Destiny's Twin Policy

[Proxima Sin]

During Kickstarter 2: Twins were offered to Explorer level and above as a bonus for backing; that's what sealed the deal for me and I'm sure many others. It came with the context of both characters paralleling their lifetimes.

More Recently: Ryan has said the Destiny's Twin link won't be available on the first day of EE even if we want to start our twins right away. That's not ideal but understandable with the complexity and time pressures of MVP launch.

What I think is fair and ask the devs to consider is a policy that when the feature is ready and a character gets twin-linked its available xp is set to an amount equal to that accrued by the older anchor character; to simulate if they had been linked since creation as was implied during KS2.

That's not an automatic win condition for the new twins because xp is only one of several prerequisites needed to gather feats and grow in power. The new twin will have a little easier time for a while but still has to go out into the world to make achievements, earn badges, build attribute points, find trainer time etc. before they can use that pool of xp for anything.

Why robust Twins are good for GW and us as players: Being able to build two characters for the cost of one more strongly motivates account holders to be involved earlier on rather than sitting out some of EE waiting for more developed features. With vital twins we'll be doing twice as many things so devs can get a lot more feedback on a broader array of features and we'll find a lot more ways to break the game. The more people are actively engaged at an earlier time, the more they show their friends what they're doing to get enthusiastic about Pathfinder Online and want their own accounts.

Yes this is something I benefit from and so do the the other KS backers and developers at no resource cost and I don't see any functional negatives to it so I'm putting the idea out there to take the temperature on it.

[htrajan]

I wasn't aware that this will not be available Day 1. If not day 1 then certainly I think it would be a good idea to retroactively apply the amount of XP equivalent to the amount of time the player has held an active sub to both characters.

+1 to this

[Nightdrifter]

I seem to recall this being discussed at some point. /cast Summon Nihimon

[Jester David]

I really like the benefit of Destiny's Twin, being able to have a warrior toon and a crafter toon.
I can understand why it's not automatically available, likely being complex, but I agree with the OP that making it retroactive would be nice.

I can see two ways of this being implemented: either it gives the Twin the same xp as another character or it adds xp totals and gives it to both characters. The later would be nice, but the former is likely easier to implement.

Knowing how this will be done is rather essential, because it changes how people will play the game and manage their characters.

If the xp is copied from a main to a secondary character it makes sense to play with the alt but limit leveling, spending the most xp on the primary character.
Having two characters with the same xp totals would mean losing the benefit of Destiny's Twin for that initial time.

A combines xp total might be nice though, as it would encourage people with Destiny's Twin to actually adventure with both characters and advance both, testing more features of the game sooner, rather than having a twin sitting and waiting for the feature to be added.

[Xeen]

I believe they said it would have the xp of the original.

[Proxima Sin]

My thinking is if we were able to create two characters and tie them together on EE Day 1 they'd have roughly identical amounts of accrued xp their entire lives (maybe just that few minutes of xp ticking to create the second character of difference). So that's what I would like to end up with when the Destiny's Twin feature is fully in place.

The simplest plan to me -for both coding and understanding by the player base- is when you tie a twin character to the anchor character the twin gets jiggered so it has xp equal to if they could have been created together and made twins on EED1. That xp still has to be combined with all the other achievements, badges, attributes etc. before it turns into feats and skills of course.

I bring it up now because I think the official plan will make some difference in when the broad player base gets active and engaged in EE.

If there's no official statement of what GW plans to do or the dev team thinks about it and replies, "No don't count on retroactive xp for your twin" some people might delay activation of their accounts until settlements, the class they want is implemented, or something. That's less feedback and data for the dev team and an emptier world for players.

If someone from GW comes back with a verbal, "yeah that's what we want to do when the time comes to implement Destiny's Twin" everyone is motivated to activate their character right away (because that time being activated will eventually benefit the twin too as stated during the Kickstarter). And if the account is activated, you might as well go and play the game with it too. That's more data and potential feedback for devs and a fuller world for all of the players.

If there's already an official Destiny's Twin policy that I missed I'd be happy to see it to know what to expect for sure. This idea is my opinion of what's fair to KS backers.

[Pax Bringslite]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

But I don't know which character I want to irrevocably tie my Destiny's Twin to until I've played enough to be able to make good choices about where I want to allocate XP earning on a near continuous basis.

Many (most?) people will make a lot of characters and play them to various stages of development before settling on the one they want to make part of the Twinning process. To force them to Twin the first character they make would suck and just give us an endless stream of "please help me" emails which we could either refuse (leading to unhappy customers) or fix (which means we shouldn't have forced them to choose too early in the first place.)

The concept of "main" makes no sense in Pathfinder Online.

RyanD

From

Not sure if this is relevant to your idea or not. There are other discussions that they will assign retro exp back to the start of the character (that is earning) which you want to tie the twin to.

It would be nice to have at the start, but we may regret such an early choice as options open up through iteration of the sills, roles and how things work, change.

[Nihimon]

Thanks, Bringslite. Later in that same thread Ryan makes clear that they won't leave it open forever, but will probably allow you to retroactively receive some months of xp.