Question for devs regarding character account limit

[OlavDeng2]

You asked why people wouldn't want to share a character, that's an example of why... Doesn't need to be the hypothetical 6 year old and even if they sailed your frigate you might then find your character on the wrong side of the map for what you want to do, or suddenly missing lots of gold or crafting mats. There are lots of reasons people don't like sharing single characters.

 

I don't quite understand what you mean by saying there will be 1 character per server 'if it is anything like the PVP and PVE server thing'. The current issue is being debated precisely because there is not a 1 char per server limit and people are using alts, no? Anyway, for those of us who want to play more than one faction (or those who have kids) an unnecessary limit of 1 character per account is a terrible idea.

I understand the issue, however the people sharing accounts i would guess is maybe 1%, the other 99% of players wont be sharing, lets assume 20% of those are hardcore players, those 20% will use those extra alts to use the extra crafting hours to craft larger ships while the other 80% of the non sharing people will be at a disadvantage

 

Also what i mean is that the PVE character is seperate from the PVP character(even though we could have up to 3 characters now, that was the case before the servers went down)

[Lady Athena]

I agree with you justme, it is quite unfair to make people pay for a new copy of the game if they want one of their family member to play NA. i'm fine with one account per game copy obviously, but maybe limiting to one nation per account, or un nation log per day may resolve the "spying" issue, in a certain part.

 

Because those saying "buy another game copy" if money is not an issue for them, will still be able to spy. So it will make people with less real money unable to let play a family member, but richer players will be able to, and will even be able to spy. That's really unfair in my opinion.

 

One account OK, one nation or one nation log per day OK, one character by game copy NO plz.

 

It's all necessary part of games like these where it's extremely Nation vs Nation dependant, and abuse of multiple characters can destroy the balance.

 

Unfortunately, not all games can be "fair and open for everyone, for every reason, and any household" Games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Aion, etc. Those games allow it because there is no reason not too.

 

Games like Archeage for instance, SHOULD have had it, but didn't, and it destroyed that game, along with many other issues, because you could just swap characters and magically know exactly whats going on on the enemy side and how much they know what you're doing. It destroyed the entire reason for PvP in a heavy PvP game.

 

It's an unfortunate draw back to games like this, that people have to accept if they want to play it.

[Sly Sliver]

So I have to buy two copies to exploit!? Damn it!

 

Seriously though, why not just force other characters to another server?

[Anarcke]

@ Azakan

 

That's what i'm saying since the beginning, one character per server, not per copy of the game or account.

[Ratline]

I understand the issue, however the people sharing accounts i would guess is maybe 1%, the other 99% of players wont be sharing, lets assume 20% of those are hardcore players, those 20% will use those extra alts to use the extra crafting hours to craft larger ships while the other 80% of the non sharing people will be at a disadvantage

 

Also what i mean is that the PVE character is seperate from the PVP character(even though we could have up to 3 characters now, that was the case before the servers went down)

 

Yeah but you could still have more than one char per server, this is the issue rather than how many characters you can have on an account. It needs a very slight adjustment to how it works, would have thought it's a very simple thing to do and then everybody is happy.

[Sly Sliver]

@ Azakan

 

That's what i'm saying since the beginning, one character per server, not per copy of the game or account.

 

Yes, I was agreeing with you - I know it's rare to see on the interwebs, but really.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Azakan

[Jexter]

One character per PVP server and no limit (well, maybe a 3 or 5 char limit for server resources' sake) on PvE servers.

 

There's no real importance in Realm vs Realm on PvE servers anyway, so who cares about meta there? Besides, "secondary" account users (the missus, young kids) are likely to be more of the casual type and more likely to play PvE, right?

[Anarcke]

Originally posted by Barberouge here

 

Posted Today, 06:36 PM

Malheureusement au départ ce sera un personnage en tout, parce qu'il n'y avait pas assez de temps pour construire d'autres solutions. Par la suite il pourra y avoir d'autres options mises en œuvre (1 personnage sur le PvP et un sur le PvE, ou plusieurs personnages mais d'une même faction) - mais pas pour le lancement de l'accès anticipé.

 

"Unfortunately, at start it will be one character only, because there was not enough time to build other solutions. Later, there could be other options set in place (1 character on PvP and one on PvE, or several characters but within a same faction) but not for the EA launch."

 

My translation may contain errors, feel free to correct anything i did wrong.

[JJWolf]

I understand the concept of tying an account to a single nation to prevent spying, an alternative is to use a similar system as WWIIOnline where there is a mandatory minimum of 15 minutes to swap to another nation not of the one you were play? It could be bumped to say 30 or 60 minutes, 2 or even 3 hours to put in some buffer to prevent team swapping/spying.

[OlavDeng2]

I understand the concept of tying an account to a single nation to prevent spying, an alternative is to use a similar system as WWIIOnline where there is a mandatory minimum of 15 minutes to swap to another nation not of the one you were play? It could be bumped to say 30 or 60 minutes, 2 or even 3 hours to put in some buffer to prevent team swapping/spying.

Considering campaigns in this game can take hours, even days the nation swapping part would have to have a cool down of days, so if you played as the dutch and want to start playing on your french character you would have to wait 7 days or something like that from last logging into the dutch character before you can play as the french, otherwise spying would still be too easy.

[Bulwyf]

I was very disappointed to see that we have been limited to one character whom is shared between the PVP and PVE shards.  I think the single character model is terrible and I feel somewhat ripped off. I like to play multiple characters and do on all the games I play. I think its pretty paranoid to think people will use multiple characters to spy (anyone determined to spy will just buy multiple accounts though why would you bother?) and its especially senseless to limit us to one character between both the PVP and the PVE accounts. You should be able to play as many as you like in the PVE shard as there is no advantage to be gained.

 

Not only that, in the present model, experience and redeemables are shared between both of the shards with  your single character. So if you redeem the yacht for instance in the PVP shard then it is unavailable in the PVE shard for at least 24 hours (not sure whether it does become available after 24 hours but am assuming it  does for the moment). I don't mind the experience sharing but since gold is not shared you will still have to do the work to gain that resource.

[Siegfried]

One character for account is a futile and nonsense limiting factor for many people. Is a hidden step in the trap of "Pay to Win" path. Anyway, if you pay more accounts, you will have advantages combining labor hours pool, spying and get resources from enemy ports.

 

For this reasons, one character per account is only good for one thing, funding the dev studio. Which is good too of course.

 

Many people who concerns about multiple characters have one thing in common. If they play as many hours as to take seriously a MMO game, the money to pay several accounts is not a problem and, for the reason I write above, is seen as an investment for they.

 

In short, one character per account is not a solution for exploits but it is a "Pay to Win" form for some players who takes a game too seriously. And one character per account, spoil the game experience for others more oriented to Single Player gaming who are a big playerbase in any game.

[Elephant Rider]

Limiting one character per account will not change anything based on spying or alts.  People will just buy the game again when it is on sale and run multiple clients at the same time.  That actually makes spying even easier, and it also helps make the game benefit those that are willing to pay more.  If you've never played EVE, this is rampant.  And that's with a monthy account charge.  So it will happen either way.  But in the long run, when you limit it to one character per account, you're only hurting the people who don't want to, or can't, buy multiple copies of the same game.  So it only makes sense to allow more than one character on an account in order to mitigate this.  If you can really only progress one character at a time, this is not really a big deal.  You can either spend your time playing one character and progressing it, or you can have a few characters that aren't progressed very much.  Where the benefit comes in is that you can have a main character and something like a trading alt.  Without being able to have more than one character on an account, this STRONGLY benefits people who pay for another account.  When you can have alts, it at least helps to level the playing field.

[Doschichis]

Considering campaigns in this game can take hours, even days the nation swapping part would have to have a cool down of days, so if you played as the dutch and want to start playing on your french character you would have to wait 7 days or something like that from last logging into the dutch character before you can play as the french, otherwise spying would still be too easy.

1 miss click can stop me to play the game for a week

[JJWolf]

Considering campaigns in this game can take hours, even days the nation swapping part would have to have a cool down of days, so if you played as the dutch and want to start playing on your french character you would have to wait 7 days or something like that from last logging into the dutch character before you can play as the french, otherwise spying would still be too easy.

 

In RL campaigns took weeks/months, so with that logic, a spy who would have taken a week in RL to procure the information on enemy movements would only need an hour or two to switch nation...