roleplaying as an ancient being (2000+ years old) is good for people who stay at the same mud for half a decade: in essence, they ARE like the immortal elves, who are always suffering because they outlive anyone they meet... play a mud for 5 years and on the 5th maybe 1/100th of the people you knew 5 years ago will still be around. To have this sort of demographic and still consider yourself "a 40 year old merchant from venice"... belittles the hundreds of generations who have come and gone in your lifetime.
I'd like to point out that Elrond is several thousand years old, Galadriel is several TENS of thousands of years old, and the valar (for example Iluvatar, a common poster here) several hundreds of thousands/several millions of years old. And if you say "yeah well, thats just one series", might I remind you Tolkien is one of the fundamental influences on the entire fantasy genre? without him at the very least elves, dwarves, halflings would most probably never have developed, as well as fantasy's semi-human "Race of Man" (which is subtly different than real life humans).