Purchase More Character Slots!

That's just point scoring using fallacious logic. At no point beforehand were any prices/costs mentioned. I keep seeing this "people were willing to pay $15" comment? A few people on a forum or two does not equate to all the players. I for one have been consistent in my request (look through post history if you must) that it should have been a bit lower price than it is.

It also has nothing to do with "mommies and daddies pay for everything" - again, that's poor debating skills at work. For example, I run my own company... I can VERY easily afford this kind of stuff. Does that mean it's necessarily considered good value? Again, it's debatable. Does that mean the persons who raise it as something to discuss/debate are whiners? That they don't know the value of anything? Their parents pay for everything? No, and such remarks contribute nothing to topics (this one or in general) - in fact they could have the reverse effect of discouraging people from taking part in a thread for fear of being flamed...

Just to clarify I'm not trying to be attacking or anything here, and this isn't directed at anyone in particular, just noticed these kinds of comments and posts weren't quite so prolific before.

No, what I am saying is that if ArenaNet is going to do this (I think its a great idea if done correctly), then those of us that, as stated in my previous post, supported the company while obtaining extra slots instead of b**ching about not having enough should be given some sort of oportunity to merge accounts - otherwise they are basicly rewarding complainers and undercutting loyal customers.

Never before have I complained about something ArenaNet did. I have disagree'd with many of their choices, but never complained. What they are doing now however needs to be seriously modified or removed from their plans.

As for you that are talking about merging accounts being increadably difficult - I am only a mediocor programer, and if their database was setup correctly to begin with, this would not be that difficult. Several ideas come to mind right away - I may be incorrect as I have never done game programing, however ARRAY's seem to be a good idea - each account is basicly listing what is on it in an array, which is tied to a main database that holds the information on what those links mean. I can see a few simple security issues with this, but they should be easly solvable.

Further - they recently did an entire game rollback of 1 hour incase you didnt remember - THAT I would bet was far more difficult than merging accounts as a one-time thing - especialy if they say they need a week or so to complete the merge - they should have plenty of time, hell, Ill even settle for 2 weeks, or MABY 3 if there is no other way.

I know quite a few people who own multiple accounts - they are all upset about this for the same reason I am. NOT because they decided to make character slots purchasable, but because there is nothing available for those that already own multiple accounts, which once again, makes us feel as if WE are being cheated for supporting the company

ah, but would you remain satisfied to wait a week to maybe threee weeks if YOU COULDNT USE ETHER ACCOUNT while they were merging?

its still basically choice...those that chose to buy extra accounts now want to merger them, while those that were tempted, but for whatever reason DIDNT are happy to buy new slots or leave it and not buy.

and would you be happy if they merged accounts, but, and this is a BIG BUT...
all the unlocks on the account with the lesser amount were removed, along with all faction ect, maybe even items?

To the OP, I understand with you but they are not forcing anyone to buy extra slots.

It is an "option"

for ppl who are saying that Anet are cheap u guys are completely wrong.... look at WoW u gotta pay to play.Guildwar's slot idea is a great idea so if u dont like it dont buy the slots and they do u see them make u pay alot of money in a month? look the character slots are optional and i dont think alot of ppl will buy those things every hr or something like that.. personally i think after a month and i need it ill do it... THE END

So how much did you expect to pay? $1?

why $10 do you ask? Well, to be honest, its being slightly fair to the people who have already splashed out on a second account:

10 x 4 = $40

I didnt mention the fact that parents buy everything for people..where did that come from? O_o

if its much lower..say even $5..then you can get 8 characters for the same cost as the original game..which is...not logical.

I am elated by the news and confused by people being upset. If the game with 4 slots was worth buying for $50 why is it worth less now that you can add to it? I am just happy because now my account can have all classes for PVE and still have a PvP slot. Best of all worlds IMO.

Very good points throughout this thread, the OP's was a work of art

Being able to buy slots is a step in the right direction, because some people will want to buy more. However I think A.net do need to consider how they would be able to merge two Guild Wars accounts together, because again I think a lot of people will want this, and it would be good for business.

People flame and complain because they don't get their way.

Sometimes the way the community complains about stuff im scared that Anet will stop offering us fantastic options like this..

There was a fantastic point made earlier..if they grant account merging, and then people complain when it takes a couple of weeks to merge your account..

I can see that happening..and once again, people would have no case for being ungrateful..not that that ever stopped anyone before..

Heh, wondered when people would start flaming the anet haters. Of course Anet are going to make as much cash as they can. Why else would they only offer an extra 2 slots ? Anyone who didn't see this coming a mile off is not functioning on all cylinders..

Took longer than I thought. Better than people being rude to first-time posters I say (go elitism!).

Where did they say they only offer 2 extra slots?

All the people complaining are those with multiple accounts. So you already have you multiple slots.

Anet cannot merge accounts its a security risk to YOU the players. Instead of hacking your account and just taking your items they can merge your account with theirs and now its lost FOREVER. If they stole mulitple accounts they could put it up on Ebay to sell as a slot account. That would give hackers even more incentive you get your account. Its not a good idea. The consequences are worse then xfering your items via friend or guildy.

The price is fine be me because its an OPTION to buy slots. You don't have to if you don't want to pay or need them.

Besides the most slots you will need to buy on a single account is 1-2. The rest of your slots can come from future chapters of GW. Remember there is going to be a release every 6 months now not the 1 year we have been waiting for recently. If they give 2 slots for merging chapters then that's 4 slots per year. That is enough slots.

This also gives you the option of buying slots for your current account if you don't want the future chapters. That will keep it fair for everyone.

When they make the pvp premade where we can save them people will complain because they bought more slots so they don't have to reroll all the time. If Anet says we are working on it trust them. They ARE working on it. They cannot however come out and say we are working on that now and will be available xxx date. If they do not meet that date then the players complain even more. At least they let you know about this before factions comes out.

It is nearly impossible to please people. We make a suggestion that majority of GW agrees on that needs to be added. Anet adds it just like the suggestions and then the same players complain about the addition. Learn to be thankfull for what you have received and move on.

OK i have played SWG, WOW, EQ, EQ 2, DDO, and a few others and my choice for gaming is Guild Wars. I had 3 accounts on SWG and payed $45 a month to play. Cost really isn't the issue for me. It is the fact that having all my characters on one account would be awesome much easier to tranfer things, no double E-mail accounts and so on....I simply ask let people buy the slots and transfer their characters into those slots...which I know would not be that hard to do...a simple addition to the play NCsoft account manager and there you go. As long as passwords and adresses are required there should be no major problem with this...I mean you would have to know the E-mail, Password and Account Number to do it.

Thanks again,

Poke

Oh and Twicky who says if they sell slots they will offer them for free with future expansions? I mean there has even been talk of GW going pay to play...(which would be fien by me it would get rid of most of the idiots)...but if there is any truth to that than they are apparently looking for a way to make money.....would not offering slots with expansions but selling them instead be a good way to do that? Oh and btw the info was leaked on another site before GW ever put it on their own...so was GW going to tell us about the slots before factions?

bout time
now if they can go ahead and let us buy the new slots
that would be super cool

made me want to start playing the game again
now that I can have a char of every class
all I can say is hell yes

I also have more then one acount but haveN all your chars on one acount is way better
and well worth paying 10 bucks a slot
now I can give my other acounts away to friends

not that easy to be honest

ANET did. new professions will have slots so you dont have to delete an old friend

ALEX WEEKES FROM NCSoft

they have made many informal information posts to let people know in the past so yes

if they make guildwars pay to play
it will be the death of the game
I know I would never play it ever agian
and I think alot of people would do the same

thats why people love guildwars so much becuse they are for free online play
besides the fact its a great game
and I would like to think they would never sell out

It probably is so. But that wasn't intentional, just part of the learning process. They are better off doing this than not even if it makes some mad - kinda like the roll back they had before.

You seem to understand - you knew it was a risk. There will always be someone and sometime that you had to purchase it before the announcement. I doubt they sat on the info once decided - it's too popular an idea (and even if they did the samething still holds true - you took a known risk and got bit by it, don't take the risk if you can't handle the bad end of the deal). I don't think they can see into the future to warn you that in the next few months someone will bring up doing this and they decide too. Anet may write some nifty software, but they aren't that nifty - just be glad you didn't buy it the day before the anouncement (I can assure you some people did). But, again, the same thing - they can not tell you before they make the decision and there will always be a "before anouncement" period that someone will have done the wrong thing.

No one has said they do not have the ability - SQL has modify semantics that are well known. Plus merging Prophecies and factions is a VERY different thing that merging to existing prophecies. Even simple things like the two accounts do not have the same unlocks what do you do? This has to be decided, coded, and tested before hand.

Plus "prohecies + prophecies" is a true merge or join action of multiple records and not trivial. The other is unlocking access to content and not merging at all. Think of it like this, merging two Prophecies accounts is like taking two different translations of a book and making one single translation out of it. It's possible, it's even been done, but it's not so easy. Prophecies + factions is like if they suddenly found a new chapter and added it in - much easier to do.

It may, I don't know thier structure of thier DB or thier code base. There is also how much risk is there to corrupting the whole DB. I can't say it is easy or hard, though in my experience it is almost always in the "hard" category simply because on large mission critical databases the amount of testing is huge. Even if the code is simple to write you want to make sure the whole game isn't down for a day because of a stupid bug you failed to test.

Also the number of accounts has nothing to do with how hard it is to do. Once the code is written and tested it's just as easy to do 2 accounts as it is a million (and the code is going to pretty much be the same either way). The difference is mainly in how long the operation would take. Think of it this way (the analogy isn't perfect), someone needs a wheel - is it harder to make the wheel to roll one mile or 5 miles? Pretty much the same - how long it rolls is irrelevant (unless it becomes some specialised endurance. In fact it would take the same amount of work to make a wheel that would roll at all. The hard part is producing a wheel that rolls and testing that it rolls (commercial stuff must be verfied before selling it), once you have done that it will roll both short and long distances just as easy.

If you are old enough to have a job just think about this - is anything you do as simple and straight forward as one would think or many people say (especially the "All you have to do is..." type things)? No, I bet not. GW is millions of lines of code, thier DB has at least a million entries (at least one for each game sold), do you honestly think that you can be fully sure that the one little change you want will have no effect on anything else? Again, think to your job - would you let a random person off the street change something because the *knew* it wouldn't effect you even though they do not have any real idea how you work?

It may be that easy, it may not and it doesn't even have much to do with how good they code - you can't write software or design databases that anything is easy to do. You try and make it as easy to modify as you can, but you have to make choices and this may, or may not, be easy to do.

Some people seem to have missed a little information so i thought it best to add it!

Taken from www.guildwars.com front page.

Quote:

Originally Posted by http://www.guildwars.com/ Character Slots Offered ------- ------- ------- 20 April 2006 We are happy to announce that you will be able purchase additional character slots for your Guild Wars account beginning this summer for $9.99 U.S. (or equivalent). Each new slot will enable you to add a new character to your account with full access to all of the content your current characters enjoy. We'll have more details to share soon!

This is some of the best news to grace my eyes for a few months, I have two
accounts but i'll be buying a couple of slots as soon as is humanly possible.

Well, I have just recently bought a second account, after I had read multiple times that there won't ever be the opportunity to buy additional character-slots. Now that it suddenly *is* an option, it makes me want to kick myself for having bought that second account just two months ago, because instead I could have spent the money for the simple purchase of additional character-slots for my primary account.

Making it possible to merge existing prophecies-accounts to *one* would of course be the best solution, whereby I don't really understand the whole deal with those people who complain about the faction/fame/rank/unlock thing here.
Look at it from a neutral point:
Assume you have an existing account with everything unlocked, a bunch of fame, maybe also a high rank.
Assume you find yourself buying four additional character-slots for this existing account.
Then these four *newly purchased* character-slots would automatically profit from the *old* unlocks, fame and rank.

Now let's look at the possibility of merging two existing accounts.
You choose which account is the base-account, you choose which account's character-slots will be merged with the base-account, and you should get?
Exactly what the above gave you - an account with eight character-slots that all have the same unlocks/fame/rank - based on the *base-account*.

So now explain to me the issue with it, if you will.

Another thing that I wonder about is this:
Pretty much any time when somebody brings up something like "this or that should be possible" (see account-merging) a lot of people on the forums jump in and explain in long, long posts why the asked for feature is not possible or too difficult or just bring up a lot of reasons that speak against it.

The funny thing about it though is, that, unless these people are from A-Net and just post "under-cover" here, they really don't have a clue if what they write really fits the facts - an example would be how it was explained over and over, by people on this forum, why there *WON'T* be additional character-slots for purchase.
I remember even arguments like "A-Net has stated several times that they feel it would unbalance the game if some players had more character-slots than others". Well, I guess the people at A-Net have changed their mind then, or *gasp* maybe the ones who wrote things like that didn't really know what was going on at the company's headquarter?

So where I'm coming from is: Again and again I see a lot of explanations for why something can't be done or won't happen, but there's a significant lack of *official* statements about such things. You can write here "this is impossible" or "this won't happen", but really, unless somebody from A-Net *confirms* this you won't know what's possible for them and/or what they're going to do in the future.

People ranting about what is and isn't possible is just human nature really, most people want to believe they know everything, and convince others that they know everything.
People don't let an actual lack of knowledge/experience get in the way. If it makes some sense in there heads, they will go with it, and try to convince you that there way is the truth, because after all .. it makes perfect sense to them.

To make some broad points.
None of us here know anything about how guildwars is programmed, and how our accounts are stored. Some can speculate, (and of course at least half the people here who's story makes it sound like they have programming experience ... won't have any more knowledge on the subject then a brick wall) We don't know whether its 'impossible', 'unreasonably hard/time consuming', 'moderate chance of corruption', 'too much of a security risk' .. or any of the other finer details that haven't been considered.

<some speculation> To compare the merger of the accounts when factions comes out with prophecies, and multiple prophecies accounts is a bit silly, as one way is adding blank slots, and not needing to copy, merge, change anything, and the other is doing .. something to multiple accounts .. making sure nothing breaks with characters, items. </speculation>
Clearly different, but again, none of us can say how much harder.

It might be nice if anet told us specific reasons why accounts won't be merged, buts its not something they are obliged to tell us, its nice that they tell us as much as they do, but they don't have to tell us everything.

Remember, everytime someone who doesn't know what there talking about says 'how hard can it be?' ... god kills a kitten.
Please, think of the kittens.

I have multiple accounts. More than two.

I think the opportunity to buy character slots is great, but rather than merge accounts, I'd rather be able to transfer some of my characters (the main ones) to one uber account and leave my other account(s) alone.

I mean, I don't want to merge two CE accounts, or accounts with preorder items. Hrm.

But, overall, I'd rather have the option than not have it. I'm not looking the gift horse in the mouth.

I'm assuming that was directed at me (long post about why it may not be possible). If not, then forget what I'm writing.

If you read what I say, I have said in there many many times I don't know - it may be easy. My response was to people who think it is easy. Easy has been beat to death pretty much, but there are many possible reasons why it could be hard.

Now, I say "In my experience" because I do actually have experience with large projects with DB back ends. I *do* have experience doing this sort of thing (if you want to see some of my public stuff google "Brian Luethke"). It may be easy, from time to time a request that we want to do actually is. But 99/100 times it's not as easy as the armchair programmers think (they are usually college students or hobbiest, the college students will eventually learn better). If you really want to know my reasoning behind that I can write it out, I can tell you what has happened with my projects everytime something similar has been done.

Nor does "hard" have much to do if they will do it. It may be ten times harder than what I imagine but they have been working it and will roll it out tomorrow. They only things I am saying is a) it could be easy or hard, in my experience hard and b) it has little to do with if it will be done.

As for the rest of my post, the "easy" crowd are talking how easy the interface is to do and requirements for security. I tend to agree that's not the hard part and *should* be fairly easy (though some decisions, such as how to merge Xunlai Storage will tick off some group no matter what). But that is typically true, the backend stuff and testing tends to be where the cost and difficulty on this type of change is at. The hard, expensive stuff is the stuff they are overlooking or do not know anything about. How hard/costly it is has to include *all* of it. I was trying to convey that.

It wasn't directed at anyone specific, just a general observation.

I apologize if I'm repeating something that someone already said, but I didn't get to read all 24 pages of the post.

I'm thrilled we're getting the opportunity to buy more slots, but I am one of those people who had bought 2 more accounts. Total, my husband and I have 3. My issue has nothing to do with fame or faction points, but money. It's true that buying 4 slots is the same amount as what I paid for one of my account. However, the people that buy 4 extra slots don't have to buy extra copies of the new expansions when they come out--which is supposed to be twice a year! I just paid $150 for 3 Factions accounts to merge onto our old accounts. Divide that up and you can see that with new expansions twice a year, I'll be paying about $25 bucks a month on Guild Wars. That's more expensive the WoW, I think (not that I play WoW).

I know, you guys are all going to say that I don't have to buy them, and yes that's true. But I want the most from my gaming experience too. And we've spent a lot of time on the characters in our accounts. I don't want to delete them and start over. So, unlike those who buy slots and only have to buy one copy of a game, Anet will get my $150 every six months. As someone stated earlier, it's sort of punishing those of us who didn't complain about the amount of character slots and just sucked it up and bought more accounts.

Perhaps if we'd had ANY idea that new slots would have been an option, I wouldn't have wasted my money, but now it's too late. I can only pray they'll figure out a way to merge accounts. I don't care about losing stuff--I'll transfer between the accounts beforehand like I've been doing. I don't want to lose the hundreds of hours I've spent on my characters though and paying $150 every six months is too rich for our blood. I hope Anet comes up with a good solution.

WOW accounts are 15 EACH so to be fair you have to compare 3 WOW accounts at 45 dollars a month

3 GW 2x per year= 300

3 WOW = about 585 per year

Mostly, I view the ability to add new character slots as a Very Good Thing.
New characters will share the account storage, will benefit from items
unlocked by other characters on the account, etc. New characters
will be added as needed/desired, without the larger up-front cost of
an additional account.

But this seems unfair, at some level, to those who bought a second GW
account, to get the extra character slots that are (currently) necessary
to have a character for each of the 6 (pre-Factions) primary professions.

I've contacted the GW support team on 2 previous occasions about
the inability to merge accounts. Previous replies in this thread pretty
well reflect my thoughts on that. But maybe we can help them by defining
what we mean by "merge accounts," or at least reaching consensus.

I'm not totally sure what it means to me, but can start with the following:

- the resulting number of character slots would be the sum of the
number of slots on the accounts being merged
- all existing characters are moved to the merged account, along
with all their possessions/money/faction/etc (they of course would
consume character slots mentioned above)
- merged account-level storage (number of items) would likely *not* be
a summation, but an optional increment would be nice
- if a skill/mod/etc is unlocked on one account, it would be unlocked
on the merged account
- license key information: I'm not sure; maybe an inclusive OR
of the abilities of the merged accounts?
- the end result is one account; the others are forfeited

The GW Support team say they monitor these forums. To be fair,
they should resolve the merge issue at the same time they release
the abiliity to have additional character slots. My opinion, of course.

Yes, that's true. BUT, there is no need to buy three WoW accounts, because you can create an unlimited amount of characters from what I've been told. That would make your math sort of a moot point and actually confirms my point. I'm spending more on GW than I would be on WoW. That sort of sucks, because what attracted me to Guild Wars was the lack of monthly fees. It seemed less greedy on the part of Anet and made me feel like they cared about their customers more. Now I'm just not sure.

what i want to know is why 3 accounts to begin with.

if you want all characters 2 accounts will provide that

if you have collected enough stuff that you need 3 accounts why not clear out some of the junk.

if you are having 3 family members all playing together my math is good for the simple reason WOW wont let you play more than 1 character at a time even with a hundred characters in your stable in which case 3 WOW accounts needed to play together.

if using some for storage there is no need for future upgrade chapters on them.

ok so far

My husband and I both play. I guess you're right about that. Didn't think about both of us playing at once. We each wanted the chance to play all the different types of characters. So, there's the reason for two accounts, but we definitely don't need the third anymore if we can buy slots. I should clarify that I don't want to play WoW, tried it once and hated the controls--I guess my point is that we'd love to merge one of those accounts, so we don't have to keep paying for that third game every time. There are 3 level 20's on that account that have finished the game, and a level 15, so I just hate to see all that time wasted. So, I guess we'll just keep paying and sucking it up. I guess I was just mad at first because it seemed a little unfair. I just hope they can figure out a way to merge them before the next expansion

In my opinion, the ability to play a character of each of the primary professions should have happened from the start. My gaming time would not have been less, but my freedom to explore all of my character options would be more enjoyable.

My definition of a thief: An individual who takes action, or possesses the expectation, to gain a great deal with little output of time and effort.

1 character slot = $10 US dollars.

Question: How much expenditure of time/resources/effort does it take to provide a player with an extra character slot?

I think I know the answer to this question, and I believe you do too.

Just my opinion.

The ability to provide that extra character slot depends on the existance of the platform (game) that supports it. So I'd say that they've put in a major expenditure of time/resources/effort and their attempt to get a little return on that investment doesn't warrant you calling them a thief. Even by your definition. (Which is closer to con artist than thief btw, thieves take things.)

I have already paid for the right to play that existing platform.

Real definition of a thief: a criminal who takes property belonging to someone else with the intention of keeping it or selling it.

A person who gains a great deal with little time and effort is merely successful.

Oh, I do. The answer is that nobody here has a clue.

This is just a rephrasing of the, "How hard could it be?" question, which is complete ignorance. There's more to it than finding some integer variable for the number of character slots available and changing it.

Additionally, "Offering more character slots is effortless." is not an opinion, but an assertion.

2 slots for me

Character from every class

hope this starts soon want to start my mesmer and assassin =]

only £12 =]

I am buying atleast 2 more slots =)

Then you will also know that Anet is incredibly incompetent if they can't trivially change the number of characters associated with a given account.

Keep in mind that merging accounts not only involves the game IT infrastructure, but also other systems like accounting, etc. Plus, the issue of whether it is exploitable would need to be explored. It happens in other games, so it is likely possible, but might not be trivial.

Seems to me that there are plenty of people here with 2+ accounts, and if i was a gamblin' man (which i'm not), i'd be willing to bet that a-net provides a way to please those of us that want to merge accounts. Its not like they havn't ever given their gamers what they want in the past. There really isnt anybody apposed to this. It'll come in due time. A-net has always been good about things like this.

Adding single slots also opens up a new marketing tool:

$10 for the client-no character slots
$10 per character slot

I'll throw in my useless 2 cents, but in the event Anet is reading...

I'm thrilled with the soon to be realized additional character slots and will buy many. However, I too have several accounts that have characters that I've spent considerable amounts of time on and would greatly appreciate being able to merge them to one account. I'd even be more than willing to purchase additional slots to accommodate the merging and forgo the other account being accessible separately.

In the end, Anet will have $150 (3 accounts) + $50 (for Factions) + $60 (for 3 characters from other accounts and then 3 more slots I would buy)
=$260

I know the retailers get their cut, but the character slots would be purchased directly through Anet and would be all theirs to keep

For me, it is not the cost but rather the time invested into these characters that is of concern.


I'm done now, I'll post again in another 6 months