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Several characters in the game


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so i don't like the idea of being able to have several characters in DU.

it kinda breaks the game.

 

for example when you are part of 1 empire and being able to make a second char joining the hostile empire.

also, dual universe would be way more serious to the player if you had only 1 character.

 

i dont like the idea.

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I mostly agree. What I am against is having more than one character in the game at the same time. Having different characters that you use at different times doesn't bother me too much. If it's easier to enforce one character per player then that would be my strong preference.

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I would only agree to having more than one character if the alliance/guild/faction association was across the entire account, so that like slaxx said, you couldn't be in multiple organisations and know the behind the scenes of everyone at once.

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I understand the desire and the draw for having alts and playing the spy game, first though Ill just talk of alts in general.

 

If you only have one character per account allowed, you eventually hit a skill cap. Even if they allow you to unlearn and relearn new skills, some people won't be satisfied, and they will demand multiple character slots, or bypass the system with multiple accounts.

 

If you allow people multiple characters, they have almost no sense or responsibility to the game world. Something not going your' way, no problem just log out let someone else fix it. They can also master everything in the game, which maybe that's fine after all they pay for content why get just a slice of the whole pie you pay for. Another problem with having an alt character is the way it interacts with the game, you are an extra dimensional being and break the continuance of each character when you log out to a character select and then go to a loading screen and are back in some other time or place in game.

 

 

A partial mix of both would be a good thing to look into, using in game mechanics. You have multiple bodies, perhaps you train different knowledge into them, and this could also allow you multiple aliases.

As it is with the spy game, its almost perfect if you have totally separate characters, e.ve. However, If all your alt characters were just clones somewhere, you could also monitor other chat systems by proxy without logging out, discretely or not, I dont know how the chat works right now so its hard to say.

 

I know such a method would require some things be developed especially for spies. What Im thinking is spies have a skill they can unlock that allows them to display a different account name, if that is even displayed, or other nefarious things to hide their true identity. It could be either or both for their main character, or their alt clones.

 

The best communities Ive felt that treat the game and other players with the most respect have been ones where you have just one character. The ones that seem washed up and cheap are where someone puts much time into a character, gets bored of it and abandons it. When people abandon characters and don't say anything you lose track of them sometimes they go join a different guild, they take up extra names, and so forth.

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I understand the desire and the draw for having alts and playing the spy game, first though Ill just talk of alts in general.

 

If you only have one character per account allowed, you eventually hit a skill cap. Even if they allow you to unlearn and relearn new skills, some people won't be satisfied, and they will demand multiple character slots, or bypass the system with multiple accounts.

 

If you allow people multiple characters, they have almost no sense or responsibility to the game world. Something not going your' way, no problem just log out let someone else fix it. They can also master everything in the game, which maybe that's fine after all they pay for content why get just a slice of the whole pie you pay for. Another problem with having an alt character is the way it interacts with the game, you are an extra dimensional being and break the continuance of each character when you log out to a character select and then go to a loading screen and are back in some other time or place in game.

 

 

A partial mix of both would be a good thing to look into, using in game mechanics. You have multiple bodies, perhaps you train different knowledge into them, and this could also allow you multiple aliases.

As it is with the spy game, its almost perfect if you have totally separate characters, e.ve. However, If all your alt characters were just clones somewhere, you could also monitor other chat systems by proxy without logging out, discretely or not, I dont know how the chat works right now so its hard to say.

 

I know such a method would require some things be developed especially for spies. What Im thinking is spies have a skill they can unlock that allows them to display a different account name, if that is even displayed, or other nefarious things to hide their true identity. It could be either or both for their main character, or their alt clones.

 

The best communities Ive felt that treat the game and other players with the most respect have been ones where you have just one character. The ones that seem washed up and cheap are where someone puts much time into a character, gets bored of it and abandons it. When people abandon characters and don't say anything you lose track of them sometimes they go join a different guild, they take up extra names, and so forth.

 

This ^..

 

However to expand on your spy idea, you could have an ability to join other factions on top of your main one, but get none of the benefits of joining it (some how, not sure how that would work).. So you could have your main faction the one where everyone knows you and you run some portion of it giving out tags ect ect.. then your spy faction where you can do nothing, but monitor the people in the faction. 

 

Only thing is people would need a way to detect you, otherwise you could just sit in the other guild all the time even during combat, and tell your main guild whats happening.

 

Different account name and such would be good.. You could have a 'inspect' mechanic that shows who they are really if you have a high enough skill to do it.. the higher your 'inspect' skill the more chance you have of seeing the persons 'real' stats.. but on the other hand, the higher your 'spy' skill the more chance you have to remain hidden?

 

That make sense at all ?

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A partial mix of both would be a good thing to look into, using in game mechanics. You have multiple bodies, perhaps you train different knowledge into them, and this could also allow you multiple aliases.

As it is with the spy game, its almost perfect if you have totally separate characters, e.ve. However, If all your alt characters were just clones somewhere, you could also monitor other chat systems by proxy without logging out, discretely or not, I dont know how the chat works right now so its hard to say.

 

Excellent idea.  Perhaps some kind of futuristic disguise/alter-ego mechanic that allows you to appear as a completely different character.  Lore-wise it could be related to the Resurrection Nodes somehow.  Maybe you can only switch to and from your alter-ego using an RN.  Maybe advanced skills allow you to have multiple alter-egos.  Whatever the system, there should be some non-trivial way of seeing through alter-egos, or knowing whether a character has alter-egos.

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I think I should elaborate on the bit of being able to see other chats.

 

Your' characters consciousness is the main character, and you just inhabit bodies. For the sake of the argument though, you will inhabit Main Character body.

and have a Secondary Body, or a "clone" somewhere.

 

You train skills, skills may or may not be specific to each playable body you own.

 

You have Main Character body in your favorite guild, organisation 1.

You have Secondary body in organisation 2.

Currently you are logged in and playing on Main Character, everyone in that guild see's you as Main Character - online - location -etc etc

Even though you are logged into Main Character, you can still see all the chat's and groups, or other information that Secondary Character belongs to.

 

You have trained into some spy skills, that allow you to alter your characters information page to specific groups of people you select, It could use the TAG system as long as you can mark / tag people / groups / guilds without their knowledge.

 

To organisation 2, even though you are playing Main Character at the time. you trick them by selecting a location, online / offline, other information. It would be up to the spy to stay on top of their game and make sure to update their information from lies, to active if they were to play on Secondary body.

 

Leaving the art of deception up to the skill of the player. And the reciprocative witch hunt by the Inquisition to actually go to the places that said people say they are at and root them out, or find other holes in their lies.

 

If you want to take it a bit further, because undoubtedly some guilds and organisations will simply not recruit more people. More advanced spy skills could involve around actually hacking into/ infiltration/ gathering data.

 

Say for instance this spy in organisation 1, was in a guild (organisation 2) but got caught, and they banned that character. Well what do you do? delete Secondary Character? You could, but that also sucks and is a hassle.

Here are my work around ideas.

 

1.) A skill line for fake identities, or appearing to have a different name to certain groups of people.

2.) Ability to hack cargo containers, and see their contents but not be able to steal the goods this way.

3.) Identity theft, some means to steal other characters identities and appear as them in chat rooms.

4.) Advanced Identity theft, get a description of your stolen targets appearance, clothing ect and have a changing room to attempt and make yourself look more like them. Also gain any of their access codes (without actually knowing the codes to boxes containers) and their clearance / security rating to more easily infiltrate bases.

These things also open up the possibility of a spy hunter or Spy versus Spy option.

 

So that should solve the main issue with the spy's who would want lots of alt characters.

Now for the skills cap and whatnot. Not sure if you intend for everything to be trained and learned at once or not, so heres some alternatives in a skill cap based reality.

 If a skillcap exists per character) these are possible workarounds that aren't game breaking or lore destroying.

1.) Memory Drives: Allow people to store learned skills onto futuristic version of USB Flash Drives, and overwrite their current skill-set. Either make it so people can trade them, or make it so only the skills you learn can be saved. Have a cooldown of 1 or 2 days in between switching skill sets.

 

2.) Retraining: This could go two ways. 1.) when you learn something and then forget it in favor of other skills, if you come back and train it again it will be significantly faster to learn. AND/OR You consume / destroy your old experience points in order to make whatever new thing you are learning go faster.

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I read all that saffi, and I think you could do that with just one single character if you played around with some of the mechanics you have described there.

 

The multi-character thing could be as simple as a spy skill that gives you the option to 'select alias', giving the guise of you either logging out or logging in as a secondary character, but you are in fact just putting on a disguise.

 

Couple of levels to it like you have depending on your spy skill:

 

Could be 'chat disguise' you can infiltrate and pretend to be a person in another chat, but it requires 'hacking into' that chat, which other spy masters inside the chat could 'anti-hack'. If you are found out the 'anti hackers' could have the option to either remove you, which would just get rid of your ability to chat/watch much like /quiting the chat yourself but forces and without any visual indication to the guild you were spying on that it was you as the spy. Or the 'anti-hackers' could 'trace-hack' giving them the change to find out who you are, where you are and what organisation you are from ect, depending on how long you let them trace you for (could have a indication that you are being traced, depending on your level vs their level)

 

Another one, like you pointed out, could be 'Visual Disguise'. You simply copy the appearance of a person, basically 'hack' their look and credentials (this could be ontop of the 'chat-hack' so its more believable) giving you the chance to infiltrate their base and loot chests and anything the person you 'hacked' can do, give more need to set out correct tag on people, so that spy's can't do anything they like. The 'anti-hack' for this could be security checkpoints, or scanners inside the base that indicated you are a spy but only to those who can see or hear the element (so it's got some leg room to work). Obviously if you get found 'visual hacking' the enemy has the option to shoot you, immediately removing your hack so everyone knows, or let you go about your business and trap you or watch what you do.

 

Trapping someone you could incorporate all sorts of skills, that would let you interrogate people, or view inventory, or 'pretend' to be them on their chat to see if you could lure more people into traps, obviously traps should only last so long.. OR you could download a 'player file' if you trap them giving you access to all this, and a risk/reward factor to spying.

 

Don't know if that makes sense, I was kind of just building upon saffi's idea. :)

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Some interesting ideas there. Just a couple of balance points.

 

First I definitely think RNs should be involved transforming into an alias. You have to physically go to the RN and select the alias you want to come out as. Two reasons for this. One is to prevent being in two places at once and hence being able to teleport between locations by switching aliases. Another is that it adds to the difficulty in keeping your cover - if you're under suspicion you have to be very careful not to get caught always heading back to our coming back from your RN. Combined with making sure you're on top of your tagging using the system Saffi describes, these difficulties could make it so that no hard counters to this alter-ego system are required.

 

Second, aliases should have none of the skills trained by the main character, but can train their own skills. However you can only gain skills for one character at a time. This ensures spies don't get double training.

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I would only agree to having more than one character if the alliance/guild/faction association was across the entire account, so that like slaxx said, you couldn't be in multiple organisations and know the behind the scenes of everyone at once.

 

I was thinking that just having the ability to see alts under one account. That would help eliminate meta gaming. While someone could have multiple accounts, that would be much harder to track and stop, and I dont think it should so I wont bother with that case. 

 

But assume someone has a main and then creates an alt under an account. When I look up that alts data (maybe even in an out of game database) I should be able to see all the characters under one account. This would eliminate the majority of meta gaming, you join my corp, well I can look up and see what other corps you are a part of. And it wouldnt force him into one group, maybe I know his main is in another alliance and I am ok with that. Maybe its a trade alt or one used for safe zone mining or something. What matters to me is the meta gaming causing problems. 

 

 

 

Now the hacking and disguise stuff is very interesting and would at least bring the spying into the game. I think it would be an interesting feature. 

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