[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Marc Fielding]

[Matt Mihaly]

>> As a single-character EQ player, you would think I'd fall in the
>> SCS camp, but occasionally I'd get bitten by the experimentalist
>> bug and want to try a new class for a few hours, or perhaps I'd
>> create a Dark Elf character in order to explore the Dark-Elf home
>> city.
 
> But if that's all you wanted to do, why not go to another server
> and do it?

Because I prefer to do it with in-game friends and in familiar
environments. With regard to the latter, I'd agree to your point if
SWG was going to have an EQ-like inability for players to modify the
environment, thus making all shards geographically
equivalent. However, SWG allows the placement of structures by
players; this will result in entirely unique locales. What if that
Dark-Elf city mentioned above was player-made and unique to my
server?

>> If my multiple-character playstyles place an additional cost
>> burden on the developer, I am more than willing to pay a
>> reasonable price to make amends. However, I find the new-account
>> requirement to be an extremely heavy-handed solution to a
>> legitimate problem.

> They also place a burden on the design. Given the (wise) decision
> to let people perform some tradeskill abilities offline, allowing
> multiple characters would be be the equivalent of turning on
> faucet after faucet after faucet, 24 hours a day.

A simple solution would be to only allow one character per server to
perform offline construction at a time. New requests for offline
construction would supercede previous ones.
 
> The single character solution also goes a long ways towards
> stopping thieves that are stealing from SOE by having multiple
> people play on a single account. Won't stop it completely of
> course, but it reduces it significantly, I'd say. 

I wouldn't categorize it as stealing if someone lets family members
play on his or her account. The true value in a MMOG is playing with
friends.  The fact that only one character from an account may be
active at a time is the limiting factor: if you want to play with
friends, you all need separate accounts.

The flat fee for EQ buys a customer unlimited usage and N character
slots. Allowing friends and family to play on the same account
exceeds neither of those resource allocations. On the positive side,
the ability to let others playtest the game on your account just
might get them hooked enough to sign up for their OWN accounts.

Thus grows the playerbase. =)

-Marc





_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev