Homin Aging...

[clyne]

I just noticed that several homins on atys are aging quite well. i.e NPCs : Look here!

While I dont prefer my characters to look old why not add realism by aging players or at the least allow us to set age in Ring NPCs? It surely seems that aging is quite well implemented...

[acridiel]

It was a Feature that Nevrax thought of implementing, but well...

We´ll see.

CU
Acridiel

[raven41]

Well I don't want to age... I like my char just the way it is. :P

[bluefve]

Back when the Alpha testers were testing the Ring on our servers, we had a rude awakening one week as there was a... noticable patch bug. Everyone on the test server was "aged". At first, I thought it was my graphics, but then I checked with a friend and he confirmed. I later spoke to Seido and he said that there were indeed "old" homins on Atys, always been. You just need to look close, such as the Stable Boy. Not much of a boy himself

But yup Acridiel stated. Would be cool.

[jamela]

In my opinion, aging, and eventually death, is the answer to the problem that newcomers face when coming into a world which is already full of high level, undying characters. I know I am going off-topic here because the original post only concerned visual aging, sorry, but just look at the current situation. We have scores of high level and Mastered characters about and this puts a tremendous pressure on newcomers to grind levels as fast as they can so that they can join in with what everybody else is doing. Which means grinding and that leads to burnout, and also means that they don't go through the same experience that we older players did when the world was young, and which is a part of why we are still here. Look at how many departed players came back when Cho was opened!

Noone wants their character to wither and grow feeble, but there's a lot of good to be said for character aging, and even though it might sound paradoxical, making character life finite, and even short, would improve the longevity of a game:

Aging would recycle the established playerbase, encouraging or even forcing them to make new characters, and that would breathe life into the starter isle (I just read meitemax's post on the "Help Save Cho" thread). New subscribers would feel that their only disadvantages compared to the older players would be their lack of knowledge of the world and their lack of a heritage. (Heritage could be a mechanical accumulated bonus for long-term accounts, or attributes passed from parent to child by lineage, as well as inevitable connections and friendships.)

When character longevity is well balanced against levelling rate then none of the players will shout for higher level caps - that situation is a dead end since the development team would have to be many times larger than the capped playerbase to have even the first hope of keeping the hungry and competitive players happy. So the developers would then be able to focus upon the existing world and storyline, and use ALL of the existing resources to create new areas, not just the level 200+ and non-existent 250+ resources .

I tried to keep my thoughts concise, there's much more I could add on this topic .

/end off-topic

[sprite]

Yeah check out the NPCs in Yrk market, plenty of them are old wrinklies

Iirc the original plan was that if you chose to have a child, then your char would start to age and would eventually die (ie permadeath) and then you could lvl using the child character which would have some kind of inherited advantage over a "normal" new char. Sounds cool but way too complicated to implement imo; very low priority for player aging, and if they added the ability to "age" R2 NPCs then I think people would keep asking why they can't age their chars

[bluefve]

Or, they could allow for a slider during character creation to appear older and younger. Therefore, those that want to add a little history to there character can, or those that want to look forever young, go right ahead. Star Wars Galaxies had this feature.

[sprite]

Originally Posted by bluefve

Or, they could allow for a slider during character creation to appear older and younger. Therefore, those that want to add a little history to there character can, or those that want to look forever young, go right ahead. Star Wars Galaxies had this feature.

Mmm true. Would be funny tho; lots of "new" homins being old geezers and all us old folks are stuck being the sprightly young ones xD

[jamela]

Are the aging skins dependent upon graphics levels? I have to run with most everything set to minimum (have to have entity range up to 150m for survival value).

Edit: ROFL, I just realised that there is in fact some realtime aging in process ingame. I have had to lower my graphics settings since I started playing, and even despite making a massive upgrade in graphics card almost a year ago, I now play with lower settings than I did when I started. I need glasses!

[katriell]

A homin's lifespan would be about 11-16 years, RL time. Even if there were temporal character aging implemented already, we wouldn't be noticing it.