[MUD-Dev] characters per account

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, AR Schleicher wrote:

> From: F. Randall Farmer <randy at communities.com>
> >
> > This "goal" of one account/person is not possible. This is the same
> > sort of hubris that went into the Original UO design decision
> > for "realism" at the expense of playabilty: No Instant Messaging
> > between players. I remember the first days of UO: "Oh! You're
> > new! You can't find me here unless you download ICQ at
> > www.miribilis.com, here's my UIN and the UINs of guild members..."
> 
> I disagree.  I think it's possible but requires some serious tradeoffs, in
> order to discourage multiple accounts.  (In this case, trading realism for
> playability, which UO didn't want to do.)  Something that I think might work
> well, is this: Imagine if you allowed a job system to exist, where skills
> unrelated to your job would be remembered, but unusable.  Let's say you were
> a warrior, but your armor was broken.  You could have, in the past, worked
> your blacksmithing skill up to the maximum as a blacksmith, and then left
> that job.  Just switch to that job, and repair your armor, then switch back
> to being a warrior.    Switching needs to have some small cost (say, you
> have to take the time to visit a local employment agency building, or you
> need to be in your home), but if it's smaller than the cost of changing to
> another character, you've just encouraged people to use one character
> instead of two.  A worthwhile goal, in my opinion.
> 
> Anyways, I haven't fully thought about the above type of system.  The
> closest example of it I can think of at the moment would be the job system
> used in the console RPG game Final Fantasy Tactics, for the playstation.  If
> anyone knows of any other good systems like this, I'd like to know about
> them. :)

How is this going to keep people from having more than one character?
Encouraging people is not enough. You're still going to have multiple
characters per person, end of story. You may have slightly less, but this
wouldn't have a prayer of stopping everyone that uses multiple characters
from doing so.

--matt




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