The above is exactly my point. You’re proposing changing pretty much everything about how sleep works, and if you dig into it, you end up having to repeat the same exercise across every aspect of the game. At the end of the process you probably wouldn’t even recognize the game, and it would be a kind of ok singleplayer game and a kind of ok multiplayer game.
You simply need to start with the game being multiplayer.
K.G. has a solid point, as usual. The way a common player looks at it is - if a commercial gamedev studio comes up with a title, reminescent of an earlier success, he starts asking for stuff like !multiplayerer! or !my_favourite_class_char! - because it’s a particular improvement over his entertainment routine. Most of us found out about CataDDA through regular RL channels online, which at most times borders on classic and arcade gaming practices; singleplayer or co-op to the very core. Again, a seasoned CataDDA player is always itching for more, even if it means explicitly dismantling the whole on_keypress system only to bring some much needed dynamics in the console-driven world.
Just thinking here, MMO experience wouldn’t grant that much of a punch to this branch of Cataclysm. Sure, it would be nice to meet everyone in game and discuss playing styles; even better if there should be a safezone for trading, sharing much wanted artefacts. Linking to the tavern/forum games section as the most prized asset of it all, of course. The shortcoming of having to treat time as a variable completely different when switching between on and off in safemode is an entirely different bland from today’s CataDDA. I really think of classic adventure-ish games when typing about this (realtime or AP-based travel, and classic RL encounters). Even though I cannot simulate the issues here nor, perhaps, ask the right questions all at once - I can see the classic online multiplayer as the only viable way; and that is, my good friends, a game-mode for two, eventually up to four players in a leaderless party-type game.
Still, if you amass enough patience to mod this, our Cataclysm into a can-a-whopass-4all, you’ll get a biiig \o// from me.