"Well, my opinion is Jedi are evil." That's how Raph Koster, creative director of the 2003 MMO Star Wars Galaxies, begins discussing the problems that faced his design team back in the day. Jedi were too powerful, too desirable and too canonically rare to be successfully implemented in Star Wars Galaxies as a standard class -- and this was precisely why so many fans ditched the game when its third major patch added Jedi as a starting character. Before launch, the Star Wars Galaxies creative team obsessed over ways to implement playable Jedi into the game, and one solution stands out to Koster as "the crazy idea I still wish we had done." Inspired by Diablo's Hardcore mode, it was a system "that effectively gave a different way to play the game. A method that kept Jedi rare, powerful, and yet allowed everyone a shot," Koster writes. This solution was, in a word, permadeath.
Source: Raph Koster
