While a lot of the FPS games do a good job of staying true to the one shot, one kill principle, it’s also possible to take several less-than-fatal hits, continue fighting, and eliminate your foe with a single, well-placed head shot.

Which brings me to Golden Eye, the original N64 version, not the Wii game. I liked that targets reacted differently in Golden Eye depending on where they were hit. I may be misremembering, but characters shot in the butt would leap and grab their wounded derriere, characters hit in the leg would leap & hop around, and characters hit in the head would die instantly, usually. I hated the elite forces in Goldeneye who could not only take multiple hits to the head but could accurately return fire while doing so. I considered this especially cheap because when you were on the receiving end of a head shot both your rate of fire and accuracy were negatively affected.

In the end, was the whole thing supposed to be much like the idea in D&D where you might meet an ancient dragon anywhere. Here, you can’t do that in PVE, because…stuff. But in PVP terms you can run into an ancient dragon.

Maybe have a an option you can toggle, with either full world PVP (and some sort of bonuses based on time spent in PVP territory, not just on beating the other guy, because as noted that’s not going to happen in low/high level mashups). OR you can toggle over to some mechanism which scales you to within 3 levels of the opponent, but then the only way you get bonuses is by winning.

1. if high enough level character goes into lower level zone? they are turned into a chicken and while they retain their hitpoints, they cannot attack anything, cannot fight back, cannot even heal themselves.

2. in pvp brackets – lower level characters brought up in power to the highest level characters. they might not have the same number of spells, but what they have hits hard enough to kill high levels. My SO, who pvps in Warhammer almost exclusively (meaning that’s what he levels through as well) routinely holds his own and often wins against opponents that are, in WoW terms – skull difficulty for him.

there’s still room for improvement of course, but I’d say its a pretty good start.

As for open world…I still think UO did it pretty well with the PK-system. add to that the skill-based progression, rather than having levels and even fix classes: differences between character power become smaller. a higher skilled character has better spells and utilities, but in essence not more ‘life’ – and there are still ways the rookie can try and evade/counter attack. at the very least, the rookie should have a chance to flee in one piece. everything else is unbalanced.
Another approach might be an MMO where character powers rely heavily on gear, rather than level. assuming gear is available fairly quickly, and level only really adds extra abilities.

The aspect of player frustration is rather important too; it’s what I hear MMO players say about FPS often, where you get one-shotted easily and for a long time as a rookie. it’s pure frustration because the learning curve is so steep. it’s definitely more agreeable to learn PvP in an environment where you get a chance to actually play before you get pwned, easier to learn something that way. it’s about finding the right balance here imo (I’ve also been advocating more fast-paced battle à la FPS on my blog lately, so I don’t wanna contradict myself too much lol!), or else install different server modes.

Leave the PvP for PvP games, like shooters and MOBAs, and keep MMORPGs about PvE, imho.

WoW has an even bigger problem with gear, don’t they? I mean, an army of raid-gear purples always destroyed an army of open-world blues back in the day when I was playing WoW pvp.

Or imagine a system with your revenge gimmick. Instead of high-levels ganking, you’d have a swarm of lower-level players attacking the higher level one. If the high-level beat them off, they’d come back more powerful.

Even if you restricted PvP to fights between equal level players, waiting for a player to be at half health or ambushing with surprise or larger numbers is a time-honored tactic in the real world. Is that fair? How would you prevent it?

In my opinion, the PvE/PvP servers are the best options, or the least-worst. You have to consent to PvP, and as long as there is consent, fairness is a moot point.