Transfer CharSlots From Unused Servers?

Which idea? This board is full of suggestion trolls, which is why sometimes I just don't even respond to particularly bad ideas rather than posting.

This idea would lead to even greater concentration of populations to Freedom and Virtue.

On the contrary, I would appreciate this feature so I could stay off of Freedom/Virtue and on my home server when I run out of slots

I don't see how you come to that conclusion. If player "x" wants to transfer all of his slots to one server he can still only log onto 1 character at a time. It doesn't increase the server population, it increases the number of characters he has to choose from when he wants to play.

i completely agree with this, i would rather transfer more slots to victory instead of having to go to a new server to make new toons (atm i just been deleting old toons that i didnt like playing as much)

I do see how Chaos came to that conclusion.

One of the reasons Freedom and Virtue pull so much of the perceived population... is that they are popular. Imagine if you will a new player whose never seen the game before logging in for the first time on a Saturday night. They see the Yellow dots on Freedom and Virtue, and think to themselves something of the effect that "those must be good servers, I'll go play there." New player turns around and tell all their friends about CoH and recommend friends come play on the same server with them.

New player looks through all the archtypes and they wind up making multiple characters, getting a quick bout of "alt-itis", and thus run out of space for all their new characters. So, faced with the choice of spending more money, or trying a different server, most players think, "I'll try a different server", and do so. There they find different people, with different play-styles, and different play-times.

Chaos highlights the concern that allowing players to move slots around would allow certain players to aggregate to one server or another. A good, or depending on your point of view, bad case example was witnessed with the free server transfers earlier this year. As the PvP'ers spoke to one another and moved to Freedom, other players picked up and moved off.

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The very real fact is, the hard-cap of player-slots at some point forces players to go to other servers to continue to make new characters. Allowing players to consolidate slots on one server or another would remove this, forced, interaction.

Now, I, personally, am neutral on the issue, and I'm going to attempt to draw a parallel to explain why:

One of the reasons I hated Final Fantasy XI was the worldpass bug^^^feature. For those who never played Final Fantasy XI, your starting server was randomized. Which meant that if you and a group of buddies all signed up at once, it was highly likely none of you were going to wind up on the same server. The "WorldPass" would allow players to go to a new server and join their friends. Squaresoft's conceptual idea was that you would have to talk with and interact with new players, and the Worldpass was one of their ways to force interaction in the game.

Which, while the system and concept worked for the Japanese Market... more resembled an Impervium Coated balloon in the US and UK markets. Many gamers, when questioned, flat out said they did not like a game developer telling them they had to play with somebody else.

Of course, the concept that "the developers cannot tell me that I have to play with somebody else" does sort of run counter to the whole point of playing an MMO. One of the "features" of an MMO is to meet other people, team up with them, and take down challenges. Ergo, there needs to be a balance between the developers respecting the wishes of the players, and enforcing the concepts of the game design.

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My own personal opinion is that the Cryptic Studio developers, and now the Paragon Studio developers, have done a good job of maintaining this player-direction balance. I think only a small minority of the game is really bothered by the limit on character slots per server. I'd go so far as to say that I think such a minority is actually smaller than the "core PvP" crowd.

I also think that it's a bit of a moot point.

We "know" that the developers are working on a modification to the underlying engine where you can change characters without actually having to log completely out of the game and log back in. We also know that the developers have talked about a serverless environment, explicitly telling players when character transfers were implemented that a serverless environment might be in the game's future.

Now, this is just pure conjecture, but presuming that work on "CoH2" is underway, I suspect the server-limited environment we have now won't be replicated in a future game. My suspicion is that the future of CoH holds Dimensional Separations, where each Classic Server is given a dimensional assignment. Ergo, Triumph server would be Dimension Zeta Upsilon 23-7, and Victory server would be Omicron Upsilon 22-9.

My theory is that you'll be able to make a character, assign it to a slot, and pick a home dimension. However, you'll be able to team up with players from other Dimensions, which would be cross-server play. I think this sort of I've run out of slots on my favorite server solution would be more suited to the long term benefit of the City of Heroes franchise.

The many times I've run into that issue I inevitably pondered which character I could delete on the server I play on in order to make room for a new idea.

First of all considering freedoms server was more or less recently upgraded I doubt it'll get to yellow dots again for a while and as the server list is from least populated to most populated its likely the new player will start off on a not-so populated server, secondly if a new player likes the new server he or she has started on they have every right to want to stick to that server and that server only and you or anybody else can't argue against that its there 15 odd dollars a month. Stupid theories are stupid.

As for me /signed, I would happily have more slots on my home server rather then wasted ones on servers i'll never use.

Actually it's server load, not population. There is a difference between the two. Also they're listed that way based on when they log in. Freedom/Virtue are normally at the bottom, but I have seen others listed below them, due to their load being higher at that time.

Thanks for explaining, my tunnel vision was preventing me from seeing that point of view.

And here I thought it forced players to pay for multiple accounts so they could make more alts on their server of choice.

The dots have nothing to do with server population. Those dots represent work load, and the devs have explained several times that all it takes is one person doing the wrong thing to send a server into 3 red dots.

And no the devs are not going to tell us what someone would need to do to send a server into the red because there are too many jacktards that would get a kick out of crashing the servers.

Show me where I claim that the dots are a representation of population, I was merely stating that freedom has been upgraded and probably wont get onto yellow dots - if anything Je saist had claimed that it was a sign of population. Yes I said that the lower populated servers are at the top of the servers list no I didn't relate that to the dots that was you're own little addition.

I was clarifying a common misconception new players have when they see the number and colors of the dots next to a server. If you'll notice Manic also took the time to explain that there is a difference between server population and server load. I merely took his statement one step further. If you don't want things like this to happen in the future then take the time to include it in the first place.

And if your first response when these things happen is to get defensive then maybe you should refrain from posting until you develop a thicker skin.

Thanks.

I'm thinking about this, and am also becoming more neutral about it.

There may be a significant number of people that play multiples for alt purposes, but there are none that have told me they do it in game. It's possible that they are an extreme minority.

You could also say that the idea would encourage more alts, even tons of them. I would probably roll alts more freely with 100 slots.

So there's no way to say how effective this would be without knowing just how much immigration there is.

That would work well. It has the advantage over CO's system in that it allows dimensions to build up communities, which makes it easier to find those who want to do the sorts of things you want to do.

I have done it for alt purposes. At one point I had 4 accounts, then they increased the number of slots available per account and I dropped two accounts and remade the characters on my main account after I unlocked the 36 slots. Now I just have two accounts.

I use server transfers to retire characters from my server of choice to make room for new alts. This has the advantage that if there is a server crash I can still play on one of my retired alts and I don't have to start from scratch.

Actually when i logged in the 1st time, i saw a few yellow dots, i thought those were bad things, so i picked a server that had a green dot... think 'traffic light' syndrome.