Multiple characters.

[Tryst]

Sometimes I just want to blow stuff up indiscriminately and be a pirate and other times, I want to trade and be a good citizen. on occasion I just want to explore. Since we have no option to have more than one character at a time without wiping the existing one to start a new one, it means we miss the old days of playing Elite when we could load up the character we wanted for the occasion. I remember having several characters in Elite, Elite Frontier and Elite First Encounter, all were specific to a role and all had ship's fitted for those roles.

It's not possible to be a normal trader and a pirate as well, one often contradicts the other and you find yourself unable to dock at certain stations to sell your wares or being blown out of space by authorities. It's also not possible to be an explorer and a trader, you can't do a lot of trading way out on the rim while you're exploring there, it makes piracy pretty difficult too.

Other games allow multiple characters for this reason, even Eve Online allowed us 3 characters per account. Why can't we do the same here so we can enjoy different facets of the game without one interfering with the other?

 

[Lestat]

I play that way all the time. It called having 2 accounts. One account is exploring the deep dark reaches of the galaxy. The other account is a trader and a miner.

 

[Jaiotu]

There is a 33% discount on Elite: Dangerous and Horizons right now in the Frontier Store.

 

[Deleted member 115407]

I think the problem, OP, is cost.

There is a good deal of data that has to be stored for your commander. Faction reps, ships, loadouts, mats, ranks, etc. One more CMDR doesn't seem like much, but if 100k players had one more CMDR, the increase could be significant. FD has to pay for all of that storage, and if we're using two CMDR profiles on one paid account, they are doubling overhead without increasing income.

Now, if this were subscription type thing, I'd say yeah, give us more account options.

That's my take on it, anyway.

 

[Tryst]

I think the problem, OP, is cost.

There is a good deal of data that has to be stored for your commander. Faction reps, ships, loadouts, mats, ranks, etc. One more CMDR doesn't seem like much, but if 100k players had one more CMDR, the increase could be significant. FD has to pay for all of that storage, and if we're using two CMDR profiles on one paid account, they are doubling overhead without increasing income.

Now, if this were subscription type thing, I'd say yeah, give us more account options.

That's my take on it, anyway.

There are many games out there that are F2P that have multiple accounts. They also have tonnes of data storage for each character but several of them that I have played have 8 slots for characters.
FD has a store page so they are gaining on both ends of the scale, charging for the game, (the F2P games are free downloads) AND a store to make more income so they potentially make a lot more than most F2P games. Stop making excuses for a corporate body whose main interest is making as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time so the bosses can buy the latest yacht.

As a programmer myself, I'd be interested to know exactly how much data is kept per character because I honestly don't think it's as much as you believe it is. Database compression methods are good these days and hard disks have more storage than the average home user could ever use now, just one disk alone can hold over 10 Terabytes, (that's 10 thousand gigabytes 10x10^13). I know people who are still using 500gb disks and still have not filled them up, every game I own (and I own a fair few) still comes up short of 1Tb.

All the data that is specific to your character and is only accessible by your character probably amounts to 1 or 2 megabytes at most, the rest is public database stuff (What Cmdr discovered which system etc). You have a database of ships, fittings and engineer upgrades and what ships you own only needs to have a byte for each ship to tell it which database entry number that ship is, the same goes for the fittings and upgrades. In total, I'd say at most, your data for each ship is no more than a couple of Kb. Practically everything about your commander relates to single numbers that point to records in public databases. Let's be generous and say 5mb per commander for arguments sake, now let's say 100,000 commanders currently playing the game, that's a paltry 500Gb of data. Even a 1tb hard disk is only 50 quid and that would hold twice as much. Are FD THAT hard up that they can't afford 50 quid and allow us an extra 1 character each?

The reason I stopped supporting SC was because they got greedy. With the amount of money they've made so far, they could afford a super massive team to develop it and the game should have been completed (and optimised a lot more than it is at present) long ago, (plus the ships they are selling are just way too expensive and also make the game Pay2Win).
DB appears to be going the same way since he still has not kept his promise of a single player offline version of this game he made when it was still a kickstarter project. At least with single player offline, you could save your game and start a new one, then go back to your previous save game later. This has always been a great feature of the original Elite games, you can start over anytime but still go back to your previous character and continue where you left off. Not everyone wants to do the same thing in a game day after day when the game has so many other things you could do, but you can't go pirating because it affects the standings of your character which means you could then be limited when you go back to what you were doing before.

 

[Deleted member 115407]

As a programmer myself, I'd be interested to know exactly how much data is kept per character because I honestly don't think it's as much as you believe it is. Database compression methods are good these days and hard disks have more storage than the average home user could ever use now, just one disk alone can hold over 10 Terabytes, (that's 10 thousand gigabytes 10x10^13). I know people who are still using 500gb disks and still have not filled them up, every game I own (and I own a fair few) still comes up short of 1Tb.

All the data that is specific to your character and is only accessible by your character probably amounts to 1 or 2 megabytes at most, the rest is public database stuff (What Cmdr discovered which system etc). You have a database of ships, fittings and engineer upgrades and what ships you own only needs to have a byte for each ship to tell it which database entry number that ship is, the same goes for the fittings and upgrades. In total, I'd say at most, your data for each ship is no more than a couple of Kb. Practically everything about your commander relates to single numbers that point to records in public databases. Let's be generous and say 5mb per commander for arguments sake, now let's say 100,000 commanders currently playing the game, that's a paltry 500Gb of data. Even a 1tb hard disk is only 50 quid and that would hold twice as much. Are FD THAT hard up that they can't afford 50 quid and allow us an extra 1 character each?

Speaking from the perspective of someone who supports a couple of very large ETRMs, you're thinking from a personal computing standpoint rather than an enterprise computing standpoint. Now yes, I know there's probably cloud involved here, and I don't know what the costs for all of that run exactly. What I do know is that what seems like a paltry amount of data capacity at the home level is a much bigger deal at the enterprise level. You have to take into account redundancy, high availability, power for the racks, power for cooling, capacity limitations on shared banks of storage, cost of expansion, etc. So 1GB of extra storage winds up costing you much more than you think.

On top of that you have database tables that begin to grow. The ships themselves may be a simple entry. The modules not so much now that we can mod them (so all of those variable stats have to get stored), module and ship locations have to get stored, faction standings have to be stored, exploration data has to be stored, filter your gal map for places you've visited - that's stored, steal data from a base - stored, bounties and fines - stored, engineer data - stored, personal stats - stored, trade data - stored, system knowledge data - stored, active mission data - stored, commodities in your cargo hold - stored. It adds up and adds up and adds up.

And along with that storage comes query latency, etc, etc.

It's more complicated than just slapping an extra 500GB hard drive into your PC. Right now, Frontier is trying to iron out performance issues as it is, as well as follow a release schedule. Give it time. Maybe down the road they will decide they have the extra cash and cycles to support multiple accounts. For now, they are probably hard at work managing the usage that they currently have.

 

[Tryst]

On top of that you have database tables that begin to grow. The ships themselves may be a simple entry. The modules not so much now that we can mod them (so all of those variable stats have to get stored), module and ship locations have to get stored, faction standings have to be stored, exploration data has to be stored, filter your gal map for places you've visited - that's stored, steal data from a base - stored, bounties and fines - stored, engineer data - stored, personal stats - stored, trade data - stored, system knowledge data - stored, active mission data - stored, commodities in your cargo hold - stored. It adds up and adds up and adds up.

Not all that hard really. Each system has a database entry in a public record, that entry has a record number so it all comes down to single numbers again. No, the modded modules don't have any real extras, it's 1, 2, or 3, in effect, less than a nibble of data to denote it's modded state. You do realise exactly how big 5mb is don't you? your Stats alone don't even come to 1mb. Also, stored cargo? Get real, two bytes (at most) for the amount and 1 byte for the record number for the cargo identifier. It's all databases and a very large majority of the data stored for your commander is purely links to database records. The biggest amount of character specific data is going to be personal stats which can all be found on the right hand panel of your ship already, I doubt that lot even amounts to 100K.

And along with that storage comes query latency, etc, etc.

Query latency? Those queries are going to take place when you use that character, not when they are sitting on a drive as raw data while you use another character. Also, a considerable number of those database entries are on your client, not on the server. Such things as cargo, module and ship descriptions and such are gleaned directly from the client to save server load. the only data that isn't stored on your client is data that could potentially lead to cheats such as module stat tables and weapon damage tables etc, that's so you can't hack the client to make your ship jump 1,000 Ly in one jump or your weapons do 1K DPS etc.

It's more complicated than just slapping an extra 500GB hard drive into your PC.

I know they use raid systems so it has a redundant disk or two as backup data but I still stand by my comment that it is nowhere near as much data as people think it is per character. Much of this data is the same as the original Elite games and we used to play them on a 512K Atari ST with a 320K floppy disk to store the saves. The only real difference now is having exploration tags (stored on the server as a public database so anyone can see who discovered that system), engineers, planetary vehicles and modded ship equipment. I know for a fact that if my entire commander save could fit on a 320K floppy disk for Frontier and First Encounter, the save data for this game isn't going to be big enough to cause that much concern. I'm talking about 5mb per save game which is 32 times more storage space than the floppy disk had.