Well, Mandos sleep should have only come into play if you were killing other members of your 'side'. I spent a lot of time playing characters on both sides, killing and being killed in PvP, but always cross 'side', and Mandos sleep was never a thing.

Ping time is definitely important, but I had a lot of success playing on a 1200 and then a 2400 baud modem. Running PPP over that gave me some nasty latency spikes. You could not always play in the normal way, but the game was definitely fun and playable, in different ways. (:

Re: losing more than a whole level after dying: that and the other 'hard' things about the game really drew me in.

I crave games where there are real risks, something substantial to lose. For most free games, that is going to be mean time.

It's like the difference between playing laser tag and paintball wars. It usually hurts to get lit up with paintballs. Thus, all of the players are far more focused and invested in doing well.

Definitely consider going back. There aren't that many players on these days. When I checked the other day, there were only 30 or so.

So you can play with relative safety in vast chunks of the world, as either side.