Woohoo he's back...
Enjoy the beach!
 

The Arena system in WoW is pretty close. Nevertheless, I'm enjoying accumlating the points.
 

I've been stuck at the final boss, Lord Bane, for a few weeks. It's just an experience grind now as he's completely unbeatable for me. I hadn't played in some time, but coming back I find the grind annoying when the game was so fun before.
 

Rather than a penalty/reward system like we already have in most games, I'd love to see something that could be called an 'outcome system'.
Taking WoW as an example, you get a quest, complete it and get rewarded... or you fail and try again. Now this is all well and good, but things would be much more interesting if instead of being able to try again, the failure leads to a different outcome - You fail to kill the boss of the ogres for the local village and ogres consolidate their might and attack the village, leading to a new quest of protecting the village from the attack.
Now, this could also be used as part of a death penalty - or rather a death outcome. The setting is a magical kingdom full of high fantasy and dark magic (this is all just an example of course), death doesn't come as easily as WoW, but staying alive is more challenging - where in WoW you can click attack then go make yourself a coffee, in this you'd have to really be in control.
Anyway... In this world there is a struggle between light and dark - an eternal battle between the two, but the only way for the dark to create an army is through the dead. The dark side has Necromancers all throughout the kingdom more than willing to bring hapless adventurers back from death - so willing in fact, as to mean these hapless adventurers don't really have a choice in the matter.
Every time you die and get brought back you look a little worse for wear - to begin with its something you can cover up, but the more times you die the more undead you look. As this process goes on, people of the Light become more suspicious and wary of you - eventually running you out of villages with pitchforks and whatnot forcing you to head to the villages of the Dark for your adventuring needs.
So... dying isn't meaningless like in WoW, but it's not the penalty it can be in other games. Essentially death simply opens up new options - just like failing quests.
For those who would really like to stay on the Light side, you'd allow them to do so - maybe through a small quest, or simply by having a chat to a Light Wizard... That would then raise the same problem though - If it is somewhat hard to die, and dying is a catalyst for further gameplay, would simply being able to chat to the Light Wizard to repair your Zombification trivialise the system? But then, what about those who wish to stay on the Light side?
 

Participating in PVP battlegrounds in WoW earns rewards for all participants, even those who completely fail to get a single enemy kill or capture a single flag or what have you.

And this is obviously one reason WoW's PVP is more successful and popular than any other MMORPG I can think of at the moment.

But it has led to the phenomenon of people gaming the system by joining battlegrounds and then paying absolutely no attention whatever. Sure, it may take many more battles to achieve a particular PVP objective for such people, but they can do other things without actually trying.

This wouldn't be a big deal, except that battlegrounds are, to some degree, all about teamwork. Teamwork is already tricky enough in the battleground pickup groups, so having a few slackers on your side can cause real problems.

I know this is policed to some degree, mostly by reporting. Don't know how effective the policing is.
 

There's nothing worth winning in battlegrounds anymore so who cares if you're rewarded for losing.

Puzzle Quest I played with a knight and one shot Bane. But I had good spell selection and came up with a great character build. It was just a shame that there wasn't anything else harder after him and that no secrets opened up.
 

This sort of mechanic isn't confined to WoW battlegrounds either. There are many mechanics in WoW that reward players for losing, even in raid instances. Reputation-based rewards and epic items from the throwaway "trash" monsters are both examples of rewards players can get even without defeating any of the "boss" characters, and these have been around ever since the launch of WoW.
 

lineage 2's reward for failure is you gain SP (skill points) which you need to learn higher versions of your current skillsets.

Typically, there is a 2 week period of grinding before the main event comes up. This main event is seiging a castle and you can burn off some lvls (which is somewhat needed in progression throughout the game, making money/skillpoints/farming certain mats).

Guildwars has a much faster paced reward for failure, as you gain a trickle ammount of experience towards learning new skills for each kill your team does in random arenas.

The corpse walking has always been a lame way to handle char death, imo.
 

I think running back to your body as a spirit is better than running back naked to retrieve your gear, and getting WTFPwnd on the way by a Mob because you have no armor or weapons because they're all back on your body.

Or getting there and finding someone else has looted your body, and they're still there, and they're willing to sell your gear back to you.