Henchman (hire/bot account) Feature?

[Bjond]

This is a rather weird idea. I was pondering a buff bot and then thought about what I'd have to do to get it where it can help everywhere:

• BUY all expansions, roughly $200 at current prices.
• BUY new expansions whenever my main buys them.
• BUY new packs not covered by free-quest token or VIP.
• BUY the "bot/hire/hencman" feature on each account.
• Manually run it about to enter quests with me (gah).

So, uh, why not permit an account to be linked to your main as a "hencman account"? Let the characters in that account be treated as hires. Same hire UI with a selectable hire AI; eg. pick the "Larafay" AI for excessive blasting. The difference is (of course) that you can gear and level the "bot" characters if you log in and play them directly. The AI would still be bad, but at least you could build/gear the bot to survive most of the suicidal AI tendencies.

It could even be done as a "henchman" expansion, which you'd need to buy on each account. Future expansions could offer a variety of features for your bot-hire henchlings, such as different AI selections and even cosmetics, such as voices for tag-line quips similar to sentient weapons.

I doubt SSG makes anything at all on gold-seal hires, since they're just as useless as platinum hires. But, I bet SSG would make a fair bit on expansion buys for "bot accounts". Some few would likely go past hog-wild, beyond ham, and into full bacon mode when it comes to gearing and upgrading their "bots", too; eg. if you can only summon one "hire" from any given bot-account, die-hard soler's would want 5 of them for (currently) a cost of ~$1K and that's without bacon.

BTW, it could also potentially be done by reusing alts on the current account, but I don't see the profit for them in that -- perhaps charge for special "hire slots" where you can craft/gear your own hire at whatever level. This sounds nicer for the players, though they'd obviously be giving up the ability to take control and play that character directly as a true bot (extra chest looter plus can use skills outside hire-AI control, like mass rez).

I seriously doubt anything like this would ever happen, but it did strike me as a bit of a win for both SSG & players.

[Altra]

That is exactly what we had to do to make a rouge to run with us. So expensive, but he's ours now.

[droid327]

Why a separate account? Make it so you can hire your alts of equal or lesser level. VIP up to level +2.

Then they could sell way more character slots and people could gear up useful hires at various levels

[Bjond]

Why a separate account? Make it so you can hire your alts of equal or lesser level. VIP up to level +2.

Then they could sell way more character slots and people could gear up useful hires at various levels

Simple answer: MUCH more profit in 2nd-account method versus almost no profit in reusing same-account alts. Character slots are so cheap you can easily buy them with favor->DP, which means not just less profit for SSG, it means no profit at all and no incentive to make it work (kinda like I mentioned in the OP).

It's definitely MUCH kinder to players to do it like that, but going that route rather implies there would be a HUGE cost to "henchify" each alt in order to monetize it.

Anyway, the general idea is basically to reuse real characters as hires. There are many ways to go about it.