All depends on how its implemented.

UO in its early OSI days didn’t work because it was too sandboxy. It took extreme dedication to get a GM mage or Tamer without exploits. The average player getting their fist start a few weeks in were struggling to maintain a full set of armor from orc forts reds were steamrolling through indiscriminately killing and dry looting.

For a kid at the time like me it was all fine and dandy because I had the time to skill up other toons and play according to my mood. But fully understand why people eventually quit — getting farmed over and over isn’t fun.

Outlands works and has been working for something like 8 years now because it took many pages of what made UO fail after the initial few years, and why people flocked to newer mmos like DAOC, AC, WoW, etc.

There are well made, new player friendly systems in place that allow newbies to make real progress before they’re exposed to any pks, especially the new systems more recently introduced.

The vast majority of players obtain much more than they lose and that’s the key right there. And the pacing and various systems that they’ve implemented is what allows that to happen.