This is just more of a hypothetical question, but I'm curious since I've seen all sorts of different approaches here over the years.
First - what Gods would you like to see on the MUD/a MUD.
If you look at help old_religions on the MUD, you can see the structure we used to have and the different themes we supported.
On an old MUD several of us used to play on, the gods were: Life, Death, Disease, Destruction, War, Magic, Luck, Time, Knowledge and later they added Balance.
Some worlds like Forgotten Realms have a ridiculous number with some major ones showing up more commonly in tales. Others like Dragonlance basically took on one for each of the nine combinations of alignment/order
Say all of the current Gods here got blown away by Daklore's siege turtles or something, what sorts of new deities would you want to see in their place?
Also, waaaay back in the past, there was some talk about offering people a chance to retire their characters. The idea is that character would be made into an NPC (sort of like what we did with the playerwipe several years ago) and making them an important character and potentially a future part of storylines down the road. Mostly likely though, they'd be un-fightable characters just relegated to a small themed space, but maybe with the owner's cooperation, they could be used in future storylines too.
Maybe running a step further with removal of gods, these characters could be part of the new deities down the road. So the second half of this question is would players have an interest in doing this or not? They would lose access to that character, it would be a very final thing - I wouldn't want to have to un-make an NPC and restore a playerfile later, but I know a handful of players in the past thought it might be cool to have unplayed, maxed-out characters as a permenant part of the game's lore going forward. Others hate the idea of losing their characters, which is understandable too.