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Add Alts as Decorations please!


Pietrastor

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It it just silly how we can tickle our alts' pets, admire their parked speeders, wave to their (unfortunately holo-only...) companions and almost everything else but we can't meet our own alts that are suppoused to be from the same Family sharing the same Stronghold. Why has this obvious option not been implemented from start? Clearly the game can already pull alt looks from the database, we see it in Family Tree so I definitely don't see why we can't have our own characters as Decorations.

 

Please fix it Bioware! Just don't make them "holo-alts", we want the entire legacy to hang out together at the same time. Use the hologram only in the instance where a character that has been placed as a Decoration is logged in the Stronghold at the given time.

Edited by Pietrastor
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It it just silly how we can tickle our alts' pets, admire their parked speeders, wave to their (unfortunately holo-only...) companions and almost everything else but we can't meet our own alts that are suppoused to be from the same Family sharing the same Stronghold. Why has this obvious option not been implemented from start? Clearly the game can already pull alt looks from the database, we see it in Family Tree so I definitely don't see why we can't have our own characters as Decorations.

 

Please fix it Bioware! Just don't make them "holo-alts", we want the entire legacy to hang out together at the same time. Use the hologram only in the instance where a character that has been placed as a Decoration is logged in the Stronghold at the given time.

 

I would totally decorate my apartement if I could put my 3 Marauders and Sentinel in 1 room

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I'd second this. I'd love to see alts about the compound(s), starships, or guild halls.
Alts on starships would be great too. THough given that there are no hooks and they said too many cutscenes happen there to add hooks, I doubt it will happen. In strongholds though it appears to be an extremly simply addition though
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I think that all companions should be inactive statues instead of active npcs, and displayed frozen in whatever gear they are wearing at the time. In order to update the look, you would remove the decoration and then replace it.

 

The same could be done for Alts, so you could have statues of your current characters to display with the current gear. They could even go so far as to place you in the "weapon drawn" pose or idle pose, depending on your preference.

 

I think they should be gray instead of full color. Just my slant.

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I think they should be gray instead of full color. Just my slant.

Gray? that's just as bad as holo. The main reason people wanted companions and alts in strongholds was to make it more alive and enhance lore/RPing experience, have Mako and Qyzen sip tea while discussing their latest hunting expenditions etc. Same with alts. You can't exactly "hang out" with holo alt, and holo-Mako won't be sipping tea with Qyzen.

Edited by Pietrastor
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Definitely second this. It would be awesome to be able to place our other characters in our strongholds; they are, after all, 'legacy' strongholds and this would really make them feel like a true base of operations. I suppose the difficult part would be deactivating the replica of whichever character you're currently on, but that could probably be overcome with some simple coding. It might take a little bit of work to add the system to the game, but I definitely think it would be worth the design effort.
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This would be my number one most wanted feature for strongholds. If they could do one thing and one thing only, I would want them to do this.

 

Displaying companions is all well and good (though I'm not doing it, because of pet limit and the fact they turn into holograms), but I spend the most time focusing on my player characters. I go through the trouble of designing them in the character creator. I spend countless hours picking out just the right armor pieces, right down to the bracers, sometimes dying different pieces individually in order to get a specific look. As a result of how the story and voice acting connect you with your characters, I'm more proud of them than I am of anything else I've accomplished in game.

Edited by thewatcheruatu
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Gray? that's just as bad as holo. The main reason people wanted companions and alts in strongholds was to make it more alive and enhance lore/RPing experience, have Mako and Qyzen sip tea while discussing their latest hunting expenditions etc. Same with alts. You can't exactly "hang out" with holo alt, and holo-Mako won't be sipping tea with Qyzen.

 

I could see that. I suppose my concern is how it impacts the game.

 

I think it would make sense to have your companions walking around AND have statues of them at the same time. The statues, like any other non-moving decoration should not have a substantial impact on the servers, and would be more likely to allow your current companions to roam the stronghold.

 

One of the problems with roaming is that paths would have to be set, and decorations change for each person, so the path could be straight through decoration objects, which would look odd IMO.

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the thing is the fact that companions other than the ones belonging to the character you are on show up in their default appearance would seem to me to show an engine limitation, and that would just cause issues with displaying alts, there is no default appearance.
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The thing I don't understand is I can have up to 50 players in my stronghold, but I can't have 7 of my alts in there at any given time? It seems as though it would actually be less load on the server to clone my alts as NPCs.

 

But having 50 people isnt making the game try and access game data for a character that isnt online

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But having 50 people isnt making the game try and access game data for a character that isnt online

 

Why is that hard? It only has to do it one time when the stronghold loads. After the NPC is created, it doesn't have to do anything else with it.

 

The stronghold would literally need to know nothing at all about those characters except for how they look. It doesn't need to know what classes they are. Doesn't need to know their skill trees. Doesn't need to know how much HP they have. Doesn't need to know what's in their inventories. All I'm talking about is a straight visual copy. That should be so simple. They do it on the character selection screen.

Edited by thewatcheruatu
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Why is that hard? It only has to do it one time when the stronghold loads. After the NPC is created, it doesn't have to do anything else with it.

 

The stronghold would literally need to know nothing at all about those characters except for how they look. It doesn't need to know what classes they are. Doesn't need to know their skill trees. Doesn't need to know how much HP they have. Doesn't need to know what's in their inventories. All I'm talking about is a straight visual copy. That should be so simple. They do it on the character selection screen.

 

Sure, 1 at a time after a load period in a field that is only loading that character.

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Okay, but how cool would it be if you could use your alts as "training dummies"? Place them in the GSH (with all their gear and abilities and such), then when your player enters, they can interact with the alt to start a "sparring" session. A generic class AI (which is already basically in place for PvE anyway) is assigned to each class, and you can duel your own alt!

 

I know it'd be a "major" update, and I haven't thought it all the way through yet (like dealing with level discrepancies and such), but it would be SO SWEET!

Edited by G_Hosa_Phat
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the thing is the fact that companions other than the ones belonging to the character you are on show up in their default appearance would seem to me to show an engine limitation, and that would just cause issues with displaying alts, there is no default appearance.

Shouldn't a problem for alts, they can just show up in whatever they're actually wearing, you can already see this at work on the loading screen or on the family tree (this one in particular lets you see the character model of all of your alts while logged in any of them, so the data must be accessible enough).

 

The problem with companions, I think, is they're always tied to your currently logged in character, so the game doesn't know how to reach your consular's Qyzen when you're logged on your Bounty hunter for example, it doesn't even know whose companion it is.

Edited by Loc_n_lol
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I apologize, but your objection makes no sense to me.

 

when they do it on the character screen its in an enviroment specifically created for that, there is a load time even then. and all they are doing is loading the visual and a set background, not all the other stuff you would be loading in a stronghold

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this would be epic. I'm thinking it might be easiest for swtor to start small w/ simply adding them in as you would your companion.

 

Then maybe expand from there to have your alts and/or companions talk to each other. Although all of this would likely be difficult to actually do systematically.

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the thing is the fact that companions other than the ones belonging to the character you are on show up in their default appearance would seem to me to show an engine limitation, and that would just cause issues with displaying alts, there is no default appearance.
But having 50 people isnt making the game try and access game data for a character that isnt online

This "problem" doesn't exist at all. The game already pulls all alt appearances in FAMILY TREE all the time, regardless which character you're logged on.

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