Character application in advance

[Salt Merchant]

The idea here is that, even if you have an active character, you can submit one character application, which could be approved as usual by the staff.

You could not go ahead and play that approved character until the active character is killed or is stored, however.

[Throttle]

This has been suggested before. The staff response back then was that this would possibly further encourage the suicide of unwanted characters, and that it might not be so bad after all that you have to wait a little while between two characters.

[X-D]

Suggested before or not, I still like the idea.

And I do not see how it would encourage suicides and shit. If your gonna do it your gonna do it. Period.

[Throttle]

My guess is that it encourages suicide in scenarios such as this:

Player Bob has been kinda bored with his character lately. He didn't get into the PC right away and it's been a week now. He really wants to have some fun right now, and since he already has a pre-approved character in the other city, he could be playing that one in 3 minutes if he just jumps down that well...

I don't agree or disagree, in fact I don't care a whole lot whether or not we're allowed to do what Salt Merchant suggested. It rarely takes more than like four hours for me to get a character approved unless I submit it at a time of day when there's noone around, which is so much faster than any other mud I've played that had a similar system for character reviewing.

I do agree with the other reasoning: it's probably not so bad having to wait a little while between the death of one character and the creation of another.

[Marauder Moe]

Yeah, I think a cooldown period between characters is a good thing.  Time to clear your head, get the old character out of your system so the new one starts off fresh (and you don't do something silly like forget who you're playing and go chat up your old character's friends).  Also it helps prevent people from looting their old corpses.

[staggerlee]

The other concern is that it could potentially allow a huge inflation of karma classes.

Let's say there are no magickers at all in the mud, and thirty names with them checked off, by people who are merrily enjoying their characters. Since there are no in game, the imms allow several.  Promptly everyone dies and starts their mindbender, and suddenly there's a population explosion.

Basically my point is, anything that makes it harder for imms to control the population of karma classes seems like a potential problem.  Although in the new mud (at least at first) I suppose this a moot point.

You could use the upper limit of said classes as a solid number, apped for or in game, but again, anything that makes it harder for the imms to control...

[Bogre]

I mean, technically this is possible with special apps, which wait for you until you use them.

Though I'm not sure if the staff would like an influx of hunter amos special apps.

And it still, if I'm not mistaken, requires a staffer to at least click a special app through.

[Throttle]

Yeah, a special apped character still has to be submitted and approved like any other character. Sponsored roles might be faster if the clan imm is online as it gets submitted.

[spawnloser]

I think the big thing against this from the staff perspective is that having a character ready to go would allow for too many chances to harvest the previous character's stuff by the new character.

[Nao]

I think it would be nice to be able to fully fill out the app when you still have another character, so you just have to hit submit when the old one dies. This way, you can still make changes and you have a waiting period until you're approved, but you can also have another character ready.

[Barzalene]

You can type up your next pc in your text editor or a doc and have it ready to just hit send.

[Tomeglow]

If you're that keen on preparing them, you can always use a Word document or a like. I don't think it's a good idea to let you submit a character while one's living, then, at the moment it gets accepted, the staff might have a case of a suicidal ranger or something, plus, like was stated that was allow for a greater chance of someone just getting their old things. Submitting a character while you have a current one running is like "oh i hate this guy, i'll get a new one ready then once its approved i'll go die, that way i'll have something to do while i'm waiting" and I think that's incredible degrading the the role-playing.

[flurry]

I think something like this could potentially mean more work for the staff, too.  I'm sure there would be people who got a concept accepted and then, some weeks or months later, decide they want to change it or don't like the idea so much after all.  So there would be characters who effectively got reviewed for nothing (which already happens, I suppose, when people lamely suicide for stats because they prefer to play Armageddon on easy mode, but that's another issue).

[X-D]

Meh, examples against the idea, so far are pretty much moot, such is ALREADY the case. People submit PCs all the time  and decide against it either before accepted or shortly after, which normaly results in suicide/storage.

As to the word doc, of course, people already do that, its not the point at all.

Also, if  you were able to submit a PC while your current one was living. I  personally think it should go in another que, where staff need not hurry to get to and should only notify you of being accepted on current PC death/storage. If pc dies before app review then it simply moves to the tail of the ASAP que. There, everybodies (IMO baseless) fears are now allied and the actual staff workload is lowered slightly while allowing people to seemlessly move to a new PC.

[Salt Merchant]

If people are concerned about looting own corpses, then a two hour delay could be built in before the next character could be started. Truth is, corpses in populated areas are stripped really quickly, whereas the ones out in the wilderness probably are too dangerous for a new character to reach, especially with the bad guy that killed the old character still lurking around.

It would be a nice feature from the staff's point of view I suspect, since applications could be handled more on a "as I feel like it" basis than on a "every twelve hours at most" basis. Well, if you have a high and low priority queue, I suspect the low priority queue would just be mostly ignored, though.

[John]

The staff has been amazingly fast of late in approving apps. I think we can all wait the less then 12 hours we have to in order to have our next character.

[John]

You can type up your next pc in your text editor or a doc and have it ready to just hit send.

I do this simply so I don't forget my cool concepts I came up with Then when I am waiting I start writing up notes on everything the character knows (if they're a physician I make my own notes of the herbs he has heard of. If he's a merchant I start writing my own notes on what he knows of styles and materials from place to place).