Guild Wars 2

I have 43 Characters on one account. I did this to maximize my access to my HOM goodies and keep my life as simple as possible in game.

Now we have time gated crafting mats and recipes and more Ascended on the way. I’m in a bind as these time gates will slow down my gearing greatly.

These time based gates were introduced well after the fact that I had such a large collection of alts and with no prior hint that this gating would be implimented. This whole gating on time feels rather arbitrary to me. Why for example are eight hours played on one day treated differently than eight one hour sessions over eight days?

This dilemma most likely won’t affect most players, but what about your customers who have loved this game so much that they bought huge numbers of character slots feel punished for their playstyle? I’d like to rectify my problem by buying more from you.

My desire is to buy more accounts (two or three) and have my characters evenly alocated to all accounts. I do not intend to sell or lend my accounts.

Is this or could this be possible?

If this is possible would I lose my HOM on all but the original account?

Support has stated in the past that this is not possible, characters cannot be moved from one account to another.

Ok. Thanks for some clarity on my situation.

Ferguson.2157:

These time based gates were introduced well after the fact that I had such a large collection of alts and with no prior hint that this gating would be implimented. This whole gating on time feels rather arbitrary to me. Why for example are eight hours played on one day treated differently than eight one hour sessions over eight days?

This might sound rude but I presume it’s the following:
- people buying gems, especially in large amounts, usually have a job
- having a job means 10 hours a day are occupied by earning money
- however these people can easily log in once a day to do a few time gates
- it means people buying gems won’t significantly lag behind people who don’t

It’s a very smart business model ensuring continuing payments by those who actually have the financial means to support the game (and at the same time support society, welfare, etc etc).

marnick.4305:

This might sound rude but I presume it’s the following:
- people buying gems, especially in large amounts, usually have a job
- having a job means 10 hours a day are occupied by earning money
- however these people can easily log in once a day to do a few time gates
- it means people buying gems won’t significantly lag behind people who don’t

It’s a very smart business model ensuring continuing payments by those who actually have the financial means to support the game (and at the same time support society, welfare, etc etc).

The flaw in your coment is I do buy gems frequently in the $100 quantity. You assume I have no income. I think you may be surprised to hear this but there is an ever growing demographic of games players who are retired with lots of both time and money. I think I’m probably in the top tier of players who buy gems in this game.

I’m retired and disabled, I have lots of time and there is not much I can do outside the house, so I play games a lot. I love this game so much I’ve given it 95% of my gaming time this past year.

Had I started this game with 4 accounts with the same number of characters spread out I wouldn’t have my issue.

If they want to keep me as a high spending customer I’d hope they look to ensuring that players with money and time on their hands aren’t treated poorly.

To my mind there should be some sort of scaling based on an accounts total character count on these time based barriers to accomodate players who have many alts. If there isn’t this old retired man with plenty of money to spend may need to seek a new game where he doesn’t feel punished for playing a game at the rate he does .

Sticking it to a heavy spending customer isn’t the best thing to do for a business!

I’m hoping there will be some way to accomodate players with many alts whatever their income level is as they have supported the game both by buying it and buying character slots!

edit: “(and at the same time support society, welfare, etc etc)” this insinuates that I do neither, you couldn’t be more off base and it is both rude and insulting. Have a nice day.

Ferguson.2157:

marnick.4305:

This might sound rude but I presume it’s the following:
- people buying gems, especially in large amounts, usually have a job
- having a job means 10 hours a day are occupied by earning money
- however these people can easily log in once a day to do a few time gates
- it means people buying gems won’t significantly lag behind people who don’t

It’s a very smart business model ensuring continuing payments by those who actually have the financial means to support the game (and at the same time support society, welfare, etc etc).

The flaw in your coment is I do buy gems frequently in the $100 quantity. You assume I have no income. I think you may be surprised to hear this but there is an ever growing demographic of games players who are retired with lots of both time and money. I think I’m probably in the top tier of players who buy gems in this game.

As you may not have noticed, I"m always very careful to add “on average” and “in general” to such posts. Do not forget that making money is based on averages over large numbers, rather than specific people. If you take an average of society, the people with the most money are the people with jobs, therefor it’d be wise to cater to those people.

However, and let me state this explicitly, every average has exceptions and obviously, you fall within the range of exceptions to this average. That’s unfortunate but I don’t believe retired gamers currently form a financial majority to build a business model around.

If they want to keep me as a high spending customer I’d hope they look to ensuring that players with money and time on their hands aren’t treated poorly.

To my mind there should be some sort of scaling based on an accounts total character count on these time based barriers to accomodate players who have many alts. If there isn’t this old retired man with plenty of money to spend may need to seek a new game where he doesn’t feel punished for playing a game at the rate he does .

That would only work in case of soul-bound crafting materials which would have a full range of problems associated with it. Granted, here should be a way for people like you to play the game to it’s fullest, but it can’t come at the cost of kittening of the large majority of the playerbase.

Sticking it to a heavy spending customer isn’t the best thing to do for a business!

Indeed and that’s why business caters around finding a good target demographic for which you are, unfortunately, an outlier. Let’s hope A.net can find a good solution that doesn’t come at the cost of people with daytime responsibilities.

edit: “(and at the same time support society, welfare, etc etc)” this insinuates that I do neither, you couldn’t be more off base and it is both rude and insulting. Have a nice day.

Again, you’re an outlier. The vast majority of people with 24/7 play timeslots are within either student or welfare demographic, in any case without huge swabs of fun money. I personally find it rude too to play games on welfare, it’s an insult to the 50% in taxes I pay. I think we can agree on my clarification in this post?

Gaile Gray.6028:

It is true that we cannot offer to split accounts, or to move characters between accounts. The character data is so intertwined with the game code that separating the characters and moving them is simply impossible. (And if it was possible, then yep, the HoM would only tie to one account, not three.)

Quite honestly, I do not think this is something that we will be able to offer in the future, although devs have surprised me in the past and what we thought was un-doable becomes possible. But in the short term, however, as much as we would like to help with this — particularly because you’ve been such an amazingly supportive player! — we just can’t do it.

Hi Gaile, for tokens like Laurels and such time gated crafting material (I believe things are headed in that direction), could A-net not think of some way to be less unfriendly to folks with multiple alts? The game itself seems so alt friendly (shared achievements etc) this feels so inconsistent.

Using the OP’s case, I understand that you don’t want someone with 43 characters to get the crafting material or token 43 times faster than someone with only 1. Yet, the converse is those with multiple characters have to wait n (where “n” is the number of characters I have; 43 in the OP’s case) times longer than everyone else. Its quite enough to make me despair about arming all my characters with end-game equipment someday (I have 10 lv80s, going to be 12 at your next character slot sale).

Material like Charged Quartz crystals is already account bound and cannot be sold. However, one a day is too slow if it were a material for end-game equipment for multiple characters; especially if the recipe required multiples for a single part.

How about making it Soulbound? The problem in this case would be the multiples-of-43 stacks of souldbound material but while this policy is in its infancy, I’m sure the developers can think of some way to take that into account and implement a fix (for example a “personal soulbound material page” for each character). It would be much more alt-friendly.

(PS. I realize making the time-gated material soulbound would mean every character would have to be a master crafter in order to process those material so obviously some other changes would need to take place at the same time. Oh well, I’m no game developer but nonetheless, I hope something can be done so OP and I will not have to wait 43x and 12x, respectively, longer than normal to arm our characters)

justkoh.4073:

Gaile Gray.6028:

It is true that we cannot offer to split accounts, or to move characters between accounts. The character data is so intertwined with the game code that separating the characters and moving them is simply impossible. (And if it was possible, then yep, the HoM would only tie to one account, not three.)

Quite honestly, I do not think this is something that we will be able to offer in the future, although devs have surprised me in the past and what we thought was un-doable becomes possible. But in the short term, however, as much as we would like to help with this — particularly because you’ve been such an amazingly supportive player! — we just can’t do it.

Hi Gaile, for tokens like Laurels and such time gated crafting material (I believe things are headed in that direction), could A-net not think of some way to be less unfriendly to folks with multiple alts? The game itself seems so alt friendly (shared achievements etc) this feels so inconsistent.

Using the OP’s case, I understand that you don’t want someone with 43 characters to get the crafting material or token 43 times faster than someone with only 1. Yet, the converse is those with multiple characters have to wait n (where “n” is the number of characters I have; 43 in the OP’s case) times longer than everyone else. Its quite enough to make me despair about arming all my characters with end-game equipment someday (I have 10 lv80s, going to be 12 at your next character slot sale).

Material like Charged Quartz crystals is already account bound and cannot be sold. However, one a day is too slow if it were a material for end-game equipment for multiple characters; especially if the recipe required multiples for a single part.

How about making it Soulbound? The problem in this case would be the multiples-of-43 stacks of souldbound material but while this policy is in its infancy, I’m sure the developers can think of some way to take that into account and implement a fix (for example a “personal soulbound material page” for each character). It would be much more alt-friendly.

(PS. I realize making the time-gated material soulbound would mean every character would have to be a master crafter in order to process those material so obviously some other changes would need to take place at the same time. Oh well, I’m no game developer but nonetheless, I hope something can be done so OP and I will not have to wait 43x and 12x, respectively, longer than normal to arm our characters)

Because of players creating alts just to farm materials and not to actual play them, the only solution that would work IMHO, would be to make the time gated materials soul bond to the toon that aquires them. Of course this will also make many players unhappy…