I was listening to Limited Edition Issue 10, and there’s a rather funny moment towards the end on a levelling pact in City of Heroes breaking up. Obviously one of the problems with the system is that it doesn’t work so well if one member doesn’t play their character so much. If, say, they’re something of an alt-oholic. Entirely hypothetically, perhaps you’d roll up a Corruptor, and join into a levelling pact with their Brute. Only next time you’re online they’re playing a Dominator, then later a Corruptor, then a Brute again (but a different one, the first was Stone/Dark, this one’s Dark/Stone), then another Brute (back to Stone/Dark, but with a different costume and power selection to the first one).
Then I thought… what about if you could get into a levelling pact with yourself? Sign up a few alts, and any XP you earn on one is distributed between all of them. During the earlier levels of most MMOs, the natural habitat of the alt, experience tends to rack up so quickly that spreading it out over a few characters couldn’t hurt. Possibly flawed later on, as many games seem to have a bit of a “doldrums” range where the levels slow down, and you wouldn’t want to multiply that by 2 (3, 4…), still, worth exploring maybe.
Do you know, they had something like this (or tried to have — I played on Test, no idea what actually made it to live) in Vanguard. It was called… ugh… fellowships, I think. Course you needed someone from another account to help out recruiting folks to it, but once in it was pretty much what you describe: all xp was spread out among the members of the fellowship regardless of who was online or not.
It was plagued with bugs and sploitable loopholes, so I’m not sure what became of the idea in the end, but for the (very) brief time it lasted it was actually pretty cool.
Melmoth! Melmoth! We’ve found the Vanguard player! (OK, not as far as the live servers, but still.)
Hadn’t thought about spreading it over a whole guild/group, even more prone to problems I’m sure, but most interesting…
Quick man, fetch me my rifle and my hunting underpants! We must capture and dissect this rarest of specimens in order for us to understand this so called The Vanguard Player.
The idea behind the pact is good, but when you get passed 20 you start to feel the effects. But I have to admit that even helping a friend to 20 is still rather nice.
Receiving a 10th of your normal XP would be rather unbearable to any player I’d imagine, so I can’t see the expansion of the system to include more than a pair.
Oh pish I played on Live too, I just ended up back on Test after… not very long. I like test servers. So sue me!
Besides… Pete at Dragonchasers is PLAYING VANGUARD RIGHT NOW!! Look over there!
This isn’t the Vanguard player you’re looking for.