Two design ideas I posted on the official forum:

These are two simple ideas to make the death system more interesting and more relevant without going against the fun or making the game more frustrating.

PvE – The idea here is to incentivate the survival without penalize for a death. My idea is about implementing a bonus. While you gain experience this bonus goes slowly up, till a cap of 10% or 20%. It means that you can gain and mantain a bonus of 10% to all the experience you gain. The problem is that if you die the bonus goes to zero. The purpose is to reward a player that survives with a small bonus, compared to an imprudent player that keeps dying. The bonus won’t make a big difference so it won’t frustrate a player if a death happen. At the same time it offers a good incentive to not just die mindlessly.

PvP – A corpse run in PvP can be boring and frustrating. The death system could push a player to not “dare” in PvP because you could happen in a place too hard to reach without keeping dying again and again. This is basically unfun. My solution is simply to allow to respawn at the cemetery without taking the experience penalty ONLY if you died in PvP. At the same time this system will incentivate the PvP when (if?) killing enemies will produce experience points.