I'm sorta nooby here, but played one of the older worlds as well as the current one. I never quite made it to end-game level gear and stuff, though. I think my experience with H&H is a common one, and could be part of the reason it's hard to gain new players here: Permadeath is a huge downer. I get it, and it's cool and sorta unique and rare and badass, but if you want new people to come and play the game, and learn it, and enjoy it, you're shooting yourself in the foot by allowing non-mutual PvP permanent killings of late-game players on noobs. Let me explain:
I like the game. it's great. I start the world a lil late cuz i'm not an H&H pro/veteran, and don't know when worlds are opening. I put a week of work in, increasing skills, playing daily, then I'm out wandering around one day and some dude rides up on a horse with freakin' waraxes and metal armor and gear and just slays me on the spot and leaves with my skeleton. I log back in and see i have to start over with a pittance of my stats, and after journeying to the scene of the crime there is no skeleton to be had. great. F this, I quit.
To me, i see several options, ESPECIALLY if you go the Pay-to-Play route:
1) allow players to choose to be in PVP mode, or not, via a toggle
2) Only allow PvP for players within a certain range of stats. EG: a player with 150,000 total LP spent cannot aggro a player under 50k LP spent. Or use Intelligence, or some other stat. I don't know.
3) You can only murder people who have also researched murder. or if you murder a player who hasn't researched it, they only lose inventory items, not their stats, or something like that.
4) if Pay-to-Play is mandatory, you could use the income to host multiple worlds--one for noobs, and one with pvp. Then perhaps after reaching a certain point, or at their own risk, players could merge their noob character into the pvp, but not bring in any items--only their stats and naked self.
These are just some options/ideas I had. if it's all been mentioned before, my apologies. I think they're all options for making the game more beginner-friendly. I know, everyone hates noobs, but keep in mind, everyone is a noob at some point, and if you want your game to live on, you have to groom the noobs and keep bringing in new players.
Cheers, all
-giantsfrey/Frey/Freya