Why not have natural character death from old age?

[Potjeh]

Speaking of Rust, just the other day I killed an AK guy with an eoka. GL pulling off the equivalent in H&H. Cancerous stat growth is ugly on it's own, but having PvP function as basically a straight-up stat comparison makes it much worse. And then of course the whole permadeath thing ensures that the tryhards with ridiculous stats will scream their hearts out to ensure that we never have a PvP system where a character with significantly lower stats can win, so it's a self-reinforcing problem.

[Shadowpain]

the game need the test server for the community to test crazy Concepts like this the best way to find out if something is good or bad this test it out
I think the Aging system is worth trying out

[wonder-ass]

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.

what about age being completely cosmetic? for instance stat cap is 500stats the moment your character gets to max stats you can prestige him which kills the character and he becomes reborn and gets a cosmetic item like a hat or emote. could even have his heritage displayed in kin tab to show how many times he has prestiged. real death shouldnt count as prestige death.