[Kaimetsu]

I have to side with Tyhm on this one. Permadeath is just asking for trouble, in the form of whiny teenagers threatening to sue you. If you say that there'll never be ways for players to die unfairly then you seriously misunderstand how big projects like this work. And when they do complain, what can you do? Sure, limited logs will help, but it's difficult to log information pertinent to a bug when you haven't even discovered the bug yet.

And the balance issue is important too. Weak characters need protection against strong characters, otherwise they can never become strong enough to defend themselves. Your system may discourage PKers from attacking higher-level characters, but that just makes them focus their immature griefing on newbies.

Sure, there'll be knights in shining armor who will protect the lowbies by attacking the PKers. Except that 90% of your players will PK a newbie if they think they can get away with it. The notorious PKers might get targeted, but they're only the tip of the iceberg. Besides, the aforementioned knights aren't gonna dedicate their lives to killing them. The PKers can always just run away, or fight back if their levels are comparable.

Personally I don't believe that permadeath will ever work as a main feature of a game where you're expected to spend hours working on your character. Nobody wants to spend hours striving if the fruits of their labors are so unstable.