Should fame/rank be binded to characters or to your account?

PvP characters are going to be alot more useful now that you can customize every aspect of them. The underlying purpose of RP characters is go on treasure hunts for skills and runes. And with only 4 slots this is going to mean that deleting your characters will be a fairly routine ordeal. Supposedly the skills and runes that characters had available to them will be saved to your account. But what about the rank/fame they accumulated? It would make more sense to make rank/fame tied to your account rather than to a single character.

For example, suppose that you finally found a rune you've been hunting for months. Your main PvP character has over 200 fame points and could really use this rune, but in order to put it in their armor you have to delete your character and recreate them with the rune, but you just lost all that fame to simply modify your character.

Wouldn't it make more sense to use the fame/rank system as a symbol of a player's success rather than a symbol of an individual character's success? So if you win a match all your characters in your account gain fame, instead of just 1.

I'd like it more if it was tied to your account because then it represents you - not your characters. I was under the impression that the game was skill and tactically based and if that is so, then it's not going to vary much from character to character. That and it'd suck to delete someone with a 300 fame staff and start anew if you had or wanted to.

Good point, But I think it's more likely that your main pvp character will be an RP char. Mostly because they are more customizable then pvp character and you'll have to lvl most of them anyway before you can make decent pvp character, so why not keep your RP?

I have thought about this subject before.. and I do agree with Weezer. I would absolutely love it if it were tied to your account instead.

However, I guess it might make sense to have it be character based if you argue on the basis that fame also is an indication of how well you use that particular character combination. So, in that argument, a person might have fame as a reward for being a wonderful monk/mesmer.. but he/she might be awful at being a ranger, and so wouldn't have the fame as the reward attached to that particular role.

But I'm just lazy, and I tend to sway towards the human weakness for fame.

Like Milton said, "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise.. (That last infirmity of noble mind) ..." And those sticks, although it's a head with tusks in the first few ranks, do have that pretty light gravitating around it...

oh man, definately account. characters come and go. but your character is going to be there as long as you play.

If asked previously, i would say characters, but after this BWE i would say account. It should represent YOU, not your character. With the PvP changes I found myself remake a character about 5-10 times before even applying runes. And yes i did lose my 200+ fame monk

No, your main PvP character will likely be a level 20 PvP only character because you would simply remake it if you want to change anything. The PvP characters are actually MORE customizable because you will have access to everything you unlock.

Because it will be fairly common practice to remake PvP characters now that this new system is in place, I would hope that fame would be account based - just as your guild's rank is not based on the composition of your team, rather it is a measure of how you perform overall.

i can vouch for that. i tested at least 30 builds this weekend. and that was just on sundary night when i learned of how easy it was (i was previously PvEing and stuff with a friend). I like my RPG characters - but after I unlock all this stuff for all of them, it'll be a cold day in hell when I completely make an RPG guy from scratch to suit a build.

Wow, im really 50/50 on this one. Everyone said why account fame is important but lets not forget like Aria said, just because your skilled with one character doesnt mean you are equally as skilled with another character.This could result in misleading problems. Maybe there should be a way to show not only how 'famous' your account is but also with which characters you are 'famous' for. That way people with many different 'famous' chars would be even more prestigous and regarded even higher for their ability to adapt to different characters.

By that reasoning you should reset someone's fame every time they remake their build, since for example, my IW mesmer plays entirely different than my shutdown mesmer. Just because i'm good at IW doesnt mean i'm good at shutdown right?

Reality is that it really doesnt matter a whole lot. Fame is a mark of battle experience that a player has been through. I'd prefer to see account based fame, especially with this new system in place. Also, if pvp rewards based on fame are ever implemented (and those rewards affect your account, which i assume they would based on the skill unlock system) then i'd want to see account based fame as well. Noone wants to be locked into a character, just because 'at 1000 fame i get to unlock Power Block'...

Account fame is better. After all, if someone have a high fame on one char, then he'll be good with another char because of the PvP experience and good teamwork.
If there will be a per-character fame, then players that play different characters will be heavily penaltized despite the fact that they're more experienced with a different types of PvP characters.

Character fame...in a sense each character should be considered a differnt person. In a RP sense this has even more importance because each of your characters has a differnt history behind him and shouldnt be tied to your other characters, you should have to work with each character individualy to gain their particular fame, because its their name, not yours, that is gaining it.

I would vote for account fame. The fame unlockables will be balanced to every other piece of item or skill, so using the fame to boost characters through the game wouldn't be a problem.

You can always roleplay you are a family member who needs to live up to his dead father or something.

The people always rerolling would just stop to care about fame if they lost it everytime they got tired of a build.

They're doing account storage and account-wide membership in guilds. Wouldn't that be the same as having account fame?

Fame is misleading in and of itself. It's cummulative, you just keep piling it up and you never lose any unlike the comparaitive ranking of, say, the guild ladder. High fame is not necessarily representative of being a good player but of being a player who's spent a lot of time gaining fame. There's no difference between a rank earned through one massive, hour long Tombs run from a rank compiled through just winning a match or two at a time except the time it takes. Over a beta weekeed there's not much time so you can pretty much assume high fame means a good player (Or at least a player good enough to be on a team that took the Hall and held it a while which can be different) but come release and after people have been playing for weeks and months, fame ranks are going to be highly deceptive. That poor player who spends two hours a day in a PUG at the Tombs is going to be a lot more famous than that newly minted player who's stellar but is just trying out PvP whether it's character or account based.

That said, behold my glory as I give unto you a poll. I'm also in favor of acount based fame as long as they're going to have account based PvP characters, storage, and the like. There's something to be said for sticking with one character, with the attachment and meaning that making character important provides, but it really flies in the face of the pick up and play sense of the rest of the game.

I'm not entirely sure what to think for this one, but I voted for Character based, just because you've only been earning that fame using one character after putting all the time and effort into leveling them up and finding excellent weapons and skills. To me, it would seem weird to have a newly created Level 1 character who has the fame of an extremely successful Level 20 character; just doesn't seem right to me. I can see how you would want to have it tied to your account though too, since you have put all that effort into the game and you would want to keep all that Fame with you.

Anyways...what's the difference between a LvL 20 RP Character and a LvL 20 PvP-Only Character?? Why don't you guys just treasure-hunt with the RP Char and ones he's LvL 20 enter PvP with it?? Ways easier to costumize in my view...or is there a bigger difference between the RP and PvP Chars I don't know about yet?

I think there could be a little of both, mostly on the character because they are supposed to be people in themselves, they should have their own merit because of who they are rather than the player that makes them. I think there should also be a way to turn off showing your fame because there's just some people who don't care about it and may just run in to PvP and such recklessly just for the fun of it to see how long they could last or whatever. I think some people would depend too heavily upon this feature and just judge people based purely on that.

Well, a purely pvp player might run through multiple builds in one week.. or even one day. The problem is the amount of time (even if it's a few days to a week) of bringing a new character from level 1 to level 20, along with gears, runes, skills, etc.

For people with only one account, this might mean frequent deletions.. and well.. the lost fame does sort of make me wince.

Account. A character is a tool, in itself nothing. It's the player that puts it to use that makes it work.

So this means when I create my 2nd character they walk out to Gwen with 200-300 fame (nepotism i suppose) Hope she doesn't fry you cause you're famous

Many good arguments on account side

How about a way to use both?

New Character has none but some type of account Tracker