One account, one character. Are you cool with that?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Canterbury, Apr 11, 2014.

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One account, one character. Are you cool with that?

Poll closed Apr 18, 2014.
  1. Yes

    78.4%
  2. No

    13.8%
  3. Unsure

    7.8%
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  1. Silent Strider

    Silent Strider Avatar

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    And what I want to be is not someone stuck in just a narrow field. For example, in MMOs that have the traditional group roles, I tend to not even start playing any MMO where I can't just switch roles at a whim. I find being stuck in a single role to be too boring.

    Thankfully this game doesn't have a subscription, so I can keep my 3 accounts at no further cost in order to have 3x more options than the game usually allows, and to master 3x more crafting professions than usually possible.
     
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  2. Isaiah

    Isaiah Avatar

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    Are all three of your accounts at Immortal Adventurer or above?
     
  3. Belrindor

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    As a former 'altoholic' in other MMOs, it'll be interesting to play one character in this one. But then again, I find that I have no desire to play more than one character in SotA. Could be that whole 'Avatar' thing. :)
     
  4. Karrolanth

    Karrolanth Avatar

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    I do tend to have several alts in online games, but I was thinking about why. Most of the time it's not because I have a particular desire to have 'lots of alts', but because the game pushes me in that direction if I want to try out different things. Most games expect you to choose between being a fighter, mage, healer, thief or whatever, and limit the skills available to you based on that initial class choice. If you want to try something else, you have to start a new character. (At least DDO allowed you to multi-class, but it could be difficult to make a viable character if you didn't think hard about what would work - there was no just 'going with it' and trying out whatever you fancied, unless you were willing to pay (or grind) for an expensive item that let you fix your mistakes.)

    Add to that the availability of different races in many games, and that's a whole lot of possible combinations to pick from! Maybe I want to be a dwarven fighter... but what if orcs are better at fighting? Would a dwarven mage be terrible? Maybe I should try it and see! Oh, but elves are so much prettier than the other races... And of course, there are never enough free character slots to try everything without rerolling, so you have to buy a few extra ones...

    So for me, SotA's proposal of just one character frees me from all that indecision. What race shall I choose? Well, there's only one! No problem. What class shall I be? I don't have to pick one, I can learn as I go and find out which skills interest me and are enjoyable through experimentation. (And hopefully redoing them won't cost an arm and a leg...!)

    Having one character will feel a little odd to me at first, but I don't mind it at all - so long as they don't make changing your skills prohibitively expensive or difficult if you choose the wrong path or discover that you don't enjoy something as much as you hoped. (I don't expect it to be too easy or everyone will be changing on a whim, but I hope there won't be an outrageous penalty for experimentation.)

    And if I do want to try something entirely different, there's always the offline game... :)
     
  5. Canterbury

    Canterbury Avatar

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    Quite right. And a lot of that indecision that other games create in players is all part of their design. The devs in those games WANT you to be indecisive and they WANT you to want to be a fighter and a healer and a mage and they WANT you to struggle choosing a race to play. Why? Because the more thinly you spread yourself... and in the case of some OCD types, they will spread themselves across everything... the more time you will end up devoted to their game.

    It's kind of sick in some ways, actually, the way that games will try and make themselves "sticky" to gamers. There's more than a touch pf psychology going on behind them.
     
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  6. mikeaw1101

    mikeaw1101 Avatar

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    One character ½ character so what, what's the difference anyways. who has the time in r/l to develof all of these online cyber-personalities anyway. if you know someone let me know haha
     
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  7. Sir Bradley White

    Sir Bradley White Avatar

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    And the new way they hook in players... Achievements. So, make 4 classes, 8 class types, and have different achievements based around that. Now, those that seem to need to have them all will have to spend even MORE time playing to get them
     
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  8. Canterbury

    Canterbury Avatar

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    Absolutely, like in GW2 -- which is a game I love, but I'm not immune to pointing out stuff I don't like -- where you can get an achievement for unlocking every location, vista, etc, in the game.

    Some of those locations and vistas and waypoints are in the RvR section of the game, and often in enemy control, not only making full map achievement difficult, but something a non-RvR person actively dreads.
     
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  9. Karrolanth

    Karrolanth Avatar

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    Oh don't... in Neverwinter they now give points for collecting companions, and whenever I or my hubby get a new one I have to pass it around to all of my characters so it gets logged before giving it to the one that will keep it. I just can't bring myself to NOT do that, it's terrible!


    *scuffs feet and blushes* In DDO I had 17 characters. 8 or 9 of them were roleplayed and they all had very distinct personalities and backstories. That game was pretty much all I did in my spare time, up until a couple of years ago. :oops:
     
  10. redfish

    redfish Avatar

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    Yes, but part of what you're giving up is the ability to be a storyteller yourself. If I want to put a scribe character in the world, who hates going out on adventures, and whose only love in life is to write and collect books, and so likes to stay in his study all day long, that's going to be useless for actually playing through the story. As a player, I'm going to want a build with good skills that can help me on adventures.

    Your characters decisions may matter, but only matter as much as they're playing to the story that the story writers are creating for you. The thing for me is, the beauty of MMOs is that you have the opportunity break the traditional divide between the DM and player... and those roles can cease to matter anymore...

    If their goal is to have one character per account, I still hope they let us create custom companions / hirelings, where we can control their appearance and habits, and maybe even temporarily enter their character for role-playing purposes.
     
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  11. Silent Strider

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    Two Digital Explorers, one Edelmann. So yeah, all three at Immortal Adventurer or above. In fact, all three already have guaranteed access to all chapters, so I really don't need to pay anything extra to keep my extra characters up to the true end of the game.

    Like I said, Portalarium made a design where the player can ignore the character limitation by throwing money at the game, so I choose to throw money at the game and not have the limitation. Given that it seems like I will really hate how the economy works, it was either that or not playing the game online at all.

    This works with me only to a point. Beyond that, it just makes me leave the game.

    Two examples come to mind: City of Heroes and DDO. In both games I got stuck while leveling because I couldn't decide what I wanted to do with my character, so I just stopped playing instead.

    Of course, the fact that I would rather stop playing altogether than pay any amount of real money for a one-shot respec pushed things that way in both those games. While I'm willing to pay extra for more character slots, or to have extra specs I can switch at any time I desire, I will never pay real money for one-shot character services like respeccing.

    A bit off-topic, but at least in my GW2 server, it's not uncommon for one server to absolutely dominate the WvW from start to finish. By that I mean having more points than the other two servers added together for the whole week. And, whenever that happen, there will be times through the week when my server has 90% of the map under control.

    I got my WvW map complete by monitoring that and jumping in when my server had control over most of the map, no fighting needed. In fact, whenever I got into the WvW to do map completion, I would flat out refuse to help my server with the PvP. I never mix PvP with PvE, so if I'm doing PvE things, I refuse to take part in PvP.
     
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  12. Koldar

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    This is the only warning I will issue in this thread. What happens in dev+ stays in dev+.
     
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  13. Tay M'real

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    I can see where it can have a great impact on the community by allowing people to choose a path and stay within that path, however, it can become quickly dull if you're only following a single way to progress your character. If there are opportunities to go into a different path to try new things without sacrificing a significant level of work, I can see that as being viable...

    However, not sure how something like this could be implemented successfully.
     
  14. cariac

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    One account, one character

    It is obvious !
     
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