Ok, first off, yes, I know I can get more slots by getting a second account. Yes, I know I can get more slots by deleting characters. But, I have no interest in deleting characters I’ve played on and off for over a decade and I’m not going to play $15 more a month for a couple of character slots. And yeah, that makes me SOL as things currently stand. I just don’t think that needs to be the case.
What I think would be good is for Blizz to offer maybe 20 more purchasable character slots to an account. They could be sold one at a time or discounted in blocks of 10 or all 20 in one go. I don’t know how much a single slot would go for, but I can’t see paying more than $10 for one. I’m sure there are plenty of players, like myself, who will never spend the money for a second account no matter how much they want some more character slots but will pay a one time fee to get a few more. It’s up to Blizz to decide of they want that money or not, I guess.
Giving us the option to buy up to 20 more slots per account really doesn’t seem to outlandish for a game some of us have been playing for 15 years that has, currently, 23 races and 12 classes. Honestly, I think the 50 cap should just be raised for free, but we know that won’t happen. Also, capping the additional slots at 20 means there’s still a reason to have multiple accounts for people who want more than 20 more characters.
Another related alternative idea was to add a kind of void storage for characters. Something that costs a lot of gold to use and limits how often you can add or remove characters from it. This would be a way to store characters you aren’t currently playing but don’t want to delete either for sentimental reasons or because you think you might play them again someday. Once in storage they wouldn’t count toward the 50 cap, though you’d have to add one to storage if you wanted to get one out if you had 50 active characters.
Basically, even though I’m not actively playing 50 characters, I’m butting up against the limit because I’ve been at this for 15 years and the game keeps adding new races and classes I want to play, and I also don’t want to delete my old characters because I spent a lot of time on them and in many cases I’ve gone back to characters I put on the shelf for years.
This game is making it’s way to the Perfect World business model for their games at a nice pace. Pretty soon you’ll see posts asking for gambling lock boxes and Activision/Blizzard suits will start drooling.
I support the idea. I don’t really have a problem deleting characters but I haven’t reached the cap on my account with important toons yet. But I’ve always had a little quaint idea of being the ultimate character collector and having a character for every race/gender/class/and spec that is possible.
This isn’t a F2P game. Please stop giving them bad ideas. If enough people start hitting the cap due to ARs hopefully they’ll raise it but we don’t need crap like that in the shop.
I hope they read your thread and determine the right course of action to take.
I don’t personally think we would need this feature, but if they look and see that there’s enough people who have the same issue that you’re having then I don’t see why not.
If we didn’t already start with 50 slots I’d be against paid character slots. 50 slots is WAY more than most players would need, so extra slots beyond that 50 is a cost most players will never have to see. For Altoholics though, several bucks for an additional slot would be a god send.
The incentive should be having people to continue to play their game. I could see having this type of thing in a F2P or B2P but not in a sub-based model. The world is not perfect and neither is the state of WoW. Only Blizzard knows if it would be worth milking a few whales or just raising the cap for free.
You’d have a point if we started with only 1 or just a few character slots. At 50 slots starting, 99.9% of players wouldn’t even be tempted to buy additional character slots. The premise of the mobile micro transactions is to limit resources to such an extent that it makes it enticing to pay for additional resources to a broader set of the market than this character slot issue would affect.
Normally the pricing in F2P and B2P games are very cheap. They want you to buy a lot, with cheap prices you don’t see the amount spend as fast. You see the same thing with games like Candy Crush or Homescapes. The other thing is you are assuming a super cheap price and bundling for character slots. If anything I can see Blizzard selling one slot for $2.99 - $4.99. So those 10 slots you want will cost you.
The other thing to take into account is gold for B-net balance. This would drive the market for the token up even more. Which would make items cost more in the game as well.
Hmm, I want to say in GW2 (which is B2P) you start with 4 character slots and have the buy the rest.
But, yeah, exactly my point.