Wednesday, April 20, 2005
World of Warcraft: Time to move characters between different accounts?
Portability issues help to serve WoW doomcasters, or: "Time to move characters between accounts?"
"Bashing" World of Warcraft seems to be a new trend on the web. WoW is not "epic enough", it's not a real MMORPG, it lags, it's pay-to-play Diablo, too PVP-focused, easy, imbalanced, an endless grind, it's a pointless kids game... you may read these or similar opinions all over the place nowadays.
I don't mind the whiners, fact is that subscriptions are falling. This is where I want to discuss an important little feature some MMORPGs like Everquest 2 and Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) already established: Moving chars between accounts.
Granted that the real life economy looks very bad since a couple of years already, it's a given that family members and even friends use the same copy of WoW to play online... After all, you don't want to buy 3 games for your interested family members and send $150 down the drain if it didn't come out as an enjoyable gaming experience for you all. I don't even want to start with the monthly fees here. This is a very realistic situation, personally I know many people who share WoW keys.
For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that they all play on the official Blizzard servers instead of the hacked private servers that are out there. They are different people (as in friends, family members), using different accounts and these might even be on physically different servers but they share the same copy of World of Warcraft and the same key. Blizzard makes it easy for them to handle different chars on one account.
Some day there comes the breaking point when you either uninstall the game and leave it to the main account holder (also known as the charity guy - "the one who pays the bills") because you found out it's not your type of game or want to continue to play it with your friends or family members.
As all characters are on the same account using the same key, you are out of luck. There is currently no way to keep your character to play with your friends. You either have to start from scratch again and ditch your elite mount for a shabby lvl1 priest who can't even heal or you try to persuade your friend to lose his character... 2 bad options after all.
So you can't transfer chars between different accounts, you can't play together with your friends so you just stop it and head over to eBay to sell the box.
From my understanding, it wouldn't even be hard to do. I bet it would take Blizzard half an hour to code this, all you'd have to do is take the char data and copy it over to another account holder. They could limit it to one move per char so it wont be abused. They could apply a limitation so it is only possible to transfer characters to new accounts with an unused, brand-new key. I also don't understand why they don't realize it, can't they see it is essential? They have access to all kinds of stats, they have to make this possible...
WoW may not be epic, but if I can play with people I know for years, I'm willing to forget about the epic part and just have some fun.
"Bashing" World of Warcraft seems to be a new trend on the web. WoW is not "epic enough", it's not a real MMORPG, it lags, it's pay-to-play Diablo, too PVP-focused, easy, imbalanced, an endless grind, it's a pointless kids game... you may read these or similar opinions all over the place nowadays.
I don't mind the whiners, fact is that subscriptions are falling. This is where I want to discuss an important little feature some MMORPGs like Everquest 2 and Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) already established: Moving chars between accounts.
Granted that the real life economy looks very bad since a couple of years already, it's a given that family members and even friends use the same copy of WoW to play online... After all, you don't want to buy 3 games for your interested family members and send $150 down the drain if it didn't come out as an enjoyable gaming experience for you all. I don't even want to start with the monthly fees here. This is a very realistic situation, personally I know many people who share WoW keys.
For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that they all play on the official Blizzard servers instead of the hacked private servers that are out there. They are different people (as in friends, family members), using different accounts and these might even be on physically different servers but they share the same copy of World of Warcraft and the same key. Blizzard makes it easy for them to handle different chars on one account.
Some day there comes the breaking point when you either uninstall the game and leave it to the main account holder (also known as the charity guy - "the one who pays the bills") because you found out it's not your type of game or want to continue to play it with your friends or family members.
As all characters are on the same account using the same key, you are out of luck. There is currently no way to keep your character to play with your friends. You either have to start from scratch again and ditch your elite mount for a shabby lvl1 priest who can't even heal or you try to persuade your friend to lose his character... 2 bad options after all.
So you can't transfer chars between different accounts, you can't play together with your friends so you just stop it and head over to eBay to sell the box.
From my understanding, it wouldn't even be hard to do. I bet it would take Blizzard half an hour to code this, all you'd have to do is take the char data and copy it over to another account holder. They could limit it to one move per char so it wont be abused. They could apply a limitation so it is only possible to transfer characters to new accounts with an unused, brand-new key. I also don't understand why they don't realize it, can't they see it is essential? They have access to all kinds of stats, they have to make this possible...
WoW may not be epic, but if I can play with people I know for years, I'm willing to forget about the epic part and just have some fun.
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