Question for developers

[Rurounin]

Not really 18.4 related but I really don't know where to put it, since it's a question I don't think it belongs in the Game Suggestion forums.

I think there has been talks about adding so that players can have more characters on each dimension, when DNW went down I had to leave a couple of characters behind, because I have no room on either RK1 or 2. I had to delete a 160ish crat on RK1 with ICRT and IRT for my DNW crat that also had said nanos.

I'm an alt whore, I love making new projects and I don't have any more room on either RK1 or 2, so I'm left with having to delete characters that I have already spent a lot of time on. I currently have four accounts that are paid (yes four!), but I can really only afford to keep two of them active at a given time, I have moved some characters from those 2 inactive accounts to my active accounts (at the loss of having to delete even more characters).

So my question would be, how hard would it be for the development team to increase the amount of characters a player can have on their account? I doubt the loss of subscribed accounts would go down by a lot considering that AO is best played dual logged, I know I'm not the only one who loves making new alts, and at times that's what I enjoy the most in AO.

Notice that the question isn't "are you going to?" or "can it be done?", it's purely related to how much time and how hard it would be for the development team to increase the amount. I also fully understand that all work time is spent on the engine, rebalance and fixing stuff that needs to be fixed.

I hope I get an answer :P

[Phixels]

Even if it would only be 5 minutes of dev time, they would not implement it. And given that this game has to make that company funds I would agree with that desicion.
/me ducks

[Onack]

Since AoC already have it and it shares account system with AO, that shouldnt restrict it. It's probably coming soon, so they can make people use more FcP

[Kintaii]

Sadly this is more of a back-end/database thing than to do with the account system, and while it's something we would love to be able to offer it's also one of those things that's made Macrosun give me and Means very nasty looks and general grumbles of displeasure. >< I won't say that we'll *never* get the functionality to allow more character slots per account, but at the moment it unfortunately isn't something that we can add in easily.

[Rurounin]

Sadly this is more of a back-end/database thing than to do with the account system, and while it's something we would love to be able to offer it's also one of those things that's made Macrosun give me and Means very nasty looks and general grumbles of displeasure. >< I won't say that we'll *never* get the functionality to allow more character slots per account, but at the moment it unfortunately isn't something that we can add in easily.

Thanks for the answer, then I can continue on hoping for it to be added

[Bonghigs]

If it's a back-end/database thing, does that mean that the correlation of alts to an account is not normalized at all? Ie, there's a single table that relates the account_name to alt1, alt2, alt3, etc in a single record instead of having a normalized table where each alt is a separate record in that table?

/curious

[Kintaii]

If it's a back-end/database thing, does that mean that the correlation of alts to an account is not normalized at all? Ie, there's a single table that relates the account_name to alt1, alt2, alt3, etc in a single record instead of having a normalized table where each alt is a separate record in that table?

/curious

hahahahahaha heck if I know. XD I'm just repeatin' what Macrosun has told us when we've brought it up. Anything more technical than the word "database" tends to sail over my head. ;P

[Omutb]

hahahahahaha heck if I know. XD I'm just repeatin' what Macrosun has told us when we've brought it up. Anything more technical than the word "database" tends to sail over my head. ;P

Im sure thats for you own good, and that most of the words involve cursing and swearing under his breath.

[DocJones]

Oh, it would be sooooo cool to have a bit more insight into the archaic architecture of AO. I have been working on the server side part of an mmo myself (private project), and my data model has been greatly influenced by what i learned from AO. Well, the used techniques surely will differ (my server is based on MySQL's own server side dialect ) but some solutions may be interessting.