Alternate Persona Tip Window - Swapping Personas Requires Fast-Camp / Starting Zone

The only real use this has now is, if you've got at least 3 toons in a fellowship, level up 3 rogue alts to 105 (I think that's when you get SoS 2). That way, you can run them to where ever you want to camp, set a campfire, Drunkard Stein back to PoK (casts faster than the Gate AA and I've never had it collapse), swap to mains, and campfire in to your spot.

Alts, even f2p alts do all that just fine. I envision AP's roles quite differently.

This could be worth doing if they made a challenging zone with a ton of see invis mobs between you and your target destination. I remember EoK?'s Chardok, RoS? Veeshan's Peak having this. Recently it's been trivial to move around with double invis that I wouldn't even bother with an SoS rogue persona on a mage with any kind of easy switching.

Until then here's my assessment from the beta forums:

Exactly. It would basically be a great QOL improvement, to help travel, for anyone who wanted to put the time into leveling up the APs needed, for each character. It wouldn't change combat at all. I was excited to be able to cut down some travel time and frustration for some zones. I would rather just have an alt, if you need to swap in a fast camp zone.

I can see it being useful with restrictions though I never had a plan to use them myself.

Tucoh summarizes it quite well here. I believe this use of Alternate Personas is and always has been the intent of the feature. By definition, alternate is a variation of a main entity.

The fact that is has come under such severe and direct fire from so many people because it doesn't live up to their opinion of what it should be is head-shaking to say the least. Did people really think they would introduce aspects of the game that would completely nullify class defining roles in an instant so that you could move your box group around better or evade zone / event mechanics on the fly?

The feature will get used for those it was intended to benefit. People that box aren't the target audience for this feature, yet 95% of the people opposing it are people that box. Pretty hilarious honestly.

You make it sound like it would break the game. Instead of logging in my alt wizard to port my guy, I could just level a wizard persona and not have to bother logging in another account. Instead of having to log in my bard to follow(which barely works), I can level a bard persona and travel without the hassle of auto follow. It basically would just be making traveling less of a headache and easier. You can only be one class at a time. Not like you can use any of the persona abilities in combat. What event mechanics are you referring to, that this would help you avoid? Who doesn't box in this game now at all? Almost everyone does. The intended benefit is almost worthless to most people, certainly not something they should have spent time on developing.

In the whole Beta, you could switch Personas anywhere(that is why people assumed they were going to be like that) and I didn't see any issues, it was an excellent addition. I see it as a needed QoL improvement for the game. People said PoK would kill off druids and wizards, it was taking their class defining abilities away, Mercs would kill off healers etc.. In the end those things were great for the game and this addition would be also.

How many people do you know that play this game and only play 1 character at a time? You know this isnt 1999 right? I would bet 95% of people who play this game play with at least 1 box.

Even if I'm not going to use personas, I would like to see it be a feature that will be used enough to justify its existence. For instance, even if I don't use ornaments, I can see that lots of people like using them. I'm sure that was a complicated change, but their widespread use likely means that they are a net positive for EQ's financial stability. But I don't feel the same way about personas. It is a also a complicated change. But if they are only used by a handful of people, they won't contribute enough to the financials of EQ. It will take a lot of ongoing dev resources to maintain, which means fewer resources for other features that might have more widespread use. With the fast-camp swap only, I'm not really seeing how this will be financially positive for EQ. I'm not really seeing how there will be enough "main swappers" using personas that it would be a financial success for EQ.

Edit: That's my stance exactly, like Bernel posted. I'm a bard, so I can already go anywhere. And I have accounts with a wizard and mage. This concerns me because I want it to be a killer feature for the expansion.

You're forgetting the part where crippling it was discovered at the 11th hour in UI text and only pseudo-announced when people asked if they were seriously going to make such a drastic change at the last moment.

Like the Plane of Knowledge it's a game changing feature. If they didn't want that they should have been more direct about it.

I only play one at a time, but I also know that I am the very tiniest of minorities in this respect. It's really a reason I've changed my position on true box. I have limited space for computers, and no, mini PCs aren't an option. My interest in the whole alternate persona thing was to be able to play a wizard when I want to play a wizard, a shaman when I want/need to play a shaman, and a melee when I want to smash things, all while keeping my character's name, and most importantly moving forward on a TLP, my flags and keys. Nothing to do with boxing, nothing nefarious like cheating past content/blocks. But again, with all the uproar on the forums about how people will abuse the feature, I may yet again be in the tiniest of minorities.

TL;DR: They chose it from a list of easily implementable features that sounded bigger than they were.

Years ago when Darkhollow was still new content, I paid to swap a character to a new account (remember when you could do that??) so I could try boxing. It went smoothly for the most part, and the new character was on my second account... but also still on my first account. Somehow the script failed to remove the original copy of my character after the second copy was made.

I did the greedy thing of selling off all of the tradeable gear and clickies worth anything, let a necro friend sac the original down to the limit (she never needed EEs again!), and then promptly deleted it.

I guess the point of telling that story is that the game's databases were already set up to allow multiple characters with the same name. If you know anything about relational databases and efficiency, this makes sense; you want to index stuff on something simple like an id number, not on a string of characters (and they either forgot or chose not to mark character names as UNIQUE). I'm not a part of the dev team obviously, but if I wanted to implement this quickly, you just have each persona be a new character with a new id in the backend, and then have a frontend system to 'switch' (ie: log out of and into) each without the character select screen. Obviously also add some new database attributes to the characters (only have one show up on the character select, etc), and make sure shared things (flags) sync across.

So my conspiracy theory? They got the devs together and said "we need quickly implementable features to choose from", and then choose personas because it was the easiest to implement while having a large-sounding impact. Limits like fast camp zones only were after thoughts that they tacked on because they don't want to upset their recent trend of cookie cutter expacs. After all, if you let people swap whenever where ever, you might have to rethink some zone and encounter designs.

We care because we want a game that's fun and interesting. Personas, if they enhance normal gameplay, could be fun and interesting. If they're only useful as a way to change a character's class, it probably wasn't worth the effort to implement.

Exactly. How much effort has gone into it (and will continue to go into it in 2024+) and how much have we lost out in other areas as a result?

I'm hopeful that AP will be useful/enjoyable and not break the game (via bugs or class blur).

I'm appreciative of the willingness to try new things, and offer unique expansion features.

But, the cost-benefit on this one is whack.

Kind of strange that they arent even going to test the "swap only in non combat zones" function in beta, isnt it? Just throw it in on the 5th untested.

DPG needs a win this Holiday season, leaving fast-swapping in would be an easy one.

FYI swapping everywhere is still enabled on test server.
edit: my bad. I was able to swap back to bard immediately after AP creation and still in CR so I thought it was allowed. But now I go to check and cant anymore.

And it will be fun to watch. From a distance in my case. I think I will let others be the testers.

Swapping on Beta was changed to fast-camp zones a few patches back. Now you get this if you try to swap:



They probably should have made it the same way on Test so that people there didn't get their hopes up. Giving them anywhere swap and then turning it off is going to make a lot of people on Test disappointed from having unrealistic expectations of how it will work.

Yeah if this feature doesn't do anything real for gameplay we would have probably been better served with... an auction house, or cross server instancing, more group missions (probably different people) or something.