Quote:And if I transferred them, I'd (probably) be paying Blizzard $25 to lose the names I love so much. This was their response pre-TBC, too. How many added races / classes will it take before they add a character slot?

Quote:Honestly, if you have more then 10 characters you play frequently enough to be attached to... you are playing enough that you could get a 2nd account.

Quote:. . . They have put an arbitrary limit on toons of 10 per server. . . .

Quote:That is your opinion. They have put an arbitrary limit on toons of 10 per server. Blizzard also created 3 trees for each class. In many cases, each tree can require a different play style, almost as if they are different classes. Therefore it is easy to understand how people can have all slots filled with toons they have invested large amounts of time on, time they don't want to throw away. With as long as WoW has been out, it wouldn't even have required ridiculous amounts of time to do so.

Quote:I agree that 10 is somewhat arbitrary at this point. If a significant number of players felt the way you do, I'm sure they could take the database hit and expand it. However with respec costs down to basically being a speed bump, I dispute the need from a game play perspective to have more then one character of a class. In fact it would probably be a detriment - it would be far far easier to delete your fire mage and respec your frost one if you wanted to try out fire for a while. Especially for mages, where your frost gear would pretty much transfer over comepletly. I'm not sure leveling to 46 counts as large amounts of time.

I like alts as much as the next guy. I've played every class to 30. I can't see many people having the motivation to make more then 9 (soon 10).

I see you also have a bank toon. I'd much rather see Bliz spend their time working out a rational means of account wide storage then spending it expanding the character slots for the few edge cases such as yourself.

Quote:On what basis do you claim that there is a greater database load for toons on multiple servers compared to toons on one?

There's a completely different reason for the hard limit per server. Overpopulation. With a hard limit, they can know how roughly how many unique accounts there are on a server without going into details.

Quote:There's a completely different reason for the hard limit per server. Overpopulation. With a hard limit, they can know how roughly how many unique accounts there are on a server without going into details.

Quote:I'm pretty sure they can know that anyway with a simple database query, regardless of having a limit or not. Perhaps they just want a cap on the number of bank toons folks will create. I know I still have one, with completely full bank and bag slots, and am thinking of deleting an alt or two for another 1-2 bank toons.

Quote:I'm pretty sure they can know that anyway with a simple database query, regardless of having a limit or not. Perhaps they just want a cap on the number of bank toons folks will create. I know I still have one, with completely full bank and bag slots, and am thinking of deleting an alt or two for another 1-2 bank toons.

Quote:On what basis do you claim that there is a greater database load for toons on multiple servers compared to toons on one?

There's a completely different reason for the hard limit per server. Overpopulation. With a hard limit, they can know how roughly how many unique accounts there are on a server without going into details.

Quote:I guess the main question is...what in the world are you storing so much of?

Quote:The database hit is not in load but in size. Having one account spread across servers means information is required to tie the one account to multiple servers. In fact, I believe this is handled by another server (what is often referred to as the world server?), an added expense and possible failure point. And, as has already been pointed out, the limit has nothing to do with knowing how many accounts there are on a server. If an account has 1 or 1000 toons, it is not only easy to find that they are one account, but it has nothing to do with overpopulation. Overpopulation is having too many toons that can be played at one time. Unless you have some kind of unknown hack, only one toon per account can be played so overpopulation is too many accounts.

Quote:Tangential question--Have you looked into forming a bank-guild? I've been considering it for my bank alt, 110g to open up a big chunk of inventory space seems worth it, but maybe there are hidden drawbacks?

Quote:The fact of the matter is that it would take some amount of time to add the slots - time they have said they don't feel like spending...
...Hopefully they will have some sort of account wide storage solution by then, but if not I'll buy a couple more tabs in my bank guild.

Quote:Even the person who has multiple mages still has a character slot free... unless you are going to claim you have spent so much time on your bank alt that you are attached to them.

Quote:Thomas Says:

May 15th, 2008 at 9:59 am
It seems to me that the problem for the WoW designers is that here is that there are two separate and distinct aspects of the difficulty of large-scale raiding. On the one hand, there are the encounters, and on the other hand, there’s the social challenge of gathering together a group of unruly, selfish, and often very young people. A lot of people, including, I expect, the designers, would enjoy the challenge of completing 25 man encounters if it didn’t mean they have to build their lives around the game — which isn’t intrinsically more difficult than a smaller group, but is certainly a different experience. As a game design problem, the issue is how to take advantage of the design space having many players creates without allowing the social challenges to prevent anyone from raiding. The solution heretofore has been to bribe players to play in large groups with superior gear.

So if raids are fun, but raiding isn’t, what are the designers supposed to do? I tend to think it’s an insoluble problem. Encounter design, no matter its quality — and Blizzard’s quality has been very high — can’t eliminate the hassle of keeping a big guild running. Player matching systems, which have been only moderately successful for 5-man groups, won’t be able to scale up to those sizes, and player-matched groups couldn’t complete a 25 man raid anyway. As Sirlin has convincingly argued, bribing players to perform unfun tasks by offering stronger characters is a pernicious and terrible design that destroys fun and creates an unhappy, addicted player base. And raiders are the last people who would do something just because they enjoy it; they are the kind of powergamers who are really controlled by economic motives (minimizing risk and maximizing reward at all costs.) Raids are fun, but raiding isn’t: if designers can’t get people to raid without bribing them with gear, then raids shouldn’t exist...

...I do think playing in large raids is fun! Organizing them is hell. The problem is that WoW, which has succeeded by streamlining away the boring and unfun elements of other MMO’s and retaining their core interest, fundamentally can’t streamline away the social obligations of raiding, which can be fun at smaller sizes but are inevitably a headache in a large guild. It’s one of the few aspects of the game Blizzard can’t control, and in my opinion gear rewards in 25-mans are an attempt to design around it since they can’t fix it.

Try not to think of it as rewards for the difficulty of performing a certain task; that’s a canard. From a design perspective, the carrot on a stick is just one part of the package of a game event which is supposed to be fun when taken altogether; this social problem causes it to take on too much weight in raiding because it has to compensate for fundamentally unpleasant activities. I like the idea of vanity items as rewards for raids, but I assume the reason Blizzard moved away from them (according to interviews, they were in the initial design for 40-mans in WoW) is because they didn’t provide enough motivation to get people to raid. That’s a sign that the raiding experience is fundamentally broken.