So like many other members here, I have recently been playing XCOM 2 quite a lot. As many of you already know, XCOM 2 allows players to save characters to a "character pool," allowing them to appear randomly in any future playthroughs in place of a randomly generated character, for as long as that option is enabled and the character in question exists within the pool itself. What you might not know is that this character pool also allows you to import characters within it into folders which can then be copied, shared, and used on another machine. It's not hard, but it requires you to know how to find these folders; on that note, you can find an article explaining the process here, as well as a video demonstrating it here.

Now, I know that I'm not the only one here who has been playing XCOM 2. The reason I'm bringing this up is because I got to thinking that maybe those of us who have been playing it might be interested in sharing characters with each other. If that's the case, the group could host a thread for members interested in doing so. If nothing else, it might at least encourage a little more activity in the group again.

Obviously, such a thread would be ripe for abuse in the same way any thread focused on file-sharing would, so there would need to be rules, guidelines, and some degree of moderation. More than that, I'm not actually certain what the site's rules for such threads are. It could be I overlooked it, but I couldn't find anything on it when I checked. It may be that the idea simply isn't in line with site guidelines, but I can't say for certain. Do let me know if you have an answer to that.

All that out of the way, what do you lot think? Should there be an official thread for character pool sharing, or is this something better left to sharing among friends?

I'm in!

Sounds interesting.

Though, I do assume we'll either use self-inserts or OC characters. I might find it more interesting if we are limited to either ourselves or OCs we have made. Using characters that already exist does kinda ruin the kinda, to me at least, as many are readily available online.

Perhaps some rules regarding how many character per member? like, only one sefl-insert and one OC. Or can use multiple OCs but no AU of the same OC. Or we alloy multiple SI by making AU versions of them.... I'm getting too technicall here, aren't I? Proves I'm interested at least!

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First off, thanks for the input. I honestly wasn't certain there would be any responses at all, so I appreciate you lot taking the time to do so.

Just in case it's not entirely clear what exactly I'm suggesting, what I had in mind was a sort of master thread where members could post information regarding the character pool they wanted to share, using the game's importable folders, not sharing individual characters. I'm not sure whether or not a limit would be necessary, but it would definitely be ideal if submissions included an estimate or total of characters in the folder. I also don't see a particular need to restrict certain types of characters at the moment, given it's a fairly simple matter to delete unwanted characters from your active pool while retaining them in the original folder. It seems to me as though it'd be pretty easy to control exactly which characters actually appear in your games. If there's something I'm not considering here, though, do point it out. There would, however, need to be rules regarding mod content in these pools; certain mods can make an importable character pool effectively useless.

The main idea, of course, is to give members of the group an opportunity to get some fresh faces in their pool while also potentially encouraging a bit more interaction between them. I don't know about you lot, but sometimes I get just a little bit tired of seeing the same soldiers every time I start a campaign, so I thought this might be a good way to get some new characters in there without just switching to random-only character generation for a bit.