It feels to me that teleporting on KO isn't the answer, it tastes somewhat artificial.
When I suggested the 'second server' back at before the current world, the idea was that dying should't be removed (as of all the meachics tied into it: loot, skulls, ...) but the overall consequences of it should be reduced to last a little over a RL week (like 8 days till finally be gone) to give death meaning but not ethernal-gimp the character. The number for the timeframe was pulled out of 'gut feeling', and I might be off. This would leave a body, so on PvP the victor would gets the spoils (and skulls) and on PvE you have a reason to return to the scene to get back your stuff (and lessen the penalty).
Death also needs a meaning, so we don't end up with endless respawn - but it needs to be in a form that a character can continue to function (regarding crafting, farming, stuff), can continue to grow (for the ones liking pushing numbers), can continue to interact with others (kin list and stuff) and has a perspective to join back on the fun (for the pvp lovers) after recovering. So, to reiterate, the following could do the trick:
- keep everything (kins, discoveries, maps, skills) on (auto-)inherit after dearth, except what was on the body (study, inventory, gear, FEP/stomach contents)
- skull with LP since last inherit only
- wound with penalties relative to the size of wound
- self healing of it over a reasonable timeframe: wound shrinking, penalites reducing with time
- not something like several hundred wretched gore that takes unreasonably time to revocer from (this could well be kept for repeated PvE fuckups though)
- not something that can be worked around with ease in case you have walled in the relevant resources
- penalties could be lessed a little with burials, worshipping and stuff, but not the wound itself (so dying again over and over will be a bad idea)
- could be biased by some form of karma or scents out in the field at time of death (either by magnitude, or timeframe)
This imho is a route that would make sense to explore.
Unrelated but in general: a corpse that decayed should turn into a container that gets the gear/study/inventory items, with random decay over them with time, instead of spreading everything into the world to insta-despawn (or be put into unreachable locations) - then the random skeleton found
could still contain some loot which could make the world a little more interesting.