A few days ago, Cautious (a Warrior) hit level 80 without a single death. This is quite extraordinary in WoW.
There is (luckily I have to say) no in-game achievement for this and probably will never be, as it would be impossible for all current players to reach without rerolling and becomes quite pointless for persons who collect Achievements.
The stats also indicate, that she was grinding quite much, which made this achievement much easier than the average WoW user may think of.
Creatures killed: 17,811
Quests completed: 1,777
Healing Potions consumed: 19
Hours played: 296 (~12 days 8 hours)
Deaths: 0 (On level 80 she died once due to a fail of Nitro Boost on fall damage in an instance)
While this is a great “achievement”, it also shows the sad fact how simplicity the MMORPGs became nowadays. While death in past online games (such as Lineage II, Ragnarok Online, Ultima Online, Shadowbane or Meridian 59) did had a meaning and people feared death, in modern MMOs death became very common.
This is one of the common reasons why WoW doesn’t have a meaning full PvP and there are so many low-skilled people in this game: Death has no effect and people die 100s to 1000s times in their online career.
Back in the old days, people were punished hardly for failing and dying. In Lineage II for example you lost 5-10% on a normal death, permanently. And you could even lose a level up. This often lead to lose some skills if you lost a level (for example: You had level 70 skills and dropped back to 69 you’d the skills you gained on level 70 and couldn’t use them (or you could only use the lower level of that spell) until you was back at 70). And gaining XP in this games wasn’t easy. It took several hours of grinding monsters without a death to get this XP back.
Back in this days death weren’t common. People played really careful and due to this heavy penalties they learned to play their classes perfectly and majority of the players had above average skill. In Ultima Online on other side, you lost all your items on death. Another reason to be careful and give your best not to die. Ganking also happened less often in this games, as you wouldn’t attack anyone you encounter (unlike in WoW) and think twice if it’s worth killing someone.
The conclusion is, while WoW became the most successful game by numbers, it also did a step back in the evolution of MMORPGs. In fact, WoW became more of a MMOG than the MMORPG, as character development was very important in the old days but almost negligible today (thanks to 24/7 respecs and now dualspec).
I hope some developers will have the courage to bring out a new MMORPG with the old values back, even if it won’t have 12 million subscribers. It’s not all about money, fun is important too.
Source: WoW.com
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