Goblin Squad Member
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Roughly how many characters per account do you think we'll be able to have?
Can only one character be training in a skill at a time or can I have a Fighter character and a Wizard character training in their respective skills at the same time?
I tend to have a variety of different characters and I don't see this game being any exception, I'm just curious what it will take to level them all up.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One at a time unless you have... Destiny's twin I think it's called, in which one will train whenever the other trains.
I believe you are able to purchase extra training time for other characters to run them simultaneously if you do not have destiny's twin. That is, as far as I am aware, the plan.
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Goblin Squad Member
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A subscription will get you a month of training for one character. If you have Destiny's Twin the secondary character will be able to train, only when the main character is also training.
If you want more than 1 character going at once(2 if you have destiny's twin), you will need to purchase training time, this may not be an option during Early Enrollment since the cash shop will not be in the game yet.
You can purchase training time in two ways(once the RMT store is open):
1. Buy it in the RMT store
2. Buy it in-game from people who bought it in the RMT store
If you are making a lot of coin, you won't have to pay more real money.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I thought Training Time gave you a boost in training quicker. I didn't see a description of it. You're saying it's to allow more than one character under the same account to be training at once?
What's this about not needing to spend real money if you make a lot of coin? Are you able to buy store stuff with in-game cash?
Apparently I missed some info in regard to what the store would be offering and what those items really did. Sorry for the confusion.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Players can by Skill Training Packages through the real money store. They will appear in game as an item. They can then be sold to other players for (likely very large) amounts of in-game gold.
To clarify, a subscription buys you one month of training time. It may be spent on one character, or divided up among several (two weeks each to two characters, for example). If you wish to train additional characters, you will need to purchase separate skill training for them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So let me see if I got it right:
We probably will be allowed to have several chars but will need to choose wich one (or two for destiny twins owners) will be training?
Yes, although you can train more if you buy additional training time from the store or from players selling it for gold in game.
It also allows you to buy additional time and sell it for ingame gold if you want to get rich quick and can afford the extra real world money. It's a win-win-win situation. GW gets more cash to run the game, you get lots of gold, and the person buying it in game gets training time they they might not be able to afford with real money.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I thought Training Time gave you a boost in training quicker.
I don't believe there will ever be anything - other than your Attributes like Strength - that change the rate at which you train. I certainly don't expect there to be something you can purchase in the cash shop to make you train faster.
What's this about not needing to spend real money if you make a lot of coin? Are you able to buy store stuff with in-game cash?
You'll be able to buy Training Time Kits with real cash, and then sell those on the in-game market for in-game coin. If you make enough coin in-game, you can buy Training Time Kits with in-game coin rather than spending your own real cash.
We probably will be allowed to have several chars but will need to choose wich one (or two for destiny twins owners) will be training?
You'll (almost certainly) be able to train additional characters at the same time, but you'll (almost certainly) have to pay for each of them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Wow, I must have missed that we will have to pay to have more than one character at a time (or 2 with destiny twins). I personally like to have multiple characters going at the same time because I get easily bored and need to change it up to maintain interest. I was really hoping for a truely open sandbox with as few restraints as possible.
You can have more than one. Its just you cannot have them sitting, never logged in, just auto-leveling away without paying for the privilege.
Personally I prefer it if people cannot have unlimited "alts" automatically leveling in the background, just sitting there waiting for the right occasion to pull them in. I can see many ways to exploit that.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Unlike other games where the character stops leveling when you switch to a different one, these will continue to train in the skills set for them.
If you log into an alt and select to train a skill with it, will it pause or undo a skill you've been training in with your primary character or will it just not be possible until the main one is finished training?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't envision there would be such a limitation. I think we could infer a few things from the existence of the Destiny's Twin kickstarter reward: The user would have to be able to create more than one character.
We don't know whether experience over time will accrue in a generic reservoir for the destiny's twins or if you already have to have a skill to be trained for that experience to accrue. Perhaps an Eve player will share how exactly that system works.
If each character accrues experience into a generic reservoir then when we log that character in we might 'spend' from that reservoir on chosen skills until the reservoir has too little to purchase a desired skill.
But it might be that we have to have a skill chosen first, which then would fill as time passes and then once it is filled that character won't acquire any more xp until we select a new skill to be training.
How does that work in Eve?
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Goblin Squad Member
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If you log into an alt and select to train a skill with it, will it pause or undo a skill you've been training in with your primary character or will it just not be possible until the main one is finished training?
It depends on if you have purchaced extra training time or not. If you have no destiny's twin, and just a standard account, then you can train one character 24 hours a day for the month. You can split the training time between multiple alts, but the training is done in series, meaning that you train one character and then that one stops when you start training yor alt. You can buy extra training time in the cash store to allow training multiple alts at once.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If possible, I intend to have two alts and train my main full time but the alts I would share the training time between them.
As I will have a destiny's twin I hope that will be allowed.
I don't remember where I saw it, but I seem to recall Ryan or Lisa saying that the Destiny's Twin would be a specific pair of characters, not just train any two characters at once.
If you log into an alt and select to train a skill with it, will it pause or undo a skill you've been training in with your primary character or will it just not be possible until the main one is finished training?
PFO may well handle it differently, but in Eve if you have char A training in a skill, you will not be able to start training char B until either char A finishes training that skill, or you log char A on and pause his skill training. Only then can you begin training char B. (this example does NOT factor in Destiny's Twin).
@ Being, in Eve there is no reservoir. When your skill Q is empty your not training anything, nor are any skill points being stored up. As I said above, PFO may handle it differently, I don't know.qw
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm personally not a big fan of the offline training thing. Those who can play more should be more highly trained characters. I don't play nearly as much as others (maybe 5-10 hrs / week) and I realize I won't be anywhere near the power of people who play 8 hrs+ a day, and I'm fine with that. What is more important is that the power curve is leveled out (which GW is addressing) and that a group of people can overpower a single much more powerful individual. Guess I'll just have to wait and see how the offline training thing plays out. I do have destiny's twin and think it should be available to everybody (for a fixed, not recurring cost).
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm different I guess. I work all day and have other things I attend to in the evening as well as play but I pay my subs just like the next guy. I don't see why I should be handicapped compared to someone who can spend sixteen hours a day during their high school's summer break grinding bigger and bigger rats.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Besides, it wont be just training that affects your power level. Training skills are requrements to make you elligible to unlock abilities, but you still will have to do ingame accomplishments in order to round out your merits/achivements/badges to actually get them.
I'm personally not a big fan of the offline training thing. Those who can play more should be more highly trained characters.
Keep in mind that offline training is not always a free ride to leveling up. You have to actually be online to start the training. So if you start training a skill that will take 4 hours, and you go offline for 12 hours, you'll have missed out on 8 hours of training had you been online to queue up another.
The person who plays more will still likely have trained more by maximizing their training queue. As well as acquired more power via gold/items by going out and actually doing stuff vs. someone who's offline. Training offline is great, but it doesn't do you a whole lot to be proficient in weapons you can't even afford to buy.
I also like the idea of having as few characters as possible. There's no reason not to be fully committed to 1 character in a game like this. To the guy who wants to bounce around from character to character, I think you're making an assumption based off what you've experienced in theme park MMOs. Having 5 alts who all do something different is kind of pointless because it should (and will) be the long-term end result of your main character to train all the specific things you made alts for in the first place. The idea of having alts to handle all the things you'll need in game is to remove the dependency on interacting with others to survive. That really goes against the point of playing a traditional (pre-2004) MMORPG, which the sandbox type is modeled after.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For me the reason for alts was never to be able to handle all the things in a game, but to be able to roleplay different people and try different ways to overcome the same problems with different tactics and playstyles.
My first real MMO was City of Heroes, and I had about 20 alts on my account. I had Heroes and Villians of every stripe, from serious charactes to jokes to tributes of movie characters.
Being a persistant world will mean we have to be more focused than a theme park, but people will want to play alts regardless of power differences when you want to try things in a diffrent way, especially if new races or classes become available after EE or Launch.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For me the reason for alts was never to be able to handle all the things in a game, but to be able to roleplay different people and try different ways to overcome the same problems with different tactics and playstyles.
My first real MMO was City of Heroes, and I had about 20 alts on my account. I had Heroes and Villians of every stripe, from serious charactes to jokes to tributes of movie characters.
Being a persistant world will mean we have to be more focused than a theme park, but people will want to play alts regardless of power differences when you want to try things in a diffrent way, especially if new races or classes become available after EE or Launch.
I agree. For example, someone could have three char just to play an arcanist with one, a totally foccused crafter with another and also a thief. Three totally different experiences of roleplaying in the game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm personally not a big fan of the offline training thing. Those who can play more should be more highly trained characters.Keep in mind that offline training is not always a free ride to leveling up. You have to actually be online to start the training. So if you start training a skill that will take 4 hours, and you go offline for 12 hours, you'll have missed out on 8 hours of training had you been online to queue up another.
The person who plays more will still likely have trained more by maximizing their training queue. As well as acquired more power via gold/items by going out and actually doing stuff vs. someone who's offline. Training offline is great, but it doesn't do you a whole lot to be proficient in weapons you can't even afford to buy.
I also like the idea of having as few characters as possible. There's no reason not to be fully committed to 1 character in a game like this. To the guy who wants to bounce around from character to character, I think you're making an assumption based off what you've experienced in theme park MMOs. Having 5 alts who all do something different is kind of pointless because it should (and will) be the long-term end result of your main character to train all the specific things you made alts for in the first place. The idea of having alts to handle all the things you'll need in game is to remove the dependency on interacting with others to survive. That really goes against the point of playing a traditional (pre-2004) MMORPG, which the sandbox type is modeled after.
Thanks for the clarification. Sounds better than what I expected.
I agree also about having very few alts being a good thing. You should never run out of stuff to do on a main character. I hope that many alts become the exception and not the norm like in themeparks.
@ Imbicatus and Dearon: That's a legitimate concern. I see the need to want to play drastically different roles or characters. It's a big world, maybe you want to see more of it than just the hex you're established in.
I think there's some logistics to work out there. Are you going to have your alts in the same hex? the same guild? If not, what happens if those guilds/alliances clash? Do you feed insider information about strategy to your 'main' guild?
How would you feel about another player who joins your guild with the intent to steal info or goods down the line? Is that player held accountable for their actions when they go back to playing their main character? Do you have any way of knowing who their main is? What if a player has an alt in your guild, and acts publicly in a manner unbecoming of your guild? What if (s)he scams a bunch of players out of their money. It would reflect poorly on the guild.
I think there's something to be said for a person who has to assume accountability for everything they do over the course of playing a character. I find that when people can hide behind an alt, they behave and do things they'd never do on their main because they can 'get away with it' (not because of roleplay constraints). I'm not against acting maliciously, but if someone gains a level of infamy within the community, they should have to carry that with them wherever they go/whatever they do.
You could get around that by maybe having a naming convention at the account level. All characters share a common surname perhaps. Or have guild allegiance at the account level so that all your characters belong to the same one.
What do you guys think about player accountability in regards to malicious acts against characters/players/organizations, and what role do alts play within that system?
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Goblin Squad Member
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@ Clynx
As a former guild leader I trully understand your point. I had in the past problems with players using alters to spy on my clan just to gather information to an enemy clan. That is a major concern indeed. But on the other hand, to prevent people to play alts at all would be something like forcing the fairplayers pay for the actions of the cheaters, don't you think?
Also, one could always pay for two different accounts and use it in the same way (or worse as he could play both char at the same time if dualboxing is possible). The surname idea is interesting, but would be a bit imersion braker as you would see a goblin with the same surname than a human and a gnome, or weird things like that.
IMO a way to reduce bad use of alts is just an * after his name in his description, so everybody would know that is an alt char while getting info about him/her.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Remember, Destiny's Twin will let one character train adventurer skills while the twin trains crafting skills. It will not let the 2 train the same type at the same time.One at a time unless you have... Destiny's twin I think it's called, in which one will train whenever the other trains.
I believe you are able to purchase extra training time for other characters to run them simultaneously if you do not have destiny's twin. That is, as far as I am aware, the plan.
Crafting and combat was given as an example. In no point did the discription say one was forced to train crafing only. You can train both characters however you see fit.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@ Clynx
Your point is valid, and I find that kind of behaviour detestible,but there isn't really a way to combat it. Some people just get off on having 5 separate accounts and using alts to manipulate conflicts. There is really no way to track it and the only thing I can do is to not use character priveledged info on another character.
It sucks, and it means that guild leadership should be extra careful about how they make decisions... but even if they make new members wait a month of real time before having access to anything, some people will want to play a long con.
I prefer to let them do what they want because I can't stop them and when they do betray you, then they will gain the betrayer flag and will have to either stop playing the alt and loose months of playtime into creating the character, or you can make it apoint to kill them every chance you get.
If they make a practice of being a jerk in game then it's only a matter of time before they get banned anyway.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Remember, Destiny's Twin will let one character train adventurer skills while the twin trains crafting skills. It will not let the 2 train the same type at the same time.One at a time unless you have... Destiny's twin I think it's called, in which one will train whenever the other trains.
I believe you are able to purchase extra training time for other characters to run them simultaneously if you do not have destiny's twin. That is, as far as I am aware, the plan.
Incorrect. You can have them both training whatever skills you want. Ryan clarified that his statement was just meant as an example, not a restriction.
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Goblin Squad Member
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With respect to alts as spies...
1. It's not possible to stop another player from having alts on another account that you know nothing about. As with most really bad laws/rules, making a rule against alts only actually interferes with honest players' enjoyment of the game.
2. To minimize your exposure to risk as a result of spying, don't make plans that rely on secrecy. Or, if you do, keep those plans limited to the smallest number of players possible, knowing that even sharing them with one other player might mean they're in the hands of your enemies.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
With respect to alts as spies...
1. It's not possible to stop another player from having alts on another account that you know nothing about. As with most really bad laws/rules, making a rule against alts only actually interferes with honest players' enjoyment of the game.
That is exactly my oppinion.
2. To minimize your exposure to risk as a result of spying, don't make plans that rely on secrecy. Or, if you do, keep those plans limited to the smallest number of players possible, knowing that even sharing them with one other player might mean they're in the hands of your enemies.
That was the way we handled it in my former clan. Most secret stuff was just known by the older players that we were sure were not spies. Other nice thing we did was to feed a spy with wrong information and let him "know" that several players in his clan were traitors, while in fact they were not. So we seeded them with missinformation as a counter-spy measure and watched while their clan broke appart with internal conflicts.
Yes I know... that is a LE behaviour LOL
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Montroc, it's this post.
From $35 Adventurer Reward Tier Enhanced!, but you'll have to read the 5 or 6 posts before it to get a clear picture.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...
That was the way we handled it in my former clan. Most secret stuff was just known by the older players that we were sure were not spies. Other nice thing we did was to feed a spy with wrong information and let him "know" that several players in his clan were traitors, while in fact they were not. So we seeded them with misinformation as a counter-spy measure and watched while their clan broke apart with internal conflicts.
Yes I know... that is a LE behaviour LOL
Nice...
And heck don't most governments do that sort of thing|
Goblin Squad Member
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Another important thing:
Alts are also a way people can test what kind of char they like more. I have changed to play an alt as a main char after being disapointed with my initial char several times in several MMOs.
Now that they have removed any penalties for multi-classing, there is no reason you cannot do this experimentation with a single character.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Now that they have removed any penalties for multi-classing, there is no reason you cannot do this experimentation with a single character.Another important thing:
Alts are also a way people can test what kind of char they like more. I have changed to play an alt as a main char after being disapointed with my initial char several times in several MMOs.
And end up with a chymeric char such as a paladin with arcane powers, ki power and bard music? No ty..
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Goblin Squad Member
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And end up with a chymeric char such as a paladin with arcane powers, ki power and bard music? No ty..Now that they have removed any penalties for multi-classing, there is no reason you cannot do this experimentation with a single character.Another important thing:
Alts are also a way people can test what kind of char they like more. I have changed to play an alt as a main char after being disapointed with my initial char several times in several MMOs.
Ability scores and alignments are are also a limiting factor even if you want to play one character that learns everything.
Ability scores set how long it takes to learn skills, so if your initial vision is to play a fighter and you dump int, good look becoming a powerful wizard after the fact, because it will take you twice as long as if you had put more points into int. If you decide to go generalist and put 12s into everthing, then you may be able to learn everything at a decent speed, but you'll be outclassed by specialists.
Alignment is even worse, there aren't very many Barbarian/Monks or Paladin/Bards...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Now that they have removed any penalties for multi-classing, there is no reason you cannot do this experimentation with a single character.
Actually, there is still a very good reason to experiment with alts: Time.
If I do all my experimentation on a single character, I have to do it all in serial. With alts, I can run my experiments in parallel and get my results faster.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Now that they have removed any penalties for multi-classing, there is no reason you cannot do this experimentation with a single character.Actually, there is still a very good reason to experiment with alts: Time.
If I do all my experimentation on a single character, I have to do it all in serial. With alts, I can run my experiments in parallel and get my results faster.
Exactly, and if in the end my main char just become something I didn't like the final product I just adopt one of my alts as main char and still having fun. For example, if I start a mage but somehow the magic system GW developped is not something I enjoyed I will not need to start a warrior from scratch or start learning warrior skills to change my char. I just move to my alt warrior.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The main reason for alts seems to be ability scores. Your high INt alt will learn wizard spells 2 or 3 times faster than your fighter who dumped the stat. I expect most players to have one alt, hence the destiny's twin mechanic.
A str/con/wis/cha Paladin pairs well with a maxed out Int/dex wizard alt for example.