Time now exists in an entirely new world.
As SMEs do stuff, they age. Time is a bit wibbly wobbly in the game, as only the active character ages, but the user’s account ages with any action (active character or no). Ages are a bit variant.
Humans have normal lifespans. Ents start at about 1,000 years, and go to 12,000. Elves are a few thousand years. Squids and Calamari are 1 to 3 years. Mushrooms 1 to 5.
Eternals, Celestials and Gods will have million and billion year spans.
Curiously, Sponges, I am told have lifespans from roughly half a year to 24,000 years, so those SpongeBob’s will be around for a while.
Characters and accounts have two ages that can both affect gameplay. There’s their in-game age which is their natural lifespan of their species and then there’s the in real life age which begins the moment they are created IRL.
As SME reach their natural lifespan, they have a chance of dying at their next birthday which increases with each additional birthday past their natural lifespan. This incentivizes the player to retire them to one of the locations in town in order to enhance that location’s services (and potentially passive bonuses/skills) before they just die.
By tracking and using both time variants for various character class requirements (and quests and in game events), this both incentivizes the use of characters for questing and other things as well as sticking around as you can’t get a Sage until you have to have a Librarian who’s been a librarian for a full real year before they unlock the Sage class (as an example).
Update:
Got the tooltips rocking right:
They now pop up *instantly* on mouseover. Probably need some shadow, but this is exactly what I was looking for to implement the “mullet” UI (business up front, party ’round the back).
Robot Pirate Ninja 