A Decade of Dungeons
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Victories and defeats in early MMOs tended to matter a lot more than today. EverQuest featured experience point loss on death, something effectively unheard of in the modern MMO age, where experience point 'debt' is the norm. Poor play could actually undo progress, rather than merely slow it.
Similarly, loot was rarer and more treasured than today. Having any magical items at all would be something to be proud of, and such magical items might be the work of several play sessions and dozens of players traipsing all around the world, to acquire. Something of this exists still, in the end-game epic armour runs to deepest World of Warcraft raid dungeons, but on the way to that end-game, the player is usually showered with hundreds of items from an increasingly complex hierarchy of rarity. Nowadays, if you are wearing shop-bought non-magical items past level 10 in any modern MMO, you are probably doing something wrong.
Keeping that equipment is a lot easier today too. Few modern MMOs feature the Corpse Run; where a defeated player must run, equipment-less, back to the scene of their demise, and somehow drag the dead body out from under the monster they couldn't beat with all their items equipped in the first place, in order to get that equipment back. The thought that that corpse could just evaporate, taking all the equipment with it, if this run wasn't done soon enough, is practically inconceivable today, and would cause apoplectic petitioning and bug reporting if it were introduced overnight in any modern MMO.
The rewards for success given to a Modern MMO player can be somewhat less meaningful than in days of old, but in keeping with the general increase in progress, above, offered by most titles, the rate at which these successes happen is far higher, which all averages out quite nicely. We win less, but do it more often. Similarly, it could be argued that as we lose less when defeated, we are more inclined to try risky or stupid things, and so lose more often as well.
