Character Creation

[Angela Christine]

In general I think a "cooling off" period is a good thing, and waiting for approval provides one.  The alternative would be terribly tempting, even for good players.  If you pre-write apps in a word processor during the Saturday down time, you can have a new character submited within about 10 minutes of your last one dieing -- it's just a matter of entering a few keys for race, sex, age, class, subguild, height, weight, and cut & pasting in the desc, sdesc and background.  If you decide to slightly modifiy a few key traits due to recent events, then it might take 20-30 minutes, but still hardly any time at all.  Without the uncertain waiting period of approval, it would be too easy to have a character that "just happens" to go some place you know is interesting because you saw it an hour ago.  The siren song of your last PC's corpse, full of virtual loot that YOU, the player, worked for hours and hours to accumulate is a terrible thing.  Or you get your shiney new character, but her stats are kind of icky, so you reroll and **GASP** make things irrevokably worse  --  it would be tempting to do something really stupid but reasonably "in character" that you know will get the wimp killed quickly, and you can be rerolling a brand new character within the hour (and the chance of getting really bad stats 4 times in a row is pretty low).   Obviously those temptations exist even with the current system, but I believe that instant gratification could make them much worse.

I'm not talking about abusive twinks, because it doesn't make sense to reject something solely on the basis that it could be abused by jerks.  No, I'm talking about unnecesarily tempting basically well-intended players that happen to be human and subject to doing the occasional dumb thing, if they think they can get away with it, particularily while in the grip of emotion.  


* * *

Imm time is an issue, but I think cleaning up after messes caused by unapproved characters could end up taking more time than the app aproval process does.  I remember some imm saying it takes about 10 minutes of work to approve an uncomplicated character.  Lessee, the last weekly update to include app stats said "79 applications accepted, 58 rejected, 15 edited this week" which is 152 times that an imm had to look at an application.  Times 10 minutes per app to get the total minutes, divided by 60 to get the hours . . . that workes out to about 25 imm hours of effort toward applications that week.  Wow, 58 rejects, bad week.   Anyway, that is a lot of time, but monitoring unappoved characters for abuse could take even longer.  Or not.  No way to know really.


AC

[Cuusardo]

The application process is there for several wonderful reasons.  I see no reason to get rid of it.

[Rhyden]

When I was making my first character (Who I'm happy to report was killed quite quickly thanks to my own foolishness.) I thought what a good idea it is for each character to have to be approved. That way you don't get any 'l33t' idiots running around ruining the aptmosphere of the game. Now this might have been discussed before, but I think that a system whereby you had to have your characters approved until you had a good account history would also work really well, and it would reward those who took the time to be good RPers with instant character creation. Obviously this would be hard to get, since it could potentially lead to disaster, but I thought it was a nifty idea anyway.

I could see how that would become so corrupt.  :twisted: