Why I probably won't play wow after release

[Lissa]

I posted this to the Beta forums:
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I feel that there are three main areas that should be improved to retain people for this game.

1) Death. This has been a big issue in this post, and rightfully so. I'm OK with leaving it as is, maybe that will appeal to more people. However, for people coming from other MMOs, they expect to mean something. Usually, it's XP,cash, or both. I'm in favor of making it an XP penalty to have the spirit healer fix you, a cash penalty (in the form of missing stamina that can be healed for a cost by an NPC) for a ghost run back, and no penalty (except rez sickness) for a ressurection. This would also make ressers more in demand and keep groups together instead of everyone waiting for people to run back.

2) Risk/Reward. I find that there is a lack of this in game. Part of it has to do with death, but a lot of it has to do with challenge. the crux of it is this: If I take down a mob 5 levels over my level I get minimally more than if I kill a mob 5 levels below my level. If I pull a camp and 2 monters come at me (joined, or call for help) I get no bonus for getting both of them. Usually MMOs have rewarded overcoming challanges of this nature for compensating for increased risk of death or increased down time. In WoW, there is little risk and little reward.

3) Forced Servers. Esablished guilds cannot afford to choose WoW even if they can swallow the first two pills because it will fragment their player base. Sure, many guilds aren't global, and within the US at elast we can choose East/West, but if this doesn't change the big boys won't be playing.

In conclusion, I'm sad, I wanted to love this game (and part of me really did), but I cannot play it seriously because of the reasosn stated above. I'm sure many people will say we like a game with low risk/low reward. WoW then has found it's casual playerbase then, but I'll say this ... Diablo 2 had more risk/reward, more in depth systems, and no server restrictions. It was also free to play after the initial game purchase.

WoW doesn't have enough to hold me if it doesn't change.
-MB
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You do realize that rezzing at the spirit healer does cost you EP, 5% of your level. My personal favorite for death system has to be AC/AC2. Vitae made a lot of sence and this outright loss of EP and the like is just annoying (E&B had EP debt, but it was the same as lossing EP, it just wouldn't make you lose a level is all).

Also, I think getting rezzed and getting rez sickness is totally stupid if you never release. Your spirit hasn't left you body yet and what rezzer is doing is putting your body back together enough so you're alive. To me, the only time you should get rez sickness is when you release and the fix for this would be simple, just make the release time less as it stands right now, it's 5 minutes, change it to say 1 minute and you have rez sickness back. This means that if you do a corpse run, you'll have rez sickness under my method.

As to risk vs. reward, that is where the instances, raids, and elite mobs come in. Normal monsters really shouldn't give you much of a reward, but when dealing with an instance or elite mobs, there is a definite reason to give a reward as they mobs are much more difficult that mobs of the same level (usually they have twice to three times the health and they hit A LOT harder than similar level mobs).