Reputation and identity

When you start a new character in World of Warcraft on the same account, the game treats that no different than a new character on a different account. Your new character does not share anything with the previous characters, no map information, no flight paths, and especially not the reputation points. That is especially annoying if your first character spent a lot of time to grind reputation with one faction, but the rewards for that are bind-on-pickup crafting recipes for a tradeskill he doesn't have. You can have several characters covering all the tradeskills in the game, but then each of them has grind the same reputation again. That is rather annoying.

It doesn't make sense that your new character doesn't have for example the map information of The Barrens, if your previous character spend many hours there. Obviously you as the player remember where what is in that zone, and uncovering the map is just a needless technicality. For things like gathering keys (or other access rights) and grinding reputation the matter is more ambigous, you can justify either solution. But obviously having to lets say killing a hundred furbolgs again to be allowed to pass the timbermaw tunnel to Winterspring with every character is tedious.

There are a many reputations in World of Warcraft where I never got very far, just to a medium level of friendly or honored. Because the rewards from grinding reputation for a single character, who can only use few of the offered items, and only has use for recipes for a maximum of two tradeskills, is often just not worth the long grind. I'd be more willing to take all the effort to get a reputation up to revered if I could use that reputation for all of my characters on that account and server. I can see that Blizzard can't make the reputation reward items bind-on-equip, because otherwise only one guy on the server would need to grind the reputation and then sell the rewards on the auction house. But in my opinion a possibility to share the reputation between the characters on the same account would be much more attractive. Because even if I change from one character to the next, I still consider myself as the same person, and can't see why suddenly the timbermaw don't like me any more after me having done so much to help them.

If you think about it, it is a question of identity. The game assumes a completely different identity for a new character. But due to account sharing being forbidden by the EULA, Blizzard must obviously also assume that behind every new character on the same account there is the same player controlling it. Having the characters not share anything is a game design choice.

Other games handle that differently. For example Everquest 2 at least has shared bank slots across the characters of the same account. In Final Fantasy XI you have the possibility to switch between classes on the same character; that allows you to play different classes but keep whatever reputation, keys, quest progress or map information you have gathered. In the (single-player) Pokemon RPG games on the Gameboy your identity was that of a trainer, who collected badges (roughly equivalent to reputation), while controlling a range of pokemons that had different levels and combat abilities (your combat identities).

The Pokemon example is interesting, because it could be a better choice for MMO games. The player represents a master identity, which controls all the sub-identities of characters on the same account. Some game aspects are tied to the master identity, for example map information, access rights, or reputation. Other game aspects are tied to the individual characters, like skills, abilities, and anything else tied to the specific character's class. You aren't playing new characters because you want to forget parts of the game, you play new characters because different classes play in different ways. Pokemon Online anyone? (The real Pokemon Online actually exists as a low-budget 2D MMO).
- posted by Tobold @ 12:25 AM Permanent Link