Number of Characters & Experience


Pathfinder Online

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Goblin Squad Member

Several questions for those who might have the answer - and thank you in advance:

1. I have read that Alpha players have discovered that they have 3 characters slots. If this is true, is this the number for EE as well?

2. Will you be able to make a second character on the same account, and log them in and use them without gaining experience? -or-

3. If you log in a second account, must you toggle them for experience gain in order to log them in, and thus toggle off the main character already on the account?

Again, thanks to anyone with the answers.

Goblin Squad Member

I've asked this several times. So far the answers have hinted that we will get plenty of character slots, but they don't know how the experience will work. I'd really think they should be able to answer this a month away from starting.

Goblin Squad Member

I think you and I might be asking for the same reason.
Perhaps if we ask nicely? :)

Goblin Squad Member

Last time I asked I specifically prefaced with "I need to know so I can make a budget to give you more money." Doesn't get any nicer than that ;)

Liberty's Edge Goblin Squad Member

I'm very interested in this as well. I have three solid character concepts, but I'd like at least one additional slot to leave open for RP needs.

Goblin Squad Member

My interest is for making RP characters - some disposable, some more permanent, but only needing to be logged in once in a while.

Goblin Squad Member

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I don't recall any specific answer on whether you'll need to be earning XP on a Character in order to log it in. However, you can check out Ryan's thoughts on the subject.

Ryan has repeatedly told us that his "intention is that you will be able to have an unlimited number of characters on an account".

Goblin Squad Member

From what I read awhile back, it seemed like you could play multiple characters from the same account EXCEPT Destiny's Twin, which you could only play it or the main, not both at the same time. Also, seemed like their was a toggle to shift experience gain between characters, but you could also just purchase time for each character separately.

I don't know how many slots you will have.

Goblin Squad Member

What are the possible complications of unlimited character slots and the War of Towers?

Goblin Squad Member

Bringslite of Fidelis wrote:
What are the possible complications of unlimited character slots and the War of Towers?

Stationing a character at each tower? 12 companies of 12 comprised of 12 players? If you aren't training them up, that stopgag solution will become obsolete within a month. Maybe its not a bad thing considering the #'s we got for day 1.

Goblin Squad Member

I don't think they will have unlimited character slots.

Goblin Squad Member

Neither do I. 3 sounds right. But that leaves the really big question about logging in and training and how we can move the training around.

Goblin Squad Member

TEO Cheatle wrote:
I don't think they will have unlimited character slots.

I'm curious why you think that, give this:

My intention is that you will be able to have an unlimited number of characters on an account...

That statement was made just a few short weeks ago.

I would be extremely shocked if we were limited to three Characters per Account in Early Enrollment. I'd be rather shocked if were were limited to less than 20, in fact.

Goblin Squad Member

3 sounds right, more to be purchased up to the memory limit GW is partitioning for every account. Don't want it to be too easy to create throw-aways.

Goblin Squad Member

With the way they are allowing multiple people play one account, or at least you can be logged in with multiple computers on one account, unlimited character creation could get out of hand.

I could create a character and place him/her in every settlement, place them all over the place.

Now, if we were only allowing ONE character to be logged in at one time, then yea, totally fine with unlimited characters. To go a step further if you bought time specifically for any of your characters it would unlock them to be logged in and played at the same time, that would be fine too.

Goblin Squad Member

You should be able to log-in to all your characters at once.

You should only get a few to start, probably 2-3. Then you have to purchase any further slots. There will be people that create a lot of alts, but those people will be getting extra accounts anyway.

Bottom line, GW makes more money off of these people.

Also, it would be nice to get a clarification on the Destiny's Twin thing. Can we have them both online?

Goblin Squad Member

Trying to have more than one character logged in at once has no appeal to me at all. That totally blows my sense of immersion as a RPer, but more power to those who can. I'm just looking for the ability to create "extras" for RP purposes, as I've posted about in the past.

If I had to stop XP gain for a bit on my main to do so, I'd be okay with that, though I'm guessing there's a good many people who wouldn't be.

Goblin Squad Member

Totally disagree with you on that one Valkenr.

If you want more than just one character logged in you should buy time for them, or at least buy an extra character slot.

Also, they have mentioned more than once that you can't play your main/DT at the same time. You have to log in with either one or the other.

Goblin Squad Member

Now, that I re-read what you said, we maybe on the same page lol.

Goblin Squad Member

Being able to log in when your character when it isn't training is a planned feature for OE. It is how the game is 'F2P'.

And the last time I saw DT mentioned, it wasn't set in stone, and a while ago.

Goblin Squad Member

With as forthcoming as Devs have been with new info in the Gobbocast interviews (thanks, by the way), it would be nice to get a better feel for how this will work. As early as month two or three into EE, people will be paying subscriptions - correct? If so, we'd need to know by then what that subscription affords us.

Goblin Squad Member

Valkenr wrote:

Being able to log in when your character when it isn't training is a planned feature for OE. It is how the game is 'F2P'.

And the last time I saw DT mentioned, it wasn't set in stone, and a while ago.

From a long time ago:

@Hroderich Gottfrei - our thoughts on "playing for free" are evolving. There will be some form of free play, that's a requirement in today's market where people want to try an MMO before they put in any money.

How long you can play without paying anything is something we're thinking about. We don't want a game full of folks who trained for 6 months, got reasonably competent, and are now playing without producing any revenue.

From less than two weeks ago:

(This is one big reason I say that Destiny's Twin is cool, but it's not as good as a "second character". Because you have to choose to either do things to earn Achievements with the Main, or with the Twin, but you can't do both at the same time. So you'll have to decide how you want to allocate your game time "doing things in the game" and you can't treat the Twin as just a convenient alter-ego of your Main.)

I expect we will not be able to log in your Destiny's Twin at the same time as your Main, although I expect you'll be able to log it in at the same time as any other Characters on that Account without a problem.

I do not expect we will be able to log in Characters that aren't earning XP, but I'm much less sure of it. I see that limitation as a very simple way to avoid the pitfall Ryan described in the first quote. Level caps on free accounts are meaningless when you don't gain XP unless you're paying for it. If your Account has a lot of XP on it, whether that was all on one Character or spread over a bunch of Characters, I kinda sorta expect that you'd be able to log in Characters that aren't earning XP.

Goblin Squad Member

TEO Cheatle wrote:

Totally disagree with you on that one Valkenr.

If you want more than just one character logged in you should buy time for them, or at least buy an extra character slot.

Also, they have mentioned more than once that you can't play your main/DT at the same time. You have to log in with either one or the other.

I think I remember (of course i have horrible memory) reading that you will be able to select which character is the Main getting xp and the twin that gets xp. Would that mean by turning off the twins xp he is no longer considered a twin and may log in with the main until such time as you turn his twin XP back on?

Goblin Squad Member

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FMS Trippic wrote:
TEO Cheatle wrote:

Totally disagree with you on that one Valkenr.

If you want more than just one character logged in you should buy time for them, or at least buy an extra character slot.

Also, they have mentioned more than once that you can't play your main/DT at the same time. You have to log in with either one or the other.

I think I remember (of course i have horrible memory) reading that you will be able to select which character is the Main getting xp and the twin that gets xp. Would that mean by turning off the twins xp he is no longer considered a twin and may log in with the main until such time as you turn his twin XP back on?

Last I heard, the Twin and Main are permanently linked. The Twin gains when the Main in gaining. They are either both on, or both off.

Goblin Squad Member

That is pretty interesting concept, but it probably won't be something you can turn on and off, but something more permanent.

Goblin Squad Member

Trippic, Ryan's stated goal is not to have people build a character to a certain point then be able to keep playing it forever without paying anything. I expect that past a certain point (whether that's 2000xp or 10,000 or something else, if the character isn't earning XP, you won't be able to play it.

The Destiny's Twin is a fairly potent feature, and I doubt if you'll be able to switch it between characters without maybe wiping the original. If I've misunderstood, and you just mean turn it off without moving the DT feature to another character, I can't imagine why you'd want to. You don't have to spend the experience, just because it's there.

I do see, though, that the accounts with DT may become quite limited. If you have a DT, you're not going to want to play any other alts on that account, because you'll be losing the double experience benefit while you do so.

Goblin Squad Member

Maybe it helps to think of it as Destiny's Twin Character = Twin A + Twin B, not Main + Twin.

CEO, Goblinworks

I have tasked the team with adding core features to the game as their first priority, adding support features as their second, and polishing/bug fixing as their third. We have a series of scenarios for account management depending on how much work the team can invest in that support feature before we get to Early Enrollment. Essentially we have a baseline of a "minimum" system, where you'll have a small number of character slots and a limited UI (essentially similar to what is in the Alpha now) and a plan for a more robust system with lots of slots and a more sophisticated UI to support them. This is a feature that won't be iterated until later in the Alpha, if it is interated in the Alpha, and that decision is made by seeing how well we've accomplished other objectives as we work on the Alpha.

So the answer is at this time "we don't know".

Long term the answer will be "lot of slots unless we find a technical reason not to support them". It will simply be a matter of timing barring a technical limit uncovered in testing and development.

Goblin Squad Member

Perhaps something along the lines of "your character is playable this month as long as you buy him at least one week of XP".

Or maybe "you can play this character as long as another character on your account is earning XP", although they'd probably have to limit the number of dependents a paid character could support.

There should definitely be some amount of free XP at character creation to allow for a trial- I'd like that amount to be a week, just because it would amuse me to call such characters "weeklings".

Goblin Squad Member

K, was prolly my mind altering my memory on me. I just kinda see the permanent thing causing alot of requests for changes due to user error and whatnot. Also, with the paying extra money each month for another character to gain xp beyond what the account originally had, would be a bit less time consuming and complicated programming-wise if it was all on toggles.

Question:
Did they say what the permanent selection process of the twin would be yet Or are they still working on it with the DT's not coming in til shortly after beginning of EE?

Edit: Wow i type slow so many got in while i was typing

Goblin Squad Member

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Guurzak wrote:
Perhaps something along the lines of "your character is playable this month as long as you buy him at least one week of XP".

I'd think there should be something like this, just to control the number of characters used for off-line tasks like construction, crafting, or bulk-harvesting queues.

Also, if multiple characters on an account are sharing a month's XP, the XP might trickle in to each character, based on that character's share. An account with multiple characters would have sliders for each character ranging from 0 and 1.0; to use a character in off-line tasks could require the character is receiving (for example) at least 0.25 of max XP.

Goblin Squad Member

I think unlimited characters is too much.
A very high number, excellent. Even if that number is like 100.

Unlimited characters logged in, even worse.

Unlimited anything = big red button that says do not push.

I know I personally would have a hard time not logging in 100+ characters at a time to just to wreck havoc in game, and I'm not even the person you would have to be worried about.

That sort of thing would be way to open to abuse.

Of couse it all comes down to how the accounts will work with XP, subscriptions, F2P, and so on. Seeing as how it has not been decided yet, we can only guess.

I will gladly voluenteer my many years of powergaming/XP/System abusing skills to helping GW figure it out though.

Goblin Squad Member

Ryan,

Thank you for the reply. That clears up the number of slots questions.

Do you have an idea about the experience portion of my original question? Would "extra" characters require purchased XP time or can they exist, even for a limited period, without needing to be gaining XP?

Goblin Squad Member

I'm pretty in the dark about the xp gaining system. If I buy a 3 month xp pack at the store, do I have to allocate it to a character and lose it if I delete the character?

Goblin Squad Member

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Here is the biggest issue I have a problem with:

If I can have a character log out, while logged out he is helping with outposts, PoIs, build buildings, and other things that GW have talked about.....

What is to stop me from making enough alts, say we get 1000xp at character creation, and I give them all 2-4 levels in what ever they need, and stick them in an outpost? We could have entire Companies of these alts doing nothing but helping production on outposts, constructing buildings, and other things. They wouldn't be the best at it, not nearly so, but they would allow for us to supplement our work force pretty heavily.

I don't think this should be allowed. If it is, you will see 20k real life people playing, and half a million characters made.

Goblin Squad Member

That's kind of my point Cheatle.
The devil is in the details.

@Avari
I would imagine, if you delete the character you loos the XP. Just like every other game. If you delete your 80 in WoW, hes gone, the time you spent leveling him doesn't go to someone else. If you delete a character in EVE the skills you real-time trained don't get to get moved to another.

Goblin Squad Member

If they aren't gaining xp, all of their queues would have to stop. The reason I'm confused at no answer for this being available is that it's at the heart of GW's profit model for EE. You'd think it's the one thing they know the answer to for sure.

Goblin Squad Member

<Kabal> Sunnfire wrote:

That's kind of my point Cheatle.

The devil is in the details.

@Avari
I would imagine, if you delete the character you loos the XP. Just like every other game. If you delete your 80 in WoW, hes gone, the time you spent leveling him doesn't go to someone else. If you delete a character in EVE the skills you real-time trained don't get to get moved to another.

My question is if I buy 3 months xp time and allocate it to a character that I delete after 2 weeks. What happens to the remaining 2.5 months of xp time?

If we can toggle the xp back and forth between characters than there is the answer, otherwise not sure.

Goblin Squad Member

I agree, seems it would be an important detail. But Ryan has said nothing is set in stone. So we will just have to wait and let our devious minds run wild with the prospects of what shenanigans we might be able to get away with.

Goblin Squad Member

TEO Cheatle wrote:
What is to stop me from making enough alts, say we get 1000xp at character creation, and I give them all 2-4 levels in what ever they need, and stick them in an outpost?

I believe the plan is for there to be a hard limit of how many Characters can be assigned to a specific task, but I'm not sure.

T7V Avari wrote:
If I buy a 3 month xp pack at the store, do I have to allocate it to a character and lose it if I delete the character?

My understanding is that XP Gain is like a hose that's always flowing, and that you can always attach to another Character (assuming it doesn't already have a hose attached). So, if you buy a 3-Month XP Pack, attach it to a Character, and then delete that Character after 1 month, I'm pretty sure you'd still have 2 months of XP coming out of the hose and you could attach it to another Character.

Goblin Squad Member

T7V Avari wrote:


My question is if I buy 3 months xp time and spend it on a character that I delete after 2 weeks. What happens to the remaining 2.5 months of xp time?

If we can toggle the xp back and forth between characters than there is the answer, otherwise not sure.

Ohhh.. gotcha. Excellent question. I would hope you could assign the training time to another character.

Goblin Squad Member

Nihimon wrote:


I believe the plan is for there to be a hard limit of how many Characters can be assigned to a specific task, but I'm not sure.

That would leave plenty of room for one man economies unless shutting off xp shuts off the queues.

Nihimon wrote:
My understanding is that XP Gain is like a hose that's always flowing, and that you can always attach to another Character (assuming it doesn't already have a hose attached). So, if you buy a 3-Month XP Pack, attach it to a Character, and then delete that Character after 1 month, I'm pretty sure you'd still have 2 months of XP coming out of the hose and you could attach it to another Character.

That's what it sounds like, but I've learned that assuming anything, especially about EE, ends up in the old ASS U ME joke.

Goblin Squad Member

There are a lot of potential abuses from letting unpaid characters run or contribute to offline queues, building management bonuses, or character counts. My working assumption is that paid xp will be a requirement to do anything interesting at a settlement level.

CEO, Goblinworks

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There are three issues that we have to consider.

The first is the issue of hardware resources and user experience. We do not know, yet, the kinds of loads that we can support with our technology. The only way to really determine this is to run the systems under daily use and monitor their performance. We will find lots of ways to optimize over time so whatever we start with will improve as we invest resources in optimization but we won't really know what we will be able to support until we have real-life data.

So the first question we need to answer is "how many active characters can the systems sustain". We are 90% confident that we can support 1 logged in character per account for our projected number of accounts through 2017, so we think that is a low-risk baseline.

Obviously we can likely support many more.

There are two variables: Number of logged in characters per account, and number of accounts.

Depending on how we alter these values we will get different amounts of load on the system. Since we cannot know in advance how that load will affect the experience of the players we have to cautiously start with small values for number of characters and number of accounts and gradually raise them while monitoring performance to see what the effects are.

Due to our architecture this is not a single problem. We will have to look at logical-server-wide issues as well as physical-server issues. We may find that because of how character densities develop during play that a few physical-servers are overburdened, even if the logical-server is not. We may therefore have to think about ways to create natural forces in the game that disburse those concentrations, think about ways to augment the hardware for the impacted physical-servers, think about ways to distribute the loads to multiple physical-servers, etc.

These are common problems for MMOs and while we know we do not know what we will have to do, we do know that we will have to confront them.

Second, we have to consider issues of limited in-game resources. The most limited in-game resource is character names. People place a high value on character names and there are active markets for character names. The more accounts we allow people to create with little or no cost the more character names will be soaked up by people who intend to hold those names and try to sell them.

There are probably a dozen other in-game resources with similar constraints (Chartered Company names is an easy to identify one). Because of this we need to think through the implications of how we enable lots of accounts with no cost to be created. There are well understood ways to deal with these problems like having a character naming system that reverts unused character names after a certain period of inactivity, etc. But each of those systems requires the allocation of resources to implement - resources which could be better spent on adding new features, adding new components to existing features, and polishing and bug fixes.

Third, we have to consider the effects of character density on game systems. We have a game economy that is based on being able to do useful things with relatively unskilled characters. That implies that throw-away alt accounts have a substantial economic value, and that implies that people will be willing to manage legions of them to extract that value. That works at cross-purposes to our goal of making money by operating the game, and it impacts the experience of paying players.

The counter-argument is that many MMOs now offer a free trial or outright free play as a way to increase the total population of the game with the idea that larger populations translate into more satisfying game experiences for paying players. As the economic success of this model is effectively unquestionable at this juncture that's a very compelling argument.

However virtually all the games where that model is employed are games that are sharded. The operators can spin up an infinite number of shards to distribute loads. Since we intend to have one shard, the effects of lots of free players cannot be diluted in relation to the number of paying players. This suggests that a simple play-for-free option won't work for our game, at least at the start where the amount of paying players will be low.

Conclusion

I think that we will likely begin with a 1:1 ratio between paying characters and active characters. In other words, to begin, you'll have to pay for a character to be "active" in order to log that character into the game. The minimum amount of payment I expect we will begin with is a 30 day time increment. (There are some oddities because we'll have subscriptions and yes that means that subscribers pay for 28 days in February and someone who buys 30 days of time and uses it on Feb 1 will get 2 "extra" days. But there are 365 days in the year so if you are a full-year subscriber you will get 5 more "extra" days than someone who bought twelve 30-day time increments.)

There is no specific reason we should not let you pay for multiple characters to be "active" on a given account. There's no functional difference between 1 person paying for 1,000 characters and 1,000 people paying for 1 character. In fact, trying to do something useful with 1,000 characters will be suboptimal considering the network topology between us and you, but if you want to saturate the network and accept the downsides, who are we to argue?

The people who got game time with their Kickstarter Rewards will get tokens equal to the number of months of game time included with those Rewards. They'll be able to chose when to use those tokens, and the tokens will be 30 day tokens. So if you wanted to play in the 1st month you were eligible for Early Enrollment, you'd use 1 token, get 30 days of game time, and then if you did not use another token, your character would become inactive and you could not log that character into the game. If you had more tokens they would sit in your account management screen until you decided to use one more more. You will therefore control when you use the game time you have received.

Inactive characters won't get XP. They probably should not be able to have crafting jobs that continue to advance, nor count for any "number of character" mechanics. There may be issues in implementing those rules in the short term and for the sake of speed and simplicity we might not try to implement those limits to begin with, so there could be some gamesmanship around doing things on the last day of a character's active game time which break the spirit of this system. We will evaluate the severity and impact of those corner cases if and when the issue becomes meaningful.

At some point I would like to have some mechanism for a test account. These are virtually required once the game reaches a certain level of population - after the early adopter pool is exhausted, later adopters are very wary of playing a game they cannot try before they buy. But that is a problem for a much later day, maybe not even before Open Enrollment.

There is a potential that we may decide we have the ability to support some amount of "Free to Play" accounts. That would be awesome from a population experience perspective. If it is also awesome from a revenue cost perspective and a game mechanic perspective, we'd love to do it. But it is too early to determine if it is possible, or desirable.

Goblin Squad Member

Guurzak wrote:
There are a lot of potential abuses from letting unpaid characters run or contribute to offline queues, building management bonuses, or character counts. My working assumption is that paid xp will be a requirement to do anything interesting at a settlement level.

I would agree. I'm aware that non-XP gaining characters can also be abused to some extent, since you don't have any XP/time invested into them, but I would still like to have disposable "alts" for RP purposes. Again, if I have to toggle XP off on a main character for a bit to use these, I'm willing to do so.

Goblin Squad Member

TEO Cheatle wrote:

Here is the biggest issue I have a problem with:

If I can have a character log out, while logged out he is helping with outposts, PoIs, build buildings, and other things that GW have talked about.....

What is to stop me from making enough alts, say we get 1000xp at character creation, and I give them all 2-4 levels in what ever they need, and stick them in an outpost? We could have entire Companies of these alts doing nothing but helping production on outposts, constructing buildings, and other things. They wouldn't be the best at it, not nearly so, but they would allow for us to supplement our work force pretty heavily.

I don't think this should be allowed. If it is, you will see 20k real life people playing, and half a million characters made.

Yup.

Goblin Squad Member

Now there is an answer!

So, last question is, can we toggle the 1 month tokens between characters, or is it an all or nothing deal?

Goblin Squad Member

And will the tokens be ingame currency?

Goblin Squad Member

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FMS Quietus wrote:
And will the tokens be ingame currency?

And if they are, can they be called "Torkens"?

Goblin Squad Member

Ryan Dancey wrote:

The people who got game time with their Kickstarter Rewards will get tokens equal to the number of months of game time included with those Rewards. They'll be able to chose when to use those tokens, and the tokens will be 30 day tokens. So if you wanted to play in the 1st month you were eligible for Early Enrollment, you'd use 1 token, get 30 days of game time, and then if you did not use another token, your character would become inactive and you could not log that character into the game. If you had more tokens they would sit in your account management screen until you decided to use one more more. You will therefore control when you use the game time you have received.

Does this mean that a subscription is no more than training time now? Early on we were told that a month of training time would be cheaper than a month's subscription, but the subscription would give the player more bang for their buck.

Ryan Dancey wrote:


At some point I would like to have some mechanism for a test account. These are virtually required once the game reaches a certain level of population - after the early adopter pool is exhausted, later adopters are very wary of playing a game they cannot try before they buy. But that is a problem for a much later day, maybe not even before Open Enrollment.

Are you considering a simple low-cost entry later down the line? I think there are a lot of people that aren't willing to drop $60 to try a game out for a month, but willing to pay $15-20 to try it out (didn't EVE do this?)

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