I agree that something needs to be done to ease the pain of the paying/paid subscriber who has several toons. I have 15 myself of varying races and career paths but I have played the game for three years too. I only buy c-store ships because of the account wide unlock. I have only done rep on two characters so far because I'm also leveling a starbase and embassy. We are a two man fleet with 30 toons at SB tier 3 and Embassy tier 2. I also am using resources to then to buy fleet weapons and gear for my crews which honestly is better than anything else you can buy in game. There really isn't time to earn rep and gear for alts which is a shame considering the added revenue that could be had for cryptic by making it account wide and selling subs and/or character unlocks. I think account wide unlocks would benefit the sale of other c-store items as well. I do see how having one character for a F2P person sounds just fine because it is much easier to furnish one character but you miss out on the multitude of other traits and career options out there that totally change the game play. I prefer to have the full immersion in the game experience with the costumes, ships, play styles, etc. No two characters/toons are truly alike and so I like having my LTS and all its perks.

But it's still the same character. I want different characters, different races, different classe, etc., and the ability to choose which one I'm playing at a given time.

Some of us like creating characters and backstories and the like. I realize that there are players who enjoy playing one character period; many players do not. I wouldn't play an MMO that only allowed one character.

I'm operating under the assumption that there will be multiple Reps over time and that I can't max out every toon in every Rep. I don't even want to try.

Heck, I don't even want to try to get one character maxed out in every Rep.

So, when there are more Reps available, different toons will specialize in different Reps. IDIC.

That said, getting to T1 or T2 should be in reach for most alts in many of the Reps. At the moment I have 5 max-level characters and only two Reps to worry about so the ones that aren't T2 yet probably will be.

I've always had a bad case of alt-itis

I tend to play more characters and have fewer that actually max out.

If we could get the rep xp itself account-unlocked, I would be fine with having to grind for equipment alone on each alt.

Works for me.

I have 10 toons right now, all offer a diffrent playstyle, 9 of them still need to make it to tier 5 Omega.

You don't need 2 computers, the launcher will allow you to run multiple instances of STO side-by-side if you have multiple accounts.

Most games are like this actually, alt-tab multi-boxing on EvE is even pretty much encouraged.

I think you should really have to grind every toon up to tier 5 rep because it proves that character is ready to run STFs or Roms missions whatever. Only thing i think would be nice is when a toon hits Tier 5 that toon should be unlocked to recieve marks from any other toons on the account. This would help you get your high costing mark items faster for the Tier 5 toons that have already put all the work in getting up to Tier 5 status.

I have 16 characters, 9 Fed & 7 KDF.

I play each of them from time to time when i play STO, but honestly a big part of the reason i don't play as much is that the game is anti-alt.

As for hwy i have so many. Different races, ships, builds, and I made alts over they years because there wasn't much else to do.