With the recent announcement of Dragonflight, the introduction of the Dracthyr race, and the Evoker class, I would like to suggest increasing the total character limit. Many players have had their accounts for over a decade. During this time, players have explored what the other faction has to offer, joined friends on random servers, gone on guild-wide adventures on freshly made characters, just want to unwind after a long day with some mindless leveling, and/or just relive the leveling experience of their favorite class.
So, while a player may not log into a character every day or check in with their random level 23 hunter on a weekly basis, that character still has value to them – whether it is invested time or sentimental in nature.
Also, for a lot of people, they enjoy the leveling process. Simply making a new character (maybe on a new realm), spending 30 minutes coming up with a name, and then setting out with a new adventurer for the weekend is a lot of fun for them. Leveling can be and is still a fun way of playing WoW for many, and after nearly two decades, players will be deleting characters to play the new class and race.
Or worse, some will not. Either way, I just want to shed a little bit of light on fact that a character’s value for a player is more than the log-in frequency.
I could end the post here, but I would like to make a few recommendations for methods increasing the character cap:
Static Change. The first and most basic method would be to simply change the cap. Maybe instead of 50, change the character cap to 100. The next person may suggest 75. The person after that may recommend 200. Either way, the change is simple in implementation, but maybe more complex in reevaluating and deciding on a new character cap.
Dynamic Change. Here, you could have a set of prerequisites that a player must fulfill before allowing them access to more character slots. For example, once a player has reached max level on a character, allow them an additional character slot. In this case, if someone has 50 Level-40 characters and they level 1 of them to Level-60, then they can create a 51st character on that account.
This could change several ways such as allowing players who hit the previous expansion’s level cap to gain access to another character slot. Using the previous example, a player could grant themselves access to another character slot by leveling a character to Level-50 (instead of Level-60).
Account Growth. From what I understand, accounts that are 17 minutes old or 17 years old, have the same exact limitations for character slots – 50. So, another option would be to add a certain number of additional character slots for each year the account is active. For example, for the first year, the character cap will remain at 50. However, once an account completes a year of active subscription, then an additional 10 character slots become available. Just to save a few people time, if an account is 17 years old, then they would have 50 base character slots plus 170 characters slots for a character cap of 220. In this case, the numbers are an example. So, it could be 10 new character slots for 1 year, 1 new character slot of 10 years, 3 new characters slots for 6 months, or 1 new character slot for 3 months. Either way, the concept still holds.
Unfortunately, myself and many in the community do not know why this cap exists, but I would assume it is for a good reason – whether the limitation assisted with some sort of botting prevention or name reservation abuse. Perhaps, if we knew why the cap is there and why it is 50, we could brain-storm some methods to increase the total cap while also not undermining the original purpose of the character cap.
Either way, it would be nice to see an increase in the number of characters a player can create on their account.