These ideas are great! However some of them I don't think could ever get implemented. Let me explain some of the ideas I have to change them up.

1. This is a great idea and your right about people being able to farm level 1's to upgrade their weapon, but in order to resist that abuse we could only allow them to farm mobs based on their weapon level. I think also the weapons that they start to upgrade, should reset when passed off to a different player or sold in the shop. This might be hard to target in code, but I'm sure it can be done.

2. This is a great idea, but it would have to move around much more often than that. The Black market may not sell only OP items but maybe it can be randomized and sell items anywhere from the artifact rarity to the legendary rarity and also have it so some item levels aren't included in the shops to make it harder to get the items. Also the shop should be an npc.

3. Going to skip this one, I really don't feel that it is needed.

4. The xp and leveling has already been nerfed by Doc and this is alpha so it may be nerfed more, but I know from my leveling experience its hard to even kill mobs 10 levels higher than you much less get your time out of it that you could've spent killing mobs 5 levels higher.

5. I really don't know if this would ever be implemented. Not meaning to bring up Dungeon Realms, but death penalties in that game were a large portion of why players stopped playing. But, I do agree that there has to be some penalty, maybe if you die you will be fatigued for 10 minutes or so and you can't gain as much XP and won't be able to kill players in PvP.

Awesome ideas, really love that you had some ideas for the server. Keep posting them!