Best posts made by Flet

I hope the game mechanics encourage community interaction and dont narrow things down to the guild-microcosm of modern mmos. Ive been playing mmos for over 20 years now - guilds used to be a thing you joined after a while when you made friends with people, and by that point your friends in the game were just as much in your guild as other people you had met and interacted with and because of this you spent most of your time doing mundane activities with friends or friends of friends and not your guild specifically. In modern mmos they are something you join right at the start because the games tend to be more 'activities for guilds to do' rather than virtual worlds. It has the effect of simply closing off the rest of the community from the players rather than being a social element.

Yes, alts are bad for MMOs. I automatically do not play games that have any kind of mechanics that encourage alt making.
Its not as simple as saying alts are bad in and of themselves. I certainly think alts break immersion and i play mmos in order to experience a virtual world - but there is more to it than that. If a game has benefits to making alts it signals fundamental design problems.
In some MMOs - typically themeparks - alts are blatantly encouraged even to the point that there are mechanics in the game based around making alts. These are always present in games where the games experience, its 'content', is consumed and you would run out of things to do even on one character. A good MMO does not give you time to play lots of characters.
In other MMOs alts become more of a strategic asset, throwaway characters for certain purposes. A game where this is advantageous becomes a game that people will do it in, and a game that people will do it in becomes a game that you must do it in to remain on an even playing field with everyone else. The issue here is that this is subverting the multiplayer nature of mmos firstly. If everyone has a scout alt, then the player role of 'scout' stops existing. But secondly and perhaps more importantly, if something CAN be handled by such a throwaway character then that thing is obviously too basic and not an engaging thing to start with, meaning the game itself is designed badly in that regard. If you have a game where people are making alts for a certain task then you have a game where that task needs to either be made to require more than an alt to do, or removed entirely.

Players will make an use alts if it is sensible for them to do so. Universally this occurs when it is not sensible to play your character in the game world. Alts indicate flaws in game design.

If you want to develop a system where players have to interact with each other and cant do all their own crafting (which is good, games where everyone just crafts everything for themselves may as well not have elaborate crafting at all and just npcs you hand resources to) you need to limit the player to having to focus.

As stated above, if you make this a character limit people will simply make alts so its pointless to do it and potentially drive away players who dont like having to make crafting alts in games (as its immersion breaking honestly)

It needs to be player limited. How to accomplish this? You might try to make it account limited but people can still get around this and make entire alt accounts. It does reduce the general community trend of total self crafting sufficiency but it doesnt feel good as people will always have this nagging feeling that they aught to just get more accounts for crafting alts.

The tried and tested solution, the only one that ive seen work so far, is to limit things by time. It just physically takes a lot of direct player time commitment to level crafting. To the point that many players dont even do crafting at all. The crafting dedicated players slowly grind their craft. This gives you something to work the game economy off of now. In such a game most people will gather materials, and need to buy from crafters.

People will of course complain about this, because people want to do everything with out restriction. But there is no neutral and isolated point from which to simply decide to add or remove features like this - they shape and affect there rest of the entire game and there is no solution with out some drawbacks. I think the most important thing is to pick the solution that makes the game world feel the most real.