Thought I'd post this since people continue to bitch about rolling stats. Unfortunately they have somewhat of a point. There seem to be four types of players when it comes to stats.

1. Players who accept massively suboptimal stats because they don't know any better. These are usually extremely new players.

2. Players who accept massively suboptimal stats because they want a challenge or some angle to role-play.

3. Players who take the best stats they can get in some reasonable period of manual rolling (maybe 5 minutes). This usually gets them MAX-2 or MAX-3.

4. Players who use rollers and insist on perfect or near-perfect stats, possibly rolling for multiple hours.

#1 punishes new players for their ignorance. #4 punishes non-obsessive players for their unwillingness to automate. #4 also uses bandwidth use that might be better allocated elsewhere.

As a solution some have suggested every character be given perfect stats automatically. I don't like this as it removes all variability from characters' stats. Instead I propose the following:

There will be one "stat generation" per {net designation} per {unit time}. Net designation is either address or subnet. Unit time is either "hour" or "day", depending on how strict you want to be. Character creation resembles the current method, but with a few key changes.

A) Stat generation becomes the very last step in creating a character. All other choices preceed stat generation. Once a set of stats is generated the user must choose to either create the character or disconnect and wait the requisite amount of time before attempting to create another character.

B) Stats are generated in a single step rather than being generated multiple times within a given session. They will not be perfect, but will resemble the stats typically chosen by type #3 players above. That is to say somewhere in the MAX-1, MAX-2, MAX-3 range. The goal is that they resemble what a normal player would get if he used the current system and rolled manually for about 5 minutes.

C) When he is shown prospective stats the user is also given a reference point from which to evaluate them. i.e. he is given the max rollable value for each stat. Currently this is easy to reverse engineer using a fairly small number of rolls. Since the new method doesn't allow generating multiple sets of stats, providing a reference point is only fair. Otherwise the first-time player has absolutely no context within which to evaluate a given set of stats.

D) Prior to stat generation the player is given the choice to alter any of his previous choices (race, class, alignment, etc.) in order to ensure that his session isn't wasted because of some errant keystroke.

Advantages:

1) Ignorance doesn't shaft new players. Their stats will be similar (though not identical) to other characters of the same race/class.

2) Less load (cpu and bandwidth) on CF's servers.

3) Character creation time is reduced for those players who currently roll manually since they no longer have to roll.

4) Stats in the new system resemble stats received in the current system by players who act in "good faith" according to the staff's suggestions concerning rolling.

5) More difficult to gain an advantage via automation (rollers).

6) Less incentive for low-ranking characters to delete and re-roll after their first death, since in many cases that will require waiting several hours.

Disadvantages:

1) Much harder to get perfect stats. (Some will consider this a disadvantage, others an advantage.)

2) Less flexible. A player can't create a character then change his mind and immediately create something else.

3) Using subnet for net designation could penalize players who share a subnet with other players. The effect should be very minor, though, as character creation is a relatively infrequent event. Using IP address would allow dial-in customers to circumvent the time restriction by reconneting to their ISP. However, that effort may itself be sufficient deterrent.