Anthony I agree a lot with what you say, but I have to be the devils advocate.
There's a blurry line between "not idiot-proof" and "tedious". I don't think p1999 walks the line very well, yet neither does Wurm Online - the one I've been playing for the past few years.
I think the philosophy of making something which isn't idiot-proof is just about allowing players to suffer negative consequences which're the result of their own bad choices. Yet there's a blurry line here. Bad choices can be confused with baseline ignorance which most any human will be reasonably expected to have. Most of us have experienced such baseline ignorance on p1999 or on live when a large train came rolling through and wiped our group. There's no reasonable way even the best players can react affectively. The result is the players die and it's not really a bad choice at all. It's not a consequence they're suffering because it's not avoidable. It's a negative consequences on rails, forcing the player to experience it.
And yet even if something IS avoidable, we all sometimes momentarily lose concentration or have to go afk or are just having a slow groggy day. Even the best will fail sometimes. So strictly speaking failure is on rails since everybody is going to experience more than once.
Then there's the issue of the amount of negative consequence. How much? If you die, do you lose 5 minutes of experience or 1 hour or 50 hours or do you permanently die? I think classic EQ up through Velious had a fairly high amount of negative consequence which made it even worse for those things which couldn't be avoided. This is why people who liked EQ were called masochists. How could someone enjoy negative consequences which're so high?
There's this spectrum of allowable ignorance and amount of negative consequence in different games. I think when players say a game is dumbed down they're talking about both. In EQ's case, it had high negative consequences and its tolerance for ignorance was so low even the best players were deemed ignorant. It's like that Plane of Justice zone in POP where everybody is found guilty. This is because it confused baseline ignorance with bad choices one too many times.
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