The Player is the Account - meeting this goal

ihatepwe735

Why event ships specifically? Why not just make all ship slots account-wide? And inventory/bank slots for that matter.

Answer: Probably technical reasons. <shrug> They are unlikely to actually take that account is the player concept very far, because it would be too much work.

On the other hand, if the account really is the player, using multiple characters shouldn't give players an advantage. In other words, mission cooldowns should be account-wide as well. As they already are with some newer event formats.

But I do agree free unlocks, whether account-wide or per-character, are not as valuable as rewards than single items because they stunt the potential for better reward interaction. Single items can be traded, modified, combined and even consumed where an unlockable would hit the obvious issue of the player just claiming another one for free.

So yes, I would have the event ships be single items again even withut account-wide slots.

Perhaps I made a mistake starting with event ships. Despite the "Cryptic will re-evaluate the effort" and hopefully rebalance rather than just smash in the change with no compensatory re-balance people are even more negative than I expected. And I did expect negativity despite it being predicted in the the book link I referenced.

My personal belief is that all characters on an Account should share a single shared bank, "Bound to Character" ceases to be a thing. Any ship is usable by all characters and all boosts from the Zen store should be purchased once per account and apply to all characters. Basically the Diablo III approach.

Nonetheless I would prefer to consider the "Account is the Player" in a way that facilitates revenue growth (Generally) for Cryptic while giving the players a service that actually provides increased value and consequently drives further demand for services.

People, generally are loss averse, and treat inflicted losses as "unfair" - and this counts for both Cryptic - and would drive them to reject the above proposal, and players - driving the negative reactions on my account bank for event ships idea.

So, to go forwards with "the account is the player" we need to provide ideas framed in a way that does not cause a "loss" to either side.

Players do not want "a step backwards" - even if it's to a place that is objectively reasonable - so in a couple of placed Cryptic just cannot roll back their generosity. And Cryptic don't want to lose revenue, so conflating "the account is the player" with "unlock everything for all characters" is going to be rejected as an attack on profitability, not technical reasons (although technical reasons might be the 'claimed' reason).

The only mechanism that sees a proper middle ground of both giving players generally increased Utility, and giving Cryptic additional opportunities to increase revenue is to treat the Ships, Services and other things we get as things that are account wide, but can only be used by one character at a time. i.e. Every Lockbox and Lobi ship I obtain should be usable by all characters, but only one can have it current and ready to fly at a time. If I buy a tribble? Its in my big bank and any character can pick it up, but once they have, other characters can't, until its put back.

I am assured that the STO has whales, and the whales of STO buy the same ships over and over again for each of their various characters. And if true, arguing for truly account wide mechanics would be a major loss of potential revenue for Cryptic. If not true, a lot of my proposed mitigation is moot and Cryptic should just consider rolling up all the per-character things into per account things. One bank. Always shared. Many extra tabs to buy though as we will need enough space to store ALL our various characters items. A single set of accolades (I'd be able to actually aim at 100% completion for KDF, Romulan, Fed, Sci, Tac and Eng all on one big list!) across all characters would make accolade chasing fun again.
For everything else? If I buy anything from the Zen store and put it in my account wide bank... then any character can pick it up and equip it. Why not.

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ihatepwe735

westmetals wrote: »

I think this might violate the forum rule about continuing the topic from a closed thread.

It might. But the thread was closed because *I* was taking heat.

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baddmoonrizin

Ummm, yeah... Opening a new thread, because your other one was closed is not the way to go. /Thread