The Alternate Persona system has the potential to be a game changer for this 25 year old game, and could pump new life in to it. All it needs are some tweaks to give it the nudge it needs to get going. Switching between Alternate Personas in a starting city or fast camp zone is the biggest deterrent for using the system. Quite simply, having to go back to a special zone to swap between alternate personas ends up making playing actual alt characters more advantageous than using the alternate persona system. To make people want to use the AP system, this needs to be changed to allow the swapping between Alternate Personas allowed in any zone WITH THE EXCEPTION OF RAID ZONES. By simply making raid zones a non-AP swappable zone, you take away the vast majority of the exploitability of the AP system. You should be allowed to choose which alternate persona to login to at the character select screen. Having to login to the alternate persona that was last played on that character before being able to swap to a different persona is annoying. Put in a quest NPC in the Plane of Knowledge that will allow you to get one-time attainable AAs that you already attained on another persona on that character. There are some AAs that you can only ever get once on a character, and therefore, you would never be able to get those AAs on your other personas on that character. An example of this is the Dragons of Norrath AAs. Create a dragon horde for alternate persona's equipped gear. Randomly tossing equipped gear in to your bags when you swap between personas is highly annoying and problematic. If you was to actually pay to open every AP slot and play ever class on one character, it would be near impossible to carry all the gear necessary for all the personas on a character. Instead, when you swap personas, it should put your equipped gear in to a dragon horde for that persona. Make it possible to convert an existing character on a server to being an alternate persona of another character on the same server. The game is really, really old, and people have a ton of time and effort invested in their existing characters. Asking them to start over just to use the alternate persona system is like asking a millionaire to give up their fortune they worked their whole life to earn in order to start over with nothing to do it all over again. Nobody's going to do that. Well next to nobody. I'm sure someone somewhere will, but it's not going to be the vast majority of people. Have separate lock out timers for each alternate persona. If they are supposed to be seen as alts of a single character, then they should be able to do missions one each persona with out sharing lockouts. **Added after reading replies** There are benefits to using the Alternate Persona system, but as it is implemented right now, there are more reasons to not use it rather than just creating alt character instead. There's a lot of potential with this new system, and it's a shame that it's being wasted due to a small handful of issues.
Just share gear and achievements between all toons (alts) on the account per server and you don't need personas for anything. The tradeskill sharing is 100% overrated.
No. You want Alternate Persona to be something that it is not. It is for people who want to restart their main and not have to go through the tedium of redoing augments, achievements, progression, slayer, etc on another character. It is also for the player who wants to create an alt on their main account and not have to go through the tedium of all the beforementioned things. Alternate Persona is NOT an ability to make your main magician a magician/shaman/druid/bard/rogue combo threat. I think a lot of people want it to be that, but it is not that.
They lost me with shared lockouts. Personas do 0 for me without that. Dont even care if I cant loot in said mission(s) I just enjoy doing missions and raids.
I'm not sure why you think that being able to swap personas anywhere while out of combat some how makes a character a multi-class character. It doesn't. A multi-class character would be able to use the abilities/spells/etc of all classes at the same time. Being able to swap personas when out-of-combat has nothing to do with being a multi-class character. The only difference is having to run BACK to a specific zone BEFORE swapping personas. It's the exact same result except being able to swap when out-of-combat takes the annoyance and wasted time out of the equation. I kind of get the feeling that you just don't like the idea of alternate personas all together and like it the way it is now because it deters people from wanting to use it, so in a way, you get your way of NOT having the alternate persona system by the fact that it is so non-functional that no one uses it. I say that because you brought up the point of multi-classing that I never said in my original post. It's a deflection tactic used to manipulate a conversation. If you don't like the alternate persona system, then just say so. There's no need to try to manipulate the conversation like a lawyer lol.
My guess is the majority of people would rather have the ability to switch anywhere. As Risiko said its not a multiclass. You still have to abide by the timers to switch. Opening it to any zone gives AP a lot more options of use. Also no one say "its for the people who want" cuz everyone wants something different.
I'm for all of this. The only thing I'd add is either a share unspent aa pool (so your main can get aa for a persona) or a vitality system where your main gets less xp but feeds a bar personas can use.
The bigger issue with this is loot honestly. What I would do? Pick easiest mission. Run on one persona -> Swap -> Run -> rinse and repeat. Currency and loot is shared between each persona. Effectively it removes lockouts from the game entirely. Instead of "1" chance for "X" loot, you get up to 16. Granted im in the who cares and let players do what they want, but thats prolly the reason Persona's share lockouts. It isn't 1:1 an alt. Everything seems reasonable to me.
I'm not sure this would be an issue regardless of timeouts. I don't think it's possible to swap personas if you are currently assigned to a mission. You'd have to run the mission as the persona who received the mission.
I am fine with my personas having an individual loot lockout that wouldnt effect others in the missions. But shared lockouts for me personally makes it utterly useless.
If the lockouts are not shared between personas it would be completing the mission, dropping it as it is now complete, switching personas, completing the mission again, and over and over again. Essentially it would make the lockouts pointless as you just need to switch personas and your get extra currency and loot.
Only EQ players think no lockouts are an issue. How can every other MMO allow players to infinitely run content, but EQ cannot? EQ is supposedly "group focused", but deliberately hamstrings players grouping together with lockouts. WoW, FF14, Destiny 2, etc if you're doing dungeons then you're helping the game by grouping with people and playing together.
This, 100% this. Funny you bring it up Destiny 2 is raids is what I liked the most. Back to back to back to back. If your fun is just doing raids, bam get in there and raid. Loved getting a few others of my friends and sherpa others that haven't done the events through them.
It isn't the players who think no lockouts are an issue but the devs themselves. I don't think you would find many players who would have a problem if lockouts got removed. The only issue being that not sharing lockouts on personas is a way to bypass them when the devs intend to limit how often a single character can run them.
Lockouts are pointless. They are nothing more than an artifical way of extending content, not through actual gameplay, but some arbitrary timer you can't do the content. What is the point of requiring a person to wait 6 hours to do only 1 of 2 in era missions? The game is already so content starved that adding lockouts results in players having even fewer options to do in era stuff. What is the detriment to removing lockouts? People get their stuff quicker? Oh the tragedy. /s
Meh, those other games are kinda built for another demographic. People who want instant gratification. And that's fine. But eq isn't built on that system and I don't think it should be. It's already become painfully easy to gear out and get max lvl and aa each year compared to eqs beginning.
It's not instant gratification if you're doing the content just as much with or without lockouts. The only difference is not having some arbitrary lockout preventing people from playing the actual game.
Lockouts being pointless or serving a purpose isn't relevant to the issue that personas not sharing lockouts would be bypassing those lockouts. If you think lockouts are pointless you should be asking for them to be removed or reduced. Not asking for them to be bypassed by people who level up multiple persona possibly spending money to unlock more slots as well.
Not really. In a few weeks or a month you'll be done with those anyways. Then you can do them on your AP. Letting APs ignore lockouts would simply break the entire idea of lockouts.
