On the face of it and without having tried these changes out yet, I agree with Isobel. I'm about as un-hardcore as you can get but I have discovered that, given the choice of corpse-run vs no corpse-run, I prefer the former. Many of my best (and worst, but certainly most memorable!) game memories involve runs to get corpses - mine, my friends', guildies, total strangers whose messy remains I tripped over in an AC dungeon, etc etc.
Conversely, EQ2 had no penalty whatsoever after a while and, predictably, the most common response to "shall we try this?" became "sure, it's not like there's any consequences for dying." That's a shame. What happened to the risk/reward continuum? I was under the impression that meaningful death (even if it's only meaningful to the extent of having to get your gear) was part of that continuum.
That being said, I was fonder of the AC death system which had you drop a semi-randomly determined number of items on death. How many depended on your level. It was somewhat flawed in that the value of an item factored heavily into whether it would drop on death or not, so people started carrying around "death items" -- but in the absence of being able to summon corpses to altars like in Vanguard, it was nice to sometimes have the option of just biting that item loss bullet, if what you'd dropped wasn't vital to you. Corpses decayed after a while there too (also dependent on level). All in all one of the best death systems I've seen, even though it probably made me yell at my screen more than once.
Memories require extremes, good or bad. If nothing of interest ever happens, you're not going to make many memories. That goes for games too. (Or, in old-speak: "Sheesh, the youth of today have forgotten what it's like to WORK for something. All they want is the good stuff, right now, no waiting no effort, and none of the hard stuff that makes the good stuff valuable." Yeah, I'm old-school.)
But hey, we'll see. This is not the first iteration of death in Vanguard. Sooner or later we'll find the perfect system.
