- Every hearthling begins as a young adult.
- Age ticks slowly, even as a hearthling remains offline.
- Attributes slowly increase, before they begin to decline in old age (Attribute progression via food is still the same, but there is an accompanying multiplier attached to age.)
- Skill progression remains constant.
- Eventually, all hearthlings succumb to old age (perhaps a semi-random "max-age" stat is attached to each hearthling at "birth", hidden from the owner, for maximum tears?)
What this does:
-It will make maintaining alts less desirable (They will die, and therefore you can't have a permanent factory of backup fighters and/or craftsmen that you entirely shield from PvP and therefore last forever, or at least doing so becomes prohibitively time consuming.)
-It will allow players who join later in a worlds cycle to get into the game more quickly, as items soft-caps will no longer be in the several hundreds. (Or in the case of things like cows, it will be more acceptable to soft-cap production.)
-It reduces the "entry-grind" for experienced players who have lost their original characters, no longer needing to spend months developing a character that will be able to even move the combat bar on a titan in PvP.
-It will stop certain content from becoming obsolete (Bears, Deer, all forms of hunting will no longer become trivial in the "late-game.")
-It will cause extremely high quality items to be exceptionally rare, as players will only have a short window of age where they hit their "peak" of skill and attributes to produce them.
-Item scarcity will become "a thing" once more.
-Because of the above points, trade will become more important, and one player will be exceedingly less likely to singlehandedly produce everything they need by themselves.
-This will in turn improve the social aspect of the game, favoring larger communities over super-neckbeard hamlets.
-Constructions and land ownership will still be permanent, leaving long-term progression intact.