Character number limitations per account.

[Yuta]

Greetings all you awesome awakening people.

I know it has been awhile since I've popped my head in the game, life is just a mess the last month or so trying to figure things out. Anyway to the matter at hand, I'm sorry I didn't read through everyone's post but here is my 2 credits worth:

1.) Having 10 characters I do feel it hurts the overall economy. I liked the old days where you had to find the right vendor and save the waypoint or talk with everyone to find the best items or places to get your goods. On the other side 10 is good to help keep cities and items as such. I understand that those who already have this many might have in the past paid for multi accounts, on the other side not everyone could afford that so we were limited to 2 or 3 if you unlocked.

2.) I think 5 is a good medium for all, but could still be pushing it from an economy standpoint but wouldn't be as bad.

3.) The 2 character option to me, makes it feel like Pre-CU and had to learn to work as a community versus being able to do things for yourself.

Over all I'm mixed for each choice I will have to think hard on this one. I love being as pre-cu as possible but as real life goes I don't always a lot of time on my hands to level 10 characters and since I'm a badge whore 2 is beyond enough for me, but would be nice to try 1-2 other professions I never tried on live with extra character slots.

I'd throw out a suggestion, I'm sure they might have already been said but I'd say everyone that says well 10 is cool because on live I paid for 4 or 5 accounts etc. Why don't we do the same as live pick a $ number and whoever donates that each month gets so many character slots and/or have that many accounts. Also until the community is super strong enough how about lowering some of the stats for cities if you go more for a 2-5 character limit. Yes that might not be 100% pre-cu but if memory is correct they did tweak cities a few times over the years. This way we keep the economy strong, keep the cities alive and those that love the game and all you awesome people on this server the ability to be closer to live but with flexibility as time goes on the city stats can be updated and you have the option to pay to get more accounts just like live.

My 2 credits agree, disagree, lick doesn't matter just my thoughts.

Love you guys,
Yuta

[beowulfchauffeur]

Reducing the number of character slots doesn't alter the consumption mechanics at all, it just condenses them because you don't have twice as many characters to spread your time across. Given a finite amount of time, you'll wreck the same amount of gear no matter how many characters you play, you'll just wreck it on different characters at different rates.

I don't believe that there will be any material impact on the economy in terms of number of items consumed via decay because of a lack of "extra alts I have to buy stuff for." I've seen that argument a few times, and I'm sure it seems logical at first, but I'm open to hear if people still think it applies.

That's definitely a possibility. Speaking from my own experience, I've been playing on Awakening for about 2 months now, and in that time I have yet to completely wreck a suit of armor. I am very meticulous about getting it repaired, and a few of my suits are starting to show heavy wear, but they'll probably last another month. I usually keep 2 sets of armor on me for general gameplay. If my current rate remains approximately constant, I'll buy 2 sets of composite armor every 2-3 months on my main.

By contrast, each time I roll a new alt, I buy them 1-2 sets of Ubese for early grinding, and then graduate them into 2 sets of composite. I've done this 7 times so far, resulting in roughly 28 suits of armor purchased. Now, granted, I'm not going to wear existing armor out at equal rates across all characters, and/or if I focus in on 5 or fewer, the suits on those characters will wear down faster, as you pointed out.

But unless everyone is letting their armor get to 0% and then throwing it away, I'm not convinced that wear-out is necessarily the primary factor driving armor sales. If a new player joins the server, and creates more than 5 combat characters, regardless of how fast they wear down the armor on those characters, they have to make the initial purchases. Regardless of whether I'm right or wrong about this, I think we'd both agree that there's two possible economic effects: either sales decrease, possibly slightly, due to fewer new characters being created, or sales remain approximately constant, because armor wear as an average does not change per account.

But, another factor to consider are the artisan professions which don't have products which wear out. Aside from cosmetic purchases, most characters will only need to make 1-2 clothing purchases ever, and 1, if any, droid purchases. One effect of a potential reduction that's been heavily discussed is the reduction or elimination of people having their own alt-doc for personal buffs - if the number of new doctors is diminished, droid sales drop heavily. I imagine the same goes for homes and harvesters - I've not seen many on fire on this server - although I will admit that reducing the amount of harvesters per account is an overall positive effect.

[Faarsider]

I have cast my Vote for whatever it's worth.....
But I do feel 10 slots is excessive and we are playing PRE-CU for all intense and purposes and one thing I loved about that time ingame was searching out players with skills I didn't be that a 4socket shirt or a shopping list of furnishings to finding a Ranger with the time to help with a quest such as the Hero of Tattooine, I know we are far from the player base levels of the original servers and understand why the options are 2/5/10 and I feel 5 is healthy and still allows for depth of play style without being able to place 100 Heavy Mineral harvesters on the latest "UBER SB" resource spawn.
Many of you will be merrily & some not so merrily be grinding for your Jedi, some of you just love the act of creation (I said creation not procreation dirty dirty minds you lot have) and crafting is why your here the most in depth and at times challenging crafting model in any game most of us have played, and some of you just want to kill stuff be that other players or mobs. With 5 characters to use you can do all of that and more, in reality with 5 chars you can do all you want to do with 10 just means when you want to switch a template you do so on an existing character and not just make another. 5 slots gives you more than enough options and opens a lot of doors to interdependency with people you have yet to strike up friendships with, Kudos to the top crafters on the server some of you guys & gals do an outstanding job keeping vendors stocked and the population serviced, but this leaves little room for the newer players coming along and to be fair new players like immigrants in our home countries are the life blood of any economy, they buy our goods and services use your cities amenities but if people join the awakening server and only stay a few weeks when they realise they can't compete with the longer playing population, this would be a great shame because in the few weeks I have been here I have met some awesome people even one or two I played with many years ago, those passing visitors to Awakening will miss what a great server we have.
I for one want a healthy balanced server with reasons to login and play, chat and Awakening is the perfect fit for me.

[commotion]

I haven't been as active as I'd like to be because of work, but I voted 10. I don't have 10 toons, but others do. If this was a server in beta, or advertised as such, I would probably feel differently.

For me, one of the biggest bonuses to having many different toons is it allows players to create characters for different group situations. Outside of work increases, one reason I slowed my playing was due to difficulty finding specific roles for a group, and having different builds available at a moment's notice helps with this. This is especially true with increased mob difficulty settings. It looks like lot reduction and some other suggestions have been taken off the table, but I'm not sure why other than time it would take to implement. This is a major decision and taking things away from players, especially those who were the ones who helped build the server, is generally not a good thing when there are other avenues to try first. I could understand if the situation was critical, or was nearing that, but it doesn't seem to be the case as presented.

I am not familiar with the SWG DB but I do work in IT, and from that I do know that sometimes the easy answer isn't the best answer. The best answer is the best answer, even if it takes a bit longer.

[Judgedread]

I voted for 5

To address those people who are using the point of 10 characters are better for the economy than five just because you by 10 suits of comp vs 5 is flawed simply because you can't play all of those toons at once. A person playing 10 characters in a 24 hour period vs playing 1 in a 24 hour period would result in the same amount of item decay. The player with 10 would have 2.4 hours per toon of decay where as the 1 toon played would have 24 hours worth of decay, so in reality the 1 toon would buy 10 suits of comp to every 1 suit the 10 individual toons would buy.

The reason 5 would create a better economy is because people would then have to start selling and buying more on the bizarre or personal vendors. They would not have a toon made to go get everything or build everything which would create more supply and demand.

[Meparch]

People are more likely to play more when they have a toon to work on. If all 5 toons are fully templated, then no need to grind, no need to buy stuff to grind and no need to solo play and therefore no need to play unless some group activity is taking place, save for farming or harvesting. The additional characters actually give people something to do and they are more likely to build a new character up than tare a character down they got just right just to grind for the hell of it.

Its the grinding that drives the economy and extra characters drives the grinding.

People always want the best stuff, if they can't make it, they will buy it. Making the best stuff of EVERYTHING is simply not possible. If anything, it hurts the service type characters like buffing doctors but not really the crafting doctors. However I see a lot of people asking for buffs, so I don't think the buff bot doc toon is all that common though I am sure many have them.

[MysteriousDD]

People are more likely to play more when they have a toon to work on. If all 5 toons are fully templated, then no need to grind, no need to buy stuff to grind and no need to solo play and therefore no need to play unless some group activity is taking place, save for farming or harvesting. The additional characters actually give people something to do and they are more likely to build a new character up than tare a character down they got just right just to grind for the hell of it.

Its the grinding that drives the economy and extra characters drives the grinding.

This is simply not true of all players...some players play the game because it is Star Wars...not because they need to grind...I'm one of those...once all my toons are full temp I continue to play to hang with my friends and to just play the game...I did this for years on Live once I found the build I kept finally I logged on all the time to play...yes some people will play less...but not all...can't make I hate grinding...ask my guild...I don't level like most people...spent a week on Deadpooll earning 400k XP in Pistoleer running around Cnet killing Meatlumps pretending they were out to get me...I play the game differently than most people...so some will play less when fully templated and some will plaay the same...some may even play more...I'll be trying to do every single goofy little quest in the game, myself, which will take forever...lol

[Lennart]

Lastly, as you and others said, I think there must absolutely be something down about the multiple accounts per household. The reality of the situation is that the cuts in character slots are a huge incentive for abusing the multiple accounts option, on top of what is already taking place.

I'm pretty sure you didn't mean it to sound this way, but my household has multiple accounts...one is mine, one is my wife's. The way you wrote it here sounds like you think we should have to share an account, though I'm certain you didn't mean that. We are both active players with different play styles. The folks who run Awakening were gracious enough to understand this and make an exception to their one account/household rule so that we aren't limited by the fact that we happen to live at the same address.

[Meparch]

There is no way for anyone to know if my wife's account is in fact, just my cat's account or in other words, me abusing the system and making multiple accounts to get around the only 2 or 5 characters per person problem. The slippery slope here is One Account Per House Hold, Period. There are always unintended consequences to any change. 10 characters is a lot, maybe too many, but so many that only a few would really abuse the one account per person. Drop it down to 5 or 2 and then more people will start creating multiple accounts.

This whole mess is a completely unnecessary and a manufactured problem. There are better ways to manage the database than deleting active players characters. The economy is the way it is because of the number players playing on this server, not because how many toons they can create. When I first started playing there were almost no resources for sale, anywhere, not even for grinding. One would think with so many characters, so many lots, someone would make a living mining, yet no one was. Why? Because no one on the server at the time wanted to do that. Now there are more people and a few of them do sale resources, but just a few. I still see massive harvester fields, I still see people wanting to buy resources, but I don't see a huge resource market. Most people horde because they know if they need something, they have to do it themselves because their isn't anyone else to do it. The pop just isn't there.

These virtual economies require a critical mass of people to work and behave in a certain manner. We were all use to how the economy worked on the live servers and have an expectation this server, with 1/10th if that, the population should work just like the live servers. This isn't true and it won't happen unless there are a lot more people, which the hardware clearly can't handle.

This duck is a duck, it is what it is and the correct decision was made a while ago to go with 8 characters (then 10) per account (the same on live btw). It was the correct decision then and it is still the correct decision. I really don't see why this problem was manufactured and why a decision would be made that would just lead to another and bigger problem, multiple accounts per house hold. This won't affect me in any way, my cat is too busy birding to have time to play with proxy servers, but yeah, it will be a messy problem.

[exarvaughn]

Not sure if this has been mentioned in the previous pages (I read the first two pages then skimmed others), I personally voted for 10x slots (even tho I do not use 10x slots, currently 7 in various use).

The reason being - I play with my three children. They were all little and fascinated by the game when I played in live, now they have the opportunity to experience it for themselves with me able to guide them along and play beside them. Obviously not all of us can be online at once due to the account limits (and as I only have two computers, it is not necessary for me to seek special permissions at this time). Each of them wants their own character(s) and the 10 toon limit allows them the freedom to try a new character and ability, without having to sacrifice those skills from their primary character.

On another side note: In live I used multiple accounts in order to record video to make SWG "music videos" (search youtube for "exarvaughn" for those few if interested) and I had hoped to once again make new videos as well as complete a few unfinished projects. The extra toon slots help in that (as an example) I can grind a tailor with the specific purpose of making costumes to match with preexisting footage. Or an Image Designer to quickly make specific changes to a character - without the confusion that comes when trying explain what you seek, once you do eventually find a person with those skills who is willing...


Hopefully the above makes sense...

[jadiz]

in my case i see that there is 6 combat builds i would like to play and have 2 crafters. If it comes down to it i would make do with 5 but then it really forces me to choose and that's what i am finding difficult to decide

[stormxero]

With respect,

There are many players who adamantly believe that lowering the amount of characters will encourage
people to seek out others for their various needs such as doctors, armorsmiths, etc.

I am not one of those people.

You see the frequency of meeting my needs on a day to day basis has gotten harder. I can only assume
with the impending deletion of many player characters that those difficulties will only increase.

In which case I will be far more inclined to make characters to suit my needs and the needs of my guild
who also have these have difficulties instead of exploring my many toons who would normally be going
out to others for those needs.

Less toons that need to be maintained, even less toons that need upkeep?

And people working within their guilds to meet their needs?
(I'm sure my guild isn't the only guild that kicks ass and does whatever it takes to help its members)

Yeah I'll be spending a lot less credits and I won't be the only one.

Plainly put, I don't see this stimulus package plan very stimulating at all lol

[jwyork]

I am not really sure how any of you think the 10 characters is destroying the economy ... you do realize that live had several thousand more players than awakening does right? Yes awakening has grown faster than any but comparing the economy here to live is not very realistic. There will be a smaller player base here .. people will come and go just like basilisk or just like live. More characters honestly has probably kept the economy stable.

Also most hard core players did have multiple accounts in live which is not an option here.

[Dramien]

the most important part of chosing this Server was the numbers of chars u can have. i like the diversity of chars i can Play, depending on my mood or whats needed for a Group or guild at the Moment. beeing member of one of the largest gilds on awakening gives the Advantage that u have Access to guildmates nearly 24/7 if u Need something but even in a large guild there r not all the chars u Need online all the time, like doc and ent buffers. i Play often at unusual hours when most Players r offline and only a few guildmates r on, who r in steady Need of help with some Special chars, usually buffing. and we r as said before one of the largest guilds on awakening, what about the small guilds or unguilded Players? the first delete victims would be the Entertainers in most cases and i dont wanna hear the whining when everybody starts to miss them and their buffs

[crparris]

Pre NGE it was 1 per server per account - but that isnt an option...

i vote two to keep it as close to my original experience.

[Lasod]

i have watched the vote and i voted a while ago and i stick with my vote, 2 characters per player means more ATK medics and Entertainers
ive never come across a situation where people actually at the keyboard for support classes ended up bad for the game

because seriously the extra characters only seriously bring afk support classes, lot holders, and remove inter-dependencey between crafting classes

there already is a star wars single player MMO out there called the old republic.


bring back the multi player part of swg and vote for 2 toons!

[Dauko]

With respect,

There are many players who adamantly believe that lowering the amount of characters will encourage
people to seek out others for their various needs such as doctors, armorsmiths, etc.

I am not one of those people.

You see the frequency of meeting my needs on a day to day basis has gotten harder. I can only assume
with the impending deletion of many player characters that those difficulties will only increase.

In which case I will be far more inclined to make characters to suit my needs and the needs of my guild
who also have these have difficulties instead of exploring my many toons who would normally be going
out to others for those needs.

Less toons that need to be maintained, even less toons that need upkeep?

And people working within their guilds to meet their needs?
(I'm sure my guild isn't the only guild that kicks ass and does whatever it takes to help its members)

Yeah I'll be spending a lot less credits and I won't be the only one.

Plainly put, I don't see this stimulus package plan very stimulating at all lol

As it was explained before, if you spend X time playing with 10 chars, and spend the same X amount of time playing with 5 chars, those 5 chars will double their needs since each char will be used on an average of X/5 time instead of X/10. That mean that your armors and weapons will get damaged two time faster...you'll consume the same amount of foods and drinks but will less chars...the economy will not suffer from the reduction of the number of available toons

[Cynar]

after much talk and conversation with my guild I have decided to change my stance, 10 chars is what was granted to us so 10 chars is what I'm adjusting my vote to. sorry.

That's the beauty of leaving that option available. People will be swayed by conversation and friends. We just ask that people vote!

[jadiz]

The votes became close for 5 and 10. Looks like alot of people are going to be annoyed and with the population being so low i would rather play on a server with access to 10 characters so i will wait to see what happens. When something gets taken away from half the population that likes what they have and they have choices to go elsewhere what will people do. Will they shrug their shoulders and accept the reduction of 5 characters or will they scope out other servers that have 10 and will keep 10. Just because people can make 10 doesn't mean everyone will but it is nice to have that option.

It doesn't take long to grind characters anyway and establish oneself.

Regards Jadiz

[stormxero]

Bad edit is a bad edit