>It seems like you have an issue (getting owned at low levels)
>and have been presented with a ton of different potential
>solutions, all of which you have dismissed for various
>reasons.
>
>Everyone wants people to stick around but c'mon man if you
>don't want to be a punching bag you have to take some of the
>initiative too! Or just be a punching bag and roll with it - I
>totally disagree with what you said regarding people not
>respecting awful PKers, seems like tons of Heralds and
>Fortress characters who are objectively terrible at PK end up
>living long, well respected lives, getting leader, progressing
>through religions, doing tons of area explore stuff, and all
>in all making a lasting impact on the game.

My goal was answered with the first reply: a solution to one of the many reasons people delete, me in particular. Pre level 30 I see the xp loss to a pve death as the final straw. The con loss, I can accept. I can replace that with a train if I die 3 times. The gear loss if I don't make it back, well I've regeared before, not a huge issue. PK losses, I can live with as painful and embarrassing as they are assuming the pk'er isn't a total ass and sac's my Aldervari gear. For now, I suck at pk and know this.

The XP loss, for whatever reason, I look at that negative xp and say 'nope, screw it.' Part of that reverts back to the old way xp seriously affected PK range. I got in the habit then of seeing that as a huge deficit that made me an even bigger PK target and even now, I can't see it any differently. And I know that xp still has an effect on PK range. Last nite a character 1 lvl above me was not in PK range because they played a race that has a + to xp.

And I'm still working on the assumption that even now, the more xp deficit you accumulate and have to make up, the worse it gets. A pve death is punished by allowing even higher levels to be in your pk range.

At higher levels characters are much more able to deal with differences in pk ranges because they have the HP and the gear to take a few hits. At low levels, especially as a low con race like Dark-Elf, you're whacked dead before you can even type flee;quaff. Making it even harder for low levels to survive a gank because they got their face stomped by Tarus is one aspect of the game I can avoid with a delete/delete.