Alts need not apply in Freesky Online
by Eliot Lefebvre 
Oct 13th 2009 at 12:00PM
Filed under: Culture, Game mechanics, Opinion, Virtual worlds
There are a lot of games that don't necessarily make the process of having an alt a smooth road, but almost none that outright prevent you from even indulging the idea. However, Freesky Online has come out with a recent developer diary that states precisely that: no alts allowed. And while their decisions outlined therein are focused highly on the idea that as a free-to-play game there need to be certain measures in place to prevent abuse of the system, they're applicable to many of the issues that players of larger MMOs have faced.
An obvious example is the longstanding practice of "bank alts", which is specifically referenced in the diary -- as far as the game's developers are concerned, it's abusing the mechanics of the game for unscrupulous means. There are certain games where it's considered standard practice to have at least one character just for banking purposes, but there's a point to be made that this is circumventing the hard-coded limitation of how much space a single character has to store items. The ramifications for other games are likely small at the moment -- it's unlikely that CCP is going to start deleting extra characters, for instance -- but the concepts are interesting to anyone who plays games where alts are frequent.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
UTech said on 2:13PM 10-13-2009
In fact, CCP actively encourages players to open an alt account, offering a significant discount in subscription fees for that new account via their "Power of 2" offers.
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Flolah said on 2:33PM 10-13-2009
I'm sure glad that Square didn't think of restricting alts with FFXI, because it was almost needed to get around the sheer number of gear you need to carry, especially before they invented all the various quests (not items; quests!) to expand personal and "bank" space, and they charged for each additional slot after the first, too!
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breezer said on 2:49PM 10-13-2009
That was exactly my first thought: wow a restriction that SE didn't adopt. And thank god because inventory management is unbearable WITH mules. Don't let SE find out though. Before you know it they'll be charging people real money to increase their inventory. Oh wait, that happened already.
mark said on 3:25PM 10-13-2009
The security token cost money, of course, but the monetary cost wasn't the reason you received the extra bank slots.
Dblade said on 1:14AM 10-14-2009
FFXI sucked though because of that. Not only did you need to juggle sets of gear for each job you played frequently, each of those jobs also used multiple sets to macro in to boost your abilities, from increasing DoT with a Haste build, to stacking strength for increased spike weaponskill damage, or worst case, macroing in one of eight elemental staves for each type of spell you used.
It was possible to fill your inventory with macro sets for one job, and this didnt count crafting or drops, or farming. The record though of alts was one player who had 4 accounts worth of gardening mules he multiboxed to make a staggering amount of gil, something like 80 alts or so he checked once a month.
NBarnes said on 3:16PM 10-13-2009
I don't think much of most developers' ideas regarded bank and storage space. Even WoW, where Blizzard usually displays a pretty good grokking of the problem space, has a serious disconnect between how much space a character is given and how much space a character needs to hold quest items, gear, alternate gear sets, etc. Most other games are even worse.
The use of bank alts to circumvent your game design is a sign that your game design is ******ed up, not a sign that your players are cheating. Almost nobody plays MMOGs in order to get their hit of exciting bank inventory management, but for some reason, devs seem to think that this is an important part of their games, instead of something to be done away with as much as possible.
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Flolah said on 3:40PM 10-13-2009
@mark: I'm not sure what you mean, exactly. I know they introduced the security token - that was after my 3 years with the game, however - but when I was a subscribed I paid the basic fee and $1 per additional character slot. I had one main character, a secondary, and then one alt to store both of their sets of low-level gear, crafting components, as well as perform gardening and auctioning in a city away from Jeuno's expensive AH. I hardly see this behavior as circumventing the game's limitations, especially because of the cost.
All I am saying is that I believe it is unfair of the developers of the game in the article to stamp so heavily on the idea of alts.
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Neurotic said on 3:47PM 10-13-2009
Utter madness.
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eddie said on 9:34PM 10-13-2009
The whole bank/inventory limit thing came about back in the text-gaming days when storage space was actually a constraint. There were literally limits on how many items could be in the game total, and large bank space would actually cut into how many accounts could be floating around.
These days, it's rather absurd. I mean, seriously, the idea behind these games is to simulate a fantasy life... why my adventuring rogue can't fill a room of his house to the ceiling with pilfered scrolls if he wants to is completely beyond me. Why can't my hunter/ranger put every single bow he has EVER used in his career on the wall?
The whole dynamic of running to the bank, trying to decide which item you can toss now because you've gotten better at domino carving and need room for 3 more stacks of special ivory or something is absurd. It's not fun, it's not rewarding, and it makes all these heroic adventuring types into anal-retentive fussy pack rats, constantly juggling junk in and out of bags.
That said, isn't this game some sort of persistant strategy game? why would anyone try and alt-play that anyway?
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Yahree said on 2:14PM 10-14-2009
Someone else mentioned muds. Back then it was a legitimate limitation. These days it's power-hungry admins just wanting to put in arbitrary rules in order to ruin their game.
Does it make sense? no. It sure seems to happen a lot both on the old muds and on more recent multiplayer games. Have you ever joined a counter-strike server only to be told no awps? (I actually agree with that one.. stupid gun :) Or no to something else. Or hey, no shooting, we're all just knifing.
It's the same thing everywhere and that includes mmos. Inventory management is nothing but painful. I don't want them to take it away though, they'd probably do something stupid like remove all inventory and then I wouldn't get to go "oooooo, shiny!!!" and make my girlfriend giggle.
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KT said on 2:34PM 10-14-2009
That's irritating also because not everyone plays alts just to manage space. I have several alts on my WoW account and none of them are bank alts. I just like to try out different characters.
I can say that if a game restricted me to one character, even if I could make more by making separate accounts on a free-to-play game, I would forgo it in favor of a game that had no such restrictions. I get too bored having to play the same character all the time and I'd rather have them on one account than have to remember five different account details.
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