This topic has me scratching my head, but let me just say that if a guild has a problem with the fact that I choose to make alternate characters, I will find a new guild.

Wow, I ONLY play One Toon and always only play one Toon.  I actually have a life so I don't have time doing the same thing over 15 times to try it 15 different ways with 15 different characters, all power to those who do, so concentrating on my first choice (which is usually researched before creating it) and sticking to it, is the only way for me to go.  I admire those who can constantly try this or that, I wonder if they are looking for perfection and to what reason?  Thank God we can't just pick and chose our kids, we bring them up no matter their imperfections or "imbalances", I know and understand that gaming is totally different but I tend to get attached to my Character through bad or worst and of course through wins and special accomplishments.  Why the heck would I want to just give up and start again?

I am not negating those who create them for Legitimate Banking, Storage or even their Crafting Toon.  Those players are getting the most of the game so they use it but rarely do you find these same players (unless they require a level to bank or craft) near or even outleveling their Mains.

 Another poster said that you won't discover anything new that your highest Level Toon has not seen. That is correct of course!

But I am not asking for the 1 character per Account or Server though as sometimes my spouse or one my kids would like to explore Middle-Earth in LoTRO or wherever land I am playing in but as a regular veteran player of the old style RPGs tabletop or Computer, I tend to make do whit what I started with, I never look back and never regret anything my toon has accomplished.  To those who make one after another, good for them, to those like me who stick with the Main until the end, more power to us as well.  It is your game, your money, play your way is all I say.

Originally posted by Radiick

 Another poster said that you won't discover anything new that your highest Level Toon has not seen. That is correct of course!

It's true of most level-based MMOs since there usually is one path and all characters travel it. It is not necessarily true of most skill-based MMOs since each character's progression diverges based on the career or mini-profession the player pursues. There has been little overlapping experience (player experience, not xp) or gameplay between my Grandmaster Merchant, my treasure hunter (I fear what his title may be) and my Elder Archer in UO. There is almost no similarity between my PvP Caldari and my PvE Gallente in skills, encounters or even the regions of space that I travel - definitely not in the combat. :) Some games even go to an extreme, like BattleSwarm, where each faction is a completely different type of game.

 
Let me take a minute to educate  you on a old game I like to call, Final Fantasy 11...or FFXI.
 
You had 1 character, 1 account.....many different jobs/classes.

Example: My Toons name was Dewm (Duh) now while I only had 1 character he was a RDM/BLM BLM/NIN and so on....

And in my opinion was/is a near perfect system.

(As for myself I really can only work on 1 toon at a time otherwise I lose intrested in the game, I like to stay focused. And while I realised that not everyone is that way and many like to have many alts FFXI's system is a perfect middle.)  

Surprised no one has made the sandbox vs. themepark connection yet, eh?

"It worked in SWG! It worked in SWG!" Well, SWG was a sandbox. Right?

Do you think this would work in today's themepark MMOs? Nope. Different classes prompt different playstyles, and some people want to have a choice which of those playstyles to engage in. Not "pick one and stick with it", though they can do that if they so choose. Frankly, another concern is lower level population. If you're limited to only one toon and must level him to max before creating another, then lower-level content will be devoid of players... almost completely, because there aren't any alts... unless the game has a steady influx of new players (and to do that, the game has to be really good or it has to have been out for a while). Would suck if you decided to get in the game late.

Of course, that's all dependent on a level-based system. In a sandbox, one character per account is more feasible.

Originally posted by nate1980

Okay, now that I have your attention, I was thinking over my past experiences and I find that one things is constant: If a new guild has most of its members constantly rerolling alternate characters, that guild fails. This could be a cause or only a coorelation. Whether it's the cause or not is not the point of the post. I'd like to discuss your thoughts on alternate characters and the number of characters per account.

To begin with, I'd like every game to have a test server like SWG has and DAoC had. Meaning, a place where you can roll characters and test them out, along with game mechanics and changes coming down the pipe-line. This would serve as a good place for people to test as many characters out as they want, before clogging the main servers up.

Next, I'd like every game in the future to only offer 1 character per account at the start. This requires people to stick to one character, and allows for people to become known by their character. Anyone who's played SWG knows what I'm talking about. The test server solves the problem of people being indecisive on which character they want to play. You should be able to create a lot of characters on the test server, so you can compare and contrast them. But on the live servers, you can only have 1 per account. This also has the added benefit that guild leaders and members can be more confident that those in their guild are their main characters and will be active. I'm not sure about you all, but I grow tired of those afflicted with altitis, because they fall behind the main group in the guild, and then sometimes expect the main group to go back and help them. I get my fun from playing with a group of others in the game. So I'm motivated to keep leveling and playing, so that I can keep up with my online friends. However, I'm never in a rush, and I think the game is about the journey, not the destination, so don't derail the thread for that.

Lastly, I think that in order to unlock more character slots, you should be required to level a character to max level. So if you want your second character slot, you need to get your first character to max level. If you want your 3rd character slot, you need to level up your second character to max level, and so on. This'll help people stay committed to their characters, and help stop people from jumping around from one character to the next, never getting far on any of them, and then quitting out of boredom.

Before the accusations and immaturity starts, I'd like to say that I suffer from altitis as well, and have learned that if I'm ever going to enjoy the game and get to max level, I need to stick to one character, and ignore "the grass is greener" syndrome. So those of you with altitis, I feel your pain. All I can say is that I'd love to play with you all, not just in the 1-20 range, but the entire game. That's why I think this is necessary. Otherwise, you all will reach level 20, and reroll to something else and I'll never see you all again. That, or I'll have to keep an Excel page open with a list of your characters, so I know who is who in the guild. That's just annoying. I'd rather get to know the people playing along side of me, and it's hard when I can never group with you, because you keep rerolling or bouncing between characters.

I don't like to only have one character because I like to do different things. Sometimes I want to play a healer, sometimes a warrior, sometimes a rogue etc etc. Also I like to have different characters setup to do different professions (crafting).

I am not a fan of a game allowing me to only have one character, and really it's more of a ploy to get people to buy and sub multiple accounts at once. Anyone who really likes the game and wants to play multiple characters will just sub multiple accounts anyways.

Also when I do participate in guilds I like to not have all my characters in a guild. Sometimes I don't want to deal with it and just want to play and be who I want (including say what I want) without having guild rules to think about.

I'm not into having to max out a character to get other characters either, it's similar to games in which you have to max out and then reincarnate the same character and max out again over and over to get all the extra bonuses to max the characters abilities. Sure it keeps people in the different level ranges which is good for new players to see, but it means a lot of grind to level and restart as fast as you can to finally have the max guy you want to play.

Overall it's tiring to play the same character with the same abilities over and over and over. I need variation to keep me interested which is where alts come in. For me it's similar to FPS games, sometimes I play the sniper, sometimes I play the heavy weapons, sometimes I play the light scout. It depends on what I'm in the mood for and it keeps the same game interesting as opposed to needing multiplay games to keep my interest.

All that being said I'm also not a big guild person, I feel they try to be too real and have too many rules and take a lot of the fun out of the game. If a guild requires me to have certain character builds, certain levels, play certain hours etc. then that is not in the least bit enjoyable. So I'm probably not the type of person who would matter much in a guild based discussion (which is where it seems most of this stems from).

This thread is a joke, right?

Originally posted by nate1980

Okay, now that I have your attention, I was thinking over my past experiences and I find that one things is constant: If a new guild has most of its members constantly rerolling alternate characters, that guild fails. This could be a cause or only a coorelation. Whether it's the cause or not is not the point of the post. I'd like to discuss your thoughts on alternate characters and the number of characters per account.

snip....

I don't think your " unlock your alts " idea has any merit, but the point about people being able to play freely when switching characters does.  I think if developers started all of an accounts characters to the same guild, then a much more tight community would sprout.   Taking away the anonymity of players in this case would probably be a great way to bring people together.

Why should we all play the same way? If one likes to build new characters over and over, then so be it!

Only recently has there really been a limit placed on characters in a game. MOst mainstream MMOs have numerous servers upon which you can make X number of characters. Often players end up with more character slots than they need. Recently with Darkfall and Cryptic MMOs (STO and CO) character slots are limited gamewide. ONe wonders if Cryptic will sell character slots in microtransactions (I thought I saw someone write on this). I will say that STO you unlock a Klingon slot when you reach a certain level

Originally posted by Emhster

Why should we all play the same way? If one likes to build new characters over and over, then so be it!

There are limits, sure.  A college roommate I had last semester bought WoW after watching my friends play the game, and since purchasing the game about 5 months ago, he has made upwards of around 30 toons all on the same server with none of them over level twenty, each time declaring he has decided on a new main character.  This guy has probably tried out every single class/race combination multiple times over, and if I were a guild leader, I will admit to getting tired of inviting a new toon of his every week.

Originally posted by SuperXero89

This topic has me scratching my head, but let me just say that if a guild has a problem with the fact that I choose to make alternate characters, I will find a new guild.

that's very fair and you definitley have the right to do that. I mean, it is your money!

but it's also not fair for players to expect that every guild wants to move forward in the same way.

If you are in a guild that is trying to accomplish certain things and they have some players who will never catch up AND who keep making alts that take up Guild space where an actual player might fit in, then you should also understand if they say no to your latest creation or that they make up rules regarding how the guild should be moving forward.

Players have the right to play with like minded people and should recognize when they are not in the right place for them and for others.

Originally posted by Radiick

 Another poster said that you won't discover anything new that your highest Level Toon has not seen. That is correct of course!

Myabe in many of the newer mmo's lately you are correct,  but some of the older ones like EQ1 you can level up 5 to 7  chars well past half way to max level and never utilize any of the same areas or quests other than a couple places for portals

Originally posted by nate1980

Originally posted by SwampRob

Originally posted by nate1980

Next, I'd like every game in the future to only offer 1 character per account at the start.

Good lord, no.    On some MMOs I have over 50 characters.     This limitation alone would assure that game never got my money.

 

Lastly, I think that in order to unlock more character slots, you should be required to level a character to max level. So if you want your second character slot, you need to get your first character to max level. If you want your 3rd character slot, you need to level up your second character to max level, and so on. This'll help people stay committed to their characters, and help stop people from jumping around from one character to the next, never getting far on any of them, and then quitting out of boredom.

Why do you feel the need to control how other people play?    I happen to like jumping around from character to character.   Sometimes I feel like playing a high level one, other times a lowbie.

 

Before the accusations and immaturity starts, I'd like to say that I suffer from altitis as well, and have learned that if I'm ever going to enjoy the game and get to max level, I need to stick to one character, and ignore "the grass is greener" syndrome. So those of you with altitis, I feel your pain. All I can say is that I'd love to play with you all, not just in the 1-20 range, but the entire game. That's why I think this is necessary. Otherwise, you all will reach level 20, and reroll to something else and I'll never see you all again. That, or I'll have to keep an Excel page open with a list of your characters, so I know who is who in the guild. That's just annoying. I'd rather get to know the people playing along side of me, and it's hard when I can never group with you, because you keep rerolling or bouncing between characters.

So I must change the way I prefer to play, because it is more beneficial to you?    Sorry, but I play the way that's most fun to me.

It seems to me that the whole point of your post is that people playing alts affects your game, and so you feel others should adjust their style to match yours.

 

If people need alts to stay interested in the game, then the game won't last them anyways. Their first character will continuously show them new content and places to see, as long as they're playing them. So if the new content and areas can't keep their interest, then what's the point in rerolling, since not too long in the near future, they'll just quit that character like they did the first one. Again, test servers could be used to test out characters.

Is it possible that the player just doesn't like the way that type of class plays?   Maybe after 10 or 20 levels, they decide that they'd rather finish exploring the game with, say, a meleer instead of a caster.    But your method would penalize them.   You're saying "No.   You've created your one character, now finish it to the top level or you won't get another!" 

...and when a person is splitting their time between characters, they're not nearly as good as they could be if they focused on mastering one class. That alone hurts the community, because you're a less effective group member. 

I wholeheartedly disagree.   Any player who has tried all the classes will have a much better understanding of the capabilities of each, the strengths and weaknesses of each class.    That will make them a better group member.

 

 

I wouldn't be bothered if you never played the game if it implemented my idea, because you're probably not the type of person who I'd play with, since you'd likely never be around my level, nor would you stick on one character long enough for me to trust you enough to add to my friends list.

My entire thread, and everyone in it has been flame free and non-provoking, yet you felt the need to provoke me by telling me I'm controlling? In most things in life, there are those with ideas, and those that follow. In MMORPG's, strong communities are remembered and make the game more fun. So I'm speaking of my idea, that'll help make the community stronger. So it's not about pleasing me, rather it's about what's good for the community as a whole; what'll make a strong community. Your attitude is a "me me me" attitude. You want to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, and damn anyone elses wants or needs. If you don't care about the people you play with, then that's your right, but don't expect me to change my idea to cater to you, since you don't care about other people anyways.

Now if you have an actual idea on how to foster strong cohesive communties, not just guild communities, while still allowing for altitis inflicted members, then please share them and point to examples of where this has been tried and proven successful. My idea has been tried, and has been successful in SWG.

Someone who tries all the classes will have an idea of what each class is about, but you could really only accurately comment on what you've physically played yourself. So if you've only played a class to lvl 20, and the level cap is 50, then how could you say you can accurately surmise what that class can do off those 20 levels? Believe me, after playing 40 classes in DAoC, I do understand how playing all those classes can give you an edge when forming groups and fighting other classes, but to accurately know who can do what, you need to get them to a high level, which takes a lot of time. So in the short term, meaning 3-6 months, focusing on a main is more beneficial to the community than focusing on a handful of alts.

  Actually I disagree with you. people who roll alts tend to be more sociable. In wow I had 4 80s mainly because I did not want to turn into the type of people who raid in wow. The decent people who play the game you suggest at least in my experience are far and few between. MMOs are not a second job to me it sounds like you take the game too seriously. Even with all my 80s most were made because my guild needed that class or the only thing left to do was raid and with 6-10 hours a week to play i did not want to waste it dealing with raiders.

If limiting alts is so important to you, then show some discipline and stick to one character. Why should everyone else have to endure limitations to gaming freedom to cater to your lack of self control?

Originally posted by Brixon

If limiting alts is so important to you, then show some discipline and stick to one character. Why should everyone else have to endure limitations to gaming freedom to cater to your lack of self control?

Because a community is made up of everyone, not just him. I understand his reasoning and what he wants, but I disagree with him. In a sandbox game, maybe it'd work (well, he claims it already does, using SWG as his example). But in a themepark game? No.

Originally posted by Arlana75

Originally posted by Radiick

 Another poster said that you won't discover anything new that your highest Level Toon has not seen. That is correct of course!

 

Myabe in many of the newer mmo's lately you are correct,  but some of the older ones like EQ1 you can level up 5 to 7  chars well past half way to max level and never utilize any of the same areas or quests other than a couple places for portals

Heck, in WoW each faction has has enough content and zones to level three different characters with very little overlap in the quests you do till around level 55.  Outland is fairly linear so the experience is pretty much the same from character to character.  Northrend essentially provides you with two sets of zones for each level range and you can mix and match which ones you do.

Beyond that there is the fact that even if you are repeating the same quests and zones, things play out very differently on different classes.  In WoW I started out as a hunter, then made a palladin, followed by a rogue and then a mage.  They were quite varied in the way one needed to play the character so fights I had done previously were singificantly different when attempted with another class.

Originally posted by Comnitus

Originally posted by Brixon

If limiting alts is so important to you, then show some discipline and stick to one character. Why should everyone else have to endure limitations to gaming freedom to cater to your lack of self control?

Because a community is made up of everyone, not just him. I understand his reasoning and what he wants, but I disagree with him. In a sandbox game, maybe it'd work (well, he claims it already does, using SWG as his example). But in a themepark game? No.

In SWG the system locked you into your role pretty much only way to try new roles was to give up most of your progress up to that point.  Say you were a weapon crafter  who wanted see if playing a rifleman would be fun.  You had to give up most of your crafting skills to do that and if you did not like the combat side you had to regrind all the skills you lost.  It got even worse when you chose a role that made you important to your guild.  Running a player city required you to put points into specific skill trees that you could not use for combat or crafting. So someone had to 'gimp' themselves so the guild could benefit.  If that person then got bored and quit the game, things would deteriorate rapidly. 

I'd like to back up Nate's concerns about how people rerolling alts constantly can cause a guild to lose members and disband.  I know those members probably read the forums and at this point I don't care as I believe the leader (one of the rerollers in question here) basically abandoned the guild without any notice.  I'd to love to see a FFXI class switching system in place in MMOs to remove the need to switch to alts or a classless system in general.

Nate probably encountered this in "The Path Ahead" guild formed via the MMORPG forums.  Well, I few of us didn't like the game chosen (or couldn't run it for whatever reason - Vanguard in this case) and decided to keep within the spirit of the community formed there and switched our to EQ2 with a few of us.

Well anyway, our guild leader was a classic altaholic.  He switched his main literally 8 or 9 times within the course of a single month.  I don't understand how or why anyone would do this.  It's essentially replaying the same content over and over again, there really wasn't much "new" to experience after a second or third time through.

I'll get into why I think this was bad in a bit, but I constantly brought it up to him how it annoyed me (as well as a few others who agreed with me, some didn't mind, and many were rerollers themselves - we had at least 4 or 5 others with similar huge character counts).

First, the main problem with it was we were constantly having to help level the guild leader (who is in a leadership role and probably should be helping us, that's just how I feel leaders should be).  We had to constantly do old content over and over again.  The best gear available at the time for low levels was in a winter only event dungeon called Icy Keep and I had to quite literally run this about 100 times over mostly because of the guild leader and other rerollers.  The need to constantly keep gearing them up exhausted us and basically threw away the whole notion of us being there to explore all the content in this game I felt we were stuck perpetually gearing and leveling these members.

Second, we couldn't do new content because of this.  We needed those members who were stuck at low levels.  Due to them constantly rerolling alts we were not only stuck leveling them (so we couldn't progress), but we didn't have enough members to form full fledged groups (aside from the low level stuff).

So low and behold, membership kept constantly dropping.  Now I'm typically a really hardcore power gamer (though I've been in a few casual guilds here and there) and I never seen an instance where such a huge portion of the membership felt the need to constantly reroll alts.  Maybe we were doing something wrong on the leadership end to make them feel that way, but it really hurt us and I don't get why the leadership couldn't see it.  I've never seen a guild go from fully active to almost dead in a month after forming.  Even my brief stint I tried as a guild leader (I make a terrible one, which is why I hate taking leadership roles) once lasted much longer and didn't fully destroy the guild.

What didn't help was those rerollers (including the leader) were the first to leave the game, leaving the active membership who actually cared about their mains and spent a good portion of their time LEVELING THEIR "NEW MAINS" left with a partially dead guild.  Did I mention they left with no notice - so we actually had hope they'd be coming back, but that looks less and less like a possibility?  I feel like now I'm going to have to cancel my membership since there is almost nobody left to play with (and sure I can join a new guild, but that would defeat the original purpose of my subscription to the game - to start from the beginning - since the server is pretty much full of max level characters).

I would like some MMORPG to have one character per account, but would never be so selfish to wish upon ALL MMORPG's to work that way.

I love a game that can provide me with enought content, keep in mind content is NOt quest/missions only as some seem to asume but it's allot more then just story/mission/quests. To give me one character per account, unfortunaly the current trend with most A-title MMORPG's offer far to little to keep the game intresting for just one character.

1 Character would mean a more effective community/economy, something most A-title company do not provide , so as started I would like to see some MMORPG being released that way, but would not want ALL MMORPG released that way as there is enough room to give players many options and choose the game that suites them best.

Overall nobody is forcing you to create Alts, that is ALWAYS in the players hands themself.