No heat attacks, less hunger, more life.

[Drael]

Less death in general. What do you think? (Could be balanced with old age effect)

[kronos]

Heart attacks are for when people have a character removed from the game or their account is cancelled, it is not random. As for hunger, it takes a year to starve...plenty of time to get food in the most case.

[Piscator]

Could you explain what you mean in detail? That's hardly a suggestion so far.

PS Sorry, I didn't read the title. I have to agree with kronos though. You can't remove heart attacks.

[Drael]

TBH im not sure why, but people seem to die to easy. Way easy. With sleep as well, its hard to establish any order.

Do you get me?

[Piscator]

I think I do. But what are you going to do against it?

If you'd get rid of heart attacks, characters whose players lost the interest in the game would simply remain in the game and do nothing until they starve.
And if you'd reduce the starvation rate you'd roughly get the same effect. Most characters in civilized regions don't starve because of a lack of food but of a lack of will to gather it. People would simply remain inactive in the game for a longer time.

[Drael]

Well thats actually a good point. Sleepers are an issue, dealt with by this mechanic.

Old age would help alot though.

If sleeper are that much of an issue, you could keep food the same. It seems to work.

[SekoETC]

People die of heart attacks either when the player clicks the X, PD kills a character by request (or due to a CRB) or if the account times out. Maybe it would be possible to make a difference between the first two and the third, in which case the third could say "You notice X is no longer breathing." instead of "You see X die." since it allows follows a period of inactivity and thus the death is less sudden. You can imagine that the person was most likely lying down and asleep when it happened (unless they were sleep-working on a project, but in that case you can still imagine that he lay down before it happened).

[Piscator]

Old age would help alot though.

How would old age help to reduce the number of deaths?

[Drael]

How would old age help to reduce the number of deaths?

I just mean that you need a certain level of deaths, and old age makes sense, after all we dont want to be ruled by a 3,000 year old mutant!

[SekoETC]

People die when the player wants them to die or stops caring about it, as simple as that. If you want sleepers to live longer, you can feed them but if the player doesn't log into his account then you can't keep them alive forever.

[Drael]

How would old age help to reduce the number of deaths?

Its a balance thing.

[Piscator]

Which means?

[Drael]

Playability over pragmatism.

[Piscator]

Could you please explain what is supposed to happen at old age? And if you mean that people would die, how is this keeping the balance and reducing the number of deaths?

[BlueNine]

It seems like you've completely U-Turned on your original idea of "less death more life". You started off suggesting that the current methods of ending a characters life (heart attack - account close. starvation - neglecting characters) are removed and now you're suggesting that characters die of old age so that a character which a player enjoys playing, only has a set amount of time to live (much like RL).

I'd agree with you about the old age = death if we had a ton of very old chars running around, but its kinda worked out as it is. The few old chars that survive (avoiding a player deleting the account or neglecting them because they are boring) tend to be leaders (elders running a village) so I don't see any problem.

Essentially you're suggestion is that we take away the ways that players can "kill off" their own characters and instead want to implement a system where they die without our control...