Why does nothing in WoW have consequences?

[Annarion]

Because it's a game, not real life. If you can't distinguish between the two...

My point is the game is supposed to be fun and not at all realistic. Consequences are not fun, otherwise they wouldn't be consequences. If you want to take your concept further, all characters in WoW should be hardcore, as in deleted as soon as you die. How likely would you be to raid if your character was deleted after one wipe? Those particular consequences primarily cause people to have to spend more time in old level-up content, which means that fewer people can raid, meaning that they can drag out the length of raid tiers far more. Why would they need to create a new tier when most of the people who have cleared it have died and restarted already? You'd have a hard time gearing up for the next tier when you could be set back to zero on any attempt. Plus it would mean that they'd have to tune down the chances of you dying, ie the chances of you failing, making the game easier.

TL;DR: Consequences aren't fun, therefore they don't belong in a thing designed to be fun.

[Mepeteatu]

Cause it would be so exploited to grief.....

[MrWolly]

Simply? WoW isn't that type of MMO.

This about sums it up, really.

[Gheld]

Because WoW was specifically designed to be the "casual friendly" MMO. Which is why I laugh when people argue about how Hard core they are at WoW.

[Luko]

To put it bluntly, if that's what people wanted, then WoW wouldn't be number 1. Success speaks for itself.

[Kryos]

because it became always was a game for filthy casuals

Fixed it for you

Critics and gamers alike celebrated World of Warcraft as a triumph in MMO gaming, and the reasons for this were manifold. Previous MMOs contained mechanics seemingly designed to punish gamers; WoW did away with these. By eliminating or minimizing pointless penalties, skillfully tutorializing, and adding quests into the game to make it more casual-gamer-friendly, Blizzard exponentially multiplied the appeal of the game.

It's the key to the success of WoW that they chose not to punish players that make mistakes but just do not reward them and give rewards to those who do the right thing. There is no need to punish someone who failed doing something. Not getting the reward he wanted is punishment enough.

[melodramocracy]

Consequences are not fun, otherwise they wouldn't be consequences.

Well, it doesn't really work like that at all. Consequences to decisions, as well as failure of a given task or attempt at a task, are what makes a game like this interesting. Which is one of the reasons that every time a decision point is effectively removed from the player, however trivial, it dulls the entire mechanic of what a player does.

Back on topic though. Dying in a raid:

Your armor and weapon need repair, costing gold.
You lose your buffs, food, etc.
You might temporarily lose the reset on something like a battle rez.
The boss health resets, and if enough time passes, mobs respawn.

These are all consequences, however trivial, of not defeating your enemy. What would you think of the game if none of these happened?

Asheron's Call did player death the right way IMO, as far as PvE is concerned. If you died, at least 2 items of the highest value would stay on your corpse, which would exist in the world 5 minutes for every level you were (so a level 24 characters corpse would last 2 hours). You were given a penalty in overall effectiveness, which was worked off by killing mobs. The tricky part was that there was, in the beginning, no mini-map indicator of WHERE your corpse was. So at times you'd need help from friends in actually finding it, as the landmass was extremely large in this game.

It was something you definitely worried about, and its effect was stacking (ie, several deaths in the same area would put you in pretty bad shape), but not such a setback that your progress as a character was pushed back, as in EQ's case.

[Deleted]

My point is the game is supposed to be fun and not at all realistic. Consequences are not fun, otherwise they wouldn't be consequences

Consequences are what makes the games fun. Without that its like playing singleplayer game on cheats. Gameplay becomes trivial and dull. And yes WoW had more consequences back then.

[edit] ok, didnt read an above post^ it sums it quite nicely.

[Cthulhu 2020]

WoW was always designed as a casual friendly game from the get go. There never was a significant penalty for death. Despite all the people saying that risky games are the "best" WoW has been the most successful MMO since its release, taking players away from many of those more hardcore risky games. Those games also still exist. Many people talk about the risk in them like those games no longer exist, talk about how amazing they "were", and yet those games are still around. And here these people are, playing WoW, complaining that WoW isn't like those games of yesteryear with feature X that they loved.