This suggestion is about three things:
- adding the ability to share equipment between multiple characters without having to transfer it
- giving players more room to store extra equipment that they aren’t using
- letting players have 2 sets of equipment set up at once
So there are two parts to this:
- add character and account storage inventories where players can deposit equipment to be used by either that character, or the whole account, depending on which it is deposited into. There is a fee for depositing equipment into this storage. 1g for Character Equipment Storage, and 50-100 Gems for Account Equipment Storage, per item; there is a cap of 50 items per storage. You can withdraw any item for free, but if you want to put it back, you will have to pay for the deposit again. You can modify items in the Storages with either Upgrade items or if they have a Select Stats option, but you cannot, for example, change the stats of an Ascended piece of equipment without withdrawing it and then depositing it again.
- add another version of equipment slots for each current equipment slot (all armor, weapons, and accessories) that can be outfitted with account-bound items exclusively from the Account Equipment Storage tab. You can choose to use either the character or account slot, but only one can be active at a time per equipment slot. There would either be a button beside each slot to change it between character/account, and/or a right-click option to do so (in addition to the Equip/Unequip right-click options currently available).
Notes:
- I would recommend that both the Character and Account Equipment Storage tabs be free mechanics, not gated behind a Gem Store upgrade or something, but if you do, please make it an account-wide unlock. And I think, based on the nature of deposit fees, that the Character Equipment Storage tab would be the only one that you should sell, if either.
- The idea behind deposit fees are to both take coin (and Gems) out of the economy to provide this useful service, while also making the players carefully consider what they put into them, to reduce how much they will put into the storages. For Account Storage, Legendary items would be a no-brainer, but Ascended, especially armor and weapons, may be a bit more of a question. Also, the idea behind the Gem-funded deposit fee is to make it more likely that ANet will implement this, as it will provide a constant stream of sales for every deposit, as opposed to only once if it was like a permanent unlock, especially because something like this could reduce sales of something like the 1-use Bank Access item, if people used it to transfer equipment (which I doubt).
- The Storages can be seen and accessed through the Hero -> Equipment -> Equipment tab’s , and, like how bag titles are displayed, there will be a title that says “Character Equipment Storage” and “Account Equipment Storage”; the Character Storage and character’s inventory will appear if you are using the Character-bound slot for any given piece, and the Account Storage will appear if you are using the Account-bound slot for any given piece.
- You can deposit items of any binding into the Character Storage, and it will maintain that binding when removed (except for Bind on Equip items, which must be equipped before you can deposit it). You can deposit only Account-Bound items into the Account Storage; if it is Account-Bound and Bind on Equip, it can only be put into Character Storage.
- Do a quick check every time you log into a character to see if the items they have equipped in the Account Equipment Slots (not Storage), are in the Account Equipment Storage, and haven’t be withdrawn. If it has been withdrawn, then unslot the item from the Account Equipment Slot, and automatically set usage of said Equipment Slot to the Character version of that Slot. In order to do this, you may need to create a custom instance-value/unique ID per item to put on each item as a tag, so that the game can recognize the difference between 2 items of the same name/structure in the Slots, if it doesn’t exist. You would want a unique ID, and a tag on the item to know if any characters are currently using the item, so that, for example, changing a Legendary’s stats don’t unequip it from all characters just because the details of the item are different, but the item’s unique ID is the same. You shouldn’t need to do a check for anything in the Character Equipment Storage, because characters will always be online directly changing that, and the check can be done there to unequip items that are removed from the Storage if it also leaves the general inventory entirely.
- Equipping an item from the Account Equipment Storage does not remove the item from the Storage, it just turns it gray for that character to indicate that it is being equipped and cannot be equipped again (for, for example, Accessories or 1h Weapons). It creates a ghost-version of the item to be equipped into the Slot, it is not removed from the Storage.
Another side-idea, somewhat based off of this, mechanically, would be to sell Account-shared Harvesting Tool slots. You would buy them as a package for like 800-1000 Gems (although if it had to be 800-1000 per slot, I could understand it because of lost revenue on tools), and it basically gives a second version of the Harvesting Tool slots. 1 version is simply like it is now, it’s unique per character, but the other Account slot is shared by all characters on the account. You can toggle between using either of those versions of the slot, decided per tool slot. For example, you could have an Infinite harvest tool in the Account slot for general harvesting, and a Master tool in character slot (or vice versa) for when you come across valuable nodes that you want better rare drop rates for.
Please feel free to ask questions for clarification, as I know this probably doesn’t make sense to anyone but me.