Feldon Players on standard EQ2 accounts with more than 7 characters in a region, or players on Station Access accounts with more than 12 characters in a region were locked out of accessing these “hidden” characters with a change in Game Update 57. Although intended to close an exploit, the primary motivation for this change has been to protect the monetization of character slots, which are for sale on EQ2 Extended servers.
Note: This change has been rolled back as of Tuesday, August 24th, to allow players to “get their house in order”. On Tuesday, August 31st, players who have more characters than are allowed by their account type will only have the option of deleting characters to access “hidden” characters. The /camp command will not load any character not visible on the character select screen, and changes to the character list INI file will be ignored.
If you have no more than 7 EQ2 characters on your EQ2 account, or no more than 12 EQ2 characters on your Station Account, you do not need to do anything.
This notice appeared on Friday, but I held it til today to coincide with the official start of the 1 week grace period.
From SmokeJumper:
We’ve been getting a lot of calls about the character slot change, so to try to let everyone know what we’re doing all at once, here’s an announcement about the subject.
First of all, there were lots of accounts out there that had extra character slots beyond the limits of their current subscription.
We made a recent change that fixed that issue and brought the limits back to where they were supposed to be.
However, we did that change without prewarning you folks…which was an error on our part.
So we’re going to do a one-week rollback on that change to allow you to shuffle stuff around on your characters and ensure that the characters you want are left in your remaining slots before we reimplement the change.
On Tuesday, August 24th, we’ll roll back the change. At that time, you’ll be able to access all your characters, regardless of our account slot limitations.
For one week (7 days) you can freely exchange stuff back and forth between your characters.
Then on Tuesday, August 31st, we’ll reimplement the fix and accounts will be restricted to their proper number of character slots.
BEFORE AUGUST 31st, just make sure that the last characters you log into the game are the ones that you want to keep. Then, when we reimplement the fix, you’ll be left with your most recently-logged characters, and you’ll be good to go.
We apologize for the inconvience we created by not pre-announcing this change. But this should let you do all the shuffling you need to do before the fix goes back in.
From Bunji, member of the crack EQ2 QA department:
This should be working now. You may need to restart your client.
From Shareana:
If you are still not able to see all 12 characters slots and pay for Station Access, please be sure that you have sent in a ticket via /petition or the Knowledge Base.
There just is no reason that they couldn’t have bumped the regular account to 12 and Station to 17. $OE is fail at customer satisfaction.
Oddly, with the “rollback” I show a full list of 12 characters if I log out to the selection screen. Prior to this “rollback” it would simply show the most recent 7 played, even though “/camp charname” would allow access to the other 5.
I have my 7 most recently accessed as the ones I want to keep access to for now, so I should be good to go once it’s bumped back down next week.
They’ve said before they’d be happy to increase the number of character slots now and then, but it’s out of their hands. The number of character slots is an aspect that’s tied into marketing and legal agreements, etc. They’ve said they’re clamping down on this exploit to protect the value of character slots on the F2P server, which will be available for purchase there.
However, that gives me pause for thought. If there’s one single Station Cash item that would be more than welcome by everyone on regular subscription servers regardless of their stance on the Marketplace and items sold through it, it would be extra character slots. The extra slots given with Station Access would still be a valuable incentive/perk, but if a player wanted to cut back to a regular subscription because they just don’t play any of the other games granted under Station Access, they could have the option of purchasing additional character slots to keep permanently, regardless of subscription plan.
Selling additional slots for a one-time fee per slot on regular subscription servers would be advantageous to the financial well-being of the game. It would generate immediate income in large amounts, as extra slots are very much desired by players who’ve been playing a lot time, having amassed quite a collection of very high level characters, none of which they would be willing to delete to make room, but wish any new characters they create to have access to the Veteran Rewards granted to their other characters, something that wouldn’t happen with a second account. It’s just handier to have all characters share the same shared bank slots, too. Additionally, all those new characters will mean those players will be spending more time engaged in the game, instead of perhaps playing something else, having grown bored with their other characters. This will also mean that those players who buy Station Cash items for their characters will now have new characters to buy things for.
I think it’s /feedback time. What do others reading this think?
in response to tock. I am highly against marketplace infultrating my server. However an additional slot marketplace item I would not oppose because it does not give any specific advantage to that player that he/she has not earned. The aditional slot would be just another opuritunity to earn your way up the ranks and create new characters. In fact, If such a thing existed I would probably purchase some myself.