PvP in Darkfall is not really hardcore

Hardcore PvP is supposedly everywhere. But really it isn't.

Darkfall does not have hardcore PvP.

Ultima Online does not have hardcore PvP now, and it never did.

EVE Online can have hardcore PvP, but most of what is called "hardcore PvP" isn't.

The idea of so-called "hardcore PvP" is that death has consequences, in PvE or PvP. The games above certainly do have penalties for dying. But a penalty to what?

I'm not sure if sledding is a universal thing, but where I grew up it was. When winter came around and you had about four inches of snow on the ground it was time to go sledding. So you'd trudge to your favorite hill, walk to the top, and then sled down. Then you'd walk to the top again, sled down again, etc., until you were silly.

While we would call this "sledding", you really spent most of your time walking to the top of that hill. You couldn't really cheat, either -- if you jumped in your sled halfway up the hill you only got to sled down half the hill. Ultimately, you had to put hours walking up hills to spend ten minutes sledding.

This is the problem with Darkfall.

Death is meaningful because you lose things, but how do you get them back? You get them back through PvE, and that's mostly how you advance your character. So the hardcore PvP is only meaningful because it reflects a much more substantial amount of PvE. Which is why it's not really hardcore PvP -- because it's not really PvP. There definitely is PvP in the game, but that's not what you spend most of your time doing.

I'm sure some people might say, "Well, I don't spend much time doing PvE, I just PvP". But then you have the opposite problem : if there's not much of a penalty it's not really hardcore, is it?

Which is not to say that hardcore PvP doesn't exist. There are two ways to make death meaningful in a PvP-centric game :

1. Have a death penalty for dying, but allow players to advance their characters solely through PvP
2. Have no death penalty, but allow players to fight over something meaningful besides survival. Territory is a good one -- although with it's own problems, as in games like EVE or Darkfall it changes hands far too infrequently.
   

I don't think either of these, done right, would entice me to hardcore PvP. But it would make the term make some sense.