Advance your Alts

[Astoroth]

What an utter lack of self awreness. The game has devolved into a state where alt play is heavily penalized with over a hundred available past lives, and millions of reaper experience points available. Yet here they come trotting out an 'Advance your Alts!' Sale.

The game used to primarily support an alt play style, but it's been bait and switch on turbines part. This sale is just another example of Turbine continuing to push a play style they are doing nothing to support. There needs to be some course correction and some eqaulity for people who invested time and money into alts, because current game designs have made them undesirable to play.

It's fundamentally dysfunctional for older players (and the developers) to demand that new players (or alts) expend 10 years of effort on a game to be similarly competitive. Old things should gradually become much easier, if you want to enable buy in from new casual and alt players.

Account wide past lives, account wide reaper unlocks, double credit for racial and class past lives. Something needs to happen to even the playing field between the alt player and the single character player.

[FranOhmsford]

Agreed!

[Broffghan]

What an utter lack of self awreness. The game has devolved into a state where alt play is heavily penalized with over a hundred available past lives, and millions of reaper experience points available. Yet here they come trotting out an 'Advance your Alts!' Sale.

The game used to primarily support an alt play style, but it's been bait and switch on turbines part. This sale is just another example of Turbine continuing to push a play style they are doing nothing to support. There needs to be some course correction and some eqaulity for people who invested time and money into alts, because current game designs have made them undesirable to play.

It's fundamentally dysfunctional for older players (and the developers) to demand that new players (or alts) expend 10 years of effort on a game to be similarly competitive. Old things should gradually become much easier, if you want to enable buy in from new casual and alt players.

Account wide past lives, account wide reaper unlocks, double credit for racial and class past lives. Something needs to happen to even the playing field between the alt player and the single character player.

It seems as though there is a lot that could be done to help out players who enjoy playing alts. Reaper experience points, for example, could be shared by all toons on a server on an account. So too, there could be such a thing as raid experience points that could also be shared. All of us, I'm sure, have played a certain competitor game that includes a shared experience point system like this, and it works out great. (I don't post on the forums much, and don't know the rules for outside references.)

Many of us spent an enormous amount of time investing in one character. The people who play alts spent an equal amount of time in game (assuming they're hardcore gamers too), and they shouldn't really be penalized for how they play the game when they put in the same investment.

[Qhualor]

I thought it was funny after all the "DDO penalizes me for optional character power" threads.

[tafla421]

What an utter lack of self awreness. The game has devolved into a state where alt play is heavily penalized with over a hundred available past lives, and millions of reaper experience points available. Yet here they come trotting out an 'Advance your Alts!' Sale.

The game used to primarily support an alt play style, but it's been bait and switch on turbines part. This sale is just another example of Turbine continuing to push a play style they are doing nothing to support. There needs to be some course correction and some eqaulity for people who invested time and money into alts, because current game designs have made them undesirable to play.

It's fundamentally dysfunctional for older players (and the developers) to demand that new players (or alts) expend 10 years of effort on a game to be similarly competitive. Old things should gradually become much easier, if you want to enable buy in from new casual and alt players.

Account wide past lives, account wide reaper unlocks, double credit for racial and class past lives. Something needs to happen to even the playing field between the alt player and the single character player.

while I agree something needs to be done to help newer players SSG is a business and needs to make money or the whole show comes crashing down. to that point I think older content that hasn't received a recent major overhaul should be either bundled at a decent discount or just get a straight up price reduction. the reasons for this is it helps newer players get content so they are more likely to stick with the game instead of being stuck running the standard F2P quests which usually don't give out great xp, and lets face it most vet players have had the older content for a very long time now the only people buying the old adventure packs are new players and players that have let their subscription slip. so packs like house p carnival which only had a heroic loot overhaul should get discounted but 3 barrel cove which got totally revamped is fine to leave at full price. next heroic past lives are another old system in place. expecting a new player to grind the 10 years amount of content just to try to feel useful in a veteran group is a bit cruel. throw new players a bone and atleast have double heroic pastlives weedend events every so often. heck this may get some of the population that has been against past lives to actually want to try it. as far as reaper and racial those are still brand new. keep those as they are because there needs to be a balance between encouraging new players and providing endless grind for our vets which is what pays the bills. and as far as the game not supporting alts is alittle bit off. yes while the lions share of attention goes to your main character, just about every quest item in recent years is BTA, every raid gives BTA tokens so you could run all 20 of your alts in 1 day and trade the tokens in to get an item. the reason there is not much alt play is because of lower server populations so you are less likely to find groups/raids, and the grind itself has grown to epic proportions and there is never a break period from the grind.

[Pyed-Pyper]

while I agree something needs to be done to help newer players SSG is a business and needs to make money or the whole show comes crashing down. to that point I think older content that hasn't received a recent major overhaul should be either bundled at a decent discount or just get a straight up price reduction. the reasons for this is it helps newer players get content so they are more likely to stick with the game instead of being stuck running the standard F2P quests which usually don't give out great xp, and lets face it most vet players have had the older content for a very long time now the only people buying the old adventure packs are new players and players that have let their subscription slip. so packs like house p carnival which only had a heroic loot overhaul should get discounted but 3 barrel cove which got totally revamped is fine to leave at full price. next heroic past lives are another old system in place. expecting a new player to grind the 10 years amount of content just to try to feel useful in a veteran group is a bit cruel. throw new players a bone and atleast have double heroic pastlives weedend events every so often. heck this may get some of the population that has been against past lives to actually want to try it. as far as reaper and racial those are still brand new. keep those as they are because there needs to be a balance between encouraging new players and providing endless grind for our vets which is what pays the bills. and as far as the game not supporting alts is alittle bit off. yes while the lions share of attention goes to your main character, just about every quest item in recent years is BTA, every raid gives BTA tokens so you could run all 20 of your alts in 1 day and trade the tokens in to get an item. the reason there is not much alt play is because of lower server populations so you are less likely to find groups/raids, and the grind itself has grown to epic proportions and there is never a break period from the grind.

Or ... hear me out on this ... they don't invalidate content with mind-numbing power creep. As a side benefit, the power gap between the haves and have-nots is smaller. This just might lead to more grouping opportunities.

Just sayin'

[Astoroth]

while I agree something needs to be done to help newer players SSG is a business and needs to make money or the whole show comes crashing down...the grind itself has grown to epic proportions and there is never a break period from the grind.

Don't follow you that supporting an alt play style wouldn't make them money. They would be able to sell more supreme tomes, bank slots, inventory slots etc., if people played more alts.

So your argument against providing decent support for alts is: that in the magical world you live in, where people still play tons of raids, the supposed alt player can join 20 raids a day and get whatever gear he wants instantly. Not all raids support tokens (in fact most don't), and the stuff you buy from a vendor has no chance of having a mythic effect either. I guess if this is such a huge advantage to have, then you must have a stable of 20 powerful alts with dozens of past lives on each? Oh wait, yeah you don't because it's absurd.

In actuality raid tokens were added not to support the alt play style, but the single character players. So they could get the benefit of 20 completions without having to get 20 completions in the same life. God forbid you keep a toon at cap to run raids with for a couple months without tring, OMG the horror.

In the real world if I want my epic quiver of alacrity or epic litany of the dead I am SOL because basically no one runs it, and I need all 20 runs on the same character. So I'd really just be wasting a rare run of it, if I ran the once in a blue moon chance on an alt. But with the current paradigm I'd be doing a heroic life when I saw a MOD run anyway.

So yeah you're grasping at straws with this one. Time for a little introspection as to why you want to drive away players who like playing alts. Because as you noted at the start if there aren't enough players to keep the lights on, well then ... the time for playing toons of any sort is over.

[Spookyaction]

Account wide past lives, account wide reaper unlocks, double credit for racial and class past lives. Something needs to happen to even the playing field between the alt player and the single character player.

/signed

There would need to be some sort of compensation for those who have multiple TR'd toons though.

[aumerle]

/signed

A couple thoughts I'd had, in an attempt to be productive:

Make the lower + tomes (like anything up to half the current max) MUCH less rare and easier to obtain. I don't see that affecting at all anyone who wants to farm out the max possible tome for a maxed out character and would allow lower level characters to catch up a bit easier. Also in an unrelated point, that would slightly help to make the upgrade tomes less useless, as right now considering how super rare all of them are, it's fairly unlikely that a random +3 to +4 STR upgrade tome is going to happen to actually be useful, for example. It seems easier in current play to just level someone to 30, get decent gear and then farm +7 or +8s from Strahd and Baba then even try to get the lower tomes at all.

Make the first X amount of TRs require less xp, maybe don't increase the xp as quickly, keep it at the "first life" level for 5 lives or so, then up to the 2nd stage of xp for the next 5, THEN raise it to the full amount. As someone who just came back with 0 past lives, starting from ground zero with all the heroics, racials, epics and iconics that exist now, it's quite daunting.

[tafla421]

Don't follow you that supporting an alt play style wouldn't make them money. They would be able to sell more supreme tomes, bank slots, inventory slots etc., if people played more alts.

So your argument against providing decent support for alts is: that in the magical world you live in, where people still play tons of raids, the supposed alt player can join 20 raids a day and get whatever gear he wants instantly. Not all raids support tokens (in fact most don't), and the stuff you buy from a vendor has no chance of having a mythic effect either. I guess if this is such a huge advantage to have, then you must have a stable of 20 powerful alts with dozens of past lives on each? Oh wait, yeah you don't because it's absurd.

In actuality raid tokens were added not to support the alt play style, but the single character players. So they could get the benefit of 20 completions without having to get 20 completions in the same life. God forbid you keep a toon at cap to run raids with for a couple months without tring, OMG the horror.

In the real world if I want my epic quiver of alacrity or epic litany of the dead I am SOL because basically no one runs it, and I need all 20 runs on the same character. So I'd really just be wasting a rare run of it, if I ran the once in a blue moon chance on an alt. But with the current paradigm I'd be doing a heroic life when I saw a MOD run anyway.

So yeah you're grasping at straws with this one. Time for a little introspection as to why you want to drive away players who like playing alts. Because as you noted at the start if there aren't enough players to keep the lights on, well then ... the time for playing toons of any sort is over.

sounds to me like you and everyone else that still wants old raid gear needs to start threads asking SSG to update old raids to the token system since every new raid in the past 2 years uses that system so apparently SSG likes it. and as far as magical land not that long ago on Khyber was there a player running raid trains dubbed raids for alts. maybe if you are having such a hard time with raids you should get more proactive and start forming your own. and guess what every time ive turned in my tokens it was to get an item for an alt, I mean why get an item from turn ins on my main characters when they have a chance at getting the item every run.

[tafla421]

Or ... hear me out on this ... they don't invalidate content with mind-numbing power creep. As a side benefit, the power gap between the haves and have-nots is smaller. This just might lead to more grouping opportunities.

Just sayin'

difference in power creep from gear is solved by shelling out 700 ddo points like everyone else when a pack comes out and grinding for the gear. power creep is there so there is more incentive to buy the new adventure pack. I know its lame for the buyers but noobs and vets alike have the same opportunity to buy the new pack and grind the gear so there isn't much of a power difference there. look at all your gear that is 3+ years old I bet you atleast 95% of it is obselete because of power creep you probably only keep it in your TR cache because of habit or because you like dancing guild mates running around your airship. the real power gap you speak of is from all the past lives, reaper points, and actual game play experience. if SSG gives the first two of those away then they basically screw over their own business by giving away their product.

[janave]

Playing alts has been a trap since MoTU with the edestiny grind, just got exponentially worse by now. Sentinent exp on many different characters, say you want at least a melee, a ranged, and a caster type sentitent weapon...

[Iriale]

Agreed.

There was another thread like this two weeks ago. See, SSG? There is a problem, and there are many people who feel that their alts do not compensate now. Do something to help the alts, SSG, please.

Welcome back, Fran!

[droid327]

/signed

There would need to be some sort of compensation for those who have multiple TR'd toons though.

Meh? Not really. They got exactly what they set out to get.. Nothing is being taken away from them...it's just being made easier to get for others.

When they lower the price on an iPhone, they don't send out rebates to everyone who paid full price originally. They got what they wanted at the price that was being asked, at the time - just like multi completionists now

[Noir]

*Snip* Account wide past lives, account wide reaper unlocks, double credit for racial and class past lives. Something needs to happen to even the playing field between the alt player and the single character player.

The question regarding account wide past life feats was asked during the last "Weekly Wednesday's Lunchtime Livestream"and Severlin said "No ". (question asked at about the 5:30 mark.)

[janave]

Good to learn pdk and half elves may receive plastic surgery, .. so far only invisibility and shapeshifting worked.

[glmfw1]

Good to learn pdk and half elves may receive plastic surgery, .. so far only invisibility and shapeshifting worked.

Helms work quite well for Half-Elves
Only shapeshifting works for PDKs, as you can still see a lot of the ugliness when they are "invisible"

[tafla421]

Playing alts has been a trap since MoTU with the edestiny grind, just got exponentially worse by now. Sentinent exp on many different characters, say you want at least a melee, a ranged, and a caster type sentitent weapon...

edestinies aren't that big a deal, even if you just want to only run 1 life on your alt. all you really need to do is just run legend of two toed tobias daily and you will get there and who doesn't want a cursed blade of jack jibbers? throw in 1 or 2 more high xp short run time quests and you are making good progress a day on alts toward finishing edestinies. could they maybe lessen the grind by lowering xp required by tree sure why not but if you are anything like many of the ddo players I see running through town running in circles for 10 to 20 minutes at a time is a common way to pass the time on ddo that could be used on alts grinding edestinies. here is a fun fact on sentient weapons if the weapon is bta you can swap gem and all to other characters so the only real grind is because you choose to have everyone use different weapons. sentient weapons is also a fairly new system and they just added sentient xp drops to chests so you aren't stuck only getting xp through destroying named items. give them positive feedback on this maybe they will add more reward choices of sentient xp in new sagas. when all they see is negative feedback it really doesn't help them.

[kanordog]

"No..., We would keep it character based to allow for each character to have that progression."

I won't buy tomes, inventory, bank, cosmetics or packs if the loot does not fit my current build.
Good money saving decisison.

[glmfw1]

What an utter lack of self awreness. The game has devolved into a state where alt play is heavily penalized with over a hundred available past lives, and millions of reaper experience points available. Yet here they come trotting out an 'Advance your Alts!' Sale.

The game used to primarily support an alt play style, but it's been bait and switch on turbines part. This sale is just another example of Turbine continuing to push a play style they are doing nothing to support. There needs to be some course correction and some eqaulity for people who invested time and money into alts, because current game designs have made them undesirable to play.

It's fundamentally dysfunctional for older players (and the developers) to demand that new players (or alts) expend 10 years of effort on a game to be similarly competitive. Old things should gradually become much easier, if you want to enable buy in from new casual and alt players.

Account wide past lives, account wide reaper unlocks, double credit for racial and class past lives. Something needs to happen to even the playing field between the alt player and the single character player.

For well over a year (announced in Dec 2016), it has been SSG and not Turbine running DDO. Turbine Points got renamed to DDO Points and all references to Turbine were removed from the game. It helps to criticise the right people when you are making a complaint. Criticising a company that hasn't been involved with the game in quite a time implies you don't play the game often enough to see this given how often it is referenced (probably not the case, but it's how it appears, especially given the big deal that was made at the time of the change).

In my guild, while most people have their mains, a large number of the regular players have a large number of alts who they regularly use to play, allowing different grouping options. While these characters may not stand up well against the quadruple triple-completionists, they work well enough to group with each other and to group with other players from other guilds who are also not quadruple triple-completionists.

Advance your alt sales provide these types of players with a means to get extra bonuses to make their alts better than they currently are (extra skills, ability points etc). Taking advantage of these sales allows them to increase the power of their characters faster than they otherwise could, bringing them closer (if not a long way closer) to where single-player characters are.

Sure, a lot of people are heavily invested in advancing a single character and have achieved, or are a long way towards, quadruple triple-completionist but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be sales to benefit people who aren't focused purely on one character.

Also, the sale includes things that are of benefit to non-alt players. Not everyone has skill tomes on every skill, and they are included in the sale. Not everyone owns all the lower level content - some of that is on sale. Some people may want more character slots to store gear that they don't need in their next life - character slots don't need to just be for playable alts, and they are on sale.

It may be a valid criticism of SSG that "Advance your alts" sales come around more often than they should, given other things that could be on sale that could be of benefit to more people. It could also be argued that these sales should be run alongside rather than instead of other options. This does not mean that the sales themselves shouldn't occur.

With regards to "levelling the power gap", making things account wide is not necessarily the best solution and it definitely isn't the only solution. It benefits veteran players to play alts while not significantly helping newer players find more groups than they can at present, nor significantly helping those who have multiple alts who are all advancing slowly.
Adjusting level limits on quests so that a wider range of characters can undertake the same difficulty would do a lot to level the power gap:

• Lower Level characters with more Past Life Benefits, good equipment, tomes etc could group with higher level characters with fewer benefits and be of comparable power levels.
• Adjusting the XP values/requirements in all Epic Gameplay to 1/3 of current values would allow non-epic characters to undertake epic quests (so your level 18 quadruple triple completionists could group with level 25 low-lifers)

Removing Epic Benefits currently available outside Epic and Reaper benefits currently available outside Reaper would also help even power levels outside Epic and outside reaper gameplay.