[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Marc Fielding]

In the following link, Raph defends Sony's limitation of "one
character per server per account":

  http://boards.station.sony.com/ubb/starwars/Forum3/HTML/088000.html

While there are secondary design motivations behind the limitation,
the cost of storing a potentially immense amount of character data
is the primary factor. Yet even though I find his description of the
problem to be quite understandable and his solution fairly
reasonable, I'd like to propose a slight modification:

The flat monthly fee would entitle a player to "one character per
server per account." A player may then create extra characters as
desired, but each is subject to an additional nominal monthly fee.

The regular monthly fee covers servers, storage, bandwidth, customer
service (CS), further development, advertising, etc.  My proposed
monthly fee per additional character would cover the resulting
increased storage and CS costs indicated by Raph. I'm doubtful that
the cost of a *single* additional character per server equates to a
full monthly fee.  To the uninformed, that looks like a cash
grab. There are more elegant ways of covering your expenses and
maintaining your margins than requiring customers to get completely
new accounts.

With this "à la carte" approach, "normal" users are unaffected,
mulers/experimentalists/families get what they want at a reasonable
premium, and Sony makes a profit.

All's well that ends well. =)

-Marc

 

 

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