There was no need to return to the body, but you did incur XP debt. You could still earn new xp, but a portion of it went to your debt also. This, as a player, sucked big time. As a designer, I get it.

Now, the thing is, COH had a brutal grind for solo-play. It was entirely possible to get VERY deep in XP debt, to the point that your hero felt almost unplayable (from a futility standpoint.) There probably should have been a cap on how deep into debt you could go.

you are dependent on the punctuality and longevity of all players in your party, or raid.

If you have your healer and a tank, the three others come fairly quickly. because it doesn’t matter really which classes are invited.

If you are a tank or a healer you are the only one waiting, and doing /who’s for your counterpart, as when these two classes are found people come running. (this extra work contributes to the rareness of these classes)

People will not like to sit around and wait for the “critical classes” that bear most of the stress in WOW.

If you are a DPS class (most everyone is) you are most likely looking for a dependable tank and a dependable healer, the two rarest classes in the game. This is because these positions are too stressful for most people who have jobs, or other IRL things to deal with.

Healers and tanks are the most stressful positions in wow, and are rarely “fun” as people will expect you to do exactly what your supposed to, on time, and, have the right gear equipped. If you don’t the flak doesn’t stop coming.

I ran two different guilds for a total time of 1 year, both guilds were completing the first end game instance raids. I can attest that no matter what, this problem is always there, due to that pesky thing people call IRL.

the only thing we could do to avoid flakey players, is by recruiting massive amounts of players based on the time they are active, and even then there are times when nobody has logged in.

If the stress were evened out. If you weren’t so dependent on the two classes nobody likes to play, it’d work alot better.

It’s poor game design
the guilds can’t be run better, unless you quit your day job. A guild with a regular raiding schedule, and forums is pretty much the best you can do, aside from being online 24 hours a day.

I think you should have an ‘assassin/bounty hunter’ type profession no matter what which would always be to hunt down players to kill, but you could up the importance of killing a player (or add them if not otherwise on the list) if they do a lot of pkilling of lowbies.

Finding ways for the system to define/decide in an automated fashion who “deserved” a red name and who didn’t was the big headache, as I recall. A big enough problem that none of the big names has really tried to tackle it ever again, let’s put it that way. I do think it could be both fun and instructive to try it again on a smaller scale, tho.

I’d like to see a bunch of different approaches to the death/killing paradigm, frankly. It was touched on in Richard Bartle’s roundtable session at IMGDC… it’s one of the biggest assumptions in the genre. The current paradigm may well be the best for general purposes, but that does not mean other approaches may not be viable as well. It’d be nice to see some alternatives, IMO.

Anyway, it all still boiled down to gang warfare at its finest. A modified system like this might be interesting to see, though. Especially in a modern game.

SOE and LA need to wake the **** up and create SWG 2. Like I’ve said over at Raph’s blog, this horse will keep being beaten until we see an SWG2 or a good alternative.