Other Chars As Heroes

I know its come up before but don't close this thread until you hear me out. The other threads aren't clear and concise this one needs to be. We've seen the system now with adding heroes to your party, why can't your own characters just be in that list?

The only complications are their level so either:
1. Make them the level of character you are playing when they enter party (and reset attributes).
2. The easier route, make a quest that becomes available at level 20 that unlocks this feature.

This is something I see as simple to say the least. Just sign it, bump it, Anet you've done well listening to us, if you could squeeze this in before Nightfall it would add some really good replayability and fun possibilities.

All armor, weapons, and skills are taken care of, whats the big deal?

Your heroes will presumably be stored as part of your character's "inventory" on the server - which in programming terms should involve nothing more than a chunk of data attached to the character file. To access your other characters, though, they'd have to send a separate request to the char server. For all I know, that may be doable in the long term, but it certainly isn't between now and Nightfall's release. Two reasons I can think of:

(1) Messing with character requests opens up a million potential bug situations, especially if the system wasn't designed to accept multiple requests simultaneously from the same client. Characters getting their stats messed with, characters losing pets, characters getting overwritten are all possibilities that would result in some seriously bad press for ANet.

(2) Character requests are presumably very secure to prevent cheating - wrongful access could mean people artifically boosting levels, unlocks, gear or whatever. It's quite possible that making your characters available as heroes could compromise that security.

Well.. the pointers to the heroes memory storage points to a different class of data... A characters class has many more fields in it and as such as a programmer with the way the system is currently designed, I can see the problem that can arise with duping.... Its a matter of taking a weapon from a hero, logging out.. going to that characters inventory and putting that weapon back in storage, then logging back onto the other character and putting the weapon back on the hero screen... the inventories are not part of the heroes class structure as it stands now, and there is the problem... If that is updated then it would work. But that would take some time to do to reprogram the class structure of heroes data.

I could illustrate it more, but basically its a matter of reprogramming the data structure of the heroes in order to secure against item duping... that's all. And that Could happen eventually, but not immediately...

And your also right in that pushing a character class into a heroes class could potentially wipe data from non overlapping fields depending on how they join the data tables on the main screen... so that would not be good either... the only way I can see it work is to copy the relevant fields from the character class, which means the heroes is a copy of a character not a direct link to it. and again Duping becomes a problem with that... So for at least the time being It can't happen the way it is currently designed.

A hero is someone you look up to, a mentor. My thoughts are not trying to powerlevel a new character, its being done all the time anyway.

If a friend needs help and needs a monk to join party, and I have a monk but don't have it on map yet, I would have to run monk to that mission. If you had 7 characters you would have to run that same quest 7 times just to keep them up with the others. Some quests or missions can take an hour or more to do. If there are 1 million people playing, a million hours for one character to do mission on average. That's 7 million hours to complete 7 character for one mission. If I could take 3 or 4 of my own and run this mission I would only have to run mission twice. I would not have to log out to swap items from inventory.

I'm not a programmer and don't know what all is needed to make this happen.

(A hero is someone who helps someone in need.)

But if they did implement this, how do you think it would affect the community? Nothing good would come out of this. I mean, there's already loads of bad healers, nukers, tanks, ... If pople can't learn to play a class by the time they beat the game and after it - how on Earth would they learn to play them if they could simply run them all together? I shudder to think.

Wow I never knew we had so many anet programmers on these forums.

IMO it's not happening for the same reason you cannot access the inventory of your heroes, it would be stupid if you could farm an area with 3 bots, but get all the rewards as if you were solo-farming...

Also if you played the preview some parts of the story are about the heroes, e.g. you need to take certain heroes on certain missions. Wouldn't work with other characters.

It's not about farming or having bad heros. It's about the time devoted to the game. I guess some people have nothing better to do, this is OK. I enjoy this game. This is one of the games that has held my interest for more than 2 weeks, and I have played my share of them. But devoting 5 or 8 hours a day to keep all character updated, is time consuming and can get boring to me.
Enjoy the game in your own way.

(Be a hero good or bad.)

It is all about devotion to the game and devotion to buying new chapters for it. If "5 or 8 hours a day" is too much for you - do as I and countless others do - devote yourself to only one character. Or two.