Concept: A adding a feature that allows someone to transfer a character from an older TLP server to a newer one. Where the character is placed in an inactive/suspended state on a limbo server until the owner chooses to re-activate. When re-activating they can then choose to transfer to one of the existing TLP's that are in the era that character was set to inactivate in, or later. This way they aren't gaining various abilities that would be out of era. Reason: Players often have to take breaks because of real life, burn out, social reasons in game. However once they are ready to come back, the existing server might have to far for catch to easily happen or they want to experience the content they missed. Also the idea completely restarting might not seems like entertain idea. This would provide players a way to resume playing a character after a lengthy break.
Sounds kind of neat but their spaghetti code would probably end up nuking the whole planet and not just Norrath.
I can see what you are going for here I just think it is probably a super-niche situation that affects only a small number of players and would be a nightmare to code to ensure against a whole range of exploit potential. Most players like the "fresh-start" so they just reroll on the next TLP that comes along & hope their work/life situation does not interfere this time around. ROI for this would likely be very low.
I have known a lot of players that are burnt out on the earlier expansions. However they like having a various special items you acquire along the way, some of those are pain to go back and redo.
Other than the BRD/ROG mask of tinkering I think all of those are obtainable later via the Casino, anything else is rendered obsolete by other items.
Doesn't Eyepiece of the Fancy Tinker make the mask of tinkering obsolete? However who wants to go back and deal with the cursecaller event in inkut'ta out of era for a BiC, or Sister and performer for your 2.5 aug. That last 25% of Vish is really annoying if you want your AA giving you 1% chance to resist a resistible spell. If you have Circle of Power III item (or other circle 3 clickie), do you really want to effort of getting another one.
Hands up I admittedly wasn't thinking that far ahead for a TLP player who had taken breaks. Wasn't thinking that far ahead either. I guess I had just assumed you were a TLP recycler, that's on me, but the things you describe here are all "later EQ" for most TLP players, and I would have to agree with you that going back to do these things would be really hard, for one thing fewer TLP players even get that far than recycle classic to PoP. The later the expansion you "take a break during" the harder it gets to go go back & do those things on the same character. Like I said though I can see the merit of your suggestion, I just can't see it being a good investment for teh dev team, too small a number of players are going to even want to carry on from where they left off. But if such a system DID exist then it could be very interesting if Live servers who had characters "frozen in limbo" could also transfer to a TLP server that was in the era that their character was "inactivated" in, maybe then it could be promoted as a way to get former players who left in expansion X to return to a TLP server also in expansion X. Could be an intruiging proposition to lapsed players then perhaps. It would necessitate some careful exclusions though, there's a lot of exploit potential with this system if impimented poorly.
Player who jumps onto a new TLP every year abandoning their prior TLP in the process. And typically that has happened as the prior TLP moves past PoP.
Ohhhh...that makes sense. That must get boring after awhile. I don't think I could do that. I don't have a lot of love for the first 3 but just enough that I could start again if the right server came up. I played on Sleeper, Fippy and Phinigel and one random 51/50 server for like a week before I realized that was dumb. I tried Thornblade but quite at lv 20, I was not ready to come back to EQ if that makes sense. Just so I don't derail the OP. I just don't think the code or tech could deal with it and a few other glaring issues.
I've been told you are still an EverQuest player until you quit more than 4 times lol If Yelinak had all classes in at the start that woulda been my perfect TLP tbh.
100% agreed. If you look back far enough on the forums. We've been asking about this for far to long for it not to happen.
If something like this was to be put in place I think the transfer would have to be locked until an expansion after the one on the old server is unlocked. As an example if someone used the transfer at the end of PoP when they are fully levels and geared it could have an impact if they transferred to a server at the start of PoP.
Innovative. Not sure how well it would work, and seems like it would break a lot of stuff, kind of like the second poster was joking alluding to. They could take it a step further, and create a prestige/re-birth situation. But that is even more out-there in thinking, and would break more stuff.
I don't know how EverQuest stores it's character data. I assume that they are in some kind of relational database software. Are those database set pre-server or is the owning server just flag in a few rows for the character? So either moving the character to an inactivate database where in wouldn't unlock new feature AA auto-grant ect or having some inactivate value replaces the server to undefining it, doesn't seem like that far beyond the current server transfer process. They would need to build an interface either to manage it, that probably easier to do in the Web interface over the game itself.
