Because World of Warcraft has been the leading culprit in dumbing down the genre to make it easy enough for the mainstream audience who has never heard of an MMO before to hop in and enjoy. Now, this isn't necessarily bad. But the soaring popularity of World of Warcraft has pigeonholed the entire industry into creating clones in order to be successful.
When I am a guest at a convention I am there to entertain people and add to the fun they have at the event. thus, unless the game session is advertised as one where the objective is to kill the PCs--and I've done a few of those--I try to keep PCs alive. Of course if a player doesn't want to have his character survive, the natural selection process of the game environment will take over. -E.G.Gygax
