I was joking about an idea on 100 and Nihilius asked me to suggest it so here it is.

When creating a new character you get to choose between normal gameplay and hardcore mode.
You get most things such as credits, standing, licenses and some badges faster but when you die you will lose your character forever.

To make it more interesting it could potentially go above license 4 for f2p players.

1) no uncapping f2p unless another payment model was introduced. We need more people to support the devs.

2) previous perma-death suggestions are pretty much wrapped up with "if you want it, the character delete button is on the homescreen".

3) Hardcore mode would imply things are more difficult, not add a perma-death [which in turn would promote runners and dishonorable fighting]. I'd think of it like your liscences progress at 1/4th speed and you can only use the base-level version of an available ship model, no upgrades or faction variants.

-1

I kind of like this; of course, as mentioned, nothing is stopping you from deleting a character after one death.

On the F2P flavor, would a hardcore character continue earning Crystal for experience gains above license 4? If so, might this not confer an unfair advantage given missions like ion storm Hive skirmishes?

I think Faille Corvelle used to do this with some of her alts. Some kind of Iron Faille project. Once the alt died she deleted it and started again.

This is the kind of play style that needs to be universal to really work well.
Perhaps if there was a second server/universe where only hardcore players could reside.
The whole attitude of the playerbase would be radically different and almost incompatible with normal game play