Alt grouping

[amorfides 49]

Hi! Currently every account is a separate account in every sense of the word.

 

My suggestion would be to have 1 main account and allow to link alternate characters to the main account.

 

When you buy anything from the shop, you can only do so with your main account. All the premium time you buy gets added to a pool, from the pool you can award premium time to other characters. All coins bought go to a shared bank balance, all earned marks go to a shared balance. 

 

Advantages:

• Pausing premium for a character by returning time to the pool (with a restriction of 15 days to avoid abuse)
• Increased usage of longterm premium packages
• Less transactions, so less payment cost for payment providers.
• All characters can buy things without needing to login to the main account just to access the funds. 
• Marks currently can't be transferred so having them shared between all characters promotes better usage of them. 

 

[validate 598]

nice idea's but reality would be less income for the game.  they don't mind us prepaying 12 months " I do for 5 characters a yr"  and I take 3-6 month breaks per year.  love to have a pause and/or move the prem time to one main. or farming alt while i'm on a break then spred it to the alts when i'm back.   But I look at it. as it's a huge discount getting the 12 months at a time. loosing 3-4 months isn't really noticed. plus the extra marks 60k  x5  is nice for large magic chests. and trans rods.  those bonus marks would most likely go away on your idea.  

 

not a bad idea for those who always play short term with long breaks.   

 

the linking accounts to one main email would be nice as I think i have 6 or 7.  cus of SFI and NFI . would be nice to just need to log in one email then select each character i want. but boy or boy if I end up only able to log in one character per account. like stream tries to make us. "work arounds thank goodness" that would become annoying for many of us. who log in mining armys. or our own sermon groups ect. 

 

would love to be able to join the marks.  I would have a ton. but I doubt that would ever happen.  it's a micro transaction thing.  leave us with needing a touch more marks to get X item, just so we add on that 1-2 more months vs grabbing it from an alt. revenue loss if they allowed that. 

 

I wish your idea's could come true someday.  but that happens to help us players save money and time. vs helping the company who just paid off their loan buying the game last year

[amorfides 49]

14 hours ago, validate said:

they don't mind us prepaying 12 months " I do for 5 characters a yr"  and I take 3-6 month breaks per year. 

I'd say in that case it doesn't really make a difference money wise. If you're planning ahead and you know you take longer breaks then you'll normally also buy shorter premium subscriptions. But if you know you can assign your premium time when you need it then people will just bank it. In the end people would buy the same amounts of subscriptions or longer ones even because they want to save up on marks for something. The main difference i expect is the amount of time people buy at once would be larger and the periods at before which they top up longer.  
 

 

19 hours ago, validate said:

not a bad idea for those who always play short term with long breaks.   

 

You could see the discounts for longer subscriptions as a big cost for the company but in a way it actually isn't because when they get more income sooner, the cost of the discount gets mostly washed away by the interest that it would gain if it were invested over the period that someone would otherwise buy a smaller subscription and then buy a month again at some other point.  

There's still a benefit for them to get larger payments up front that would warrant the discounts and marks. 

 

22 hours ago, validate said:

the linking accounts to one main email would be nice as I think i have 6 or 7.  cus of SFI and NFI . would be nice to just need to log in one email then select each character i want. but boy or boy if I end up only able to log in one character per account. like stream tries to make us. "work arounds thank goodness" that would become annoying for many of us. who log in mining armys. or our own sermon groups ect. 

I think you currently already can link it to one email, just the shop and balances are different per character.
I thought of it more as an administrative action, the accounts in game would still be completely separate (except for the shared balances).

 

 

22 hours ago, validate said:

would love to be able to join the marks.  I would have a ton. but I doubt that would ever happen.  it's a micro transaction thing.  leave us with needing a touch more marks to get X item, just so we add on that 1-2 more months vs grabbing it from an alt. revenue loss if they allowed that. 

I think it would ultimately give the same behavior where people buy some extra months to top up their marks if everything is linked to one account, since the same situation would still come up. 
But those marks are actually the loyalty program to reward the player for their investments in the game judging by that it makes more sense to actually award it to the player and not to a game character by the player. 
 

 

22 hours ago, validate said:

I wish your idea's could come true someday.  but that happens to help us players save money and time. vs helping the company who just paid off their loan buying the game last year

 

Helping the customer to spend more money and make the process of buying time and coins easier doesn't seem that much of a bad thing for the company, more like a win-win. Any time that's bought is just ready to spend, but the actual money is already wired to the company. 
Having this time banked up and locked within the system also makes it easier to spend it from a psychological standpoint. The tress hold to assign yourself more premium time is lower if you already have it saved up than when you need to get your paypal and buy it. 
Think about people adding an extra alt, the decision to make that alt a premium character is much easier because of the sunk cost fallacy having the time already in the bank. 

When everything is assigned many people will still top up the balance of the account again (would be handy to at this point also include larger times like 5 years or 10 years, less money for payment providers and more for the company)
 

[Stinboi 363]

what you are saying sounds greate but in reality i think Wurm would loose money this way, i dont know about any games or other things that has a sub model do this for good reasons.

 

I dont see this happens.

[Minnie 178]

IIRC, a few years ago there was some talk about putting something like this together, but it fell by the wayside for one reason or another.  At this point it is unlikely to happen, as the focus seems to have shifted almost entirely to attracting and retaining new players.  Us old players are probably not going to be much of a priority, at least for the foreseeable future. 

[amorfides 49]

9 hours ago, Minnie said:

IIRC, a few years ago there was some talk about putting something like this together, but it fell by the wayside for one reason or another.  At this point it is unlikely to happen, as the focus seems to have shifted almost entirely to attracting and retaining new players.  Us old players are probably not going to be much of a priority, at least for the foreseeable future. 

Ah too bad  thank you for the heads up. I'm actually a newer player, only started playing at the start of this year. 

 

A mechanic like that won't be the factor that makes someone stay or leave, but it could be one to make people spend more in the long run, obstruction of the actual monetary cost allows for faster actions.