Permanent Death Servers

[IloveYouPumpkin]

So, in an FF-related MMO, where progress on a character (ala FFXI) will take months, or even years to fully complete.. you'd be cool with the idea of people losing all of that progress to permanent deletion because somebody thought that was a good idea?

It's never been done in a fully-blown MMO. And don't even begin to say that Diablo 3 is an MMO, because it isn't.

Well in Diablo 2's hardcore servers, there weren't many people who even made it to the end of the game. That server was mostly filled with people starting a new character and mid-leveled players. You would think people would get bored of that but the hardcore server survived for as long as D2 has been out and even today you still see people on them.

Here's is the difference I noticed on softcore vs hardcore servers. On softcore, leveling was mostly seen as a boring thing you have to do in order to get to the endgame where can start grinding the last levels (90+ took an enormous amount of time, nothing like D3) and getting gear for PvP. On the other hand, no one pvp'd on hardcore. There was really no reason to want to be high leveled. The real fun of hardcore came from the experience of leveling up with others. It was a completely different environment. The people always stuck together, worked together, communicated.. it was a far cry from the headless chicken-like gameplay of softcore. Really, the difference in the way people played was huge. You would actually feel real adrenaline from hardcore, which hardly ever happened on the normal server. That's why people played it.

When first starting out in D2 for the first 2 or 3 years I never went on hardcore and wondered why people would want to create a character on it. I finally tried it, reluctantly, and I became hopelessly addicted to it. Softcore had nothing on this.

Sorry, in direct response to your post, I know this is an MMO and not whatever Diablo was. But the idea is the same, you have to level up by sticking together and doing the content.