Frank Mignone: It used to be, back in the days when your choice was either Ultima Online or Everquest, that there was one constant between them. They were hard! One of the key factors that made it so was their death penalty. The death penalty made the games exciting! Everything was not a cakewalk; you really had to consider your actions. You could lose all of the stuff that you had in your possession with one false move. This added a lot of tension and a bit of white-knuckle-mousing to the experience. How many of you back in the day found yourself, at some point, running for your life shouting 'REDS!' with your heart pounding? It was good times.

Now, it seems most games are about coddling the weak. The penalty in WoW is a joke. If I die, my only penalty is walking back to my body, which no one can loot. When I spring back to life, I still have all of my XP. Even SOE has seriously softened the penalty for dying with EverQuest. Where is the challenge? What am I risking by walking up to players 20 levels higher than me and just running my mouth like a five-year-old? I have absolutely nothing to lose, and therefore nothing to gain by playing. Reward has no value without risk.

Garrett Fuller: With all the hours of hard work players put into these games, why penalize them? Building your character takes time and effort. Games should allow players the chance to continue that fight with little to no penalty for getting killed. There was nothing worse than getting ganked in Ultima by a player while at the bank. This led players to quit that game.

In WarCraft, you suffer enough humiliation just getting killed and being forced to go resurrect. There is no reason to make the player lose money or items they have worked hard to get. Allowing players to loot corpses would turn the world into a total mess. You’d have huge zergs running around farming random players who are just trying to complete quests. WarCraft holds up with the danger factor that they have established. Players are still fearful. I say forget the harsh death penalty and let players compete on an equal field.