| Subject: Origin Responds to Advanced Character Concerns |
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Darkstone News
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Date Posted: Sat, Sep 21 2002, 04:37am
In reply to:
Syn
's message, "ADVANCED CHARACTER SERVICE *shakes head sadly in dismay*" on Thu, Sep 19 2002, 07:04pm
Origin Responds to Advanced Character Concerns
Posted on Thursday, September 19, 2002, 4:48 PM EDT by Galahad KoA (GeneralNews)
The following message was posted to the UO Boards by Cynthe:
There's a couple things in this thread I'd like to address. First, Jehosaphet is right in that we are profit-driven, and that without profit, there is no game. But calling those who are upset about the advanced character program "whiners" isn't the answer either.
I am a game player myself, and I have accounts open for 3 different MMOGs right now, including UO. I know how I feel about my characters, and I understand the frustrations I've seen from a lot of people here. There's nothing wrong with expressing those frustrations, and that doesn't make someone a "whiner."
We put a lot of thought into this program before it launched - a LOT of thought. We knew that some players would have issues with it. But over the last several years, many players have asked for something like this. Players have wanted a way to catch up to their friends, to create new characters without having to retrain the basic skills, to start on a new shard without having to start over completely. We have already received many, many requests for the service from people who are excited about this.
I can already hear a few of your responses. "But we asked for a character transfer between shards, not this!"
We want to provide a way to transfer between shards. We've been looking at the possibility for over a year - long before it was brought up at the FanFest. The problem is that moving a character from one shard to another essentially requires that our Support group manually recreate everything about that character, which is EXTREMELY time-consuming. Moreso than you'd think. And in order to make it an automated process, we need development time - and that's something we don't have a lot of, with scenarios going on, constant emergency fixes for crashes, network issues and exploits, and Age of Shadows development. But the Advanced Character program is different - by creating set templates for Support to use, we can do it much more quickly - and it provides much of the same effect by allowing players to start on a new shard without having to start back down at the bottom.
So the two biggest issues seem to be these:
1) Many feel that it lessens the feeling of achievement of having a veteran character. But actually, there's not much difference between a new player having a character built by us vs. having a character bought on ebay. In fact, characters bought on ebay often have rares or status symbols attached to them, in the form of veteran rewards or other items - so you could have a brand new player with not only a 7XGM character, but riding on an ethereal ethy as well. This has been possible for years. Advanced characters will not be grandmaster status, and will not include these kinds of items or status symbols, so in effect, they should have less of an impact on the feeling of achievement than ebay sales have.
2) Players are concerned that this will prevent new players from learning the game properly. This is a valid concern, and it's been discussed here at length. Ultimately, the potential has also been there from ebay sales as well. Again, a brand new player could buy an advanced character through an auction, and find themselves well past the learning curve of the game with little idea of how to play. The advanced character templates were specifically designed to not put a new account holder past the point of being a "young" player - so through this system, new players could purchase the advanced templates, but still be considered "young," and still be eligible to go through all the new player tutorials and take advantage of Haven - which will provide somewhat more help than the method of buying one through an auction.
As for us wanting money... well... yes. It's true. We want UO to continue to grow, and we want to be able to continue expanding the game. We want to be able to hire more programmers to do extra projects that players have been asking for, such as finding time to create shard-to-shard character transfers, or creating a better patch message to get information to our players more effectively. We want to be able to open new shards, and continue to upgrade our hardware, and add new functionality to the interface, and improve the art. But those things take money. We haven't raised the cost of UO once in five years, and our costs have not gone down. By creating services that offer players a choice on whether or not they want to spend more, we can get more revenue without having to raise the cost of UO across the bar - and that's good for everyone involved.
I hope that's helped to explain a bit - and we are most definitely reading the feedback (when we can get onto the boards, that is - they're really slow from all the traffic!).
Cynthe
Community Manager
ORIGIN Systems
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