Alts professions

[ErdTod]

Alts are wrong, they provide a superiority above people with no alts, and this game is competitive. Basically, I hate the idea of alts, but if I want to succeed and be stronger than my neighbour - I HAVE to use alts.
And I feel like I'm the one who is the victim, who is kind of forced to play alts.
Not the neighbour, who is forced not to play alts.


Also, probably I'd like to take the risk and team-up with my neighbour - but, well, he has alts, so he has no need in me, but I need someone to help me... Of course I can make another account...

And then, this strong neighbour comes and kills my char - I'm left with nothing, cause I didn't have any backup alts. If I was to attack my neighbour - he would loose his warrior alt most likely, and then he probably would kill me with his main.

Of course there is no such thing IRL as a person who excels in everything: professions are a thing. And that's why it is a multiplayer game with social factor: team-up with friends and don't make alts.

Maybe, the population would be way higher if people had to convince their friend to play with them instead of making dozen of alts?

[Sevenless]

Also, probably I'd like to take the risk and team-up with my neighbour - but, well, he has alts, so he has no need in me, but I need someone to help me... Of course I can make another account...

Alts do not negate the need for multiple controllers in the slightest. You can see that by looking at large factions. Unpopular base locked types (farming/tailors) are often shared as communal accounts (I have a feeling this is technically against the rules, take part at your own risk). But you still need human players controlling said accounts.

You seem to be confusing alts with bots, that's a different story.

[Strangelet]

And that's why it is a multiplayer game with social factor: team-up with friends and don't make alts.

Totally this. For some reason people choose to ignore that the current state of things in the alt department is simply harmful for several key mechanics of the game, player interaction being one of them.

Currently other players are mostly seen as nuisance. That is because you have absolutely nothing to gain from interacting with them. Sure, you can participate in some low-level trade early on if you just can't find those barley seeds and your neighbor have those and wants a few bars of metal to kickstart his metal production a bit. But that's it, after you've acquired all of your basic necessities you don't really need others, you don't need to team up with some random dude you met in-game because he's a skilled miner - you can always have your pocket army of specialists just a few clicks away. And thus the whole social aspect of MMO is reduced to discussing who rekt who on the forums.

Furthermore, using alts is effectively cheating permadeath, since your "meta character", your whole combination of all your alts is never at risk. You can lose your combat or forager alt, but then you are losing only that amount of LP and FEPs you spent on that particular character and given that raising another one is fairly easy and can be achieved mostly offline, you are not losing that much. Hell, if you really wanna tryhard, you can have a couple of spare combat alts ready for deployment at any time. Crafting/farming alts are practically immortal since they spent a lot of the time offline and rarely ever leave the safety of their base. Same thing applies to "mains" - most players who consider one of their alts their main rarely ever leave base with that character until it has godlike stats and equipment. Meanwhile, players who are dedicated to only one character are fully affected by permadeath (which is not a bad thing on it's own, it's just pretty sad that you can easily cheat this part of the game).

Basically, with alts as they are, players have very little to risk for being dicks and very little to gain for not being dicks, thus reducing player interactions to mutual dick slapping.

[ErdTod]

Maybe there can be some cap to raising stats that depends of some wicked formula that is calculated from all the stats? Making it impossible to just raise 1 or 2 stats and leaving others at 1...

Not too harsh, but just to make atls more of an investment...

[BrantMathew]

Hum, looks to me like you just want to cry that people in a sandbox game don't want to play it like you do. Always amuses me when people forget games are suppose to be fun, and fun is a million varieties of different for a million variety of gamers and that's why they choose the "Sandbox" genre. You may think it some cheeky challenge to "just have one character" in some game and 6 months later some griefer takes you out and leaves you with "that rush" you must adore. Other people may play a sandbox game for an entirely different reason, go a whole world without fighting another player once. Maybe they like hermit farming, maybe they like relaxing on a river fishing, maybe they care more about crafting, most devs will take the widest possible playerbase to bring in the widest possible financial gains.

As for interacting, when such a thing is centered around losing everything you have done and all the time you have then wasted, those interactions you want to force on people hold a whole different definition than they obviously do to you. IF it is suppose to be like that, or will be like that, someone will eventually do it right elsewhere and give those people a place to go. They say a fool and his money is soon parted, same goes for a dev and his playerbase when he decides he wants to create a "sandbox game" that limits a playerbase to a strict set of rules about how to play in general, which in the end would = NOT a "Sandbox" anymore. But just another "Survival game" with a limited rule-set (And Steam is full of those).