Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Completely speculative suggestion incoming. I'm personally in this situation and I'm not sure how many others are. Upvote if so.

With Alphas, a potential host of new players, and maybe a boatload of returning vets, I suspect for a lot of us, all of our about-to-be-Omega accounts are full: three mains/alts per Omega account. I equally expect that lots of them have characters that people would like to move over to an Alpha account and/or shift around the alts on their Omega accounts to either make room for new alts, shift more-than-Alpha characters from previously inactive, soon-to-be-Alpha accounts back to Omega accounts, or other similar situations.

In short, I suspect a ton of us would like to do a lot of character transfers within the accounts we possess. I also suspect the thing standing in our way is the absurd amount of money and/or PLEX it would take to reorganize. With full accounts, that's difficult/impossible without GM intervention, and with soon-to-be-Alpha accounts... how is that even gonna work? Will Alphas have to pay to move characters to Omega accounts? Will they be able to?

So, tl;dr: CCP, please have a week or a month when character transfers are free so we can sort out our lives without having to pay the equivalent of a few months of subscriptions to do it.

How about it?

Some people buy 12 months subscription like me.

Do you have any justification for this free character transfer month other than "a lot of people will want to transfer characters" ?


"A lot of people will want to do x" when x is something people already have to pay for is a good reason to keep x as something that people have to pay for. Because that means more money in CCPs pocket.

In principle I agree, but I think you are jumping the gun a little, or being short sighted with the request.

If Alpha clones and MT are successful to the degree hoped for, CCP could allow people to merge all Omegas onto a single account with simultaneous logins, and varying subscription levels within the account, or per character.

Alphas would be unaffected by such a change, and might be given an option to transfer or upgrade their account to unlimited slots after a period/as a reward for a long-term sub.

There are a lot of options here, and I suspect long term both players and the company would like to see account consolidation for all sorts of reasons, provided the books balance. But it might be a mistake to do this right now without good numbers on Alpha uptake.

At this point an amnesty might also have negative consequences on both the economy and community. Existing players might merge their highest SP alts onto lower numbers of accounts, gut the rest for SP/turn them into pure zombie farmers and sub specific alts when activity is high. PCU dips, as you know, cause panic - but so does the sudden disappearance of long term players ingame who have no reason to login without a major campaign and with an unlimited skillqueue. Surges in re-subs during conflicts could be manipulated to a damaging degree in the Plex market. Ideally the scenario should be to incentivise long term subs over spikes, but a cack-handed approach to account consolidation might do the reverse.

I've considered a revamp of my own accounts in the past btw (usually run 8 core, 6 tertiary with lab/build/trade gimps in the spare slots). But I'd rather hold out burning through massive amounts of ISK now to do something that might be free long term.

I don't think this is the best time to push for this change, but a few months post Ascension we should collectively ask about account re-org. It should be free indefinitely, not as a short term amnesty, so that all returning players can consolidate.

To Danica's point though, no one has yet given any compelling reason why CCP would want to do this. What's the benefit to them from a business standpoint? Or is this just a kindness of their hearts sort of thing?

I mean, from a business perspective, if you want me to forgo what sounds like it could be a windfall for me in servicing fees - fees that people already willingly pay, you'd better have a damned strong business case that presents a clear and present benefit to the business.

Yes as he said IN HIS ORIGINAL POST, go up and read it properly!!

I for one thumbed up this as I'm in a situation now where I have quite a few old accounts knocking around from when I started trials and never stayed on, but now only used three characters (trade, mine and my mission/combat main) and the trade and mine as Alpha's have no needed for skill training so have ended up here as I wanted my three characters on my one account but didn't see that CCP charged you a huge amount per character, for one simple act (surely it's just one field in a DB gets updated to change the characters account owner....?!?!)

How about no !

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