I do really like the new warband character select screen. No complaints on look and feel from what I’ve seen so far. However, I have a practical challenge with it. We let our youngest play on my wife’s account since they are too young to have their own. We use different servers to differentiate between my wife’s toons and our child’s toons, so having the two different / separated character select screens is a really nice thing. The combined warband char select screen tosses a bit of a wrench into this method of organization.
I’m not sure how we’ll handle the warband bank for this use case as well. Giving my child direct access to my wife’s bank items will be an interesting challenge. We’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there I suppose.
Do you think they’ll have options for these things for parents who have to share accounts with younger children until they get old enough?
So, first of all, if it’s financially tenable, it’s probably better to set up a seperate Battle.net account for your kid. (It would be in your wife’s name.) It will make things less painful when they are old enough for their own account. When they are old enough, the account can be swapped over to them.
But, yes, some options for the Warband bank and Character Select screen would be nice — and not just for people with young kids who play on their account. (I’m thinking of the nightmare/confusion of all my character on different servers with the same name.) Different bank groups would also be nice as I might want to control which characters share with each other for RP reasons.
That’s definitely the long term plan. But they have multiple characters on my wife’s account so I’ll need to figure out how to best get those moved over to a different account if I did that. I’ve been looking into it but the online support docs generally leave more questions than answers.
As long as both Battle.net accounts are under the same name, you should be able to transfer characters between them. The main issue is that any account bound stuff with stay with the original account, so mounts/pets/transmogs ect will all need to be recollected. (Although at least with pets, some of them can be caged and traded.) But, that day of reckoning will come eventually anyway unless the kid stops playing WoW entirely, so it’s probably easier if it happens earlier rather than later.
My understanding is that if the child and parent have the same last name, it’s pretty easy to just change the first name when they turn 18. (Otherwise, it requires a ticket and submitting some supporting documentation to get the name changed — to prove it’s really a transfer of parent to child and not someone trying to sell an account.)
If it’s something you want to look into more, you can try posting in the customer support forum with any specific questions.