Shoot Me Down: Retirement Proposal (in General)

So, I was thinking.
What if ... instead of retiring a character once you finished with him, he (or she) stayed around to fight?
They would become a 'virtual' character (or 'ghost' if you will), with all the skills, spells and equipment that they had when they were 'alive'.
They would *not* lose score when defeated, as they woiuld not actually be 'in existence'. This would then stop the dreaded 'drift down and bunch' that some ppl are concerned about.
Being virtual, the only way you could interact with them is by fighting - thus their equipment, being unable to be bought/sold could not be counted in the economy.

You'd obviously be given the chance, once you'd opted for Carousel to take their equipment before the characters ascension, where they would get their virtual equipment back.
Thus, over time, we'd build a collection of NPCs at sensible levels for their score that would give new characters a decent challenge.
I don't know if it would be possible to automatically LastDay characters if inactive for (say) a year, but that would swell the ranks of the undead with reasonable efficiency too.

Am I a genius, or am I just talking mince?
You decide.

highly abusable.

I've supported an idea similar to this for a while now. It would be nice to donate characters to a fight pool so that they remain selectable targets.

However, one problem with this is; retired characters are unequipped, which makes them easy targets even for weak teams (I know you mentioned something like this already).

too exploitable

The only part of this that draws my attention is here:

I think we'd need them to lose score, but with a system in place to allow all NPCs to regain it over time.

Definitely, I'd set myself up some big guys with massive HP and a decay vulnerability, and without any score drop, I'd ride them with my NCB for months easily. No thought required!

Not only that OB, but once there are several of them the low game is over. Those characters will be around for everyone permanently. There won't be any searching for new targets, no thought at all until you get to the top.

OK, fair enough.
I understand - I'm talking mince :-)

how about this.... SCREEN THE APPLICANTS let everyone vote on it :) and then after 48 hours it is either destroyed or ghosted

What if a tourney was set up to help with this. In this tournament, all you had to do was make a character and play it. After x amount of time, it ends and everyone gets their character voted on. Characters that are reasonable candidates for this pool of 'ghosts' are selected as winners and receive a prize. This would, potentially, solve the equipment issue too. In the event that tourney characters cannot be changed over to regular characters, they could be cloned, or a character could be simply made as a copy.

It doesn't work in practice, but I do keep my characters unretired with no equipment for a while so people can beat on them. It feeds score back into the system.

I wish we could do this. There are lots of aspects to this idea I really like... but like Nat said, I guess we cant just trust people to not gimp their perma-characters for an easy 100% challenge bonus for their whole NCB.

Actually, the screening idea is good - good supporter incentive, and maybe a small reward ever time you got one accepted?

lol, sorry - just been thinking about this for a while and hated to be shot down so easily :_(

Guess I thought that everyone was as honest as me :-P

Can people fight their own characters? If you can't fight one of your own characters with another one of your own, there can be no self-benefitting intentional gimping.