Goblin Squad Member
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OK Ryan, this is where the money is!
I have played a lot of games, and there are many way companies manage accounts. Blizzard allows one account with up to 50 characters (limit of 10 on one realm), but you can only be logged in to one at a time, and play one at a time, and you only gain experience while you are actively participating in the world. (Most companies follow this model now.)
CCP allows three characters per account, but only the "active" character would be running it's training queue, but you could have as many accounts as you wanted and have them all playing at the same time (you called this "multiboxing").
Pathfinder Online will let any character you are paying a subscription fee for gain experience, even when not playing, and you advance your character by gaining feats and "cashing them in" at a trainer and for a few, some experience, and perhaps some other thing, you learn a new skill. (Terminology in flux I think.)
Not including the Destiny's Twin bonus feature (which I missed):
If I wanted to have three characters that are gaining experience, do I need three accounts?
Can I play all three at the same time? (Mining a node, or stealthing in place on guard duty, present at a facility as manager but otherwise inactive.)
Are you planning in allowing multiple windows to be active at one time, or must I Alt+Tab through my open windows?
If I can't pay for one character's experience gains for a month or two (budget crisis, changing jobs...) can I still play a character that is essentially stagnant? If so, must I still have an active subscription running?
Just curious. I am trying to plan my gaming budget and see how many characters I can realistically employ. (I had four accounts in EVE, nice to have my own little fleet.)
(Edit: Will I be able to leave my characters logged in all day until I can get back to them, or are you planning on having a logout timer? I vote let us stay logged in until server maintenance forces us out, but that is a server load question.)
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CEO, Goblinworks
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My intention is that you will be able to have an unlimited number of characters on an account and that you can have as many of them gaining XP in parallel as you want to pay for. You should be able to log into an account multiple times in parallel.
We haven't built ANY of that tech yet. So those plans are subject to change.
One thing I am super sensitive to is the idea of someone farming names by making hundreds of characters that they will never use just to tie up names. So we will have to have some way to deal with that problem, tbd.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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My intention is that you will be able to have an unlimited number of characters on an account and that you can have as many of them gaining XP in parallel as you want to pay for. You should be able to log into an account multiple times in parallel.
We haven't built ANY of that tech yet. So those plans are subject to change.
One thing I am super sensitive to is the idea of someone farming names by making hundreds of characters that they will never use just to tie up names. So we will have to have some way to deal with that problem, tbd.
I have no idea about the difficulty to implement what I will say, but I know that in swtor, one time, I had to rename some old characters I didn't use, because their names were "put back on the market".
So I don't know about the difficulty to do it, but when naming a character, a simple check to see if the character already named like has been played in the last two months, and has at least a certain amount of experience. If said character doesn't, then you can take the name, and the character is tagged for rename.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One thing I am super sensitive to is the idea of someone farming names by making hundreds of characters that they will never use just to tie up names. So we will have to have some way to deal with that problem, tbd.
Maybe part of the solution is to figure some xp cost for a new character - to cover her initial skill set, starting gear, etc. The first character on an account is free, but each generated character after that has a basic xp cost.
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Goblin Squad Member
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How about maybe an XP cost to create a new character (say 500 XPs) and after X number of hours of playtime that character gets those XPs refunded into the character's XP bank. That forces playtime instead of having a stagnant toon sitting in the reserve taking up a good name.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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I really don't want to say too much because I am not responsible for figuring out how to implement this tech and it would seriously be just speculation and pretty uninformed speculation too.
The team has a huge list of things they're working on and they know that account management will be a Big Deal. As soon as they start getting into it we'll probably do a dev blog about it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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TY Ryan!
Follow ups.
1. Can you log into a character not training if another character on that account is training.
2. The delay on the Destiny Twins. Are you expecting them in at least half way through EE?
Destiny's Twin will not be available month 1 of EE?? Will we be able to pay for more then 1 character training per account month 1?
What I'm kinda wondering is, can I make an account and enter the game without paying a dime?
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Goblin Squad Member
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This would be acceptable to me. Is this intuition, or is there some basis for this belief?Destiny's Twin will not be available month 1 of EE?Current belief: Twins, upon their creation, will be backdated in XP to their matching character's total.
That's what we really want to know, at least by the 1st day of EE.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Wait, if I can log two characters in at the same time, I may actually be able to get my wife to play this game with me at times, if I let her use my Destiny's Twin.
I do hope things work out that way.
I could be mistaken, but I think I read somewhere that the Destiny Twin won't be able to be logged on with your chosen Main.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Best quote we have from Ryan:
(This is my objective. Technical limitations beyond my control might affect this but at this time I see none.)
You will be able to log in more than one character on the same account. So you can run the client twice, or run the client on two computers logged into the same account. (This is commonly called "multiboxing").
(Ditto to previous disclaimer).
You MAY NOT be able to log in your Destiny's Twin character at the same time you are logged in to another character on that account. I haven't thought through all the complexities yet. It is likely that you will have to specify, in a way that cannot be changed, which characters are Twins. This twinning effect may have other repercussions TBD, such as the inability to sell either Twin to another player separately if and when we enable character or account transfers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Here is the thread I wanted to reopen. I got the approval from the boss (my wife, of course) to spend my gaming budget here. I want to have four (4) characters gaining XPs as early as possible. So, I am willing to spend X monthly sub fee x 4. Is this technology in yet? For the sake of GW's cash flow and income stream I would hope so, as most of us who have followed PFOs twinkle, conception and soon, birth, want to put a few dollars in the college fund.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I think I will use multiple accounts anyway. First because less risks of being hacked, and secondly, well, no one can pretend he will never get banned from a game, s*!* happens, and I would prefer to loose just 1 character, not all of them.
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I had a 1 hour soft-ban years ago on WoW for discovering a lag bug in Shat'Rath that let me get the Alliance PvP Quartermaster in combat so the enemy couldn't queue up for Arena.
Ran out of arrows and then the GM teleported me into some lava and told me to sit in time-out and think about what I've done. Learned some good lessons over that cup of noodles.
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Goblin Squad Member
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OK, still wondering how this part will be implemented and when. I would prefer to have all my toons in as early as possible, if not laying at least banking XPs. Any updates from the people writing this part? (This is the money making part! I mean, GW has peeps to pay, and we are all willing to help them get paid, so kind of important to take our cash...))
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would prefer to have all my toons in as early as possible...
Ryan's relieving at least some of the "immediacy" pressure:
Nobody will have access to the game on the first day of Early Enrollment but people with Alpha and Early Enrollment accounts, and the Early Enrollees may not choose to begin using their game time. Accounts don't get XP backdated to the start of Early Enrollment regardless of when they start playing. We're going to have a little "smoothing function" of XP for the start of Early Enrollment so that people don't feel like OMG MUST BE IN SECOND ONE MINUTE ONE HOUR ONE OF DAY ONE OF EARLY ENROLLMENT OR MISS ANY XP FOR ALL TIME, but that smoothing function will end, probably before the Explorer Enrollees join in Month 2.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I had a 1 hour soft-ban years ago on WoW for discovering a lag bug in Shat'Rath that let me get the Alliance PvP Quartermaster in combat so the enemy couldn't queue up for Arena.
Ran out of arrows and then the GM teleported me into some lava and told me to sit in time-out and think about what I've done. Learned some good lessons over that cup of noodles.
That is an awesome story, thanks for sharing.