(As in "Free Willy," not as in "Murky Giveaway."Trust me, if I had a random Murky lying around,
. . . love you all, but I'm not that generous.)
Your account is comprised of all of your characters. That's the point of an account. You are a player, you can have up to 100 characters on any server or faction you wish all on that one account.
Account-Bound items are only available to be passed from characters in the same faction and on the same server.
This seems messed up to me.
While I can understand that Blizzard does not want you passing random goods to and from your alliance and horde characters through the mail, and I agree that they have a good reason to keep the factions from being able to communicate (even if the factions are both comprised of, well, you), I still think we're getting screwed over by account-bound items not being extended to the entire account.
I have two characters that collect pets, Dustfire and Birdfall. Dusty is horde on a PVP server. Birdfall is alliance on a Normal RP server.
If I, by some miracle (or a lot of irl money), got my hands on an account-bound baby murloc pet, I could only use it on one of those characters.
Which makes the pet's "account-bound" status utterly worthless.
Blizzard might argue "But you can use it on any of your extra horde or alliance characters."
My rebuttal is, "I don't have any." (While this is technically untrue, I do not collect pets on any other characters, to the point of not even using account-bound pets on them, thus making their existence moot for this discussion.)
While the current account-bound mostly screws over people who have characters on both factions (so... most people), it also messes with anyone who has characters on separate realms; though, if they're on the same faction, the server issue can be managed by a paid transfer.
My point is that a server transfer is extreme and shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
If something is account-bound, it should actually be account-bound, not just where-you-are-right-now-bound.
In the end, you have to look at Blizzard's motives for implementing account-bound pets: They were getting flooded with requests to restore this or that pet when Wrath came out and said "Screw it, let them take care of their own freaking pets." Or something like that.
So while they might be less than motivated to help us get our pets across faction barriers, even to the point of citing old "We don't want alliance and horde communicating because they're not supposed to" hype, I still maintain that players deserve the benefit of being able to send account-bound cosmetic items across time and space to any character they want.
I also maintain that not allowing it contradicts the spirit of pet-collecting achievements.
So either change the functionality or change what it's called.
*cajoling smile* Please.
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Another way to solve this is having account bound items just appear in the mailbox of every character on your account simultaneously and not have to be transferred at all. I suppose it defeats the idea of having it be one item that's bound to the account, but the way they have it now isn't quite that either.
ReplyDeleteThis way you could just delete any extra ones or keep them all, whatever you like.
Or they could do it like they currently do the RAF mount: Set it up so that your account management page shows account goodies which you are eligible, with the restrictions that come with them, and let you apply them to the characters you choose.
ReplyDeleteSince the RAF mount can only go to one character, this might be difficult, but if they can keep track of all the other information about your account in your account files, then I don't see why they can't include account-bound items as well.
I play another MMO called Guild Wars and have since it first started. In Guild Wars if you get the 1 million subscriber account upgrade your account gets access to special weapons. Any character you create has access to these weapons because they are account-bound. To access them you simply type a /bonus emote into your chatbox anytime you want them and they appear in your backpack immediately (if there is room, if not you get a warning saying so). If you already have said weapons either equipped on your current char or in their backpack/bank then it says so and doesn't provide duplicates. These weapons are also bound to each character that 'conjures' them and they are worth no gold, similar to vendor items in WoW.
ReplyDeleteThis works wonders because due to the game mechanics low level characters don't gain much more of a benefit from using these weapons and yet if you delete them, say because you're short on space, you can just recall them at anytime.
Guild Wars doesn't have player factions like Horde or Alliance in WoW. However with the amount of money we pay Blizzard, in comparison to the 1 off payment you make to NCSoft for Guild Wars, this sort of a similar system should be very easy to implement and I am at an annoyed loss as to why it is not in-game yet. I recently bought the Balanced Heartseeker heirloom dagger on my Horde main in an attempt to trade it to my Alliance rogue, both on the same realm. Then it hit me, how the hell do I get it over to my rogue if they're on Alliance and we can't mail the Alliance?
Account-bound tooltip is very misleading.
I played Guild Wars as well (still do, on Tuesdays before the patching is finished, anyway), and the /bonus emote is fun.
ReplyDeleteGranted, with CE pets, you can only have one per account. Period.
And with the new Hall of Monuments, it gets even worse. To unlock sick goodies for Guild Wars II, you have to dedicate your pets. And only one character on your account can dedicate them.
So both Arena.net and Blizzard kind screwed us over with the "account-bound" items.
What bugs me is that they actually have this in effect for the bonus pets you get with the Collector's Edition. That is, whenever you make a new character on that account - any server, any faction - the pet shows up in the mail for that character.
ReplyDeleteThere seems no good explanation for why they allow this for Collector's Edition mini-pets, but nothing else.
*scratching head*
K/K
I think their original reason for not allowing Account Bound items to be sent cross-faction was a technical limitation, but I totally agree that they should fix it. I have characters of both factions and would love for my account bound items to be exchanged between them.
ReplyDeleteA lot of their faction v. faction stuff has sorta waned as of late...no real reason to have the language barrier anymore since it was originally to prevent trash talking, but people find their way around it, plus in Arena half the time you're fighting your own faction.
It'd also be kinda nice being able to transfer account bound items from server to server, but that might be a bit much...maybe with a time-delay or a cooldown, once every week or something, I dunno.