Author Topic: Being Able To Play So Many Characters Ruins The Game  (Read 18546 times)

Indirik

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Discuss.
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Constantine

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On the one hand, I agree that being able to play several character on one continent leads to all kinds of power hoarding/metagame.
On the other hand, it helps populate the servers.
But yeah, that is one of the reasons I like Dwilight the most.

Zakilevo

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I for one have to agree with this. It distracts you from other characters and eventually you only pay attention to one or two while making other characters into zombies...

More reason to close down islands and just go with one big 'round looking' island with maybe max of 2 chars per each player but Tim is busy and can't spend time one something that will take a year of dev time :(

Indirik

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On the one hand, I agree that being able to play several character on one continent leads to all kinds of power hoarding/metagame.
Yeah, that sucks. I'm a big fan of one-character-per-continent.

Quote
On the other hand, it helps populate the servers.
But what's the point if all those islands are, essentially, carbon copies of each other? When the same people get together to play in common realms on four different islands, how unique do you think each of those is going to be? Instead, what we get is Sartanism and the Church of Humanity on four different islands. *yawn*

Don't get me wrong, both of these points you bring up are valid. And the game needs both leaders to point people which direction to march *and* sheeple to march in that direction.

I do have a few more ideas on why I think that opening the game up to 5 and 6 characters per account is the wrong move, though. Some of my characters have certain things to achieve, and when they do, or when they die, I doubt I will be replacing them.
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Constantine

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We're basically on the same page, Indirik, but I'm playing devil's advocate for the sake of keeping the discourse objective.

For once, playing on several isles, even if they are pretty much identical, allows for different experiences. You play a tourney knight on one continent, on another you play a priest of a new religion or an infiltrator. Makes sense.
Again, I can come up with no redeeming arguements for having two characters on the same isle.
Playing a lot of characters is likewise kind of cheesy. There is no way you can invest enough time in, say, 5 nobles. Obviously at least half of them are there for power hoarding.

Vita`

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I absolutely agree. Too many characters across more realms and islands means more opportunities to gain positions, there being more of them and less folks to hold them. Thus, the positions aren't as challenging to acquire and thus less exciting to gain. Too many characters means player focus is diluted between more characters meaning less emphasis on each character, which then affects the other characters playing with them. Especially when considering how many of our players lead busy lives and must delay responses, thus delaying IC events.

More indirectly, with all the continents and realms we have for these additional characters, it just means more places for new players to join, find uninteresting, and leave.

I firmly believe that all continents should be capped at one unpaused noble and one unpaused advy per family. Even with that, I think we have too many continents. I think War Islands and Colonies have purpose with their unique reasons. Other than those, I don't think we need any more than a stable and testing island of small to moderate size. Somewhat related, I also think new players should start with three nobles, not two, and no advies until after the first couple months.

PS: I do my best to actively play all my characters, but it absolutely affects the focus I'm able to give each one. My War Island character is meant to take my least attention, but I still do more than just check orders too.
« Last Edit: March 31, 2015, 05:17:23 AM by Vita »

De-Legro

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Lets also cover the fact, that you can look at a few notable families and see that all or most of their characters hold high positions. It is not like having more positions is necessarily opening up those positions for more players.
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Zakilevo

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My family at one point held multiple ducal positions which brought multiple cities as well. And this was when I was most active too. But even then I only paid attention to 2 at most.

I actually think 2 characters per new family is fine IF we reduce the number of playable islands down to 4 (colonies, stable, testing, war island).

Also, the testing island should be used for testing as well to get feedback for the game and let people know that bugs can occur often. I've heard some people complaining about changing game mechanics on testing islands that affect their realms.

Constantine

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A sound plan, but I still want a SMM isle too.

That said, is there even a chance of such an overhaul happening?

Zakilevo

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A sound plan, but I still want a SMM isle too.

That said, is there even a chance of such an overhaul happening?

Nope. Tom doesn't want it.

Vita`

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Lets also cover the fact, that you can look at a few notable families and see that all or most of their characters hold high positions. It is not like having more positions is necessarily opening up those positions for more players.

There are certainly some players with most or all characters holding significant position. And just returns us to my other point, and the one Zakky emphasized, of not enough focus into all those characters and how they then affect their realms without that focus. And your counterpoint is hardly universal - it is leaving more positions to more players. Just as there are politically savvy/power hungry families with many positions, there are plenty of instances of realms with a character holding most council positions and plenty of realms that can hardly find folks to fill positions. If anyone wants a position, it is not difficult to do so, so you will find families who suck up all they can as well as plenty of families who will take what is left lying around.

Fleugs

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I don't actually mind playing a drone character or two. That's how I started out in both Luria and Thalmarkin, but I somehow got involved into those realms (or their predecessor, in Luria's case) and now I hold all sorts of titles there. The issue comes when you get yourself overinvested in more characters than you can comfortably handle; at this point, you are at risk of becoming an "idle" council member/lord/marhsal that may bog things down. Something we should all try to avoid, perhaps, but it's not always to let go of the one ring moderate power.
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Indirik

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Hmm... I had not intended to start this thread and abandon it, but sometimes life intrudes, and forces us to do what we have to do, instead of what we want to do.

Anyway, there are quite a few reasons I think that adding more characters has actually moved us in the wrong direction. Most of them have already been hit on by others. Here's a rundown of my own reasons, some of which are duplicated from above.

1) Having a large number of characters creates more opportunities for power hording. Players who really enjoy this game tend to quickly learn how to gain positions, Once gained, positions are easy to hold. A quick rundown on my own characters:
* EC: Ruler
* AT: General, Lord (stepped down from general ~2 days ago)
* BT: Banker, Lord (lost banker re-election yesterday)
* FEI: Ruler, Duke
* SI: Duke, Margrave
* DW: Margrave, Vice Marshal

Do I really need to hold four council-level positions with four different characters on four different islands, in addition to the various duchies and lordships? As a result of holding all of these positions, I really don't care when a new position opens up in one of these realms. I have all the positions I want, and have access to more, if I really wanted them. Lots of other people apparently feel the same way, judging by the now-common occurrence of elections for council-level offices failing because no one runs, or the offices staying vacant because no one wants to be appointed. I've even seen circumstances where the only person that wants the office refuses to run, deliberately allowing the election to fail so he could make a point. He knows no one else will run, and can afford to allow the election to fail, then run and get the office in the next round. In some realms, region lordships are essentially meaningless, because anyone who wants one already has one, and there are more to spare for the next dozen nobles who show up.

The combination of lots of characters per player, and ready availability of positions and lordships pretty much everywhere has devalued their significance and desirability. If I only had three characters, that general's position would have meant more to me, and I probably could have found some way to contribute with it, instead of becoming a zombie.

2) The greater number of positions being help by the same person creates more demands on players' time. There is only so much time in a person's day. I used to spend multiple hours a day running just three characters. Now I've got six characters, but less time overall to play. So my characters end up being what I've always despised: Idle placeholders. Characters who hold positions of power, but let that power go unused, not contributing to my own fun, or the fun of the other players in the game. So I've started shedding positions. It's one thing to run your landless knight as a zombie drone, but running your combination general/duke/margrave/marshal/ambassador as a zombie is criminal.

3) Having lots of characters available is an enabler of one of my pet peeves: Propping up tiny realms with lots of doubled-up characters. (Or reinforcing large realms with an even larger contingent of ultra-reliable, ultra-loyal drones.) This is one of the reasons I liked Dwilight so much. One character per account, with no way for two or three people run a realm all by themselves with doubled-up characters. You either had to openly horde power by carrying all those titles around on one character (and thus people could easily tell what was happening) or you had to allow other people to join in the fun. (Interestingly enough, the most insular, friendless, and despised realms on Dwilight (Averoth and Aurvandil) both turned out to be giant multi-accounting scams.)

Doubled characters in a realm also lead to a proliferation of zombie characters in that realm. Yes, there are exceptions, but doubled characters tend to be zombies or practically NPCs. They rarely add anything useful to the realm beyond holding a spot. At worst, they are used by the player as nothing more than a second voice to parrot their main character's agenda.

Running multiple characters per island is a slightly different beast. It is in some ways both better and worse than doubling up in one realm. It doesn't allow some of the same concentration of power in a single realm. What it does allow is for more secret, non-obvious, and/or unbreakable ties between realms. You may not be able to run a ruler in two realms, but two or three people with doubled character on an island can easily have an unbreakable hold on two realms.

4) With everyone running so many characters, it can be difficult to get away from players you just don't like. We all know that there's always that one (or two, or ten...) player that you just can't get along with. But with everyone running so many characters, it can be almost impossible to get away from them. You leave the realm they're in on FEI, and two weeks later they join the realm you're in on AT. You pause that character and start another on EC, but they're already there, too! It may seem like a minor thing, but playing in a realm with a player you just can't stand can be damn painful, and just suck the fun right out of the game. A shrinking player base, and profusion of characters, can really cut down on the places you can enjoy playing.

5) A profusion of zombie characters leads to more quiet realms, where only a few players ever truly interact. Alice and Bob may both have characters in the same 5 realms. But if Alice likes Keplerstan and Bob likes Evilstani, then they are going to focus their attention in different realms. Alice and Bob may play in the same realms, but they never interact, because they don't care about each others' favorite realms. If both of them played in Keplerstan and Evilstani, and no other realms, then they would be much likely to devote time to those realms, and thus interact more.




The more I think about it, the more I think that our reaction to the shrinking playerbase (giving people more character slots and slightly decreasing the available land) was not the right way to go. The extra slots just diluted the meaningfulness of the characters we had. The slight shrinkage wasn't enough to compensate for that dilution.

I think that the drastic action of closing islands (yes, multiple islands) is our only remaining option. Shrinking down to four islands is probably a good first step: Stable, Testing, War, Colonies. What this means is that we would close FEI, AT, and then either BT or Dwilight. (Executive direction from Tom: Shut down EC and we shut down everything.) Change character limits to as follows:

War Island:
* Every account gets one noble character on the War Island. This is a special character, and is separate from all of the below limits/conditions.

Other Islands: (EC/Dw/Col -or- EC/BT/Col)
* All accounts can have get three active characters.
* Normal accounts can have a maximum of two active nobles.
* Donor accounts can have three active nobles.
* No more than one active noble character per island.



Or is this all an overreaction, and I'm just barking up the wrong tree with all of this?
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De-Legro

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Hmm... I had not intended to start this thread and abandon it, but sometimes life intrudes, and forces us to do what we have to do, instead of what we want to do.

Anyway, there are quite a few reasons I think that adding more characters has actually moved us in the wrong direction. Most of them have already been hit on by others. Here's a rundown of my own reasons, some of which are duplicated from above.

1) Having a large number of characters creates more opportunities for power hording. Players who really enjoy this game tend to quickly learn how to gain positions, Once gained, positions are easy to hold. A quick rundown on my own characters:
* EC: Ruler
* AT: General, Lord (stepped down from general ~2 days ago)
* BT: Banker, Lord (lost banker re-election yesterday)
* FEI: Ruler, Duke
* SI: Duke, Margrave
* DW: Margrave, Vice Marshal

Do I really need to hold four council-level positions with four different characters on four different islands, in addition to the various duchies and lordships? As a result of holding all of these positions, I really don't care when a new position opens up in one of these realms. I have all the positions I want, and have access to more, if I really wanted them. Lots of other people apparently feel the same way, judging by the now-common occurrence of elections for council-level offices failing because no one runs, or the offices staying vacant because no one wants to be appointed. I've even seen circumstances where the only person that wants the office refuses to run, deliberately allowing the election to fail so he could make a point. He knows no one else will run, and can afford to allow the election to fail, then run and get the office in the next round. In some realms, region lordships are essentially meaningless, because anyone who wants one already has one, and there are more to spare for the next dozen nobles who show up.

The combination of lots of characters per player, and ready availability of positions and lordships pretty much everywhere has devalued their significance and desirability. If I only had three characters, that general's position would have meant more to me, and I probably could have found some way to contribute with it, instead of becoming a zombie.

2) The greater number of positions being help by the same person creates more demands on players' time. There is only so much time in a person's day. I used to spend multiple hours a day running just three characters. Now I've got six characters, but less time overall to play. So my characters end up being what I've always despised: Idle placeholders. Characters who hold positions of power, but let that power go unused, not contributing to my own fun, or the fun of the other players in the game. So I've started shedding positions. It's one thing to run your landless knight as a zombie drone, but running your combination general/duke/margrave/marshal/ambassador as a zombie is criminal.

3) Having lots of characters available is an enabler of one of my pet peeves: Propping up tiny realms with lots of doubled-up characters. (Or reinforcing large realms with an even larger contingent of ultra-reliable, ultra-loyal drones.) This is one of the reasons I liked Dwilight so much. One character per account, with no way for two or three people run a realm all by themselves with doubled-up characters. You either had to openly horde power by carrying all those titles around on one character (and thus people could easily tell what was happening) or you had to allow other people to join in the fun. (Interestingly enough, the most insular, friendless, and despised realms on Dwilight (Averoth and Aurvandil) both turned out to be giant multi-accounting scams.)

Doubled characters in a realm also lead to a proliferation of zombie characters in that realm. Yes, there are exceptions, but doubled characters tend to be zombies or practically NPCs. They rarely add anything useful to the realm beyond holding a spot. At worst, they are used by the player as nothing more than a second voice to parrot their main character's agenda.

Running multiple characters per island is a slightly different beast. It is in some ways both better and worse than doubling up in one realm. It doesn't allow some of the same concentration of power in a single realm. What it does allow is for more secret, non-obvious, and/or unbreakable ties between realms. You may not be able to run a ruler in two realms, but two or three people with doubled character on an island can easily have an unbreakable hold on two realms.

4) With everyone running so many characters, it can be difficult to get away from players you just don't like. We all know that there's always that one (or two, or ten...) player that you just can't get along with. But with everyone running so many characters, it can be almost impossible to get away from them. You leave the realm they're in on FEI, and two weeks later they join the realm you're in on AT. You pause that character and start another on EC, but they're already there, too! It may seem like a minor thing, but playing in a realm with a player you just can't stand can be damn painful, and just suck the fun right out of the game. A shrinking player base, and profusion of characters, can really cut down on the places you can enjoy playing.

5) A profusion of zombie characters leads to more quiet realms, where only a few players ever truly interact. Alice and Bob may both have characters in the same 5 realms. But if Alice likes Keplerstan and Bob likes Evilstani, then they are going to focus their attention in different realms. Alice and Bob may play in the same realms, but they never interact, because they don't care about each others' favorite realms. If both of them played in Keplerstan and Evilstani, and no other realms, then they would be much likely to devote time to those realms, and thus interact more.




The more I think about it, the more I think that our reaction to the shrinking playerbase (giving people more character slots and slightly decreasing the available land) was not the right way to go. The extra slots just diluted the meaningfulness of the characters we had. The slight shrinkage wasn't enough to compensate for that dilution.

I think that the drastic action of closing islands (yes, multiple islands) is our only remaining option. Shrinking down to four islands is probably a good first step: Stable, Testing, War, Colonies. What this means is that we would close FEI, AT, and then either BT or Dwilight. (Executive direction from Tom: Shut down EC and we shut down everything.) Change character limits to as follows:

War Island:
* Every account gets one noble character on the War Island. This is a special character, and is separate from all of the below limits/conditions.

Other Islands: (EC/Dw/Col -or- EC/BT/Col)
* All accounts can have get three active characters.
* Normal accounts can have a maximum of two active nobles.
* Donor accounts can have three active nobles.
* No more than one active noble character per island.



Or is this all an overreaction, and I'm just barking up the wrong tree with all of this?

Well I certainly agree there are families that have every character with Duke or better positions, and then they contribute almost nothing to many of the realms they are in.
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Zakilevo

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So shutting down EC is not an option. That sucks.

I think the best option we have is EC/Dwi/SI/Col. And open up Dwi probably and allow people on other continents to move to Dwi without losing any gold or H/P since it is more of a forced migration but of course they will have to choose among their characters which one they wish to play on Dwi.