** 3) No opinion/don't care. -- 366 votes, 20.62%
*** Total Votes: 1775
The majority of supporters of instant-death dueling (seem to be non-HC players like Jay Wilson and @Diablo), simply say they think it would be cool and "hardcore." The argument isn't any deeper than that, or comments like, "Any form of resurrection cheapens Hardcore mode." Which is an emotional appeal, but not exactly an argument full of winning logic.
On the other side are Hardcore players who want a permanent death mode, but also want some sort of practice or non-lethal mode so HC players can enjoy the Arena and play it as much as they wish, just like Softcore characters. Having '''only''' a perma-death mode means that most characters will get about 20 seconds of Arena before they are dead, forever. And that's just not any fun. It's also contrary to the whole design concept of the Diablo III Arena, as Flux argued in one of the forum threads linked above: [http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=785939&highlight=hardcore+arena]
::Arenas are a fundamentally different game type than PvM. They're even quite a bit different than dueling in D2. The D3 Arena game type exists only for dueling. You're locked in a small area with enemy players, there aren't shrines or monsters or huge levels you can run away in, or a town to duck into. Someone's going to die, and generally quite quickly. Which is the whole fun, since you get to start a new round right back up 5 seconds later and try a new approach.
::Hardcore mode works perfectly with PvM, since PvM is about killing huge hordes of monsters with the goal of not dying at all. Dying in PvM, even once, is failure. D3's Arena isn't like that. It's about dying less often than the other team. It's about co-op team play, pairing up your talents with other player's and competing against the enemy team through a dozen+ rounds during the 15 minute battle.
::Trying to play Arena w/o dying is like trying to learn to juggle w/o dropping any balls. Yes, not dropping any is the goal, but no one would ever learn to juggle if every time you dropped one you had to stop juggling for a week while you went off to make a new ball.
Another common argument against takes the form of an analogy:
Imagine if there were a softcore dueling mode, in which the loser could not play that character again for 2 weeks, and couldn't even transfer their equipment on other characters. How stupid would that be? How awful? How annoying? Would anyone ever use that mode? Probably not. Well that's HC dueling, except it's not 2 weeks, '''it's forever'''.
On the other side of the argument there's not much. People who advocate for the planned insta-death system seem to be almost entirely people who didn't play HC D2 (and presumably won't play HC D3). For them it's not something that will personally effect them, so they're going on a purely emotional/visceral level. These people say things like Jay Wilson did at Blizzcon 2010. "It will be so cool! So hardcore!" Which is true, if anyone does it.
The pragmatists, most of whom are long-time HC players from D2 (where high or even mid-level HC dueling has always been almost non-existent) agree that it would be cool. They just say that no one will do it, and that it's better to be realistic and make some allowances or exceptions to a cool game feature than see it not used at all.
===Hardcore Dueling Game Mode Suggestions===
