Indeed, some people may never meet their soulmate.

Much like on earth, perhaps my soulmate is sitting on their couch, eating out of a gallon tub of rocky road ice cream whilst crying during an episode of America's Got Talent. It'll make me sad if they never leave their house in order for our eyes to lock and feel that connection. :)

I imagine there will be more soulmates lost than found. That's what will make that bond extra special and powerful beyond any buff. Good luck finding yours!

To ease your mind, there will never be a "minebot3000" devs wouldn't approve that surname :D

That being said, it is entirely likely you will never meet your soul mate and it's designed that way. Much like the talent system, it is going to be very rare for someone to have And unlock their talent. These sorts of events are meant to be spectacular plotlines in what is to be your in-game story.

At the very least take comfort in the fact that most everyone else will be soulmateless also, and some may find their soul mate is their arch enemy, Better off no soul mate than evil twin soul mate :P

Posted By Teland at 9:55 PM - Tue Mar 05 2019

Much like on earth, perhaps my soulmate is sitting on their couch, eating out of a gallon tub of rocky road ice cream whilst crying during an episode of America's Got Talent.

I hate to disappoint you, but I don't think I'm your soulmate Teland. Sorry.

As far as never meeting your soulmate; expect not to. It's not integral to the game. It just alters your story a bit.

I think the concern of the OP was having a 0% probability with it being a non-player, not the lowball odds that are generalized. I don't think, "Oh don't worry about the glitch because it never really comes up," is a solution. This should be addressed with a real answer. 1, how is SBS going to deal with Bots and correcting the disruptions to gameplay that they might create and 2, is there going to be any active course corrections to errors that occur in the story's plot. Like, what happens to the lines of one actor if his counterpart is randomly removed from the production, mid-show?

I think one of the solutions (kind of) to bots is that you need to pay for a life. Every bot would have a real life value attached to it and the bot would need to be productive enough to profit. This being said, if a bot is productive enough to compensate it's spark of life value, there will need to be a system in place to identify and take action on these bots. SBS i believe has stated that they want players to resolve all in game conflicts, but this in my opinion is an exception and it'd likely be too costly in resources to do by hand. If an effective system is in place, the original concern shouldn't be an issue.

Nothing guarantees your soulmate will speak english either. Your soulmate could also be a player who only logs in once a month and has his OPC sitting in town most days. Part of the risk I suppose, but at least botting is going to be a bit more diminished with OPC scripts being already a thing. No need for mining bots if theres a paywall involved and your character can be scripted to mine for you while you're offline.

I honestly think each soul should be linked to three others...

Love triangles, or even squares would be rare, but the odds of a soul's match going unused is high with the current design.

Posted By KalTheo at 10:27 AM - Wed Mar 06 2019

I honestly think each soul should be linked to three others...

Love triangles, or even squares would be rare, but the odds of a soul's match going unused is high with the current design.

Why stop there? I've always thought that there was great storytelling potential regarding a love tesseract.

Posted By MatrimCauthon at 11:49 AM - Wed Mar 06 2019

Nothing guarantees your soulmate will speak english either. Your soulmate could also be a player who only logs in once a month and has his OPC sitting in town most days. Part of the risk I suppose, but at least botting is going to be a bit more diminished with OPC scripts being already a thing. No need for mining bots if theres a paywall involved and your character can be scripted to mine for you while you're offline.

I was actually thinking about this. It makes it less grindy i think. You can set your OPC to do the repetitive stuff while youre offline, but that means everyone can also do the same thing. People will still look towards bots to gather more resources to get an edge on other players if it's worth their real life dollar.

It will be very interesting to see how OPC characters interact with the world. I spent a little time on other MMO's spotting bots and reporting them (sorry but i hate the idea of programs getting you an edge instead of you actually doing the work) But spotting them seems quite a bit harder with the OPC factor.

I'm sure OPC's will be limited in what they do and if you see someone moving in perfect "programmed" movements from site to site getting resources you could 98% guarantee that it's a bot, especially if they are out in the middle of nowhere farming away, but then you could probably easily take advantage of them and kill them, take their hard earned botting loot, and it would be hard pressed to assume the bot program would know to get back to it's body through the spirit realm.
So with this, i think botting could be quite detrimental to the user more than anything. Though it is a big world... but coming back to your character being dead and all your stuff gone would be a blow to these sneaky folk.

@Vashric,

I think you are missing some of the points about OPCs. The most important is that a character cannot progress in skills while it is an OPC. The next most important is that basic boring "grind" operations to carry on everyday activities can be conducted as an OPC. If the promise of a basic set of scripts to craft, run a storefront, farm, herd animals, and respond to threats provided to all players is fulfilled, then everyone will be on an equal footing with respect to the most common bot activities.

A third point is that resource gathering will probably not be like that of previous games, visiting resource nodes in a circuit to gather the resource that spawns there regularly. Some resources will be found consistently in a single spot until they are exhausted; the duration of the exploitation may be rather long, perhaps RL years in some cases. Others will be renewable but over a longer time period and not necessarily in exactly the same spots, like wood. Still others will be grown or raised under player control, like cultivated plants and domestic animals. OPC programs in some cases will generate what look like bots, insofar as NPCs performing the same activities would look like bots, but there will be some necessary differences. Character inventories will not allow the gathering of bulky materials indefinitely, so the monopolization of a resource by one character will be very difficult. Several characters might cooperate in their activities, and keep other characters from using the resource, but that is an activity that demands coordination among characters and players in the same local area of Elyria and is an element of potential PvP that is an intention of the game's design.

Posted By Poldano at 02:48 AM - Tue Apr 16 2019

@Vashric,

I think you are missing some of the points about OPCs. The most important is that a character cannot progress in skills while it is an OPC. The next most important is that basic boring "grind" operations to carry on everyday activities can be conducted as an OPC. If the promise of a basic set of scripts to craft, run a storefront, farm, herd animals, and respond to threats provided to all players is fulfilled, then everyone will be on an equal footing with respect to the most common bot activities.

A third point is that resource gathering will probably not be like that of previous games, visiting resource nodes in a circuit to gather the resource that spawns there regularly. Some resources will be found consistently in a single spot until they are exhausted; the duration of the exploitation may be rather long, perhaps RL years in some cases. Others will be renewable but over a longer time period and not necessarily in exactly the same spots, like wood. Still others will be grown or raised under player control, like cultivated plants and domestic animals. OPC programs in some cases will generate what look like bots, insofar as NPCs performing the same activities would look like bots, but there will be some necessary differences. Character inventories will not allow the gathering of bulky materials indefinitely, so the monopolization of a resource by one character will be very difficult. Several characters might cooperate in their activities, and keep other characters from using the resource, but that is an activity that demands coordination among characters and players in the same local area of Elyria and is an element of potential PvP that is an intention of the game's design.

Oh I got that part of the OPC, but i thank you for the clarification. I wasn't knocking on the OPC part as I think the idea is great. It also seems to give people who can't spend every waking moment on the game to continue to advance their world even when they can't be on the game. I was more just slowly getting to the fact that the BOT programs would have to be quite advanced for this game. So i agree with you with the resource part of your statement. I love the finite system as well, the fact that nodes will not just 'spawn' back into place really screws up any botting program.
So really I guess what i was getting to it my statement was that this game has a great potential to stop a lot of the morons who run bots as it would not be as fruitful like in other games.
Either way, just like everyone else it seems, I'm more than excited to get into this game and see all it's potentials.

Also I think I didn't help with this thread going way off topic, as it was mainly about soulmates and bots. Sorry about that.

Vashric