EDIT - Placing what I anticipate being my last post in this thread here for easier viewing.
This topic has gone through about an 8-hour period where responses have died down. So, I am going to assume this thread has run its course and present somewhat of a summary - in the off-chance that some poor developer is forced to read the forums and comes across this post. Naturally, if the conversation picks back up, then I will continue to participate.
SUGGESTION SUMMARY
There is some support for Blizzard to increase the number of character slots a single account can contain. The methods by which this could be accomplished is as follows:
- WoW Token. The WoW Token would be utilized to unlock more character slots. As far as how many character slots a WoW Token would unlock, obviously, this would be a decision for the WoW Team.
- Achievement. The player would be able to âearnâ additional slots by reaching specific levels on a character. In some of the examples used, leveling a character to 70 would unlock an additional character slot.
- Account Age. In addition to the base 65 characters, accounts would be awarded additional character slots based on the number of years that this account has had an active subscription. For example, if the reward rate is 10 character slots per year, then a 15-year-old account would have 65 + 15*10 character slots (for a total of 215 character slots).
- Blanket Increase. According to some within this thread, there should be an overall total increase of character slots with no strings attached. Given the nature of bi-yearly expansion costs, monthly subscriptions, paid boosting services, and a Blizzard store more detailed than some talent trees, I do believe there is merit to this line of reasoning. However, I presented this thread as someone willing to purchase WoW Tokens to sort of demonstrate the earnestness of my request / suggestion.
- Higher-Tier Subscription. This one is rather straight-forward. Higher-tier subscription rewards more character slots. I have not had a chance to deep-dive this, but Silverleigh has a few posts about it within this thread.
DETAILS OF REQUEST
At the end of the day, an MMO is a game designed to be played in an infinite number of ways, with no single goal in mind. There are obvious mainstream objectives such as gearing up oneâs own character, but, at the end of the day, as long as a person is enjoying the game, then there is a degree of success for the developer and the player. I donât believe providing a full list of ways to enjoy WoW is necessary, but I believe we could all agree that the ways are endless.
Similarly, some players still enjoy the repeated adventure of leveling up a character. This is their personal spin of having fun in WoW. For them, unfortunately, this comes to an end when they need to delete a character in order to continue their adventure. While owning a 2nd account is an option for some, many people prefer to simply have everything on 1 account. Monetarily speaking, there may be an untapped market of people who are unwilling to purchase a 2nd subscription, but they would be willing to make a 1-time purchase of a WoW Token.
While this only affects a very small percentage of the community, I believe this could be a blessing and curse. The inclusion of something like the WoW Token would force people to âput their money where their mouth isâ so to speak. It would also provide a built-in soft cap by limiting people based on the personal funds someone is willing to put into their account. This, in turn, would yield a negligible to minimal impact to the WoW Token prices and server loads (especially if purchases incurred a 2-week cooldown).
OPPOSITIONAL OPINION SUMMARY
As a whole, nothing substantial was brought up as a concern as far as negative impacts to the community. I have presented a list of repeated complaint summaries below.
It is also noteworthy, when pushed, most individuals quickly devolved to personal insults, the insistence to detract from the topic, announcements of departure, and belittling of the playstyle of others. Given their inability to rationally reason out their perspective, I would take the following input with a grain of salt:
POTENTIAL NOTEWORTHY COUNTERPOINTS
The details revolving around Blizzardâs financial and technical capabilities was largely left unexplored as the conversation would be largely speculative. Pixypockets began to give a bit of numerical insight into this, which could give a little more clarity of feasibility. However, ultimately, it will always come down to the collective accounting of many highly specific details (none of which are available to the public) regarding the feasibility of a concept.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of complaints of this concept centered around themselves and their own playstyles. So, deeper concerns such as name-hoarding was never mentioned, so I will bring it up here. I do not believe this to be a concern, because, while we see it to some degree today, most people have less than 15 characters. Therefore, despite having an additional 50 characters for free to name-hoard, this does not seem to be an overwhelming problem outside high-population realms. So, the belief this would be an explosive issue with WoW Token-paid-for character slots is unsubstantiated.
CONCLUSION
I believe this suggestion has endured the critical fires of the forums quite well, and I hope developers see this post and provide this option for people who love the game and simply wish to continue their adventures on 1 account. Thank you.
