Make past lives account(server)-wide

[Ooblagato]

The amount of time needed to invest in past-lives and the difference it makes in gameplay to have a lot of them is very significant. While there may be a few outliers, this usually means alternative characters on someone's account rarely get played aside from the occasional special case use such as filling a tank role in a raid party or such.

I for one would love to be able to swap between characters without penalty. So I suggest, any past lives gained on a particular server should be applied account-wide and all characters on that server should be able to make full use of them.

Some benefits this would bring to the game are:
- Players would not need to feel like they are wasting experience points/progression when they play on an alternative character
- Players would be able to swap classes and playstyles more easily
- Players could more easily play with their friends who are at a different level and would no longer feel forced to not play when their regular group is not playing
- The ease of swapping classes would make balance decisions less controversial


Some complications that may need to be addressed are:
- Veteran status characters may be an unfair way to skip early levels for farming past-lives
- It may be difficult to bring past-lives across server transfers for a character
- Reduced experience requirements for the first few lives could cause existing characters to have a mismatch in experience and level upon implementation and upon achieving the first few past-lives

Please help by considering the practicality and finer points of implementing this and giving your feedback.

 

[Svirfneblin]

I think the game could use some sort of catch-up mechanic like other games do because there’s a huge huge gap in power between newer characters and any sort of Completionist. I’m just not sure how to accommodate this without devaluing all the work completion have put in.

I think the best we could realistically hope for is a bump in the VIPXP percentage and even that chances are pretty slim.

The idea of being able to share some unused reaper points with others in your group was a really cool idea and I like that but apparently the mechanics are doing that are complicated and Severlin said they’re not gonna do that. Perhaps do some sort of boost to reaper XP percentage if you have less than 20 past lives and do that concurrently with any other normal weekend boost but then again I’m not expecting anything.

I ran some raids recently in true pick up group newer player fashion and boy those were rougher than a stucco bathtub.

I voted this up on the concept of helping newer players not the specific details outlined in the original post.

 

[Enoach]

I think the game could use some sort of catch-up mechanic like other games do because there’s a huge huge gap in power between newer characters and any sort of Completionist. I’m just not sure how to accommodate this without devaluing all the work completion have put in.

I think the best we could realistically hope for is a bump in the VIPXP percentage and even that chances are pretty slim.

The idea of being able to share some unused reaper points with others in your group was a really cool idea and I like that but apparently the mechanics are doing that are complicated and Severlin said they’re not gonna do that. Perhaps do some sort of boost to reaper XP percentage if you have less than 20 past lives and do that concurrently with any other normal weekend boost but then again I’m not expecting anything.

I ran some raids recently in true pick up group newer player fashion and boy those were rougher than a stucco bathtub.

I voted this up on the concept of helping newer players not the specific details outlined in the original post.

One thing they have done is change the XP needed per life has changed Experience needed increases after your 4th and 7th TR vs prior where it increased after your 1st and 2nd lives.

 

[Shear-buckler]

One thing they have done is change the XP needed per life has changed Experience needed increases after your 4th and 7th TR vs prior where it increased after your 1st and 2nd lives.

Well, that they changed it by an insignificant amount and ignore all feedback to make it actually do something was more of a slap in the face than anything else. It only showed that they dont understand the issues raised here.

 

[Svirfneblin]

One thing they have done is change the XP needed per life has changed Experience needed increases after your 4th and 7th TR vs prior where it increased after your 1st and 2nd lives.

I know that was a nice first step but does not resolve the problem of huge huge power gaps

 

[Zavina]

BTW some od us play other games too.

I play DDO Inventory Management Ultimate Edition as my side-game (and maybe Rust from time to time. I need to bathe my soul in salty e-tears of other people...)

 

[EinarMal]

Why would shared past lives invalidate past lives?

I have one character with nearly all past lives (I need 4 iconic and 9 archetype lives to be complete). Now, if I want to try a new build, I have to reincarnate.

If I could share those, I would level 5-6 characters one time and basically never reincarnate again.

I probably should have said invalidate reincarnation. I would basically stop having to level up after you had 5-6 characters at cap.

 

[Minako]

Perhaps SSG eliminates the xp penalty all together. Everyone who has ALL the lives by a certain date gets a feat called OG completionist. It give a bonus to all your stats and skills, dc's etc. Anyone who gets compltionist after that date can't get it. Newer players catch up easyer so the vets have people to play with and the people who did all that work get a reward no one else can get.

 

[EinarMal]

Perhaps SSG eliminates the xp penalty all together. Everyone who has ALL the lives by a certain date gets a feat called OG completionist. It give a bonus to all your stats and skills, dc's etc. Anyone who gets compltionist after that date can't get it. Newer players catch up easyer so the vets have people to play with and the people who did all that work get a reward no one else can get.

I have most of them, but I don't care if they remove the xp penalty. Let people catch up, no need for that extra benefit IMO.

 

[Shear-buckler]

Perhaps SSG eliminates the xp penalty all together. Everyone who has ALL the lives by a certain date gets a feat called OG completionist. It give a bonus to all your stats and skills, dc's etc. Anyone who gets compltionist after that date can't get it. Newer players catch up easyer so the vets have people to play with and the people who did all that work get a reward no one else can get.

No unattainable stat buff.

The usual objection to removing the penalty completely is that adding new races etc end up not adding enough grind to keep up the pace. Just making something like 50 first lives x1 and keep upping that number when new grinds are released circumvents this problem.

Dont get me wrong, I would support removing the penalty too but increasing the number has less risk of overdoing it and is "future proof" while also doing a lot to the catch-up issue.

 

[Ashellia]

I am surprised at the amount of pushback I'm seeing against this idea- I've been playing this game what I consider a pretty significant amount focused 95% on one character since it became free-to-play and I still have around 100 past lives left to collect. Maybe I underestimate the level of dedication of the average player, but I am doubtful there are more than a very small percentage of people with no more past lives to collect. If lives were account-wide, it would make playing Hardcore and special event servers feel more rewarding as I could either pursue a build that I know I'll enjoy at cap on my home server or work on past lives that I don't have yet and not feel like a waste of investment towards all past lives.

As it stands currently, I hardly sit at the level cap for long because I want to get all of my reincarnations, and due to that I rarely am able to join groups for raids or high Reaper questing. I would feel a lot better about leveling a character to sit at cap and swap to if the past lives were shared, and it would be nice to have a variety of playstyles available for when they make changes. I know I was pretty annoyed when caster DPS was dropped a ridiculous amount across the board, and if I had had a melee and ranged character with similar progress as my main on stand-by for playing at cap I wouldn't have felt as disgruntled by the nerf.

I do think it should be an opt-in feature though, and exactly when you are able to opt in would need to be considered to avoid situations of people getting an unfair advantage by running lives that require lower exp to speed up their past life progress. Opting in at character creation or during the reincarnation process seems like the best place to choose so that build points and initial difficulties available could properly reflect your overall past life progress, but the experience requirements should be set to double when you opt in regardless of the number of total lives you have to avoid the edge case of someone making a lot of opted-in characters before reincarnating enough to require more experience. Maybe just allow anyone who opts in to open on Elite/Reaper and to be given 36 build points in addition to the experience requirements set to max.

 

[Drunken.dx]

Maybe I underestimate the level of dedication of the average player, but I am doubtful there are more than a very small percentage of people with no more past lives to collect.

Those with Uber completionist are not "average players", they're either whales or someone South Park made episode about.
years ago, before racial reincarnation was introduced someone made a post on forums how it took them year and a half DEDICATED playing to reach class completionist (TBH they didn't buy XP pots, only using what they got ingame), while leveling 1-20 is easier today due to better choice of quests, only class completionist got easier to acquire since SSG (thankfully) didn't put archetypes as required for CC, but getting racial one is harder than ever since with every new race it requires 3 new PL's to get...

 

[GrizzlyOso]

I am surprised at the amount of pushback I'm seeing against this idea- I've been playing this game what I consider a pretty significant amount focused 95% on one character since it became free-to-play and I still have around 100 past lives left to collect. Maybe I underestimate the level of dedication of the average player, but I am doubtful there are more than a very small percentage of people with no more past lives to collect. If lives were account-wide, it would make playing Hardcore and special event servers feel more rewarding as I could either pursue a build that I know I'll enjoy at cap on my home server or work on past lives that I don't have yet and not feel like a waste of investment towards all past lives.

As it stands currently, I hardly sit at the level cap for long because I want to get all of my reincarnations, and due to that I rarely am able to join groups for raids or high Reaper questing. I would feel a lot better about leveling a character to sit at cap and swap to if the past lives were shared, and it would be nice to have a variety of playstyles available for when they make changes. I know I was pretty annoyed when caster DPS was dropped a ridiculous amount across the board, and if I had had a melee and ranged character with similar progress as my main on stand-by for playing at cap I wouldn't have felt as disgruntled by the nerf.

I do think it should be an opt-in feature though, and exactly when you are able to opt in would need to be considered to avoid situations of people getting an unfair advantage by running lives that require lower exp to speed up their past life progress. Opting in at character creation or during the reincarnation process seems like the best place to choose so that build points and initial difficulties available could properly reflect your overall past life progress, but the experience requirements should be set to double when you opt in regardless of the number of total lives you have to avoid the edge case of someone making a lot of opted-in characters before reincarnating enough to require more experience. Maybe just allow anyone who opts in to open on Elite/Reaper and to be given 36 build points in addition to the experience requirements set to max.

It's not against "this" necessarily. The devil is always in the details and it's easy to paint black and white.

I have alts with 157 PLs, 135, 69, and some with less than 20. I don't have any at "completion". I'd be somewhat angry that people trying to build and play alts over the years, would be behind someone with 207 PL feats, even though I clearly could've just done 207 on one character and "had them all"

None of my characters have, say, artificer 3x, because I personally don't value it. But obviously if I was working towards 207 I would've done that. So if it's a "union" of my PLs towards completionist, I'd be pretty mad, since I've actually done ... 370+ lives, but would be behind people with 207 lives.

If the lives all added together, sure, whatever. And I'm all for catch-up mechanics. But I don't see why I, or anyone in a similar situation, would be punished, yet again, for playing alts. When the point of all this is to play alts. So, yeah. probably SSG will do it.

 

[l_remmie]

That would be fiscally irresponsible...

 

[Igognito]

From the point of view of a noob,
I think it would cause an even bigger gap and would make playing with new players even harder.
I often make a new character to play with new players and to keep my character at the same level with them.
This mechanism would make that near impossible. So that is a hard no.

But I do see a point that I like in the topic. If we could mark a character at the primary, when playing with other toons that character could gain something. I would argue against a 1on1 XP but more like a 1/10th on 1. That would relieve the feeling I'm not progressing my main.
The gain must be marginal in order to just keep us feeling better but not affect gameplay. A problem I see, is that one could use it for gaining early XP levels 1-10 for example while playing a character at epics which numerically the XP are high. So you earn 100k take 10k bonus to your main when normally questing would give 2-3k. So I think that mechanism should be scaled on the current level of the main character and not a proportional transfer.

Someone had suggested a mechanism that you could transfer past lives from character to character. Again, I would be against it but I would consider that turning in a character of xyz past lives for the cost of the character and the character slot could reward another character with a past life. I don't think I would do it but I think it would have some merits.

Cheers

 

[droid327]

Catch up mechanic? Yes

Auto progression mechanic? No

Any system intended to support accelerated alts should only benefit alts, not mains. As you point out, full shared progress means you just farm burner alts for four lives and never actually play your main

I've always suggested your characters get an XP bonus of 2% for every past life your main has more than that character. That way you can build alts up super fast but your main still requires you to play it through

 

[Eme]

People would still buy ottos to skip the grind on established characters when new races etc comes out.

I've just watched a new breakthrough AI learning to play any video game with complex chained goals, -grinding like we know will be a game mechanic of the past in ~2-3 years, as it will become flooded with automation without the need to ottos/ xp pots or even play, people will just be selling / achieving full past life capped toons without the grief, and DDO's economy model will be dead.

SSG need to rethink their entire strategy to keep up to survive, to future proof the game, but considering they can't even devlop the game to be (what is now) 'past' proof, I don't hold out much hope, sadly.

 

[Ahser]

The amount of time needed to invest in past-lives and the difference it makes in gameplay to have a lot of them is very significant. While there may be a few outliers, this usually means alternative characters on someone's account rarely get played aside from the occasional special case use such as filling a tank role in a raid party or such.

I for one would love to be able to swap between characters without penalty. So I suggest, any past lives gained on a particular server should be applied account-wide and all characters on that server should be able to make full use of them.

Some benefits this would bring to the game are:
- Players would not need to feel like they are wasting experience points/progression when they play on an alternative character
- Players would be able to swap classes and playstyles more easily
- Players could more easily play with their friends who are at a different level and would no longer feel forced to not play when their regular group is not playing
- The ease of swapping classes would make balance decisions less controversial


Some complications that may need to be addressed are:
- Veteran status characters may be an unfair way to skip early levels for farming past-lives
- It may be difficult to bring past-lives across server transfers for a character
- Reduced experience requirements for the first few lives could cause existing characters to have a mismatch in experience and level upon implementation and upon achieving the first few past-lives

Please help by considering the practicality and finer points of implementing this and giving your feedback.

That would actually make me play alts!

 

[Jack Jarvis Esquire]

I'm supportive of catch ups in general but I can't agree this is a good Idea.

Maybe instead, after you cap out the full 207 on one toon, you can get triple-life benefits from single lives on alts?

Still needs a grind, but not as much for alts after the initial hump, and incentivises that first full completion (I have a number of heroic and iconic PLs I have zero interest in progressing right now, nor do I intend to repeat the grind on any alts).

 

[DDO Gaming]

maybe I am missing a core argument but I'm interpreting this OP as "everytime my main character of 6 on this server gains XP for completing a quest, that XP should be replicated across my remaining 5 characters. Share the love kindof thing"