IDEAS FOR RYZOM

According to Ulukyn on the Discord, there is a technical limit to how many characters one account can have: 16

That leaves room for 11 more hypothetical character slots.

We could have more slots for free I guess, but I don't see anything wrong with monetizing them. Each character represents a collection of database entries, after all, and a taken name too.

There are two ways to do it:

1. Players pay an additional subscription on one account for the convenience of having more characters on one login. This is the way Istaria does it--that's another old indie MMO. They let players stack multiple subscriptions on one account. A single subscription gives you 5 slots, two give you 10, and so on.

2. Players buy each extra character slot with a one-time payment. This is how most MMOs do it. $20 is way too much for a character slot, but $10 is reasonable and $5 is cheap.

I'm very much in favor of option 2 for these reasons:

- The subscription stacking idea doesn't make much sense without having more benefits. In Istaria for example, you get an additional concurrent login allowance on your account (so you can log into two characters at once without needing more than one account name and password), and, most importantly, you get another property slot, meaning you can own and build on an additional piece of land in-game.
I don't know if multiple concurrent logins on one account is possible in Ryzom's system, and we don't have a land ownership feature that's similar to Istaria's, so that's a moot point.

- It's much easier for a player to justify dropping a small one-time payment on a permanent upgrade. A player (like me) might buy several extra character slots and not even play the characters in them. On the other hand, a player who pays a higher monthly fee for access to 5+ extra character slots will continually reevaluate whether it's worth it. If they do downgrade their subscription, they might feel punished by losing access (temporarily, in theory) to the characters in slots 11-15 and/or 6-10.
Plus, there'd have to be a system in place on the backend to manage that access, and a more elaborate GUI change than just adding a scrollbar to the character selection screen.

- A subscription translates neatly to +5 character slots, but a total of 16 is possible. Buying them one at a time makes that an issue no one has to think about.

An argument could be made, and has been made, that players can just create another account and have 5 more character slots that way. Some players already subscribe multiple accounts. RyZtart supports storing multiple logins. But for players who might appreciate the frictionless convenience of being able to add another character slot to their main account, why not give them that option and collect a tip for it?

+1 :D

I have no idea how subscriber numbers are and what people might sway toward subscribing. If we assume that there aren't enough benefits of the premium account you could also do a mixed approach. That is, give premium accounts 1 or 2 additional slots and for the remaining possible slots do the one time payment Jelathnia mentions.

While in principle I never disagree with an idea that gives more options to the players, I do have to wonder who the target audience is.

Ryzom is a long-haul kind of game, where each character takes months (if not years) to develop. I guess a powerleveler could almost master ONE skill tree over a weekend, so maybe people would be making one-off characters, just for special occasions?

However, what I can predict with more certainty is that players would use additional slots for easier hoarding -- i.e. making more alt-guildhalls in which to dump stuff. It is up to everyone to figure if hoarding is something that needs any extra encouraging..

mmm... hoarding...
hoarding is everything