Hello all,

I'm curious as far as what forced deletion and age death is? I'm a prospective new player but I'm just curious how fast aging happens and what exactly is involved with a deletion? I usually like to maintain one character for a while if possible, so if I would be turning over new characters every few months, I don't know if this mud would be for me.

Can someone help?

I'm going to make two cases here, just as generalizations.

Let's say you are either A, a busy student or worker who still manages to have time to play CF for at least 2 hours a day, every day. Or, you are B, someone with a lot of free time, and you can dump 10 hours a day everyday into CF

Case A:

You are able to play, and do play, for 2 hours every day. As Dur said, you have, AT MINIMUM, 400 hours to Age Death your character (assuming a shaman doesn't wither you 8 zillion times -- I've actually only been withered once in 2 years of playing, albeit sparse). That means that you will be able to play your character for 200 julian days. At maximum, you're looking at about 375 days of play time (that is over a full year of playing the same guy every day).

Again, this is assuming you play for 2 hours a day every day.

Case B:

You are able to play, and do play, for 10 hours every day. This means, at a minimum, you will be able to play a character for 40 days, which is about 9 or 10 days over a month. At maximum, 75 days, which is a little over 2 months.

That's 10 hours a day of playing for up to 2 months of the same character. Some people only play a char for a month at an average of 2 hours a day before deleting, some even less.


Now, then, you have CON to worry about.

First and foremost, this game is called Carrion Fields. Not "Live in Happy Land and Never Die Plains of Glory" (unless you roll maran). You're going to die. If it is your first MUD, you're going to die a lot (this was my first MUD and it is hilariously embarrassing how and why I died). You get a lot of con, and only lose 1/3 con per death.

One thing to understand about CON is that you cannot go below 3 (I believe it is 3, I havent con died in awhile) or you will die of CON LOSS. So, if you have 20 CON, 17 of it counts towards your lives.

Because each death is 1/3 of a con, you have 17 * 3 = 51 lives. 20 is considered low con, too. There are races (dorfs lol) with 25 con, which means 22 * 3 = 66 lives.

That's at your base, too. There are ways to restore lost con. So, the numbers I provided are a BARE MINIMUM if you never restore lost con.

If it is not your first MUD, you will likely be more survivable than other noobs. That's good, you wont go through your con fast (it is actually pretty difficult to blow through 51 lives quickly anyway).



All that being said, you may end up wanting to try a different race/class and end up deleting your current somewhere along the road, anyway. Or, you get so involved with the new character that you forget about your old one and he AUTODELETES (auto deletion timeframe depends on char level, but I'm not too sure about the specifics here. I believe higher level characters might have even more than a month before auto deletion -- but this could be false. Maybe an imm will clarify here).



What I am getting at is that you shouldn't worry about your characters premature permadeath. You will have PLENTY of time to figure out if it is a race/class combo that you really want to play, or if you want to play something new. If you do like it, you will find that the character will last for a very long time.

Oops

Let's go by the tags you see in Battlefield forum

(DELETED) and (RAGE DELETE) are player manually deleting his own character. (AGE DEATH) and (CON LOSS) are involuntary permanent deaths in the game.

-Age death: You have approximately 400-700 hours of playtime for your character. There is some randomness involved and Shaman supplication wither can reduce the age you die permanently at (this is determine in character years. Characters that are short-lived in terms of years age slower in CF, which means that wither impacts them the most in terms of hours). Most people delete and make another character before they age die, so it is not a huge issue. Necromancers may also age die if their Becoming goes wrong and they do not manage to become a lich or a mummy.

Your character has maybe one hour or so to say goodbye to his friends in game after you age-die, in the form of a ghost. It is also traditional in CF to reminisce the dead characters in their death threads in the battlefield forum.

-Con loss: You lose 1 point of constitution every three deaths. When your constitution is reduced to 3, your character dies permanently. You can train your constitution. There is maybe half an hour or so ghost time to say goodbye after con loss.

Ranking up a character to max level isn't a huge investment of time; It should be doable within 30-100 hours, although newbies might level up slower at times. CF has multiple classes that play differently from each other, so once your character dies, you can try another aspect of the game.

I advice you to roll up and not worry about age death if you feel like playing. Age death/con loss hits maybe 2% of the characters, others die by player deleting and rolling something else. So think of it as a non-issue and just play. If you age/con die your character, you can then decide if you want to roll another one. Permadeath has positive consequences as well: There will always be new characters around at lower levels since the high level characters die off at some point. Leaders of different cabals will also change as the old one dies off, giving you a chance to rise to power.

This is a pretty good answer.

I'd add that, while we do have a small handful of players who will run a character to age death, in general it doesn't seem to be an issue. Character choices are varied enough that people typically seem eager to try on the advantages/limitations/opportunities/conflicts of a new kind of character by the time one's run its course.

This game design choice does have some benefits for you, even as a new player. For example, there's an excellent chance you'll run into some fairly veteran players even at the lower levels and can learn from them. Also, there's a constant/gradual turnover in cabal leadership, meaning it's not too unrealistic that you could get the chance to be a cabal leader, even as a new player, if you do a good job by your cabal's goals and stick with the character.

Or any.

NT

If you con-die in under 200 hrs, you don't get that extra time. At least, all my chars that con-died in under 200 hrs didn't (all 2 of them lol).

Ok, here is how it goes. Aging is based on the hours you play (actual time played). Some races, such as arials, have shorter life spans. If I'm guessing correctly it tends to be around 400 hours, I think, give or take. Some races, such as elves, have longer life spans. There is a random factor in there too. So, as a newbie. I would not be as concerned about age death as CON death. In this game. Expect to die. Expect to die often. Your first character will probably not be deathful. But that might not be what your character's goal is. In fact, I would spend my first character exploring, figuring out the world and so on.

You lose 1/3 of a con point per death.


The exceptions are Leaders of Cabals, they tend to live longer (hours), and they only lose 1/4 of con per death instead of 1/3. Some leaders have lived over 1000 hours. But on average, the Imp Zulg looked into the statistics and most characters get deleted (by the player) before they pass 150 hours. Mine tend to last about 250 hours personally before I start to get bored and want to move onto something else.


The last factor is auto-delete. If you do not log onto your character for an extended period of time...if will auto-delete. I generally don't go more than 2 weeks without logging in. Also, there is anti-hording code, so you really should be logging in every week atleast for an hour or two.

Some of this info is in Help death in game.

I'm not sure what you mean about forced deleting. If you just mean deleting in general. You can do it at any time. However, if you just died recently. It counts as a RAGE delete. That means they give you a chance to recover your character within 3days - a week. I cannot remember.

You should be aware that there are some items that can shave off
a few years from your characters lifespan.