Thread: Suggestion: remove Lottery eligibility for locked-out chars

Right now I have a Minstrel that's locked out (7th character when I was VIP, only 6 slots active now). He still appears on all the lotteries, though, even though he hasnt been played (or even logged in, naturally) for a long long time now, several months at least.

Its rather annoying having to manually remove him from my semi-weekly Lottery entries. I feel bad entering him, knowing if he did win, the items would poof long before I ever reactivated him, and thus some other active player might lose out, but it does increase my click-load...

Plus, I imagine there's lots of players who dont really care about that, and just enter every character for every lottery regardless of if they actually can collect the winnings.

Suggestion: Uncheck the box

I suspect the intention is to entice you even more to unlock the character.

Suggestion: Remove F2P and Premium players from Lottery.

Originally Posted by Hayley

Suggestion: Remove F2P and Premium players from Lottery.

Why? When premium players may pay even more than VIP players in any given period that'd be absurd.

The lottery system has always been blind to account status, and I dont see any reason Turbine would change that, nor do I desire them to.

That's true, F2P accounts must be out from lotteries at least

Originally Posted by Hayley

That's true, F2P accounts must be out from lotteries at least

Why would they do that? Many lotteries contain 'promotional' store articles. If they would entice one F2P player to make his/her life easier and buy more of those extras with purchased TP... and so make it a premium player, they make a profit. A pure F2P player is very strapped for TP. Every quest pack and unlock bought is a grind. They normally don't have TP for 'advantages'. Some of them play this way due to necessity (they are not allowed to spend money for various reasons), some for sports. I know both kinds. I'm not very familiar with two other F2P player categories I think exist; the super-casual and the new-to-lotro. If they actually took the time to research this game so far that they found the Forums and the Lotteries; let them have a go. They are prime candidates for premium status anyways.

Disclaimer: I have a lifetime and a premium account

I'd be all for locked-out characters being ineligible for lotteries; I'm usually a VIP player but lately I've been strapped for cash and had to swap over to F2P for a while. I ended up with extra characters beyond the character limit on two of the three servers I play on (yup, alt-o-holic) and it got very tiresome unchecking them all the time, since I'd hate for them to win stuff and have it rot when someone else could have won and used it.

I've also now pretty much stopped playing on the third server I was on, but the eligible characters there are still showing up for lotteries, so I'm having to uncheck all those ones as well.

Actually, what I'd really love is if on the "My Character Settings" page I had a "Lotteries" columns that allowed me to toggle on and off which characters I wanted to show up in the Lottery Widget for entry. So those ones I'm currently not playing I could switch off, and not have to be manually unclicking their names several times a week.

Theoretically, if you don't log on to a character for long enough, updates to my.lotro.com are supposed to stop for that character, making it ineligible to enter in the lotteries.

I'm not sure how long it takes for this to happen, but if it's working correctly, your suggestion seems to have already been implemented.

The big problem is that the character database on the web servers is not in sync with the character database on the game servers. All of the following problems exist:

1) Character has not exported to the web site. You can not enter a lottery.

2) Character level on the web site is lower than the real level. You can not enter a really good lottery like the level capped character lotteries with your 75.

3) Character exists on the web site. You can enter a lottery. The character has been deleted. All winnings are returned to the prize vault.

4) Character can not be logged in. You can enter a lottery. All winnings are returned to the prize vault. Character is locked when customer dropped to premium.

Maybe some day Turbine will improve the web site features that they are more accurate and up to date. In the mean time if you got characters that can not receive their winnings - you have to remember to not enter them.

Originally Posted by Fredelas

Theoretically, if you don't log on to a character for long enough, updates to my.lotro.com are supposed to stop for that character, making it ineligible to enter in the lotteries.

I'm not sure how long it takes for this to happen, but if it's working correctly, your suggestion seems to have already been implemented.

Nope. I have a character that I deleted more than a year ago and he still shows up as eligible for the lotteries.

What they really need to do is put an extra checkbox on the character options list that allows you to disable lotteries for a specific character. Then we could just remove the ones we don't want entering the lotteries one time and never see them appear again. This would be good for when you stop playing on a server for example but don't want to delete the characters there yet.

I have one character on one server that I deleted months ago that still shows up on some lottos, while the characters on another server that I actually play are kept up to date and there levels are usually correct. Even my current main who is getting 1 or 2 levels a day.