That’s pretty harsh, even if possibly true. As for the outrage, well, in theory you’d understand that when you roll your character (as you should when you get a pet).
Edit: Also, I’m not advocating character deletion. They could remain in game, logging in occasionally to act in some kind of “elders” way. I can see game play being designed for that. Similar to what they call significant NPC encounters (vs. combat encounters) in DnD.
Absolutely 100% against this idea. A big part of my anchor to WoW is this character, who turns 14 this coming year. 14 years is more than half of my life on Earth; losing him is a great way to make me lose interest in the game.
I do enjoy the game on its own, but a large part of the loyalty is the character that’s been with me for so long. So no, losing him is not an option.
The characters DO die already. If you die in real life then obviously your character in the game is dead. XD You obviously can’t be playing WoW if your six feet under so that’s the final death…assuming the more probably death of the servers finally shutting down.
Giving “old” characters a noticeable stat debuff is almost as good as killing them off with the modern “if you aren’t optimal, you’re trash” WoW mentality.
Not to mention it makes little sense for long lived races like Draenei and Elves to suddenly get old after 9-10 years tops of adventuring.
Which 9-10 years basically is the entire timeline of WoW. Even a human that started out young would be in their late 20s/early 30s and not at all really on a decline.
People keeping their characters doesn’t make them emotional immature or have mental health problems.
I think you mean MMO’s, because if were talking about single-player games, they last pretty much forever. Even games with multiplayer elements in them as well MMO’s can effectively last forever since the fans love it very much. (Granted, with possible legal and copyright problems here and there.)
Yes, people have the right to be outraged by that, it’s essentially losing all your hard work or all the progress in a save slot in a video game. What’s wrong with being attached to something like that?
And before you tell me “i didn’t say that”, if you weren’t trying to imply/say it, then why you are speaking fondly about this? why are you saying “forced character deletion would be a step in the right direction for improving mental health and emotional maturity” if that’s not the overall message your trying to get across?
You’re acting like that’s the only progress the people have in their lives when your just assuming that, or basing it off of one’s experience most likely.
I don’t think forced character deletion is the way to go, infact, people should do whatever choice they want since it will be much better for them to choose then be forced into something they might not want yet.
cheats the system and gets a really long lived Tortoise… Heh, now it’s gonna out live us all…
Yea they do already.
Instead of the actual toon doing it the player does and the toon disappears forever.
I already do that with my characters whenever a race change or swap mains. I don’t need the game telling me when or how my character ages or retires.
You can do this now if you want.
That is of no help to the storyteller who needs to write code for the living.
I think it was Stan Lee who said in effect, writing for the hero is easy, they’re the same every week. Creating a new, interesting villain every week, that’s the hard part.
you can always impose that on yourself by retiring(delete) your character. I know some rpers do that
I’ve been retired for many years.
It is more like 1 year. Honestly that is alot of world ending disasters but after 2020 I understand how it could be possible.
No, we are forever young!
Damn my back is killing me today.
Somebody is getting defensive 
Imposing death on yourself does not solve the problem the developers face with programming with very large numbers. Which, for those who’ve done any programming understand, is why we have to get a level squish periodically.
Not a single one of my characters is older than sixteen years. They’re still babies, still in High School (if WoW had school). Let them live!
MMORPG’s =/= Sims
How so?
Can you explain how am i being defensive with that comment?
Can you also explain how having characters is being emotionally immature and having mental health issues as you implied in that first comment i have responded?
I kinda think it could add to that, if it was done well; they could make it so that different races “age” at different rates and maybe have different effects that happen to them when they age (like instead of getting weaker, undead get more and more powerful, but start going insane, or something like that). Would help races feel more distinct.
No I wanna live forever!
…jk end my suffering lol.