[quote=Magic Magnum]
The Evolution topic just got me thinking, it's be kind of cool if there was a game that worked off it kind of.

Like say for example a standard MMO, but it's a 1-life only kind of game.
All character's spawn with pretty basic/all around stats, with slight variations among them.

Then when a person dies they spawn again, but their base stats are based off the base stats of two players who are still alive?
It would be interesting over time to see what kind of feature's, abilities, builds etc. (More if they expand this to powers, class types, races etc.) they turn into over the life-span of the MMO.
[/quote]

MMO's work because people have roles to work within during a fight or raid. A lot of people choose their roles very carefully. Going by the holy trinity (dps, tank, heal) when I roll a tank, it's build and equipment will be completely different from a dps. However, dps are pretty much always the most popular role, so chances would very likely be that if I'm in a raid and my healer disconnects, my character, a few minutes later, revives as a dps with more HP but no way to hold aggro. There goes all my effort in building my character for the role as tank, and to top it off, I'm not even a valid DPS.

Also, this would feel like a cheat because player skill can keep a shitty character alive longer than a n00b with godlike settings. If there's randomised stats, there are seriously people who will spend a day reseting until they get the right starting stats (thankfully most games don't have this feature anymore.) The idea sounds interesting on paper, but unless you've got a heavily modified system around it, I don't see it keeping players for very long before they move on.