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Back when I actively played a few HnS MUDs quite a few years ago, I ended up running around with a loose group of PKers who tended to stick to total-pk oriented MUDs simply because they got bored everywhere else, but who also liked to cause a little mayhem in rp/achiever MUDs from time to time.
Since they'd known each other for months or years, they all used IM, chat rooms, or other MUDs with sympathetic admin to devise an attack on a MUD. These attacks could take a day, or extend for months at a time, but the basic plan of attack was as follows:
One player logs, gets a general feel for the current society of the MUD, and befriends a few people on the game. He quickly learns the map layout and fun little tricks from the "explorer" class of people on the MUD, and hooks up with the "social" guys to get a feel for how he can start to undermine the current alliances kept together by the "sages" and other nonsense characters PKers have no use for other than fodder.
Then the posse arrives. They've been given constant updates by the scout as to how to powerlevel quickly, or failing that, how to attain enough power fast enough to start gang-banging some high-level guys to get the equipment to powerlevel to dominate the MUD. Usually, the goal is to dig in with a clan, make it exclusive to the kind of people they want (power-hungry pre-pubes who like to wreck everything in sight) and just take over. They sit outside of safe rooms and scream at the "wimps" who won't leave for fear of death, and meanwhile their clannies amass a huge stockpile of weapons and items necessary to maintain their dominance even through a major clan war.
The point of this is that perma-death is only a big deal for the first week. After that (unless your MUD requires months of work to get a decent character off the ground), perma-death is a minor annoyance, but probably even less of a problem than you'd expect; by the time a player is ready to take the risk of death, he's also got 4 or 5 other characters who always log from completely different IP addresses ready to be brought out quickly in the event of a character death.
Perma-death doesn't get rid of PKers you don't like. It's simply another obstacle that a resourceful PKer will learn to welcome as an asset and then use to his advantage to dominate a MUD.
The only way to get rid of PK mongers is to watch the pbase carefully and stay alert for the trends that severe MUD destruction comes from: a sudden influx of players who don't seem to be interacting with the RP side of the game much, who are quickly amassing power, and who seem to bounce around each other, pairing or grouping up to quickly advance. You see that, you watch it. Take action as soon as the massacre starts, and you may stop it before it gets out of control.
The other posters who said that using in-game measures to get rid of malevolent players was futile were basically correct. Until someone develops a highly advanced AI program to skim along the top of a MUD looking for certain abnormalities in your system and fixing them quickly, only humans have the freedom of will to be able to control a pbase that may or may not be getting out of control.
Perma-death is an RP feature. It should be used for RP purposes, and only for RP purposes. All other attempted uses for the feature will end up in either futility (frustration to the admin) or too much success (frustration for the player). Neither, as KaVir would say, is the usual goal of a MUD administrator.
-Visko
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