The aging we were talking about has two big problems (not taking into account bad feelings about being forced to play in a certain way or ideological disagreement because freeform RP would be reduced, "less freedom for players" etc.):
1. How to determin the time a char gets older?
2. What about race-specific lifespans?
The first problem can be reduced to the question whether online time or RL time should determin the velocity a char ages.
Only online time: if one doesn't play a char for a year, another char which is being played for this time would be a lot older in the end -> not acceptable
Only RL time: If one decides to not play a char for a year, the char might be dead after that, although one haven't played with it -> not acceptable
It is possible to reduce that problem to a decent amount by following case destinction:
case 1: onlinetime < 100h / month => char gets older for 100 (units aren't important here)
case 2: 100h / month < onlinetime < 1000h / month => char gets older for onlinetime
case 3: onlinetime > 1000h / month => char gets older for 1000
With that only a factor of 10 is possible as maximum difference, but still the problem isn't really solved, only reduced.
The second problem is not solvable within this system.
More in detail:
In The Sims, you play a character for a defined lifetime. That means you have a maximum time in RL to play through childhood, adulthood and so on.
If one tries to set maximum lifetimes for races equally, one would have to reduce the lifetime of some races (enkidukai, for example) to a non-acceptable limit in relation to other races.
It is not desirable to take the maximum lifespan as a reason to prefer one race over the other.
On the other side, a player only can play a little window in the chars life per default (who can sit there day and night and play the char from birth to death?).
With continous aging this window is not only too restricting in regards of the game experience (online/RL time may vary too much from IC time) but also leaves too little space for people who want to develop their chars over a long time.
One could also think that aging itself has the other problem that it is not balancable. Taking the CC into consideration, it would be a very big problem to give players the choice with which age to start. Right now one can override those game mechanics. If age actually has a big impact, one couldn't anymore.
However, I said "could think", as I doubt that it is intented to be that easy to override the CC as it is an integral element of the game mechanics.
All chars start per default (now) in early adulthood and that should not be changed as it would create big troubles in balancing (what stats should be reduced/raised for older chars? how many creationpoints additional? what additional events? etc. etc.).
After considering all variables I could think of, I come to the conclusion that continous aging with death in the end is not realisable in an acceptable way.
Instead I propose a different approach, trying to circumvent the problems of continous aging but having the advantages (because of the lot of possibilities) of age itself.
Three stages - child, adult, aged.
All chars start off as adult (like it should be now without circumventing the CC).
It is possible with potions, spells, quests etc. to change the physiological age/appearance, but leaving out the continous aging dependant on online/RL time.
It's possible to have age-specific items/skills/quests with that, without being forced as player to do those quests in a certain time.
One wouldn't die of age anymore, but being ghost could still be an option, for instance if you lost your body in any way or decided to be a ghost, or as quest or even as dream (wasn't there a thread about sleeping and dreaming? *scratches his head*).
