Feldon So the biggest kerfuffle about today’s announcement about EverQuest II going fully free-to-play was an unexpected one for me. A larger-than-expected number of players have multiple characters on both the EQ2 and EQ2X services and they are concerned that they’ll get locked out of some of those characters when the transition completes and will be forced to buy character slots to continue playing those characters.
A player asked:
I have 12 slots on live full and 14 on eq2x.. when the merge what happens to all the characters? do I need to delete toons before hand that I don’t want?
also most of my toons have the same name on different servers. how am I going to deal with that?
Please give me a response I need to know if I need to delete the toons I don’t want..
SmokeJumper has responded thoroughly on this issue:
Don’t delete anything!
I’m chasing this answer for you now and expect to announce a resolution early next week (after many discussions in the meantime). As far as I know, this is our only unresolved question on the changeover.
and:
This is a discussion that’s hot internally right now. We know what we want to do, but we’re discussing how to make it exploit-proof right now. We’ll get something announced on this issue by early next week, I hope.
and:
The character slot question will be answered early next week. It is not decided yet. We know what we *want* to do, but we have some homework to do before announcing the solution.
and:
Answer coming early next week. I have to talk this over with a couple departments and make sure everyone’s on the same page before announcing the solution.
Also with regards to those with All Access (formerly Station Access) and grandfathered character slots:
Checked on it. If you have SA slots currently (we don’t offer slots on SA currently, but people that had them before the change are grandfathered in still), then you will keep those SA slots after the changeover.
also:
LoN character slots definitely count as “purchased” slots. You keep them.
and:
You keep all character slots you purchased. We take nothing away.
So I think that’s every possible question about character slots, except will Age of Discovery include one for Beastlords, and I think (but can’t be certain) that the answer is No.
You just had to use the word “kerfuffle” didn’t you?
I’d assume no new slot with BLs as well since we can purchase slots now.
Yeah, this one is actually a surprise big deal to me. I have my character slots max’d out on Live and have six characters on Extended. What is the answer?
I’m guessing the solution that SJ has stated the team ‘wants’ to do is grandfather all pre-existing slots to be available. You delete that allowed over cap character, the slot is gone. Just like they’ve done previously.
What about those of us who paid for extra character slots what happens to those.
@Isest, It’s not explicitly stated in this article, but if you read the thread in question, SJ does explicitly say that purchased character slots (and LoN slots count as such) are not lost. The only question is if your # of characters exceeds the cap (23 or 24), which is what the quoted posts are actually about.
Here’s the post he was initially replying to:
“I have 12 slots on live full and 14 on eq2x.. when the merge what happens to all the characters? do I need to delete toons before hand that I don’t want?
also most of my toons have the same name on different servers. how am I going to deal with that?
Please give me a response I need to know if I need to delete the toons I don’t want.. mostly the toons on crushbone/kithicor”
and…
“I have in my case 23 toons on Live and 7 or 8 on EQ2X and a silver membership there, and pay for live a year at a time. What will happen???”
and the erroneous reply by Silat that he was correcting:
“You will lose access to anything beyond 23 or 24.
Silat”
On my main account I have 13 on Splitpaw, 13 on the Bazaar and 7 on Freeport, many with the same names. My second account has 7, 7 and 4. Also on Test and TestCopy but presumably those aren’t affected. “We have some homework to do before announcing the solution” is hardly reassuring. It seems that, one way or another, I’m going to lose at least 11 characters.
Hmm. I hadn’t really thought about this. I have maybe six or seven characters on Live and four or five on EQ2X on the same account. The bulk of my characters are on Test, where I have all the slots filled. Mrs Bhagpuss, though, probably has all the slots filled everywhere, or nearly.
All those would be on Access accounts, so I think that makes them safe? Having the same names doesn’t come into it since we aren’t on any of the servers being merged.
Doing the F2P conversion simultaneously with a GU and an expansion launch sounds like insanity to me, but I guess we’ll at least get all our inevitable downtime and emergency patches in one lump rather than three…
I’m definitely wondering about how they will handle the slot merge. I have seven characters on my lapsed live account, which are probably logged off in approximately the order I’d want them in. If I remember correctly, zero of these are free race/class combos, though I will definitely pay to unlock the race and class(*) for my main. I have one character (and three name-save placeholders) on EQ2X. If they put the EQ2X character at the back of the list, I won’t have any characters I can log into, and I won’t be able to create more without deleting because I would be over the cap.
* – I presume class unlocks are still allowed – the matrix thing says gold only.
After hanging out here, and now reading some of the official forum threads, all I can say is that I hope someone on the team with a good sense of logic-based problem solving is working on this transition.
From people who might or might not have the Freeblood race (if you bought it in the last 60 days apparently they are refunding?), all access accounts and multiple character accounts, EQ2X and EQ2 combines, characters with the same name, the merger of the LiveGamer servers, to too much money/high level equipment/master spells/broker access for their tier when the changeover goes live, the permuations are pretty daunting! We won’t even consider how the dungeon finder is going to function with characters that have limited gear and access mixed in with gold subscribers. So far their track record with complicated changes hasn’t been so terrific, so I hope they have some kind of flow chart so the entire thing doesn’t blow up in a flurry of fireworks.
It is pretty mind bending when you consider the details. “We have some homework to do before announcing the solution” is probably a phrase we will hear a lot in the coming weeks!
Unlocks will be available if you don’t want to pay the recurring fees. They are trying to give people as much as they can for character slots. If you bought a char slot previously, you will still have it. You will now have access to your old chars that previously were not available. If you pay the monthly fee it unlocks everything save the current 2 expansions. If you have already bought the current expansions you do not loose them. You have more options to play on all servers.
“Also with regards to those with All Access (formerly Station Access) and grandfathered character slots:
Checked on it. If you have SA slots currently (we don’t offer slots on SA currently, but people that had them before the change are grandfathered in still), then you will keep those SA slots after the changeover.
also:
LoN character slots definitely count as “purchased” slots. You keep them.
and:
You keep all character slots you purchased. We take nothing away.”
My question/concern:
In light of these statements above, Will Station Access accounts still be viable, or will we have to pay separately for all the SoE games we play?
I would actually ask the bigger question, are all SOE games going to a F2P model. Sure seems that way. Which I wouldn’t mind. would love to try some other games without have to buy the whole dang thing.
thought we had more than 7 character slots normally…
so what happens now that they downgrade the base to 7, do we have to buy a few more character slots to keep all our characters?
They haven’t (that I’ve seen) mentioned other games. I also have 12 characters in Vanguard on my main account. The ones in SWG are going anyway and those in Free Realms I don’t really care about but I wouldn’t want to lose the Vanguard ones.
My concern is I current have 6 on EQ2X and 6 on Antonia Bayle… I have pre orderd the AoD so I will need a slot for my Beastlord as well. If they let us keep our current slot characters thats fine and dandy but I’ll be really upset if I have to fork out an additions $10.00 for another slot for my beastlord!!
It would probably help Vanguard to be FTP, but does that game have a marketplace? Doubt they have the manhours to implement any kind of elaborate SC feature for that game.
My guess is that they will handle the merge like they have handled the server mergers in the past. Toons on Live will have priority over toons coming in on EQ2x. The toons coming from other servers to Live will be sorted by creation date, with the exception of level 5 (plus or minus) who probably will get name bounced and have an X added to their names if there is a conflict. As for toons on multiple accounts with the same names, I am guessing that the Live server toons will have priority on names, and others get an X (and you get free name changes either by potion or petition).
As for what they “want” to do and are checking on it … I am assuming they “want” to allow all toons to transfer to Live. So maybe we should all go to EQ2x and get a couple extra toons to transfer tonight and hold some spots open. Just sayin …. lol.
so how about this player A moved his character XXXX to the Bazaar and sold it on Livegamer to player B who kept the name and copied it to Freeport.
Then player C sold the character XXXX on the Bazaar to player C.
both kept the name XXXX.
After the merge who keeps the name XXXX player B or C?
From Smokerblowers latest post:
Station Access allowed you to play all SOE games for $30 a month, and gave you 12 character slots in EQ2.
All Access allows you to play all SOE games for $20 a month, without the 12 character slots.
You were transitioned from Station Access to All Access, and your 12 character slots were grandfathered in. There was an announcement and probably an e-mail or two.
The base account has always had 7 character slots, for years now. If you had more than 7 characters, you either bought character slots (which are yours to keep), or a Station Access/All Access which gives you 12.