Creating alrealy lvled alts

[Chessire]

I recently have been playing with an alt, I created that one to play as a villain character for roleplays and of course I needed him to be strong (A weak villain is doomed to death upon the hands of all the trained righteous character unless you manage to outwit everyone). I would never have the time or even the motivation to sit countless hours and lvl him up so I ended up roleplaying all of his spells, stats and skills as happens with almost all secondary characters. I have even read forum topics on magic saying that its meant to be impossible for a character to become master in several ways of magic.
But if that's true what about alts? Most people don't want to roleplay as the same character all of the time and roleplay scenarios often need some extra character to bring the change.

So, to address this problem without making leveling easier which would result to perfectly trained and overpowered characters I thought it would be simpler to be able to create trained alts once you have a first, skilled character. In other words, all the training you do to your most played character could be transferred to a new char in the form of points to be assigned to any skill upon character creation.

These points could be measured in tria and pp spent on training. For ex, all the tria and pp the main has spent to train the skills A B and C could be used during the creation of an alt to assign him the skills D, E and F. The skills D, E, F may be higher or lower than A, B and C but equal in terms of tria and pp spent.
This gives us an alt able to participate in rps and duels without being necessarily a feeble and dim.

Such a system can be easily abused, anyone who wants to test the other skills and magic ways could just create numerous alts and abandon them later, thus just filling the database of characters. So perhaps creating such an alt could be restricted to only a few times during a year, for ex no more than two trained alts a year. Or chances to create such characters could be given based on the accounts actual playing time, or granted as a right or reward from a GM.

Apart from all this, i am aware that even if everyone likes this idea it will take a good while to be implemented since it probably requires tables and code to be written and skills like alchemy have been on stand-by due to such reasons. I'm still posting this here as an idea for the game.

[Sen]

I have exactly the same problem and some RPs already pretty much stopped due to the lack of (time for) training.

A system where I can create an alt that isn't the overall newbie would help that greatly.

[Gilrond]

The only argument against it could be - getting a trained char without much effort, which can be unfair to other players.

[Bonifarzia]

More than a year ago, I had some interesting conversations about this and similar concepts with a friend who stopped playing PS in the meanwhile. He was convinced that a system that allows players to create secondary characters with somewhat advanced initial stats and skills would be a great addition, but needs strict rules and limitations to prevent abuse. His reasoning also took into account concepts of aging, limited lifespans and inheritance. These related topics are indeed interesting, but setting up rules that feel fair for everyone is a delicate task.

Back to the actual subject, I think that a somewhat restrictive set of additional features in character creation would already be a big help. Keep in mind that your actual, cumulative training costs for reaching a certain set of skills are not a static quantity, but really depend also on the development of stats like intelligence or strength over time, in conjunction with skill progression.Thus it does not make sense to request a very precise mapping from one set of skills to another one.

The concept which I would suggest here is the following. Add some predefined sets of stats and skills in the spirit of the "quick paths" of character creation. If the paths of "Warlock", "Knight", "Enchanter" etc were reworked for better balance, the same patterns could be used for that, simply scaled to a much more useful sum of skill ranks. These "advanced paths" of character creation may then be available in exchange for the overall time spent with a given Planeshift player account. For example, you could call that "loyalty" points or whatever, hand out one for every 20 hours spent online and assign some loyalty point costs to each of the advanced creation paths. Yes, I intentionally decouple this from skill progression of existing characters, because it really should not give PLers an advantage. Those will find it much faster anyways to grind their alts from scratch. Of course, such a system will benefit from a wider variety of paths, and none of them should be close to a fully trained character, which of course depends on your personal point of view.

I hope there will be some more interesting comments in this thread. The topic deserves some more attention and thought.

[Earowo]

The problem I see with being able to make an alt, and transfering exact ammounts of skills, is a person could, train a character, in say light armor and ranged, Up to 100 each, make an alt, and have mettalurgy at mabey 150.
BAM, get rich quik scheme.
Even allowing half as much, could still end up to the same effect, if its somone like say perlan, whos maxed everything

[Karlyle]

I like the concept very much, obviously there would be a lot to work out.  I too have had the same problem.  I don't know if there any real "fair" way to do it because the players make the game, I do believe they should reap some of the benefits.  I myself am limited on my time available, but that is just life.

[Chessire]

The concept which I would suggest here is the following. Add some predefined sets of stats and skills in the spirit of the "quick paths" of character creation. If the paths of "Warlock", "Knight", "Enchanter" etc were reworked for better balance, the same patterns could be used for that, simply scaled to a much more useful sum of skill ranks. These "advanced paths" of character creation may then be available in exchange for the overall time spent with a given Planeshift player account. For example, you could call that "loyalty" points or whatever, hand out one for every 20 hours spent online and assign some loyalty point costs to each of the advanced creation paths. Yes, I intentionally decouple this from skill progression of existing characters, because it really should not give PLers an advantage. Those will find it much faster anyways to grind their alts from scratch. Of course, such a system will benefit from a wider variety of paths, and none of them should be close to a fully trained character, which of course depends on your personal point of view.

I actually like your idea better than mine. Its true it would better to base all this on time spent playing rather than skills trained, since there are very loyal players that don't like training skills and I think there will always be some as long as there are hardcore roleplayers. So maybe gameplay hours, perhaps with the timer going off when a character goes afk (i.e. player or charcter performs no action for a long while).

The problem I see with being able to make an alt, and transfering exact ammounts of skills, is a person could, train a character, in say light armor and ranged, Up to 100 each, make an alt, and have mettalurgy at mabey 150.
BAM, get rich quik scheme.

Perhaps some skills used to make money could be taken out of all this although I don't see where the real problem is. If someone managed to train skills to a high level they would need to have money already and if they didn't (which was my case, making money from killing monsters) it took them a very long time to train high enough. Besides, in later versions of the game metalurgy will be only one of the ways to make money.
Still maybe some skills would be better off taken out of the new character's lvled abilities or at least capped upon character creation. Or, if we take Bonifarzia's idea,  maybe these would cost more loyalty points to lvl up than combat skills or stats. This is actually a matter of balancing things out.

[Soloyos]

Maybe you could creat an Alt, up to the same levels in each things to your main, E.g your main has Maxed stats you can make an alt with max stats or less.

[Bonifarzia]

I actually like your idea better than mine. [...] Perhaps some skills used to make money could be taken out of all this [...] Or, if we take Bonifarzia's idea,  maybe these would cost more loyalty points to lvl up than combat skills or stats. This is actually a matter of balancing things out.

I am glad you like the idea. In fact, I mainly thought of PvP relevant skills, i.e. combat arts and magic ways. These are probably enough of a challenge to properly balance out. The inclusion of some job skills may be possible at a later stage, after some extensive testing.

[Vakachehk]

I don't really like this idea, it's not easy to implement, no other game has it (meaning it doesn't work). However I do believe making an alt needs to be somewhat easier than it is now. I wouldn't care leveling an alt if leveling wasn't so freakin hard!! Winch access now is just ridiculous, and developers didn't listen to players about how hard it was, instead they make it harder!

So I believe that the devs need to concentrate on easier leveling and questing than making alts.

[Phantomboy86]

I don't really like this idea, it's not easy to implement, no other game has it (meaning it doesn't work). However I do believe making an alt needs to be somewhat easier than it is now. I wouldn't care leveling an alt if leveling wasn't so freakin hard!! Winch access now is just ridiculous, and developers didn't listen to players about how hard it was, instead they make it harder!

So I believe that the devs need to concentrate on easier leveling and questing than making alts.

Actually thats not quite true, I played a game once where you could do what was called a 'rebirth' to make your character start back at level one, and i forget if it was either you leveled up faster when you did that proportional to what level you were when you did it, or you had more starting points on him. (Memory is a bit foggy, played it a long time ago)

[Vakachehk]

Actually thats not quite true, I played a game once where you could do what was called a 'rebirth' to make your character start back at level one, and i forget if it was either you leveled up faster when you did that proportional to what level you were when you did it, or you had more starting points on him. (Memory is a bit foggy, played it a long time ago)

Sounds like an interesting game. I'm also more meaning that the idea is good however I think work at starting characters (whether a noob or an alt) needs more priority than something like this.

[novacadian]

It is my feeling that such player preference can create a two tier game.

After working on a second character a bit more seriously lately, my heart is with the OP. 

There is no question it would be a help to loyal players; yet on a MUD, which a similar  development was witnessed, playing appeared to, later, become more two tiered in style of play. 

The MUD eventually became a MUD of Wizards with top tier Mortal Lord alts. The non-Wizard player base fell away. It would be a situation worth avoiding in PS.

On RPG Table Gaming my favoured is still by far the 1-5th level character. My love of the dice may be hidden in that fact. 

So instead of developing such a tier of playing style upwards, my suggestion would be to let us cast it downwards. That is that any player creation type which may evolve from this thread should be tempered with the curse of real ageing. That topic deserves; if not already has; a thread of its own. Yet suffice it to say it would be perma at some eventual die roll.

- Nova

[verden]

The problem is of course that we are talking about a completely different game with these ideas. And it is not like this idea has never come up before. It might be possible though to have a system where an existing characters attributes and stats could be transferred to a new character. But there would have to be a stiff price for doing this.

[Chessire]

@ Novacanadian: I haven't had the chance to play DnD online or as a board game before so I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say by this post. Could you please post again explaining without the DnD terminology?

So instead of developing such a tier of playing style upwards, my suggestion would be to let us cast it downwards. That is that any player creation type which may evolve from this thread should be tempered with the curse of real ageing. That topic deserves; if not already has; a thread of its own. Yet suffice it to say it would be perma at some eventual die roll.

You mean that alts created with already raised levels would eventually result to numerous very powerful characters that would ruin the balance of the IC world? I actually agree with that. What happens today is having powerful stats roleplayed in order to have a powerful villain or at least an enemy that can provide a challenge but noone will be accepted as powerful if they try to abuse their way through rps with pretended stats. That's also the actual reason that leveled alts need to be restricted to loyal players, not because they are some sort of reward but because they are meant to be used for roleplay, not in-game competition. Perhaps it wouldn't even matter if the leveled alts couldn't train any higher than their starting skills in most cases, since they were never meant to help powerleveling.

So, how about this:
Every account gets loyalty points based on time spent in the game world (without being afk). Perhaps a few points could also be awarded by GMs in events? These points can be used upon the creation of an alt to add skill and stat levels but cannot be used on skills used to make money. The created alt cannot train or gain any levels further than the starting ones. If the alt is deleted all the loyalty points spent are lost.

I think this covers the money making exploit, the overpopulation of alts and the overpopulation of powerful characters. And its certain there will be some balancing needed on how many points are gained for say, every in-game hour and how much every skill lvl would cost upon character creation. thoughts?