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EverQuest II: Unlimited Character Slots
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Everquest II playerws will have the opportunity to create as many characters as they wish...for a price. Beginning October 5th, players will be able to purchase extra character slots in the Station Marketplace. There is no limit to the number of slots one can buy and the purchase is permanent.
Here's a couple quick facts to answer obvious questions:
Slots are pemanent. You pay for them once and they stay on your account forever.
You can purchase any number of character slots. There is no limit. You want 20, 30 or even a bajillion character slots? Go for it.Regarding Station Access subscriptions:
Character slots sold are *in addition to* any slots you are getting by being an SA subscriber. (Example: If you had 12 slots available as an SC subscriber and you purchase two more slots in the marketplace, you'll now have 14 slots available.)
If you cancel your SA subscription, and then buy slots to replace the slots you were getting, your characters *will* still be present in those purchased slots (they won't get deleted during the swapover).Character slots will be available in the in-game marketplace for 1000 SC each.
Read more here.
Comments
I always hated sub'ing a station pass (additional $15/mo) just for slots. They recently made those extra slots unavailable after downgrading to a regular sub and was a big factor in me quitting the game. I've been saying they need to do this for years now. I was ready to forget I ever played this game but this might just get me back.
Is 1000 SC equal to US$10? (Checked. Yes, it is.) That sounds a little steep for a single character slot, and I am somewhat opposed to this sort of nickel-and-diming on a subscription game, but I am glad to hear that there's a way to add more permanent character slots for those who like to play multiple characters across multiple servers. The relatively low number of character slots was a turn-off for me when I tried EQ2.
I am an Altoholic. Character slots were my first and biggest complaint when the game was originally launched.
If there is a way to earn SC's then 1000 isn't too much. If you have to pay cash, then we should get more for our money. I could see paying $2 for a character slot, so $10 should get me 5 slots.
That's my opinion.
As a long time EQ2 "veteran"....I agree with you.
10 dollars PER slot is....well....STUPID. WoW (god forbid....I brought up WoW) gives you TEN.....ON FIVE DIFFERENT SERVERS! In other words....the FIFTY character slots I had in WoW....with EQ2, would cost FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS?!!! (You get seven slots without a Station Access Pass. SA subs get 12, so the total damage for fifty for THEM...would be a MERE $380.) WTF.
This is the breaking point for me with EQ2, I'm afraid. And that after 5 years (almost six).
I'm thinking it's Runescape for me for awhile. Fuck ALL these "Triple A" bullshit companies.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
What a bunch of total jerks the devs at this thing are. We were told for 6 YEARS that it wasn't possible due to load to create as many as we wanted. What a bunch of lying garbage.
This is SoE we're talking about dude, if you didn't get how intolerant this company was from the beginning you deserve the slap in the face.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
For years they preached about how this was not possible for a number of technical reasons. However, now that they have the option to charge real money per extra slot, those previously described technical limitations have magically disappeared.
SOE seems to really enjoy digging there grave deeper and deeper, they never miss a chance to add another foot to the hole. I'm so sick of there mindless cash grab attempts, yes they are a business, but they make every possible effort to ensure you get as little as possible for your hard earned money.
Ten dollars for a single character slot? Absolutely proposterous.
SOE never screwed me over until F2p at EQ2. And now I feel betrayed. I will NEVER play another of their games.
Every single character does add several lines to a database, they weren't lying about that. There is a reason why no game offers true unlimited character slots, every character takes up space. By charging per character slot they won't be character spammed by some guy who finds it funny to create 200 characters just for the hell of it. Most people likely wouldn't ever get above 12-15 characters since they have to pay for each slot and that many characters is the amount many modern MMOs offer up to subscribers.
Any game that offered truly unlimited free character slots would be spammed by tards until the database choked and ruined the game for everyone.
This is pretty much what many people have been saying about soe for years now. The reason things like this keep happening is because people have continued to defend these types of actions. When people continually reward poor business practices with money they only encourage more poor business practices.
Play long enough with soe and they will eventually burn you.
Lol you think that was bad, we're you around when the NGE was patched into SWG? SoE has screwed over basically EVERY community in ALL their games.
I think this is a cool addition. However, it's a bit spendy per character for a game this age.
Always frustrated me that I had to do Station pass just for EQ2 slots.
Wish FF14 would do this instead of their current method.
Hope games like Rift, Tera, GW2 and TOR offer large charater numbers as part of the package. I believe TOR will offer at least 8 because they have repeatedly stated they want us to play all the classes to get the whole experience.
Yet, I suspect GW2 will probably offer along the lines of Guild Wars - 4 plus a couple per expansion and then purchase additional.
Guild Wars offers extra slots for $9.99 so it's not like EQ2 is out of their mind. I don't know the whole nickel and dime trend is wearing on me in this beloved genre.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play."
"Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
I know about NGE but I never played Star Wars until after the NGE happened. It was ok, but it never managed to keep my attention. EQ2 was always really good. Until they had a total staff turnover and all the devs decided to screw us all over. MY favorite was David (smokejumper) saying at the Fanfaire "just trust us, we won't screw you over" like a used car salesman trying to sell us a junker. That was my breaking point. Especially since they have repeatedly proven that they WILL screw us over every chance they get.
Chello!
I think the breakdown on CoH is $4/slot if buy bulk (1e, $20 for 5; otherwise, $5 each). They also give out slot tokens as vet rewards.
I still don't understand why people that don't play, and aren't affected by the SEPARATE F2P model servers get all riled up about them.
twitch.tv/itpaladin
@ITPalg
YouTube: ITPalGame
The EQ2 devs have spent the last several months working on content updates aimed specifically at the F2P changes being introduced. The last game update lacked the promised high level content that the devs said each content cycle would have. Again focusing on new player experience for the F2P server. The devs have said the next 1-2 content patches would also be focusing on new players and not existing players.
How would you feel if you were told it would be 9-12 months before game updates were going to focus on content for existing players as they had in the past. As they were promised to do when the devs changed to a 3 month content cycle.
Not to mention the legacy servers have had their 14 day free trials removed which makes it extremely hard to attract new players to their servers.
Existing players lost a ton of support and lifeblood with the "seperate" free 2 play service that EQ2 is offering. Don't be so niave to think that it has had no effect on the legacy servers.
Every hour spent working on F2P content is an hour lost to legacy players.
1000 points/slot?? And I thought LOTRO was a bit high at 595/slot. My answer to the limited # of slots is multiple f2p accounts and dual-boxing to share items between chars.
I just wish the was a non-spendy way around the 15 points/broker transaction. That is the main thing that keeps me from playing EQ2x on a regular basis. So its LOTRO f2p for now.
It will be interesting to see how SOE tries to squeeze out the $$s when PotBS goes f2p soon. I'm currently on a free trial account there.
Nearly ten years ago, SOE had Infantry offer 100 characters per account. That's not quite infinite, but close enough that it might as well be. Character storage takes virtually no space, and SOE could probably fit all of the character data for every character ever created across all servers in all of the games they have ever hosted on a single hard drive if so inclined.
There might have been technical source code reasons why it was hard to offer more slots before, if the limit was hard coded in a bunch of places that were a major pain to track down and change. Think Y2K bug type of stuff. That's only an issue of bad coding causing all sorts of problems, not a technical reason why the game would still have the same problems if it were coded better.
Guild Wars charges $10 for a character slot, too. But I'm fine with it in Guild Wars, because things like that are instead of a monthly fee. $10 per character slot on top of a monthly fee is ridiculous, though. We do, of course, have a simple solution: don't play EverQuest II. That costs $0.
Aside from Daffid's response regarding the devs working on the F2P servers and content, I'm not sure why people are so worked up over this (or why they think *this* is going to be the tipping point that ruins SOE - really?)
Think about it - right now, if you have a standard subscription, you get 7 characters. I know MANY people who have Station Access subscriptions (myself included, although I haven't logged in in over 2 months) JUST for the extra slots (12 total). Technically, you would get more for your money to maintain 2 separate accounts (14 v 12), but those 12 get shared resources (like banks and what not). I guess you can argue you get more with SA, because you have subscriptions to other games included - but I don't play any of them anymore (short stint with PotBS).
One of the reasons I remember seeing repeatedly stated that they wouldn't give additional character slots is because they wanted to keep people paying for SA subscriptions - if they kept upping the number of slots, they'd lose out on income. And face it, EQ2 isn't the most popular MMO out there (although I still think they must be doing alright for themselves). Thus, it was a smart BUSINESS decision - I imagine them not upping the slots didn't cause that many people to quit.
Now, they're giving people the opportunity to increase the slots permanently at a much cheaper cost when you think about it. For a subscriber like me (and most of my friends in-game), we have SA subscriptions JUST for the extra slots. That's an extra ~$15 / month ($30 / month for SA vs $15 / month for standard). Now, I can drop the SA, purchase 5 tokens for $50 (actually less, more on that in a moment), and drop my subscription to standard, saving $15 / month and maintaining all of my existing characters. In 4 months, I'll have saved $10, and every month thereafter, I'll save an additional $15.
Now, if I'm smart about it, I'll wait until Sony does another one of their 'bonus SC' weeks or weekends (I never really paid any attention before) - apparently, if you buy one of their SC retail cards (Best Buy, GameStop, whatever) and redeem it during one of their special periods, you get either a 25%-50% bonus (I'd have to check an old e-mail). If it's 50%, all I need is $25, and I can buy 5 tokens - thus in the first month alone, I save $5.
So really, for long-term players, this makes a lot of sense and will save a LOT of money *if* you only use the SA subscription for the extra slots - if you use it for other games, the benefit is diminished (although some people may REALLY want 300 slots... they're just odd).
I see this giving them a decent amount of 'burst' income - maybe the EQ2X is requiring a quick infrastrucutre upgrade, who knows. But overall, I think a number of people (myself included) will take advantage of this and save ourselves some money, which probably ends up being a bad business decision for them
Either way, I don't see why anyone would think this is a bad thing - if you don't want it, don't use it. It's the whole concept of supply and demand - if nobody buys these tokens, they'll lower prices until they do. Would I like to see it cheaper? Absolutely - but I'll take advantage of it the first chance I get, even at $10.
Oh, and keep in mind - The Realm (super old "MMO") still costs something like $8 / month, and you only get 4 slots!
I am rambling off in general here and not in any way towards you, but I think you hit something there with the highlighted portion above.
Soe is a business and there will always be times when a company has to make decisions that appear to be in the best interests of the business, revenue or whatever. The problem seems to be that soe's entire decision making process is focused around that one single highlighted statement. The concept of what is best for the customer doesn't seem to be a factor in their decision making process. The entire focus of the company seems to be how to best monetize everything in their games now.
Essentially soe is a service based entertainment company, but their actions make it hard to believe they are truely in touch with what they do and how it is effecting their products.
Taken by itself this is not a gamestopping deal, but overall it is just another dump on the shit sandwhich that soe has been trying to feed the players for years. Telling players this couldn't happen, but suddenly it is a possibily, but requires a price tag? Not the best way to deal with your players.
It isn't like this is going to be the last cash grab the company does and more and more people are coming to that reality.
Letting more players create more characters would keep them happy and subscribing longer. This could have been a win-win situation, but the single minded office space focus on "is this good for the company" is representative of a much bigger problem with soe.
Maybe this decision did not cause to many people to quit, but this decision isn't some anamoly of soe decision making process. All of these changes have a compounding affect. There is a reason why eq2 is preparing for yet another round of server mergers.
this is a really cool feature...we only have to pay once for a permanent slot...much better than the 30/mo for SA...figure it out guys...15*12=180 a year added to your regular sub and if you downgrade to regular sub you lose access to those slots/toons...or pay 10 once and it is forever and ever until end of game...sweet!