Perks for pay?

[kralex]

I wonder if small perks could be made available for those who sent donations, for example things like renaming a character (without having to reinc), changing the voice set of a character, or DM renaming an item so its name still shows up in white... stuff like that. Nothing that would have any effect on in-game performance (no pay-to-play content or anything like that) but rather small customizations that require a DM's attention as reward for making a donation.

[Yojimbo]

I think as with anything this come back to the EULA and how that in all probability such things would be in violation.

[Normace]

I would love to be able to change my toons name without reincarnating.

Is it possible for this to be allowed without the "bribe" ?

[FunkySwerve]

The EULA expressly forbids getting ingame benefits for cash. We could tinker with the meaning of 'benefit' till the cows come home, but we're not going to. I doubt there's much chance of Atari trying to enforce it these days, but it still doesn't seem worth the risk - even by devious methods that skirted the EULA, like paying a DM for their time.

Funky

[uncanny]

Back to the other question... would it be possible to enable name changes then from the pcscry or something (naturally excluding [test] labeled characters)?

[crimsonbinome22]

One of the best incentives for donating I've seen work on a forum was a special board that only donaters could access. The rules (swearing, explicit content etc) were all relaxed on that board so could post or talk about anything you wanted to. Doesn't sound terribly exciting, but was quite effective. Also skirts around all your EULA problems.

[kralex]

I agree that it's not worth the risk of finding out how enforceable the EULA is, and Funky would be in a better position than most for estimating that risk.

I'd love being able to rename characters, I can never seem to think of a good name until after I created them. That's how I came up with the idea, the donation thingy was an after-thought.

Sept 16, 2011 12:49:24 GMT crimsonbinome22 said:

The rules (swearing, explicit content etc) were all relaxed on that board so could post or talk about anything you wanted to.

Personally, I'd pay for not having to read that.

EDIT: maybe we can keep the whole affair in-game. Have a town hall clerk that can take rename requests for a fee of, say... dunno... 500M gp?

[wollstonecraft]

It seems that a lot of people used to have custom epic pets. I dont see them anymore, but I always kind of assumed that those were given to big money donors.

-WSCraft

[FunkySwerve]

No, we kept the requirement for pets much more generic than that.

Funky

[gandoron]

Is someone who donates $10 entitled to the same benefits of someone who does $200 or $1000 over years. This game is free and flat, no tiers. No paywalls, the only currency is time and to a lesser degree skills or general likeability. I think that is about as pure as it gets. Dm/ guides get a pet, which means shard levels his many twinks faster than I can, but other than that, everything is pretty even.

I have donated quite a bit since I started and will continue. People are at different places in life and can afford different levels of giving, but everyone should give what they can. Our dev work very hard. Help them keep this alive.

The only other thing that is as valuable is recruitment. Nods to bad and the current reward system.

-g
From a beach in Bali

[Normace]

OK, all perks aside, and back to the original question:

Is it possible or feasable to implement the ability of being able to change the toon name after player creation, and without reincarnating ??

Cheers and thanks !
Normy

[FunkySwerve]

That's difficult to say. We used to link all our database entries to characters by using a playername/character name key. Such keys required some fairly extensive anti-exploits because such keys are not by their nature unique - players can make same name characters. Because of that, we swapped to a unique id system, setting a truly unique key on the character's tag field and associating most variables with that instead. We'd have to do extensive checks to make sure all variables were switched to that setup before allowing name swaps. Normally, I would think that they were, but we run a number of scriptsets released to the public (SIMTools, Legendary Levels) which can't use a UID setup because it requires nontrivial integration with module scripts. We may or may not have swapped those variables to use the new setup.

Funky