I like the line of thought on this one: do as much as possible to keep the action going.

I’m fine with the check point idea, and keeping the action going, but there needs to be some penalty for dieing.  Something like 20% penalty to XP earned for the next 100 monster kills… and it stacks every time you zerg and die.  Charge in and die 10 times in a row, your next 1000 kills are at 20% XP penalty.

well… since i’m not allowed to edit… next 100 kills of monsters appropriate for your level… no being level 80 and going back to normal diff for some easy kills.

But...if your health is low after a death and must regenerate, which wastes time, isn’t that similar to the time waste of running from town to your body?

Anyway, all I really care about is how the existance of multiple bodies must be abolished. This system, used in both d2 and Everquest (a few years ago in Everquest, not sure how it is now), is the worst idea ever. How can your body be running around looking for...your body? As long as Blizzard doesn’t employ this idea again, I’m happy.

I like it. Pretty tired of games where one important person in your party dies, and then leaves the game because they think they’ll die again trying to get to their corpse and loose even more XP. They leave and then other people start leaving, the game is 5+ minutes old now and no one wants to join. I suppose I described a bot game right there....but that really applies to far more than bot games. I like the idea of less xp for the next 100 or whatever kills, I like that a lot. As SCFreelancer also said, do as much possible to keep the action going.

"But...if your health is low after a death and must regenerate, which wastes time, isn’t that similar to the time waste of running from town to your body?"

@ Stillman, perhaps this would be one of the what should be rare occasions in Diablo 3 where you use a potion.

i wonder what the hold up is with confirming that there will be a hardcore mode…

I really hate the experience penalties in D2 - I very rarely die, but one death for a character in his/her 90’s is possibly hours of work lost. This penalty system, I think, unfairly hurts players who want to level, and doesn’t do anything to discourage reckless and/or selfish play.

However, they need to have *something* in place to prevent this very thing. It should hurt a little when you die - there needs to be something that discourages this kind of play, otherwise they can talk about cooperative play all they want and they’ll still get a bunch of rushers plowing ahead activating a bunch of enemies and generally making a mockery of coordination.

What they need to do is make the penalty hurt you in the short term, not long term, because the people who will plow right ahead don’t care about long term. They are content to be lv. 75, and if they die they will just beg a TP or leave the game. I definitely don’t think you should respawn with all your gear. I think recovering your body should be a requirement. That was often a really tough challenge in D1.

Some ideas:

a.) Variation on what they have now. You respawn at your last checkpoint, but you have no gear (not even your inventory) and you can’t run or use movement skills. You have to get back to your body. No extra penalties for subsequent deaths, you just start again. You can pick stuff up along the way, and if you die along the way you don’t create a new corpse, you just pop the items you picked up. If you leave the game you lose your stuff.

b.) Guild-Wars style. Much as I find the game boring, they did a good job with death penalties. Having the reduced life/magic really hurts you, but knowing you can work it off (and knowing your quest resets if you go back to town encourages you to both not die and stick it out if you do.

c.) When you die, you end up in a new area. Like a mini-game. Say, a maze in heaven, with no enemies. When you find your way to the teleporter in the maze you are back to your last checkpoint, fully equipped. The mazes get increasingly complicated the more often you die, but require nothing more than time to get through.

@Kunzaito:
I think both of your first suggestions are way too harsh, and the third one is just a terrible waste of time. Like Cram says above, such "short term" death penalties just encourage players to leave and restart the game.
I think the best thing for Blizzard to do would be to implement an XP penalty as well as ensure that check points aren’t too common.
Also, a "Y% XP penalty for the next X kills which stacks every time you die" won’t work because different monsters give varying amounts of XP.
I would prefer something along the lines of: "A 20% *stacking* XP penalty until you gain 1/5th of a level, even if you leave the game"
For the numbers I’ve used, if you take say, 30 minutes to gain a level, then it will take you 30/5/0.8 + 30*4/5 = ~32 mins to level up if you die once, 30/5/0.8/0.8 + 30*4/5 = ~34 mins if you die twice, ~36 mins if you die thrice… and ~80 mins if you somehow manage to die 10 times without leveling up.

I don’t like the concept of death penalty at all.
Maybe I was playing too much pen-and-paper RPGs or Nethack and not enough online multiplayer games but the very idea of dying is very unpleasant to me. I always try VERY hard not to die. Sometimes to the point of paranoia (one of my friends used to say "Fear is good. Paranoia is better.").
I think it was already said somewhere in the forums: Some kind of incentive for NOT dying would be far better.
There is something like this in 9Dragons MMO. If you manage to kill 999 monsters in "one live" you are getting a Blood Essence (used to enchant weapons). It’s nothing grand, especially for higher level characters, but they don’t grow on trees either.