# Attitudes to Permanent Death

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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Will attitudes to permanent death change?

If some way could be found to retain the desirable consequences of PD while losing the undesirable ones, attitudes wouldn’t need to change. With our current knowledge of PD, however, this seems unlikely.

Change will have to occur, however, if virtual worlds are to remain faithful to their essence, at least in combat-oriented worlds. Dilution of the virtual world “product” will leave people unsatisfied. Will they stop playing all virtual worlds, or continually drift from one to the next, forever unable to find something that satisfies their long-term aims without violating their short-term criteria?

Existing virtual world culture is anti-PD. Upcoming virtual worlds are therefore also likely to be anti-PD. This is primarily due to imperfect early implementations [^96] and bad customer service decisions; nevertheless, the legacy is there. Trying to stop it is like trying to prevent a herd of cattle stampeding toward an oasis in the desert: You know they’re going to drink it dry and then they won’t be able to make it to the distant but flowing river you want them to go to. But if you stand in their way you’re only going to get trampled.

Players, fortunately, are not cattle. Those who think about the subject—what they want and what they don’t want—may change their views and (reluctantly) support PD. Then again, they may become even stronger in their opposition to it. Change would amount to a paradigm shift, however, which is very hard to effect. That said, we’ve already had one the other way (early MUDs had PD) so it’s not impossible.

Many designers feel that the reason PD fails is because it isn’t “done right,” at least on the large scale. They could be correct. However, they also believe that the way they plan on implementing it is right. When it turns out to be wrong, they set back the cause of PD even more. The more that designers know about PD and non-PD, the more they can base their decisions on experience rather than hope. With any luck, this section has gone some way toward helping inform such decisions, whichever way they eventually go.

I have one last thing to say before I leave the subject, which I present here without comment. It’s a statistical observation from a well-known, large-scale graphical virtual world:

A change from PD to non-PD has no effect on the number of customer service complaints.

Draw your own conclusions.


[^96]: Note that this does not imply that there must necessarily be a perfect one. It may be that PD will always be flawed beyond redemption and therefore it’s just as well that emerging virtual worlds reject it—even if this is for the wrong reasons.