Guild Wars 2

This idea popped into my head a few days back. What if Character slots and bank tabs where the same thing. Here’s how I can see it;

All bank slots and character slots are merged into one thing(I’ll call it a mystic slot for ease of explanation)

When you want a new character you use one of these mystic slots.
When you want a new bank tab you use one of these mystic slots.

Once your done with your character/bank you can delete them to make them back into mystic slots. (naturally any items they carry will be destroyed as well)

I can see this helping in a number of ways.
-Players who don’t want to use more than one or two characters can use their other slots.
-It would also save a bit on server size as most “bank characters” would be switched to bank tabs.
-This also makes mystic slot more valuable to buy in the gemstore as if you are using it for a character and it doesn’t pan out, you can always delete him/her for a bank tab.

What does everyone else think?

I’m…pretty sure you just suggested raising the price of bank tabs by at least 200 gems. While mystic slots would be more flexible, if you just want a bank tab, that’s not an improvement.

I guess I’m not sure how this idea is very useful. If I’m just using a character for storage, I can get way, way more storage by loading them up with bags than I could converting them into a single bank slot. It’s slightly less convenient, but I’m mostly storing materials, not stuff to which I need constant access. Meanwhile, I think it’s more confusing to be able to convert characters into bank slots and bank slots into characters, because that’s a pretty bizarre equivalence to anyone unfamiliar with the practice of using alts for storage.

As for the servers, they hardly need to save space. They’re not storing player data on floppy disks. ;P

That sounds terrible. A complicated solution for something that isn’t a problem.

Bank characters are not an issue, as Anet has no problem letting people have (what is the number, 69 right now?) a large amount of characters.

If Anet was worried about data space that characters use, the amount of character slots we currently have would be a lot lower.

You may not want more than 2 characters and that’s fine. The issue is that once you make level 80, a lot of the rewards setup in game are designed specifically to help us create additional level 80 characters. It’s a system that works fairly well because it gives the player a lot more freedom and options, and as those characters become level 80, we want more characters to use the next rewards on, so we buy more character slots, bags, stuff, which is good for the game.

I also don’t understand the benefit to this.

For one thing a bank tab holds 30 items while a character with no extra bag slots and 18 slot bags (at about 2g each) can hold 92 items. So converting a character slot into a bank slot actually loses you a lot of storage space.

And as people said it’s highly unlikely the number of bank characters in the game is a problem for Anet given they allow everyone to have about 70 characters each, if we’re willing to buy the slots.

It would also complicate a system that’s currently very straight forward. If you want another character you buy a character slot. If you want more bank space you buy a bank tab. If you have a spare character slot and want more space you can make a mule. Mixing them all up and making them interchangeable just confuses things.

As someone else said it’s a complicated solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.