I wish I could've grown up in the age of MMOs that had really hardcore death mechanics and more open PvP, like Ultima Online () . I could still technically play it today, but it's basically on life support at this point, with very few players, so it's not the same. Other MMOs like Tibia had weird broken game mechanics, like there was an NPC that would attack you if you swore around it, so some people would trick another player into swearing next to them and then they'd die and the other player could take their items that were dropped on death. And you de-leveled, I think. Nowadays, MMOs are more casual, and if you die, it's just a setback of like 5 minutes or something. But those hardcore and abusable game mechanics (which were sometimes unintentional) were what made it fun. There was another Tibia thing where you could lure a high level monster into a safe area and then it'd aggro on low level players and kill them. Or you could block someone from leaving a certain area, and there was this one place in particular where someone would trick a player into going into a dangerous place by dropping a valuable item there, and then the player would go through and then the scammer player would block them, and then the victim player would be within aggro range of a dangerous monster that would kill them and they'd be unable to escape because of the other player blocking them (and in Tibia you couldn't just clip through other players).

But I feel like hardcore death mechanics in online games, and MMOs in general, are both kind of dying.