Agreed. We tried mortality and it was an abysmal failure. Unless someone has a concept that goes way, way beyond "make everyone mortal", I'll not take him seriously.
I think you have to look at the context, though, Tom.
As Chénier said, part of the problem with mortality in the Fourth Invasion was that, well, it was an Invasion. Daimons and Monsters, by their nature, are vastly more likely to kill people than regular human troops.
Another part was that we just didn't tune it well enough. Adding mortality should require a lot more testing—I can even think of some good ways to gather significant data before we send it live, if we were to do anything of the sort. This would allow us to watch the mortality rate in normal play, and see if we think it's too low or too high.
Finally, yes, if we activated mortality gamewide, we would lose some players.
But guess what? The same is true of
any major change we can make that we hope would push the game in a more positive direction, including closing islands. I think we really need to be past the point where we're saying, "This change would cause some old players to leave the game, therefore we shouldn't do it." We need to seriously evaluate the
long-term benefits and risks of such a change, and see if we believe it would improve the gameplay for the people who remain enough that it would likely improve retention.
