What's up with this 10 day period to merge Factions with Prophesies?

Sorry if I sound like a noob, but this is the 1st time I heared about this.
A guy in-game told me that I have only 10 days to merge my accounts if I want to keep my skills that i already unlocked in the beta events and in the 24 hour headstart.

Now, can someone plese explaing to me this:
Does this only concern skill unlocks, etc?
or after ten days I wont be able to merge my accounts at all, and wont be able to use my old characters in factions?

Reason I'm asking is because I'm not getting my Factions till May 11th due to delays in shipping. (dont ask)

after 10 days, the 2 charachters and everything accociated with them will be deleted

Edit: maybe im wrong on this. Refused says they wont. so, just to be safe, dont keep rare items and money on the 2

They will NOT be deleted. They will be held there until you put in the retail key for Factions.

sinc ei ordered CE and its being delayed, if i put one of my Tyrian characters there will it be frozen till i get the factions box in the mail? And say i did get it after 10 days, would my warrior i worked so hard a long on from tyria be deleted? Or could i bring my warrior back after the 2 days? Im pretty confused, if they could just stick to what they say and have it out on time there wouldnt be so many *Put this in place of real long curse word* problems.

This whole thing is making me angry.

I believe it means that you'll lose the Factions progress you've made in the headstart (maybe the preview too, don't know) unless you link them in 10 days.

However, you should be able to link the accounts at any time.

Yes that's exactly what i wanted to know. I dont care if I loose all my early progress, as long as I will be able to bring all my old characters and items from Prophecies into Factions.

The Bonus Slots will be LOCKED. That's all. Why would your progress be lost? If the character is there, everything on the character will be there as well (at least from the Head Start).

but what if you have a character from TYRIA in CANTHA, will they get locked in CANTHA and be FROZEN until factions?

I believe there is a post from Gaile(too tired to find it) where she addresses this problem. according to Gaile, if you bring Prophecies characters from Tyria into cantha during the head start but do not have a retail key after the end of the 48hrs your characters will be teleported back to Tyria(probably lions arch since it's the port city)

your two new character slots as well as any newcharacters that you created in cantha will be locked until retail key is added but your tyrian characters should not be locked.

thank you very much, you dont know how much i appreciate this post ive been waiting for this answer!

I could have sworn i read somewhere (in one of the gaile chat logs?) that if you had a character in cantha and the grace period was up that they would be moved back to tyria....of course they had to start in tyria to begin with.

I really wish Anet would clear up the whole thing with 2 slots as reading what they have said so far can be taken 2 ways.

Nothing says what they will do after 10 days as by reading this these slots will be locked off after the head start and first day.

well what i dont get with the grace period is if they ship our game out after the 10 days i find it quite bs'ish that they would lock our characters for their mistake.

gj ncsofft, you guyspwn! (sarcasm)

I dont understand this whole 10 day thing at all. I wish they'd explain what's their philosophy behind this... Why ten? Why not two, five, or mabe twenty or even thirty?

What about the people waiting for CE or people who bought the regular edition, but wont get it untill 10 days after Factions comes out? These people spent time during the preview weekends unlocking skills, why not let them keep that indefinately untill they get the expantion? How can this possibly hurt anyone or hinder anything?

It's like saying that people who got Prophecies 2 months ago, got a HUGE advantage over people who bought the game a month ago...
Honestly, I just dont get it.

The bottom line, is I dont care about all that MUCH as long as I'll be able to merge Factions with my primary account when I get it 12 days from now. I simply disagee with all that philosophy.

I have been in contact with the 'support' team and got an email saying that you have the 2 days (27-29th) for the preoder key to work, after that your characters will be locked....if you do NOT enter the order key before the end of the 10 day grace period, the characters will be DELETED....when (if) you enter the key after that you will get 2 new slots which will be BLANK.............


so for those of us who spent the extra cash for the collectors edition----we are royally screwed by neglience on the part of the game manufacturer....
so I dont think it paid to pre-order this

um. I live in Asia, and I fear the stores won't have the game in time. And I'm not even talking about the CE. Shoot.

When they say "characters will be deleted", do they mean those in the 2 extra slots or any Canthan character? In other words, if my assassin is created using one of the original 4 slots, will he be removed after 10 days?

The announcement from Anet about the 10 day grace period was specific about one thing, that it was time to make the two extra slots permanent. So IMO, it's only going to affect chars in those extra slots. Canthan chars in other slots should just be locked at the end of the preorder period.

Well I emailed support. here's what they said:

"Hello Chris,

Thank you for contacting Guild Wars Support. If a retial access key is not added to the pr-eorder account then any Factions content and characters will be removed, regardless of which slots the Factions characters are created in.


Regards,
The Guild Wars Support Team"

I suddenly have a sinking feeling that I'll have to redo lots of stuff.