It takes a certain amount of either skill or abject cowardice to age-die a character. It's several hundred hours of gameplay to age-die, whereas only 39-66 deaths will permanently kill most characters who aren't fighting it off with their (very limited) extra training sessions.

And that even kind of permanent death doesn't kill of the majority of characters. Voluntary deletion swamps all other causes of character death by a wide margin. Check the Battlefield forum, and remember that only high-level characters hit that board at all-- for every thread, there's probably at least a couple dozen characters who deleted at lower levels.

Age death kills off maybe a dozen or two characters per RL year, nearly all of whom are played by experienced players. It should be at the very back of your mind as a newer player.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com