Once again i'm not talking about current system where u can put thousands of lp in combat skills and just eat alot of stuff then go fight bears with prepared character. I'm talking about my vision, the way i would like it to be and it's a Ultima Online or The Elder Scrolls style, where you gain skills by using them, you want to make a warrior then u grab a sword go to the wildereness kill ants, then rabbits, then foxes, then boars, then bears and you progress slowly making a warrior character, that will demand more thinking. Right now you can just hide beside the palisade, send your alts to collect curiosities, meanwhile eat and lvl up stats, when u got curiosities then you lvl up your combat skills and thats how the great warriors are born in HnH! first time they leave the settlement and they can kill you with one punch. I dont like it.
I remember UO being basically this:
1: Start new character with like 100 GP and two skills at 50%, all others 0%. Go around doing money scams (buy fish and carve them up to sell the uncooked fish steaks, buy cotton and spin into thread then weave into cloth then scissor into bandages - both of these require almost no time and no skills) until you have enough cash for a dagger, butcher knife, staff, and a horse. Takes about 15 minutes.
2: Work the training dummies AFK until you have 30% in all the fighting skills. This also bumps up your stats a bit. The dagger gets you fencing, the butcher knife gets you swordsmanship, staff gives macefighting, unarmed trains wrestling.
3: Run around town and near town killing birds, which each drop 25 feathers (that's 50 GP to sell to vendors) plus some raw food. Buy an axe and start chopping trees, which gives good STR gains and the logs can be made into arrow shafts with your dagger. Now instead of selling your feathers for 2 GP each you make crossbow bolts and sell those for like 7 GP each. And because you're making them one by one AFK you get skill gains in bow craft and lots of DEX ...
4: Find a buddy who will spar with you. Bring your plate mail and a ton of bandages. You're gonna beat on each other while healing yourselves with bandages, which you can wash and re-use, gaining weapon skills, parrying, tactics, and healing. At some point you can safely AFK this.
5: Stand in town doing AFK Anatomy, Eval Int, Detect Hidden, Hide, and Stealth. Whatever stat you want there's definitely a way to grind it in town, though certain ones like Snooping and Stealing really need to be practiced in your house with a pack mule. These AFK skills also raise some stats, generally INT.
6: Get a spellbook and some spells, and reagents from shops. Buy your Magery and Meditation up to 30% which is the maximum you can pay GP to train. Practice Magery by casting Create Food (no more buying food for you, and you can sell the stuff you don't want like cakes to recover some of the reagent costs), always having Night Sight running, and eventually by just casting defensive spells on your buddy in town. You ideally want enough Magery to reliably Mark and Recall, which is simply required to play the game at all. A later trick is casting Blade Spirits or Energy Vortex and letting it run around killing everything while you loot and try to avoid its attention.
7: You know how slowly Magic Resist goes up? Cast Fire Field and run through it, taking massive hits but raising Magic Resist, and also letting you get tons of points in Healing.
Congratulations, you have a 7x100 skill character without leaving town. Now you go to Wind and fight Liches for 30k GP an hour plus treasure maps, scrolls, and reagents. Then you fight dragons for magic item drops to complete your armor and weapons and to sell the excess to players.
The main factor is either carrying lame loot so if someone kills you there's nothing worth taking, or build up the right set of skills for PVP and risk carrying decent stuff around.
Anyway, in that scheme, there was a later development that let you raise your skills above the max but you needed to find rare scrolls or whatever. But the actual max limit was pretty close to 100%. Certainly your player skill or luck could determine a battle between a 100% character and a 115% character. And teamwork was OP which is a wonderful thing. If you have an ambusher who fights someone who is his equal, but your friend is off screen casting Greater Heal on you ... that's enough to win right there. Much less having two people come up and whomp on one person.
I don't have an answer for the H&H key issue, but UO had certain items bound to the character so they wouldn't drop on his death and would be there when he got resurrected. Not exactly an option for H&H because of the way things are. But then again UO had lockpicking where someone could actually get into your house even though it was locked. Of course your best stuff you could store in the bank which was totally unlootable. Again not really a H&H solution.
I think it would be nice if they flagged certain accounts as probably alts because of patterns of logging on and off near each other, whether these characters ever actually see each other but use the same facilities and are friended on each others' territory, etc. Then correlate that list with skill gain patterns and assaults and murders. Now you have the alts who powerlevel and grief.
Of course, the devs don't care and if anything love griefing. I'm sure that suggests why they haven't done anything at all about it.