Character rebirth feature

Diablo III players will know what I'm talking about. A short explanation for the others:

Diablo III has a feature that allows you to move an off-season character (in PoE terms: standard character) into the current season (league). The character is reset to level 1 and all equipment and inventory contents are removed and sent via in-game mail to any remaining off-season characters. Statistics such as the amount of time spent playing that character is retained. I also find deleting a character terribly rude so this offers a nicer alternative.

Can we have this in PoE as well? The item transfer could be implemented with a remove-only stash tab. The potential loophole of extending one's stash space with remove-only tabs can be combated by setting a limit on the number of characters that can be rebirthed per season. Or if it still seems singificant enough for players who only have the default four stash tabs, simply require the character to be stripped of all equipment before being reborn.

I don’t understand - what’s the benefit of this feature? Just being able to use the same character name every league? If you care about that you can delete the Standard character then quickly make a new one with the same name (odds are astronomically low someone else would coincidentally grab it within a 5 min window).

Other than that there’s zero reason to do this over creating a brand new character.

The only reason I could see for a feature like this is to save yourself from
Putting on MTX, Name selection, and character deletion.

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demon9675 wrote:

Other than that there’s zero reason to do this over creating a brand new character.

I am struggling to find other benefits to something like this, if anything it makes remove-only tabs after a league ends even more of a nightmare.

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MrTremere wrote:

That being said, such a feature could be useful for the many ears achievement.

That's actually a good point there.

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demon9675 wrote:

I don’t understand - what’s the benefit of this feature? Just being able to use the same character name every league? If you care about that you can delete the Standard character then quickly make a new one with the same name (odds are astronomically low someone else would coincidentally grab it within a 5 min window).

Other than that there’s zero reason to do this over creating a brand new character.

The point is that it's much quicker and easier and eliminates even that small chance of someone snatching your name. Yes, you can certainly delete a character manually, but removing all the items from the character, deleting the character, making a new one, and reapplying all the MTX is a lot of clicking. A rebirth feature would simplify that down to a single click. It's exactly the kind of tedious task that computers are great at automating.

That said, I don't see it happening in PoE. GGG wants the game to be 'old-school', i.e. deliberately designed to be clunky and to waste your time with needless clicking (e.g. having to click each currency orb individually to pick it up instead of vacuuming them up automatically), so this kind of quality-of-life feature is not even way down on the priority list, it's something they actively want to avoid.

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MrTremere wrote:

Items on character need to be deleted for the suggestion to work : if not, players are going to abuse the feature to create more stash space through remove-only tabs.

One rebirth per character per league solves that pretty handily. And/or, impose a maximum of one rebirth tab. Can't rebirth another character until there's enough space in the rebirth tab to contain that character's items. Hell, it doesn't even need to use remove-only tabs at all. Rebirth could only be available if you have a premium tab named Rebirth to contain the character's items. There's plenty of ways to tackle this, it took me like two minutes to come up with these three.

Sounds like a waste of development time. Especially considering this game has no mail feature (and should not have, Blizzard mail is basically endless space).

Blizzard mail may have endless capacity but it also has limited duration. Since you can only transfer 30-74 items (depending on their size and whether you have a character that can equip them) to mail at once and you have a maximum of three rebirths available per season, this puts a pretty hard limit to using it as additional item storage. I honestly don't think being able to create 2-3 extra remove-only stash tabs per league is an issue compared to how many tabs get created in the stash merge when the league ends.

As has been said, the rebirth feature could retain all of the character state that does not affect stats or gameplay: /age, /played, /deaths (bonus points for separate counters in the current league), equipped MTX, NPC conversation state.

This one is just a personal oddity, but I also get attached to my characters and feel bad for deleting them. A rebirth feature would let me bypass clicking the delete button.

I don't know if it would be such a big development effort. They already have a way to move characters from temporary leagues to permanent ones and from hardcore to standard, so why not the other way?

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Frostride wrote:

Blizzard mail is basically endless space

And having unlimited storage space is bad because......?

In my opinion, this idea makes no sense. It will never be introduced, but not because it does not make sense, just because it has no business sense. From GGG's point of view, players should create as many characters as possible, because you have to pay to create a character that exceeds the official limit. Introducing the possibility of an easier "reset" and transfer of the old character to the new league may cause a drop in income, which is why there is no chance for it. Well, unless such an operation would be payable :P