I completely agree with this sentiment.
The dev team has been talking for a few years now about doing away with physical age as a detrimental factor to your character's ability to do stuff. I honestly can't see a good enough reason to keep it around, so while it may take me a few days to clean up my code repository enough to safely send it live, I will be disabling all negative effects of age Soonâ„¢. (I will make an announcement when it happens.)
However, the fact remains that age was introduced to combat a very real problem: namely, that of people keeping around old, tired characters long past when they stopped actually doing anything useful.
Thus, I propose the following (still somewhat sketchy) system to replace it.
All characters will have a Health value, which will, broadly, improve by doing things, and decline from inactivity. It will operate on a threshold system, so that there will be a clear cutoff point below which you will start losing hours, and a plateau above that where the system will be smart enough (and generous enough) to warn you when you're likely to slip into Ill Health or whatever we end up calling it.
It will be a constantly shifting value, so that if you have a period of, say, six months when you can't log in as often (or just don't feel motivated to do so), you may end up getting 5 hours/turn for a while when you start being more active again, but once you are reasonably active again, it shouldn't take very long for you to return to full health.
It will act as something of a buffer, so if you're the type of person who has bursts of activity every few days, that should be plenty to ensure that you remain healthy.
It will, however, also be affected by torture and wounding—but since activity counteracts those effects, people who are already active should not find them to be too onerous, while people who are not will find them to significantly impact their play.
We will make every effort to ensure that people who log on and act regularly, even if it is less than once or twice a day, do not find themselves falling into Ill Health. It is intended specifically to penalize those who log on infrequently so as to maintain positions they do nothing useful with.
The components of "activity", for the purposes of Health, will include travel, a variety of actions, combat, and length and frequency of messages.
All of this is subject to change, and open to suggestions and criticism!
