Maybe make it where when you die you don't lose everything just some things? Other than that, I am enjoying the game a lot.
I debated the death penalty a while. It was worse. I had it also take away all XP earned for the next level but after testing (and cursing the programmer when I died) I removed it.
In V1/V2 I would see players running around, not worried about the risk of vitae and loosing a few items. I rarely saw them stop and calculate the risk versus reward. Well, I rarely stopped and thought about while playing my self! Now, I am actually careful and think about things first cuz it is a pain in the butt dying but I don't feel it is over the top.
Most Online RPGs spoon feed players baby food. Why? Cuz they want you to pay them money!!! It seems to me, to be a balance between
easy and
hard where
easy generally brings you back more and more willing to spend $$$ on it and
hard tends to have less players and less $$$. This is generally true for the casual gamer. The more hardcore ones... are all over the place, depending on what they like to play, I think.
On a scale from 1 to 5, 1 = easy, 5 = hard, my goal is a 4, so medium-high. Having no towns at the start definitely adds to that and being sandbox elevates the difficulty. I don't want to baby players. That one reason I give players the choice of starting spot, low, medium and high difficulty starting areas.
And thanks to Jon (thanks bro!), as long as he lets me have a server, I don't plan to charge money... probably
OK, I think I am off topic, heh