Why not have natural character death from old age?

[pawnchito]

This sounds like no fun.

[Actuarius]

This sounds like no fun.

The idea of death would be minimalized with the idea of lineage or ancestry. You would have a line of descendants, with certain inheritances. Perhaps even genetic traits, or wisdom passed from one Gen to the next. The overarching idea is not to punish but to renew the early - mid - late game cycle while achieving a sort of quality cap on items produced by geriatric toons. Currently, worlds get stale and people leave because the tech-race of stat gains outpace their ability to catch up. This leads to "not so fun" too, resulting in new world gen.

[MagicManICT]

That would make people feel like all their hard work was for nothing. Not good for playerbase growth, imo.

Death is like that... I think that's one aspect that people like to forget about in video games: you don't have to die--it's just the player's lack of top skills.

[Actuarius]

The last idea just hit me.. before I hit the rack here it is: Aging isn't tied to time but to consumption. As characters eat, different levels of free-radicals and carcinogens build up and trigger aging ticks and/or aging wounds. This is a counter to eating the same types of foods over and over. Other foods may counter certain free-radicals and vice versa. The end goal is a well-balanced diet that produces the least amount of aging ticks. Perhaps other types of activities trigger aging ticks but food consumption is a good start. Players could try to game the system to keep old toons alive longer by eating less and less - resulting in less stat gains. The aging progression could affect the body 1st then the mind.

[Enjoyment_2]

So, OP signed in WEEK ago, and says all other players who played hard for like a YEAR should be dead, so he can rule this world by his own.
Good job, sir!
But one of the moments you missed - there won't be players at all in this game after 1 week. NOONE would spent their time to start from scratch every week. And this will turn H&H into hearthling simulator - where you can play for a couple of hours and forget about it. There will be no Villages, no Markets, no Kingdoms, no deep mines. Nothing at all. Because all those, who could build it would be dead and playing other game. But if you just want to wonder across endless wildlands - keep suggesting your shitty ideas.

[Actuarius]

So, OP signed in WEEK ago, and says all other players who played hard for like a YEAR should be dead, so he can rule this world by his own.
Good job, sir!
But one of the moments you missed - there won't be players at all in this game after 1 week. NOONE would spent their time to start from scratch every week. And this will turn H&H into hearthling simulator - where you can play for a couple of hours and forget about it. There will be no Villages, no Markets, no Kingdoms, no deep mines. Nothing at all. Because all those, who could build it would be dead and playing other game. But if you just want to wonder across endless wildlands - keep suggesting your shitty ideas.

lol. Nerd-Rage? Hitting the nerd-lock key to CAP a word every other sentence is the icing on the cake. In any event, your post cracked me up, and I've found a great signature in your first sentence.

[Enjoyment_2]

So you're not just a dumb-newbie with great plabs on how to improve th game, but another mega-nagibator9000 who thinks that nerds are loosers?
That make you... boring.

[Fostik]

-1 to the idea. This is just stupid implementation of limiting and timegating, and if we speak about it, why not just limit stats and dont ruin food and other character developmnent systems?

[Lyrroth]

I don't necessarily think death from old age is a bad idea in and of itself. Jorb and I have talked about it on multiple occasions; I've often thought that death should be a more common occurrence and that the "blood-line" should be more important than the individual characters; and I, too, have thought that deterministic character death would be a much more aesthetic mechanic than stat-caps or stat decay. The main problem is that I can't think of any mechanic for it that wouldn't have rather egregious side-effects. For example:

• If age counts as real wall-time from the point of character creation, then that would heavily discourage people who don't play particularly often. I don't think it would be too fun to perhaps only play for four or five sessions before your character dies, just because you only play once a week or so.
• If age counts as the total amount of time the character is logged in, then that would heavily encourage logging out the second you're not actively playing, which hurts the level of perceived presence of other players in the game.
• The implementation I would really prefer for purely aesthetic reasons would be a kind of use-based aging of the character, like getting small unhealable wounds from daily activities. However, that obviously encourages using alts for everything, similar to how stings from beehives currently works.

this post sums it up and explains why this should never find its way into haven. it doesnt matter how you bite that matter it will turn out bad for too much people regardless of option chosen

[pppp]

I don't necessarily think death from old age is a bad idea in and of itself. Jorb and I have talked about it on multiple occasions; I've often thought that death should be a more common occurrence and that the "blood-line" should be more important than the individual characters; and I, too, have thought that deterministic character death would be a much more aesthetic mechanic than stat-caps or stat decay. The main problem is that I can't think of any mechanic for it that wouldn't have rather egregious side-effects. For example:

• If age counts as real wall-time from the point of character creation, then that would heavily discourage people who don't play particularly often. I don't think it would be too fun to perhaps only play for four or five sessions before your character dies, just because you only play once a week or so.
• If age counts as the total amount of time the character is logged in, then that would heavily encourage logging out the second you're not actively playing, which hurts the level of perceived presence of other players in the game.
• The implementation I would really prefer for purely aesthetic reasons would be a kind of use-based aging of the character, like getting small unhealable wounds from daily activities. However, that obviously encourages using alts for everything, similar to how stings from beehives currently works.

You can always combine 1 and 2 so the logged off time counts as a fraction (e.g. 1/6) of logged on time.
Small unhealable wounds not from all activities but only from these that give recognizable advantage and require some skill, like raising stats, attributes, perhaps raising q as well, deeper wounds should never heal fully, killing should hurt soul anyways. I have suggested similar thing a while ago.

Regarding raising q - it is tricky. While it is easy to put a cost on spiraling a metal bar, it is much harder to put similar cost on raising crop q, perhaps cost could be applied only only if seed q is below farmer skill (so it can be raised). Similarly only mining ore and gems should come with a cost, with aging-free tunnel building.

Not sure if the above is a good direction because it would put a price tag on staying at cap level rather than on crossing it by a significant percent. Consider instead putting increasing aging cost on using anything of more than 10q (or 100q or whatever number). The idea here is to let everyone immediately stop doing things that accumulate age, while they can choose to pay high costs for specific activities.
"increasing aging cost" - for starters linear function of (q-capq), later it could be higher exponent if ever needed.