Guild Wars 2

In Guild Wars 2, there are 8 Classes… and 5 character slots. This prevents me from having one of every Class, to be able to play whatever Class is overpowered, and avoid playing an underpowered Class. I did not have this problem in WoW, in WoW I had 50 characters slots (9 Classes)

The only way to get more character slots is to buy gems or whatever with real money, then buy slots with gems. This creates a clear dividing line between players who have money to burn, and players who are not eager to spend money on Guild Wars 2 beyond the box cost. Part of the appeal of Guild Wars 2 was the lack of a subscription fee to play, but that is ruined when restrictions like 5 characters slots for 8 Classes are made

Pay to win

No.
You can buy gems with gold.
I think it averages around 1.5-2 gold for 800 gems.

You can buy gems with gold.

Gem prices may be that cheap now, but wait a few months. Every game I have seen where you could purchase the “premium” currency using ingame currency started out cheap too. Then the gold farmers get rolling and EVERYTHING skyrockets until the average player simply cannot afford to do business anymore without spending a fortune in real life cash. I understand that one of the very reasons the currency exchange exists is to COMBAT gold farmers. However, in my humble opinion, it doesn’t help.

The term buy low sell high is your friend in freemium games, and GW2 IS freemium, don’t let the initial buy in fool you. It is the ONLY way to compete with the gold farmers. Unless of course you want to spend hundreds(literally) of real life dollars, or hundreds of hours farming gold. BTW, I got my first ingame gold spam email today! I felt so proud!

No sub doesn’t mean free. It’s like all those people who cry for free 2 play, not realising that a company still has to make money.

You can buy the character slots. The amount of character slots you have, has nothing to do with pay 2 win. That is an absurd conclusion on your side. You can do sPvP at level 80 from start. Don’t like it? Delete it and try again.

And as the others here pointed out you can actually get them with in game gold as well.

My advice: read up before you scream like a 5-year-old.

Now, I never played WoW, but are you telling us that you got 50 character slots included in the price of the sub? That seems unlikely.

Gehenna.3625:

No sub doesn’t mean free. It’s like all those people who cry for free 2 play, not realising that a company still has to make money.

You can buy the character slots. The amount of character slots you have, has nothing to do with pay 2 win. That is an absurd conclusion on your side. You can do sPvP at level 80 from start. Don’t like it? Delete it and try again.

And as the others here pointed out you can actually get them with in game gold as well.

My advice: read up before you scream like a 5-year-old.

Now, I never played WoW, but are you telling us that you got 50 character slots included in the price of the sub? That seems unlikely.

Actually that is true…however after paying 10 quid for the base game plus first expac…then another 20 for the other expac…then another 20 for the latest expac plus 9 quid a month….you can understand why they give you as many as you would need.

I dont have any complaints with the GWs system, if i ran out of character slots, i would happily pay a small fee to get some more…the game is worth it…plus i guess all the extra cash Arenanet make, will be pumped back into the game at some point through expansions or patches.

Gehenna.3625:

No sub doesn’t mean free. It’s like all those people who cry for free 2 play, not realising that a company still has to make money.

You can buy the character slots. The amount of character slots you have, has nothing to do with pay 2 win. That is an absurd conclusion on your side. You can do sPvP at level 80 from start. Don’t like it? Delete it and try again.

And as the others here pointed out you can actually get them with in game gold as well.

My advice: read up before you scream like a 5-year-old.

Now, I never played WoW, but are you telling us that you got 50 character slots included in the price of the sub? That seems unlikely.

It’s actually true.

You can create up to 50 characters, with restrictions being 10 characters per realm.

Since this is relevant to the subject; what’s the maximum number of character slots you can have? (By purchasing from the BLTC)

Also since you mention World of Warcraft’s realm and character slot structure; Guild Wars 2 was designed in a way that you have to invest in your guild and realm. However, in World of Warcraft your realm doesn’t play too much of a role.

(Unless, of course you are in a specific kind of realm, like PvP/RPG/Normal etc)

Meanwhile in Guild Wars 2 your World matters since your contribution in WvW counts for the World’s points and performance that is shown to the others.

Character slots have nothing to do with P2Win.

@Gehenna
In WoW you had 10 slots on each server, up to a total of 50 characters, iirc. Not that it matters. ;P

Just save up some gold and buy the gems that way, if you feel that the game devs haven’t earned some monetary support.

I’ll gladly pay real currency for additional character slots, should the need for it arise. Because I think that the game is pretty awesome, and I don’t mind a couple of micro-transactions to show my support.
After all, I gave blizzard 12€ per month for several years. And I wasn’t even very fond of WoW post vanilla.

EDIT: Not to mention I bought D3 against better judgement. /shrug

Gehenna.3625:

Now, I never played WoW, but are you telling us that you got 50 character slots included in the price of the sub? That seems unlikely.

Lol? Have you ever played a game that wasn’t a pay to win Asian grinder…?

WoW has 50 character slots, 10 per server (11 per server in the next expansion). You can look this up, if you don’t believe me, but it’s pretty common knowledge. Most games have a solid amount of characters slots… Guild Wars is the odd man out here

Guildwars always gave you slightly less character slots than available classes, I’m not surprised they’ve done it again.

Ultimately, further development of any online game relies on some kind of income, wether via subs or micro-transactions. This title, like its predecessor opts for micro trans, and as a result, needs to provide a viable reason for people to keep paying.

It can be a bit of a pain, but to be honest paying for the odd extra for my account here and there is far more appealing than feeling like I have to keep paying a sub on the off chance I feel like logging in during the course of any given month, and I still feel like I’ve gained something if I don’t play for a few weeks.

If you think about it, its kind of absurd to think that after all you’ve paid just to install and run the game initially, that you should continue paying just for the privilege of being able to continue to do so.

Whilst you are still, ostensibly paying for a virtual item, a character slot on a server, with all the stigma that goes with doing so, it’s an optional purchase that you are free to make, or not, as you choose. But, in my eyes at least, you’ve “gained” something, rather than just “retained” the right to access it at all.

Gehenna.3625:

Now, I never played WoW, but are you telling us that you got 50 character slots included in the price of the sub? That seems unlikely.

Pff. That’s small potatoes. City of Heroes give you like two hundred character slots out of the gate, although only 12 on any given server to start with. I think you get extra character slot unlocks the longer you maintain your subscription. I have around 36 active characters on my primary server. :p

(I’m not an altaholic! The guys with the real problem are the ones with 200+ active characters!)

Ganadorf.3460:

WoW has 50 character slots, 10 per server (11 per server in the next expansion). You can look this up, if you don’t believe me, but it’s pretty common knowledge. Most games have a solid amount of characters slots… Guild Wars is the odd man out here

Ofcourse WoW gives you as many character slots as you want. They actually WANT you to spend more time in the game leveling all those characters, as you’re paying them for every month you spend in the game leveling that character.
Or do you actually want to tell me that you would need to spend MORE money in GW2 if you bought those additional character slots (for real money) and leveled those characters, than you spent on WoW?

i think the system is perfect …there are no montly fees so 5 slots is more than enough to play enough content for the initial cost ..that way if you want to play even more than you paid for there are additional costs

1) They are probably going to start bringing out expansions from about 6 months down the line and each one will almost certainly include some extra character slots. Yes you’ll have to buy the expansion but you’ll be getting a lot of extra content for that.

2) If you’re wanting to play PVP then as other people have pointed out you don’t need to have 1 of each profession ready to go because you’re automatically levelled to 80 when you go to PVP areas, given max-stat armor and can freely re-do your traits. So if you want to switch professions you can just delete one character and create another without really losing anything.

3) In PVE you shouldn’t need to worry about it. The game is intended to be balanced so that no profession is under or over powered and the meta-game tends to move slower and have less of an impact so it’s easier for the devs to keep up and make sure it actually is balanced than with PVP.

4) You’d need to buy 3 character slots to get all 8 professions. That costs 2400 gems. 2800 gems costs £29.75 (I can’t check other currencies). That’s not a huge amount of money by any stretch. It’s more than I’d be willing to pay having just bought the game, but then I’m a) broke, b) cheap and c) have no need of more character slots right now.

It’s in no way expensive enough to create a “clear divide” between those who can and can’t pay it, especially since as explained above you don’t really need all the character slots to have an advantage.

Twilightman.4710:

Gem prices may be that cheap now, but wait a few months. Every game I have seen where you could purchase the “premium” currency using ingame currency started out cheap too. Then the gold farmers get rolling and EVERYTHING skyrockets until the average player simply cannot afford to do business anymore without spending a fortune in real life cash. I understand that one of the very reasons the currency exchange exists is to COMBAT gold farmers. However, in my humble opinion, it doesn’t help.

The term buy low sell high is your friend in freemium games, and GW2 IS freemium, don’t let the initial buy in fool you. It is the ONLY way to compete with the gold farmers. Unless of course you want to spend hundreds(literally) of real life dollars, or hundreds of hours farming gold. BTW, I got my first ingame gold spam email today! I felt so proud!

The difference, to me, between GW2 and most “freemium” or microtransaction based games is that you don’t need any of the items in the gem store to play. Some of them are helpful, or allow you to do things a bit quicker but you could quite easily complete the entire game without ever having or spending a single gem.

Hardly consider character slots Pay to win.

Jakula.1072:

Hardly consider character slots Pay to win.

When there’s 8 Classes, it is. If there were only 5 Classes it would be fine

Ganadorf.3460:

When there’s 8 Classes, it is. If there were only 5 Classes it would be fine

You don’t need to pay for the slots with real money. You can acquire the amount of gems quite fast with the in-game currency; simply look at the second tab of the Black Lion Trading Company “O”

I think five character slots is minimal. Most people will have five or six characters anyway. That also helps not to have inactive characters.

So buy the extra slots. Every post of yours I’ve seen has been whinging about something, Ganadorf. If everything in GW2 is so bad, why are you even playing? Anet needs to make money somehow, because they’re not charging us a sub.

For the majority of players, because the majority of players aren’t altaholics, 5 slots is plenty enough. For the afflicted (yes, I’m one! ) we have to buy a few extra slots. And you know what I’ve done with those extra slots so far? Little more than create the alts. I may never spend another penny in the store; I was happy to buy the extra & support the game. Long before the game came out, I knew full well that there would only be 5 slots. I could have not bought the game because I thought I was being conned. I did buy the game, knowing full well that I would be buying 3 more (reasonably priced) slots. I don’t see what the problem is.

If all you want to do is try out other classes, you can create & delete. If you think you’re genuinely going to play all 8 classes (or 6 or 7), then buying extra slots is not a rip-off. You will get full value for your purchase. Try not being so negative all the time. If there’s another game you’d rather play right now, if there’s another company you think is doing a better job than Anet… why are you here?

Ganadorf.3460:

Gehenna.3625:

Now, I never played WoW, but are you telling us that you got 50 character slots included in the price of the sub? That seems unlikely.

Lol? Have you ever played a game that wasn’t a pay to win Asian grinder…?

WoW has 50 character slots, 10 per server (11 per server in the next expansion). You can look this up, if you don’t believe me, but it’s pretty common knowledge. Most games have a solid amount of characters slots… Guild Wars is the odd man out here

Yes I have played many MMOs and most of them are not Asian grinders. I just haven’t played WoW, that’s all. This whole realm thing is new to me in that sense but I believe it. It just sounded like such a big number. I’ve never had 50 characters in any game for that matter.

I really am surprised at 50 character slots but then since you pay for the game, a sub and all expansions I suppose it’s the least they can do.

In SWTOR you got 8 character slots per server for example but since you can play both sides you would need 16 slots. They are offering f2p but you well get fewer character slots. So there’s another example.

You get 5 slots here as part of the game price. It’s still a good deal and has nothing to do with pay2win. In the end Anet do need to make money somehow and you get the possibility to earn it with in game gold as well. I don’t think the OP has a leg to stand on.

Ganadorf.3460:

Raedwulf.3712:

So buy the extra slots. Every post of yours I’ve seen has been whinging about something, Ganadorf. If everything in GW2 is so bad, why are you even playing? Anet needs to make money somehow, because they’re not charging us a sub.

For the majority of players, because the majority of players aren’t altaholics, 5 slots is plenty enough. For the afflicted (yes, I’m one! ) we have to buy a few extra slots. And you know what I’ve done with those extra slots so far? Little more than create the alts. I may never spend another penny in the store; I was happy to buy the extra & support the game. Long before the game came out, I knew full well that there would only be 5 slots. I could have not bought the game because I thought I was being conned. I did buy the game, knowing full well that I would be buying 3 more (reasonably priced) slots. I don’t see what the problem is.

If all you want to do is try out other classes, you can create & delete. If you think you’re genuinely going to play all 8 classes (or 6 or 7), then buying extra slots is not a rip-off. You will get full value for your purchase. Try not being so negative all the time. If there’s another game you’d rather play right now, if there’s another company you think is doing a better job than Anet… why are you here?

Grow up

Just because I have a few legitimate complaints about Guild Wars 2, doesn’t mean I hate the game. Aside from the problems I’ve listed on this Forum, I like the game

Nobody is saying you hate the game, just maybe think about the complaints before you post….

Ganadorf.3460:

Grow up

I’m 45, thanks. Don’t think I need to grow up any further. Play nice, eh? I admit my post was slightly spiky, but I’m not the first person to have remarked upon your negativity. As I’m sure you will agree, if responses to this thread can be considered as representative of the community (I don’t say that they are), you’re very much in a minority. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong, even though I think you are.

But complaining about something that you, presumably, knew about well in advance of release? Yes, there are some problems with the game, some things that need tweaking. I don’t believe either the game or the company are beyond criticism. But moaning about slots? As Gehenna just said, I really don’t think you have a leg to stand on. You don’t even have to pay cash to get the slots you want; you just have to be patient. How cheap is that?

Monstrosity.7035:

No.
You can buy gems with gold.

THIS. ’nuff said…

Supposedly op thinks that game company is obligated to cater to his every need…

If it’s for PvE or sPvP, it doesn’t matter. The former, it doesn’t matter if you’re “UP” or “OP”, and the latter you can just create and delete.

For WvWvW – you can buy the extra slots if it’s that important to you to always have what’s considered the most OP class.

Comparing the rate of class-balancing patches in other games, the cost of the character slots will still be lower than a monthly fee if you truly want to max out all 8 classes just for WvWvW.

you can buy gems with in game currency and tbh i was suprised how stupidly cheap it is, even the upgrade to digital deluxe is gems and its so cheap, i feel bad for actually buying it with real money when its actually cheaper in game, that i think is bad but whatever.

i dont have a problem with chara slots, cheap to get more and easy.
wow has also been running for many more years and is subscription vs a game thats just been released and doesnt have a subscription.

Ganadorf.3460:

Jakula.1072:

Hardly consider character slots Pay to win.

When there’s 8 Classes, it is. If there were only 5 Classes it would be fine

It’s not pay to win, if you just PvP you only have to delete your character if you want to make another profession. You get boosted to lvl 80 in PvP anyway so who cares if you delete a character you just play PvP on anyway?

You’re just saying it’s pay to win because that’s the only reason you can find to give you free slots. Find some other arguement that actually is true for this. As others have said, you can get gems for gold quite easily, so it’s not that hard to get 3 more slots even without spending more irl money.
I rather have this kinda cash shop than an actual free to play pay to win game. I rarely spend money on cash shops, and here it really doesn’t matter that I don’t.

Ganadorf.3460:

Jakula.1072:

Hardly consider character slots Pay to win.

When there’s 8 Classes, it is. If there were only 5 Classes it would be fine

You’re missing the point. How do you “win” by having more characters? You can’t play more than one at a time anyway.

Pay to win means you will gain an inherent advantage (in PvE or PvP) that cannot be obtained without spending real money.

I already bought a character slot with gems exchanged from in game gold. Whenever I have some extra silvers, I exchange them into gems. I have enough gems to buy one more, but I realize I have no time to play so many characters at this time (6 characters made). So I just bought a tab of 30 bank slots.

After 100 or so hours of playing and reaching lvl80, I currently have enough gold stored to buy an extra 7 character slots. That’s with absolutely zero real-world cash spent. If I didn’t buy exotic items and trait books I’d have been able to buy twice as many.

5? I have 9… and it is still not enough for me lol.

But yes, ArenaNet needs to make money somehow, they can make it from me with character slots, and clothing/transmutation stones.

Business model is “slightly” different between WoW and GW2… whereas WoW lives of you 1) buying the game and then 2) paying to continue to play the game, in GW2 you 1) pay for the game and 2) continue to play for free. So there is quite a difference in the interest of making more slots available. For WoW, the more slots they give you, the more time you need just to level all those toons… without them even having to add content in order to have you continue paying for the game. That doesn’t apply to GW2. GW2 gives you a more limited number of character slots, but it is your own choice if you to invest in more toons.

5 slots perfectly enables you to create one toon of each race. Though sure, 8 would’ve been nice in order to have 1 of each class. But having the versatility to use each class is probably only really relevant for competitive PvP and for that purpose you have the ability to re-roll a toon on 1 slot, without having to re-level each toon.

Besides, as stated by others, by the time you have completely leveled those 5 toons in PvE you’ll have acquired plenty of gold to buy more slots by converting ingame cash to gems. Without having to spend any real cash.

Be as it is, considering that this is the players helping players section of the forum, what are you asking from us??? You’ve been advised by several people already that if you just play the game and start with the toons that are available to you that you’ll make plenty of gold to buy the slots with ingame gold. However that apparently wasn’t the help you were looking for… so what do you want from us? That we provide you with the funds for more character slots?

Or are you just looking for a place to ventilate your frustration and picked this place for it?

I’ve racked up ten character slots, currently occupied by 8 humans (one for each profession), a charr and an asura. At the moment, most of them are doing little more than reserving their names, but I’ll get to it.

I don’t have a problem with starting with 5 slots at all. As has been said, you can only play with one at a time and most sane people do pretty much everything with that one before looking to create more.