Just throwing ideas out any or all of these! No NPCs will death touch. Mob killing you wipes you back down to level 1 and purges your inventory. Resurrections will not restore exp. Essence emeralds wouldn't require players to die to create them. Triple loot drops to compensate for this. One character per account on this, and one account per player. Three race factions that can only group with their own, similar to what was used on some of the old pvp servers, except it doesn't have to be pvp related.\ Make one day a week pvp flagged day where all players are pvp flagged, or perhaps weekends, and dying to players causes no exp loss. A player gets a grinding exp leveling buff, that has a 30 minute duration, and refreshes each time the player earns exp. The amount of exp earned would continue to increase by 1% each time that the buff refreshes until it caps rather large bonus mabe 300% to catch up, this buff only would unlock per player basis after reaching max level. The expansion unlocks are not set, perhaps make it so that one expansion end boss has a tiny tiny chance to drop a clicky that can start a 7 day expansion unlock countdown. Perhaps after 30 days in an expansion the chance to drop it would start increasing by a small amount each day.
I've played this way before, and it really sucked in a lot of ways. Star Wars Galaxies, the original Jedi system. You were allowed on character per server per account, until/unless you unlocked Force Sensitive. At that point, you unlocked a second character slot for that server. You could choose to roll a second standard character, turn your main into a Jedi, or roll a new character as a Jedi. If you used your Jedi powers or lightsaber in view of humanoid NPCs, you would gain visibility. With enough visibility, you would start showing up on the bounty hunter terminals. Then you would be hunted by player bounty hunters. Being killed would result in permadeath for that Jedi. You could roll another, nut you would have to grind out everything again, plus replace the gear you lost. As a TLP, I wouldn't want what the OP has described. As a short-term, or resetting special event server, it also wouldn't appeal to me, but as I've said before, I'm just one guy. Something like that could work in the short term.
Big NO. Most pvp is just ganking someone while they are trying to level. So, using the OP's idea, if the mob got the last damage in, you are starting over. There was one short lived perma death PVP server (one month, by design). Several of the top scoring players were 3rd party hacking cheaters. I do not see why this would be any different. So, just NO.
I kind of like the final outcome. When you see geared people you would know they're good players. Its like before armor dye. When you saw a necro with a blighted robe you were like DAMN they raid lol.
