Originally Posted by Illuminator

It seems that a lot more legit players are multiboxing than anyone might think. This here is just a brainstorm, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out what game this idea is based off of.

Imagine in EQ2 if:

1) Instead of running multiple clients on multiple expensive PC's for multiboxing with huge hardware requirements, you only had to run one client at best.
2) Instead of error-prone Alt+Tab to switch between characters, you had Ctrl+F1-6 or a command like /switchchar Illuminator that you could hotbar. Then the camera, targets, macros, inventory, and hotkeys would change.
3) You paid $15/month per character for concurrent character access. You want to 2-box? $30/month. 4-box? $60/month. Up to a set maximum (maybe 6?).
4) You wouldn't have to painfully plan out which old-style accounts had which classes, because you instead have a pool of slots to choose from, and each concurrent access would add slots to that pool.
5) To manage resources effectively, each client instance you choose to run would confine its characters to a single zone. i.e. When you switch zones, your other chars on that client instance zone with you. When you zone into a solo instance, your other characters become inactive and hide from the game until you zone out.
6) Due to the subscription cost (which is the same as it is now), plat pharmers don't get an easy-out.
7) Due to the fact that classes would retain their one-char-per-player interface, bad players don't get an easy-out.
8) Expansion pricing TBD.

Right now I'm stuck on detail #5. 32-bit consumer Windows gives each process about 2GB of its own memory space and I've seen a character on max settings have OOM errors at around 1.8GB. Running more than one zone in a client instance just can't happen and this could cause weirdness when mixing good and evil characters who call out to different cities.

However, bonus schemes like this are something I can envision as being the future of MMO's.

Originally Posted by Pinski

And you would know this?

Originally Posted by Illuminator

Addressed in detail #4. If each concurrent access gives 7 slots, then your shared pool would have 14, and your two concurrent accesses would let you use any two characters from that pool at a time, whether from the same running client or two separate ones.