Partner Accounts
The only major issue I see with this, ( and im sure anet will from a support feature ) is imagine you have b/f – g/f and linked accounts, they split up, one raids the entire account and sells/sends stuff off, or someone sells something they shouldn’t etc etc, support would get hounded with requests for rolls backs etc, it would be a nightmare.
People divorce or two people stop being friends. They then fight over the account and who owns what. Someone gets drunk and trashes the account (it was funny/a good idea at the time). Someone spends gold for the Legendary they always wanted and the other objects. Someone else spends some or all of the accumulated laurels, karma or dungeon tokens on themselves.
Amazingly enough, support doesn’t want to take the time to untangle all this. They feel they have enough to do.
Sooner or later, sharing one account leads to problems. No way around it.
People divorce
If I’m getting divorced, I think my GW2 account would be pretty low on the priority list. Somewhere after “the house” and before “the kids”, I guess…
To avoid a support overload, they could simply have a “we are not responsible for your poor judgement”-disclaimer. Such system wouldn’t be forced upon the players and you can choose who to trust with your shineys. If you trusted a kitten instead of a puppy…learn from your mistake instead of crying to support to fix it for you.
PS: I think it should go more like this: 1st partnership – free or 100-500 gems. Then doubling the fee every time(it can be equally split by the 2 accounts, maybe 2 pieces that get forged into a insert fancy item here through a quest). Breaking the partnership should be free(in case you made a poor choice for it and you did have your account raided, you should be able to break the connection and recover instead of being doomed to a lifetime of getting destroyed).
On a side-note: You can also help your spouse with it. Craft the fancy stuff(the one above the daily item), do bosses with her, jumping puzzles or wvwvw. Play together instead of just crafting it(kind of sounds like you wanna blow your significant other off)…
My spouse hates dying, I simply hope to allow her a maximum chance to survive. Her favorite games are mostly solo and she feels a real gut level failure if she is with me and falls and then I drop too. Working on it.
I stated things badly. When I say freely share account bound items I should say freely trade account bound items via email. NO shared banks or inventory.
While unfriendly splits could occur, it would be inherent in the agreement and understood by both parties that anything given to a partner is theirs, unconditionally, unless they elect to return it. The leverage to see goods returned, if that is an issue at severance, is that the Partnership cannot be severed except by mutual consent and payment of the severance fee. Neither partner could ever have a different partner unless they both consent.
This still leaves the possibility of someone simply quitting, and leaving the other partner trapped and possibly out major assets. The support answer to that is you knew up front that this could happen. In a year and a day, if your existing partner does not log on you may sever without their consent. (If that seems too long pick an interval to impose.) However, unfriendly splits may be an insurmountable obstacle. Having been married 25 years and having gotten over tantrums 45+ years ago I just did not really think that part through.
I see a lot of problems and possible solutions, meanwhile the gain on implementing such a system would be minimal.
Just look at how long the LFG tool took, this is all easy on paper, in reality you need a lot of working hours to implement.
Right now you can create your own guild and have only 2 people there to share stuff like mats and gold for example, apart from sharing account bound items, you can do most of the stuff you’d want from a partner system like this, and you can do it right now for free.