3rd middleground challenge league

So right now we get 2 challenge leagues - 1 hardcore, 1 softcore. Softcore for the casual players with almost no penalties, an always inflating economy, ... point being it becomes very boring after the first month or two. Hardcore without those problems but just too frustrating to play - it's more a matter of grinding it out to be overgeared to not have to fear content, you can experiment less with more risky stuff, always have to be on top of your game.
I'm one of the players who would like more challenge so I can enjoy the game more but not have to deal with things like 'Oh you dc'd? Well fuck you for grinding a week straight, go start over or play softcore'.

Here's a suggestion and a possible solution: a 3rd challenge league with harder penalties but not as unforgiving as current hardcore.
I thought of a few solutions regarding those penalties and feel like a life based system would approach the problem the best. You start out with 0-3 lives, each time you die you loose one and if you die without any extra lives you get transfered to standard league.
You can acquire more lives by slaying monsters in challenging areas in a similar fashion the current leveling works. So once you get into maps (possibly corrupted zones too) you get additional separate experience depending on map mods and area level. Each extra life would require more experience, much like current leveling. This means if you die too much you won't be able to keep up getting 'life-experience' to generate a new extra life. 'Life-Experience' gained would scale heavily with area level to prevent low level farming (a penalty per level would work as well I suppose) and extra lives are character-based.

tl;dr: New challenge league where you can acquire extra lives to protect from mistakes/lags/etc by doing very challenging content

Sounds pretty interesting. There's still a question of how to scale gaining what you called life-experience. You can't really base it on maps or corruped zones as people would simply farm them the same way they farm currency or sacrifice pieces. IMO additional lives should be obtained as rewards:
- 3 base lives;
- 1 additional life for completing each difficulty;
- 1 additional life for reaching level 60, 70, 80 and 90.
- 10 lives total.

This is interesting because it shows why I don't think HC is currently in a good place. Would probably go to this league first, but then again it's kind of like a riskier standard without the severe penalty HC gives for the game's current issues that kill a lot of players.

I like this concept as compared to the standard challenge league, and would even recommend it could replace it.

I'd probably still play hardcore, but I fully understand that essentially there is a lot of room for middle ground between the complete polarity of standard (die as much as you like) and hardcore (never die.)

I'd also be for a kind of wizzardry resurrection system, where there is a direct cost, and a chance at instead putting your character into a worse state. In this system, any death could be your last, which adds some thrill similar to hardcore.