Guild Wars 2: The One Thread

[MrSerious]

Now, having said all that, I'd totally quit WoW for GW2 if I had to pay a fee. But because I don't, I'll be white knighting both companies!

Even though I've cancelled my subscribtion to wow I'll probably come back around 4.3 to see whats new (4.2 doesn't look good enough at the moment) but couldn't play both games, I don't have the time. Its one or the other. An exciting new game or a 7yr old dying game. Its an easy choice.

[Valeron]

Could be, I'm just assuming that ANet will realize people will want enough slots to play all of the professions. They said they wanted to correct the mistakes from the first game, the initial amount of character slots was one of those mistakes.

[Deleted]

I would not call less than 8 character slots "a lot", so I'm positive the number will be more like 20, maybe 50.

WoW does it, and they won't settle for something inferior to what Blizzard does.

I think your really dreaming with 20 or 50 character slots, why would anyone really need that many on release? I don't think GW2 will be as quick as GW1 is, so I doubt you'll really need that many in long time, nevermind release. Considering theres 8 professions, only the extreme no lifers will be bored enough to take every prof/race combo up. I do like to have some alts to play of each race and profession, but still your numbers just seem silly in my opinion.

[ZyngaFail]

I think your really dreaming with 20 or 50 character slots, why would anyone really need that many on release? I don't think GW2 will be as quick as GW1 is, so I doubt you'll really need that many in long time, nevermind release. Considering theres 8 professions, only the extreme no lifers will be bored enough to take every prof/race combo up. I do like to have some alts to play of each race and profession, but still your numbers just seem silly in my opinion.

It costs them nothing, and people will spend that cash on other content either way.

A character is... 5kb, let's be pessimistic and say 100kb (that's probably closer to a 20x overestimate). You go and buy a 1TB hard drive for 50 euro. That's enough room to store 10737418 characters. Now say you give every player 50 slots and you sell 10 million copies, then you can be pessimistic again and say that every one out of those 10 million will create all 50 of their characters. You'll have to spend 2350 euro on hard drives, big deal!!

50 character slots = 0.0235 cents

1 cent = 42 character slots, magic!

lol fact: I have 10 TB of server grade HDD in my desktop because I got them for 15 euro/TB. They were priced wrong though... so take that for what you will. But I could easily sustain all the storage needed for a MMO with 2.5 million subscribers and given from the estimates at the top it's likely to be 20x more than that, i.e. 50 million subscribers.

Oh and add in compression, see where we are going now?

[Deleted]

Also look at it from Anets PoV, people want character slots, we give them "enough" could be anything they want in numbers. People are willing to buy them its been proven in the first game, so why not give people a few less, to make more on microtransactions.

[ZyngaFail]

Well think about it, they might want their game to actually succeed? Long term profit > short term.

[Deleted]

Well think about it, they might want their game to actually succeed? Long term profit > short term.

So basically your saying, it won't succeed if there aren't 20+ character slots at lanuch. I don't think you've thought about a business plan here. Character slots will sell more than costumes.

[ZyngaFail]

Was Guild Wars selling costume when they were still working on the game? No.

I'm saying it will succeed more if you get 20+ character slots than if you get 6. More people will be playing longer = more potential purchases from the in-game store and more word of mouth to get new people into the game, not to even mention increased internet taffic related to Guild Wars 2.

[Deleted]

That's not what I said though. I'm saying you need to look at it from a business PoV, they want the game to succeed, but they use microtransactions for money. They won't just ditch they're best selling feature.

[ZyngaFail]

Pretty sure character slots in GW1 were a mere fraction of their revenue.

[sacrypheyes]

except servers usually don't use cheap HDD but rather raid grapes of (damn hell) expensive drives such as SAS 10-15k rpm disks if not SSDs in order to sustain fast enough data operations, which is not a simple task when we're talking about tens of thousands or even billions of customers.

and that's only the price of the hardware itself, add up to that everything that's around the servers (datacenter place, power supplies, A/C, employees, etc) and that quickly adds up to quite some money they have to make (that's the part i'm not worried about though).

but my point is, character slots don't cost "nothing". and btw, it's been a while since game characters fit in a 100kb file considering all the data they put in (chacter quests progression, gear, etc) , it's usually a few MB for the least.

[ZyngaFail]

No, they said in a dev interview that GW1 character storage is trivial since they are just a binary blob of a few KB in size.

So they use a HDD that costs twice as much... big deal.... as I said, even I have 10TB of server grade HDDs and a 240GB SSD in my desktop that I use only for programming.

Oh and if they face billions of customers as you say, I think they'll happily dish out for the hardware.

[Deleted]

Getting way too defensive when all I'm saying is true really, it's better for them to give less at the start to make money later. They aren't going to give you 20-50 character slots, just face it really. In reality would you give 50 character slots at the start of your game? Or would you use it to your advantage?

[ZyngaFail]

I would give the character slots and hope people spend as much time as possible in my game even though there is no grind, because that's what ultimately determines how many more people are going to buy the game.

Blizzard gives you 50 character slots already, why should ArenaNet not?

[Deleted]

I would give the character slots and hope people spend as much time as possible in my game even though there is no grind, because that's what ultimately determines how many more people are going to buy the game.

Blizzard gives you 50 character slots already, why should ArenaNet not?

Well Blizzard doesn't giving you 50 on 1 server, I doubt Arena Net will do it either. They will give you a few on 1 server since transfers are free.

[ZyngaFail]

GW 1 was a big success not sure what you are trying to say.

At that time they were probably more worried about piracy due to account sharing.

---------- Post added 2011-05-12 at 10:53 PM ----------

Well Blizzard doesn't giving you 50 on 1 server, I doubt Arena Net will do it either. They will give you a few on 1 server since transfers are free.

From what I can see it looks like characters won't really be server-bound, but stored in a central database just like in GW1 along with a tag for their home server.

[Deleted]

From what I can see it looks like characters won't really be server-bound, but stored in a central database just like in GW1 along with a tag for their home server.

They said there using the golbal naming system again, so I don't see the need for loads of character slots on each server.

[probert]

Does WoW have a persistent world? GW2 is the same way. You just described GW1

My understanding was that GW2 wasn't going to have servers. It was going to function more like D2... you logon to Guildwars, and get assigned to a zone (which is on some generic server). If i want to group with a friend, i can invite them and we'll phase into the same zone -- meaning one of the two of us will teleport to the same server.

Or at the character creation screen, do i have to pick a server name?

[Deleted]

My understanding was that GW2 wasn't going to have servers. It was going to function more like D2... you logon to Guildwars, and get assigned to a zone (which is on some generic server). If i want to group with a friend, i can invite them and we'll phase into the same zone -- meaning one of the two of us will teleport to the same server.

Or at the character creation screen, do i have to pick a server name?

WvWvW wouldn't work without servers, since it takes 3 servers to do a WvWvW campain. :P

You will probably pick a server on first login, then you can transfer around for free every so often.

[probert]

WvWvW wouldn't work without servers, since it takes 3 servers to do a WvWvW campain. :P

You will probably pick a server on first login, then you can transfer around for free every so often.

Some of the commentary at GW2guru is that they haven't figured out, or publicly stated, what they're doing with WvWvW... and that's one of the reasons I'm asking around friends. As far as I can tell, they've indicated that 'persistent world' = instanced public server like Diablo2, that you move around based on dynamic things like population changes, who you group with, and where you're assigned when you login.

its still better than having to pay for a server transfer off of a dead WoW realm, but it also lessens player accountability -- you'll NEVER see the same person twice between session, barring you grouping with them specifically. GW1 had what, 2m players? GW2 will probaby have as many if not more.