It doesn’t, you can respec it & change it to one of the 3 your base class has access to.
Yeah, after I posted I checked and saw that you can. But I had a feeling you cannot, so maybe you couldn’t at first and they changed it later? I don’t see many situations where you need to respec ascendancies anyway. Most of the time it’s just a lot cheaper to make a new char.
Either way, it’s not important. As I said, I don’t really have an opinion on mastery respec and I’m fine with it either way. And it doesn’t really have to do with what we’re discussing in this thread.
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Just make mastery re-spec have diminishing returns. You lose 1 off your skill max level, and 5 passive points – permanently – each time you re-spec your mastery.
While it’s true that usually the last few points aren’t too relevant, I still don’t agree with crippling the character on respec. I don’t really care for mastery respec, but I think it should just have some high cost, either in materials/currency or in time (re: my suggestion in the other thread).
This forum needs a sarcasm tag…
It was more a snarky response to the “oh muh gard, playing teg game iz such a chore, letz me doo everyting wif won characktur!” gripe we get on this issue.
Mainly because I tire of the “It would just turn the game into a Respec Simulator™” canned response…
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My bad 
And yeah, sometimes it does need it. It’s hard to convey tone in written form and I’ve seen pretty much all kinds of responses that it doesn’t surprise me when people say dumb things seriously 
Personally, I think that if we had free mastery respec available, most players would still not use it, or just use it occasionally. I don’t think it’s much of an issue either way. I don’t think we’d end up with either “Do everything with one char” nor with “Respec Simulator”. A very small number would probably do that, but that would be negligible.
If the internet is any indication of how this would go down I think what would happen is at first (new) players will constantly abuse it. Respecing every time there’s a new wind that blows with a build. But then after a dozen or so of those, they get tired of doing that and start a new character. Then they repeat the initial abuse of the respec with that character a while.
Eventually they’ll have a dedicated character for each mastery and they’ll stop using the mastery respec feature and EHG will be: 
(insert sarcasm tag)
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This is actually why I hope the online character limit goes away – entirely. I want to try out different builds. I want to start the character from lvl 1, and I don’t necessarily want to be forced to delete existing characters to do so.
That would be nice, but it will never happen because of technical/performance issues. Much like tabs aren’t infinite, they just have a high number. You might increase the character limit a lot, but never get rid of it.
EDIT: Personally, I’d raise the limit to 45. That would give you 2 chars per mastery for legacy, plus 1 char per mastery for the current cycle. That would be more than enough for me, especially considering that some masteries for me will only have 1 char total, if that many, and I’m not likely to have more than 4-5 chars in a cycle.
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I’m not sure how it’s a technical/performance issue, and not just a storage issue. It’s not like if I have 100 characters, I can have 100 characters logged in at the same time. Otherwise they’d also have to limit the number of players who could have accounts… because 1000 players with 20 characters would bog the game down more than 100 players with 100 characters.
I mean, I guess if they were using Excel or Access as their backend… but I doubt we’re going to see the same traffic as say… World of Warcraft, where we’d have 10 million players creating unlimited characters.
Edit: I guess there could be issues with the character selector at login, but can’t see how this would have any effect in-game other than that being a little laggy if you started getting more than 50 or so characters. I think Grim Dawn has a 50 character limit for Steam Cloud saves. But don’t know if this is a limitation from Steam on their provided storage, or based on something else by Crate.
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It’s a technical/performance issue because, for example, of the loading screen, where you select the char you want to use. There’s a query running that will get all your chars and all the relevant info for each char, like gear (which shows on the model preview), skills, skill points, passives, stats, etc. If there are thousands of people making the same query you can reasonably expect that a certain point the DB will just lock.
Not to mention we might, at some point, get an account info on the site, like PoE does, with the same thing. And possibly some api that returns the same info.
As I mentioned, it’s not just you that’s making that query, it’s thousands of concurrent players. So performance issues are very much a concern in this case, much more so than the limit of the stash tabs.
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I mean, yeah. If there’s a 3 year old maintaining the DB… or it’s being run out of Excel. Even MS SQL could handle this, unless we’re talking millions of concurrent users trying to access 1000s of characters…
But aside from the outrageous technical limitations that would make this an issue. The only reasons these limitations are usually placed are: a) data storage costs or b) plans to have additional slots sold in a cash shop (which, by the way, negates the technical/performance limitation thing) 
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If the only thing that was occurring was this query, then yes. I’d agree with you. But it isn’t. There are constantly thousands (when the game goes live, presumably even millions) of calls being made all the time. SQL queries, API calls, etc. People are looking at the stash, people are loading areas, people are writing on the chat. Even just combat will cause lots of calls. All of that will affect performance unless you place limits on it.
Which is why the stash isn’t actually infinite but limited to something like 200 tabs (I think I’ve read somewhere about this, or saw it on a Mike stream).
And why all live service RPGs and MMOs have an account limit, whether it’s a higher or lower number, along with other limitations (like PoE limiting the amount of times you can search trade in a certain amount of time).
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The query is going to have pretty much the same execution overhead, regardless. The # of characters the player has wouldn’t limit the scope of any query against the DB. The only real significant thing that would change would be the amount of data being returned to the client to cache/render the character models, and generate the character list. Of course, this would also pale in significance to any SQL/API call overhead being made by a character simply walking in town, with other characters (multiplayer) being present.
I mean, sure. If you think a player is going to create enough characters to equal the possible 200x(stash grid size) worth of characters… then sure. Otherwise this is saying we can’t have skateboards on public streets because a rocket can travel 1500 km/h, and that is just too dangerous.
I’m sure development companies have their reasons for this, and they probably even vary…I mean, I can set every database field to be NVARCHAR(MAX), but why should I do that for a field, if I know it won’t realistically ever exceed 20 characters? Coincidentally, why would a developer allow unlimited slots, if his game only had 5 classes to pick from? If there was some magical performance degradation from the amount of characters an account was allowed to create, we’d probably also see that limit carved in stone, from game-to-game. Not some games have it, plus you can spend $$$ to get more. I mean, why should the rest of the player base have to suffer lag, because Johnny Fat-Pockets decided to buy an additional 20 character slots? Unless performance hits were deemed acceptable, as long as cash monies was involved :\
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Not really. Not every game company has the same resources. I doubt EHG has the same server capacity that GGG has at this point, or that Blizzard can muster. So performance issues are much more important to EHG than to others. What we do see is that there is no live service game lets you have infinite characters. Even the ones that let you buy slots for money usually have something like 20 free + 10 bought or some such numbers.
I mean, I don’t know how EHG implemented the game, but it’s not hard to imagine that you have a query for your character list, with gear and some info, and then you have API calls for each piece of gear so it can render them. So 1 char would have 10 API calls or whatever, 10 chars would have 100, etc. So the overhead would actually add up.
Not to mention that, individually, pretty much any operation has a small overhead when compared to the total amount of operations occuring. Which is why you need to limit many of them so they don’t get out of hand.
Well, 1- if there was no limit to chars you can be sure there would be a bunch of people with 200+ chars over time. Just consider the seasonal players that don’t play standard and don’t even open their characters anymore. If there was no limit, they would never bother deleting older chars.
and 2- That example is just absurd. Even for a hyperbole. The closest analogy would actually be speed limits. There are many roads and highways where you could drive a lot faster, but you impose limits. There are even many countries that impose different speed limits for different vehicles. Trucks are required to drive slower than other cars.
Does it stop crashes or congestions? No. Does it help stopping crashes? Absolutely.
And as for the overhead: Mike himself has said that MP towns are 100% a performance issue. Yet, by your logic, the overhead is quite small. There should be no need for that. But the fact is that all the small overheads do add up and they need to be reigned in.
Anyway, I think we hijacked this thread enough (yet again) and I don’t think Mike would enjoy splitting this thread (yet again)
No, it’s awesome, I want to see it.
Actually, I kinda did, the opening scene of The Boys episode 1. splat
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