Remove it. Add a pvp points system instead and post it on the website. Show the top 50/100/etc. Do like EQLive did and show all of hte deahts on the server every day. Allow for us to filter by guild/name/zone/god/etc. That will do the server far, far more good than this badly thought exp loss (upon pvp death).
People who kill somebody close to their level (or above) get more points than peolpe who kill those who're lower level than them. People get their score lowered if they do multiple kills of hte same person.
The only function of the pvp points is to be a scoring system. It offers no other rewards than the fame you get from being on the top 50 or top 100 or top 200 lists. No more reward is needed.
I'm willing to bet that in a server-wide vote most would agree with me.
The time/point-loss people get from dying in PvP is more than enough grief. Additionally, EQ is always punching us in the gut when we fail. Now players are cutting our throats in PvP. Lay off on the masochism.
I do not know my programming all that well IN THIS regard, but my guess is that a output text file can be saved (periodically) by the server and a PHP page can read it. Alternatively (this is outside anything i've done), there might be a way to directly communicate the statistics without having to open/save a file (on the game server). This would mean that any saving can be done elsewhere and the game server can just work in memory.
I don't think there're THAT many deaths per minute though that a little bit of saving overhead cannot be afforded. Then ti's just a matter of a php page loading and parsing for output to the browser. MySQL or something similar may be related. But my expertise in this area is very distant and flaky.
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