I was browsing this thread when I got to thinking about the environment again. I know this might be kind of off topic, but ....
There're a lot of arcade games where the trick is not in how to kill the boss and/or his minions, but it's how to survive pitfalls (traps) and jump at the right time (to avoid falling to your death) and knowing where to go (not to take the wrong turn because you only have so many lives and you shouldn't waste them) and know where the bonuses are (things that give you extra lives and/or points and/or levels and/or gold)... all with the goal in mind of finding TREASURE (or whatever it's you're after). Why don't MMO's have more instances or zones or (insert place that you go to do a mission or task or adventure) where the objective is not to kill things but to survive the environment so that you can collect things (treasure, gold, points, etc). Instead of monsters that want to kill you, there're moving platforms and high cliffs that you must climb and traps that you must avoid or disarm and puzzles you must solve (maybe it has a big treasure inside) and so on.
Why can't it be a combination of monsters AND environment? I know I'm not the only one to bring this up because I see bits and pieces of this in almost all MMOs, including EQ. Just not very much. Mostly, what you find is that the enemy is a monster. The environment is usually just a second thought or worse even.
This same idea of battling an enemy (whatever it's) to get things (treasure, points, experience, gold, etc) can be translated to WR bags and other WR things. We get in the mode of thinking that killing monsters is the only fun thing to do. But it's not. Everything imaginable can be made fun. It just needs to be developed. My mode of thinking is that encumberance is boring to players because developers failed in their job to translate it to something fun and challenging. But I know that this is just me tricking myself. The reality is that I'm an engineer and I'm attracted to things most non-engineers are not. I'm like a man who is sexually attracted to bumps on a log and disliked. They see me with a log and shake their heads and all walk away with shame on their faces.
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