The Daily Grind: Characters go around again?

DDO has a "true reincarnation" system that allows you to re-roll the charatacter & keep some benefits from it's "past-life", it's sort of a re-spec with fringe benefits, I've not tried it out but it closely fits the suggestion made.

Some other games use similar methods, Mabinogi I believe does something similar.

Have to disagree; think this is a HORRIBLE concept for an MMO.

The foundation stone of an MMO is that we're all sharing the same world - whether heavily instanced or single-shard - and as a direct consequence of that the gameplay is balanced for the whole playerbase.

Having 'new character +' features means that, to be challenging, the levelling curve and end-game has to be balanced for 'new character +' strength characters.

This would exacerbate pretty much every single MMO negative known to man...

* Anti-social elitism - there'd quite literally be second-class characters.
* Power gaming - whose going to care about their sacrificial characters? Efficiency would rule all.
* Storyless grind - why'd anyone care about fluff when their character's personal journey is a one-way sprint to Deletesville?

In fact I cannot think of a grimmer opening for an MMO than expecting players to dash headlong through a game with no thought to socialising, acquisition or personal investment - THEN hoping they do it again having experienced the main story already and knowing the soul-less bare-bones mechanics of every quest.

This has been a common feature in MUDs since the 80s I think. We should be able to find out about its advantages/disadvantages by asking MUDders :)

If such a system offered benefits that were useful at all levels, it would become a mandatory grind.

NOT a good idea, imo.

If you want to run through an MMO again, isn't that what playing an alt is for?

If I'm going to play my way through a second time, I want to play a different class an/or a different faction and start my toon on a "level playing field."

What I *do* MMOs would do is make quests and adventures much more class specific (something it sounds like SWTOR plans to do). This is the RIGHT way to make an MMO "replayable".

WoW has a similar concept in the form of heirloom gear, whereby you earn blue-quality gear with your high level character to pass on to low-level alts. This heirloom gear scales with the level of the character equipping it and usually confers an XP bonus. It's bind-on-account which allows it to be passed among all of your characters regardless of faction.

I agree with the other people. This would turn into the largest grind every created. If the stats and bonuses mattered at all, you would be required at end-game to have played through the game twice, or three times, or four times, or wherever the benefit ended.

The only place I could see this making sense is in a game with perma-death.

I mostly agree with everything said in the above statements. I do believe the solution to that would be to make sure the benefits do not make the game play in round two easier. I believe adding content that can be unlocked such as new classes or new spells would be fine as long as it was not promised to be better than everyone else and the system was balanced. It should not be about experiencing the game over but this time in easy mode. The system should be about experiencing the game again but from a new freshly unlocked unique standpoint. The player should be rewarded for their treadmill run but should not be granted power which is beyond that of what most other players can access.

Although, I do not really agree with these systems at all. I much rather prefer experience bonuses. For example in Dark Age of Camelot once you reached the level cap with one character you could /level all other newly created characters to level twenty.(That server and faction only) This kept a large amount of people in the lower range game content to group with the people who might be rolling their first characters. It worked really well. It might sound a bit broken but if you look at Heirloom gear in WoW and you do some number crunching; I'm sure the bonus 20%xp would add up to about that same amount of levels, if not more. And they are talking about adding heirloom gear for every slot as well. All aboard the gravy train.

It would be an interesting concept but you would have to create an MMO around it not just tack it onto an existing one.

Consider games where you have many job changes and 100 something levels if instead of continuing down one path at level job change you are reborn as a level one into a whole new area where the stakes get higher. Instead of fighting giant rats now you're fighting plain ol' giants, and the safety of your hometown as been replaced by a war-torn battlefield (maybe even PvP enabled).

On your third class change now you're on the level of slaying gods, with a large raid force of course, or leading huge armies against each other. Eventually you can become a god and leave your character behind forever but not before creating another legacy with a new character.

No. I hate that concept, its an artificial way of enticing replay, a cheap substitute for actual content, and we are seeing some of it emerging in MMOs too. Wow heirloom items...

I felt pretty left out when i saw others had the pretty shoulders with good stats AND bonus to XP, and i couldn't get them because i didn't have an 80 char. I was really angry. I know the XP bonus us useful to everyone who has played through the content once, but i still thought it was unfair that i couldn't get them. I just dislike that concept.

I think it's a copout. That said, the feverish rate at which gamers devour content these days, I can't say I'd really fault developers for resorting to such measures.

I think the "Job" system is a great way to increase Longevity without unbalancing the game for other players.

The Matrix Online had a system whereby you could build your character into any one of a multitude of defined class-builds, the restriction being you could not swap classes on the fly but had to go to one of many specific map locations to do it, meaning you couldn;t swap in instances etc, you entered a group decided who was doing what role & re-class as needed to give yourselves a balanced complimentary group.

I've not come across a system that worked anything like as well as that, which is a shame as I think it would translate to many other games perectly & widen the appeal, the problem with it is that for games with "gear treadmills" of class specific gear, that this would not be a good solution, those games require months of gear-grinding & this is a big stumbling block of any replay system for the 1 character, in game with any kind of class-restricted gear grinds the replay of that character is null & void & the re-incarnation or "legacy" benefit ideas are best suited to those & yet they have their own stumbling blocks.

I think there are some fundemental built-in problems that hardwired level-based games will not be able to surmount by any exotic system, this topic illustrates one of them, lower level areas being devoid of players being another.

Definitely a bad idea for MMOs, for all the reasons given thus far.

The way to encourage replay and therefore longevity of subscription is by providing enough content to allow alts to be advanced through different areas and quests thereby maximising the replayability. Also, the classes need to be sufficiently well defined so that you aren't experiencing the same gameplay with different characters, and the proposal here would simply muddy the waters so far as that aspect was concerned.

I agree with most of the previous commenters. This is a generally unappealing idea, with too many potentially negative repercussions for game play. Something fairly low-key, like WoW's heirloom items, seems to work okay, though.

This is a concept that has been around for years, it's called Final Fantasy XI, except you have more flexibility and choice in the matter as you can start or change any job, anytime you want in your Mog House (player home). You don't even have to retire your old character. You can go back to playing a high level job, level a lower level job, or anything in between.

This is a concept for more hardcore players obviously because it does involve grinding out many different job/classes to cap, but you don't face the restrictions of having to do it all again without support or having to do certain quests for gear/limit breaks/missions/etc all over again. You still have all the gear you already have earned and it can be used immediately upon reaching the items proper level if your new job can use the item.

In FFXI, most players by this time have at least 3-4 jobs at level cap and usually more. It provides a ton of variety, utility and fun without losing the connection you have to your own personal character.

I am really shocked at the lack of interest/knowledge that this site has about FFXI. Many times I see articles like this and wonder if you guys even know of anyone that plays FFXI (or anything besides WoW for that matter). This is especially strange considering the huge number of people that play FFXI (everything is obviously dwarfed by WoW but FFXI is one of the highest population games in the "everyone else" category).

Isn't the idea to "pass items" more or less equivalent to buy expensive BoE gear for your alts (or heirloom in WoW)?

And "forcing alt recycling to have increased stats needed for competitive endgame" would probably cause burnout in many hardcore players.

Kingdom of Loathing has been doing this for about five years. The whole crux of the game is defeating the final boss, reincarnating, keeping most of your loot, gaining a new skill each run (allowing you to cross class to a large extent) and inviting the player to select different restrictions for each 'ascension' to earn better rewards or just explore different playstyles.

KoL doesn't feature a persistent world like most MMOs, and player interactions are more limited, so comparisons to games like WoW are difficult in many aspects. Still, KoL has explored the new game + concept pretty thoroughly, and it would be foolhardy to not look at what they've learned over the years if you want to implement a similar concept in another game.

-SirNiko