Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
They don't plan on allowing changing your base class and if the combined classes don't make something completely different I.E a warrior mage is the same as mage warrior, this limits gameplay for some of us.
Perhaps if mage warrior and warrior mage are the same then you will have a good amount to experience but all in all I don't love the idea personally. In fact, its one of those hard lines that could completely remove a game from my play list.
But i do get your point about bypassing the team effort problem if you build your own team and multi-box. The only way around that is to do as stated
...1 alt per server.
This enables any alt to be built, but they can never interact with each other so the team effort concept cant be bypassed.
The latter has the unfortunate problem that every time you start a new alt, you lose all your long established friends and team mates and have to create social circles from scratch. If you can work around that issue......I think you may be onto something.
Part of what is killing WOW is alts. People who play one of everything insist on being able to gear and level all of them. Go to the WOW forums and you will see posts crying about 'not alt friendly this" "not alt friendly leveling that". In one sad post a guy was talking about his wife who just passed away and on the day of her death she was planning on completing a holiday event on 20+ toons.
Point is when you allow someone to make that many toons a demand will soon follow to be able to play them all equally. In AoC where you have this many options for classes/combos do you really think that allowing someone to be able to play them all will be a good thing? 5 total is plenty. Any more than this and AoC will get whined into making the game alt friendly, ergo, easier.
why should alt friendly = easier ? ..or harder for that matter.
That balance sounds broken to me.
When you have 64 classes to play and you can't try them because you are limited to 1 character suck.
When you want to change your main you need to start again from 0. (losing legendary and epic items)
Ip is easy to change
If 1 character per account gold sellers (if any) will just buy more accounts
Another option, I suppose is limit resources. Either through having them spawn based on certain locations, forcing you to trade with other nodes. Any system that within the context of the world and game encourages, heavily, player interaction helps with the longevity.
Another, more hardcore way to do that is to make materials decay. Things like food, plants, drinks, potions, this would, to a degree, I'd hope remove the need for auction houses, and instead makes players visit the market. Something like Ragnarok Online player merchant shops.
However, every potential mmo forum is full of players with awesome ideas. I'd have no idea how to properly implement an engaging crafting system. And neither do any developers. Or they simply choose the easy way.
But yea, mechanics like this make mmo's mmo's. Being able to do everything yourself, makes things easier, and people naturally gravitate towards the path of least resistance.
@Ariatras
Gave me an idea. What if no two alts could take residency in the same node ?
You can still meet up with friends and such unlike alternate servers.
Doing everything yourself is made more difficult than doing it with others.
So that path of least resistance is actually to use other people.
For reasons already stated in this thread, restricting character creation per ip address would be impossible. I think that if character restriction were limited to once per account or by server people would be more likely to pay multiple subscriptions. Personally, I would like the option to try one of every class since classes are locked upon creation. If they restrict housing per account I think people are still going to be reliant on others for crafting purposes especially if certain housing structures benefit certain professions. I don't see a problem with people locking up housing with multiple alts since it can be contested through pvp, nodes with large alt concentrations would be more vulnerable.