Persistant World is great stuff. Moreover, a handful of people already requested PW having a database with your character stats in order for players to progress on their char development. Despite Vornne rejecting this idea several times, I still find it really nice. Besides, the problem in Persistant World has always been the lack of mature players and the weak enforcement of basic rules.
A PW based cRPG mode would be great, but the thing is how to separate the Persistant World from the native one. The principle of Persistant World is that you buy your weapons and equipment; whereas in cRPG everything is done via website. You'd either waste your time and gold buying your armor and gear, or developers should have to get rid of all the buyable options and everyone would just go with their default stuff. The thing is the spirit of PW relies precisely in that, travelling through the map, buying this, selling that, fighting, looting, selling, storing food etc. Besides for people who have no riding skill, how do you solve the problem of travelling through the map? Giving riding skill to those who don't have it would be unfair for the ones who invested points in it.
In my opinion, the only way this could be approached would be by dividing characters between normal cRPG and Persistant cRPG. Just like you have a main character which can participate in marketplace etc, and skip the fun characters or alternate, you could make a "Persistant" character, this could not participate in the rest of servers like EU1, EU3, and all the grinding would have to be made on the Persistant Server.
PS: There is a shitload of work put into Persistant World. Unless the devs really wanted to get to it and asked Vornne for the source-code - they are currently busy with their Melee game - it is unlikely to happen.
Dreaming is free, though.
