There are a couple of viable routs to making OPCs viable and lucrative.

The first being that as stated before there will be plenty of downtime to level your OPCs if you have time.

Since we got the old soul you could get lucky and start with the skills you plan to use it for and use the skill ramps to quickly and easily bring up your skills on an alt account with other exp boosts.

You could also let your friends play an level up your OPCs.

You could also potentially buy an account with a young skilled OPC and never need to touch anything as your OPC is already started in your city and spec'd out to the task your want it to do that is highly efficient.

When your OPC starts to age and is unable to do the tasks you intend them to do you could in theory stagger a new OPC to become an apprentice and then learn quicker to do the same task when your other OPC reaches perma death. Either way if you have them doing a low risk task you can pretty much keep them ramping each other non stop.

Still this is a very viable solution and with already having a decent amount of sparks and souls along with the potential of staggering two opcs and the length of time between their deaths being 6 months potentially it is very easy to count it as being easily justified as low as $100 a year for 3 chars, it is quite doable for one account alongside my main.

Posted By protagonist at 11:49 PM - Thu May 31 2018

Sounds like perm OPC may be actually required in some scenario. But I'm sure there's pros and cons to doing that over using somebody you know and trust, an NPC, a random enlisted via contract system etc.

But your example SilkyBazaar got me thinking of the finer points. Take stabling, this might be best suited to an NPC rather than any of the above.

Think of the logistics. If that was player run, you'd have to keep track of whose horse is whos, what if they log off in your town and come back days later. Is a player going to remember them? You could use a contract or simple ticketing system on parchment. But you would still have to be online when they come to collect.

Much easier if devs make a mechanic NPC can use.

There should be no need for permanent OPCs. Anything NPCs can do, OPCs should be able to do, except progress skills from doing so. Fulfilling the terms of contracts that a PC has created should be possible for that PC as an OPC. It's something that NPCs will have to be able to do if they are sources of PC contracts, so the script will have to be written by SBS and should therefore be available in some form for OPCs. That's one task required for storefront management, and it's no more complex than other tasks of managing a storefront.

One way to think about PC/OPC phases for characters is as fun time (PC) versus day job (OPC). This is not exact, but is a way of viewing characters so that "always in the world" is easier to conceive of. The questions then become related to how trustworthy an OPC compared to an NPC. An OPC is not necessarily more reliable than an NPC at a day job, especially if working for someone else. If your (non-adventurer) character is in an early stage such as apprentice or novice, it will almost certainly be working for someone else. (Adventurers need another discussion, but WTF does an OPC adventurer do anyway, besides hope not to die?). Moreover, do you trust your OPC scripting more than SBS's?

Personally I think that I'll be using an alt OPC mainly to increase my alt's soul ramp just in case I am unable to use my main soul or if my main soul was stolen then I'd be able to regain it with my alt so that I wouldn't have to use an inexperienced soul. It's just too bad that an OPC can't advance the skill ramp on their own but I'd be willing to put a minimal amount of time in an OPC or I could just let somebody else play as my OPC to advance their skills.

I'm just wondering, Would I be able to have 2 active PCS on my account at the same time?

Posted By AlexGTheGamer at 08:57 AM - Thu Dec 06 2018

I'm just wondering, Would I be able to have 2 active PCS on my account at the same time?

If you mean both online at the same time, I don't think that's been determined yet. It would probably require multi-boxing, and that is not exactly being promoted by SBS. The question hinges upon whether multiple simultaneous logins on the same account will be allowed.

If you mean sparked but not online simultaneously, I would be quite surprised if that were not possible.