I am not entirely sure where to put this, so I will post it here and hope it gets moved to the appropriate forum.
On the subject of people wanting to transfer BoA-Heirloom items to other servers without having to pay transfer fees, why not just do something like this (Which would save a lot of coding time I would think):
Currently how the system works, is you purchase an item from the heirloom vendor with Justice Points and you have access to that item on that server only unless of course you transfer a character with it.
Why not make it so when you purchase an item, you aren't buying the item right then and there, but you are "unlocking" it for the account. You would have a vendor in each major city that then sells the BoA items (that have been unlocked) to new characters on any server for that account for free/1c so players may join their friends on other servers with accelerated leveling (because if we own BoA items we don't want to level slowly, ever) without having to worry about paying $25 every time a friend plays on another server.
This presumably wouldn't put any excess load on the character database since there is already a cap of 50 characters per account.
This would save the dev team from having to write code to link every server in a global mailing service.
What do others think?
Just my $0.02
wysłany:
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wysłany:
What you're describing are two incredibly different mechanics which require very different technical solutions. Yes, we can mail you an item to every existing character on your Battle.net account. But purchasing a BoA item doesn't result in the item being mailed to your character; nor should it, as we're not going to mail every character a BoA item you've purchased on one character. The reason you might not accept the fact we call this a technical limitation seems to be because we fundamentally disagree about how the system should work.
You have to earn the ability to purchase each BoA item. You're not unlocking access to a BoA item which can then be duplicated for every character on an account. You're buying one item. But, that item can be given (not duplicated) to any character on the same account and realm via the in-game mail. What we want to build into Battle.net is the ability for this type of item to be mailed to any character on your account, regardless of realm. Such a system does not exist yet and provides a weighty technical challenge -- we need to make sure there are no adverse effects to making in-game mail cross-realm. For instance, just because we want you to be able to send BoA items to any character on your account, regardless of realm, doesn't necessarily mean we want to open Pandora's box by allowing anyone to mail anything not BoP cross-realm. Can you see the difference between us mailing every single character on your account on every single realm an item, versus allowing you to mail a single item to any character on your account on any realm? It's a very big one as far as programming is concerned. |
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wysłany:
Hello? Is this thing on? Testing. Testing. Check one. |
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wysłany:
Look, we know people want to be able to send the BoAs they've earned to any character on their account. We want the same. But we have no intention of fundamentally changing the reward system just to work around the limitations of the current mail setup. The way a BoA item is obtained on a per-character basis shouldn't be trivialized just for a "quick fix." Not to mention that, even changing the BoA reward system to unlock for all of your characters an item you've purchased on one of them, would still be much more than an insignificant development undertaking. This is how it needs to work (which is no different than the current functionality, with the exception of the cross-realm feature): 1) You earn the required currency to purchase a BoA on a character. 2) You then have the ability to send that BoA to any character on your account with no realm or faction restriction. In order to do that, some level of integration of in-game mail needs to be made so the system is cross-realm. Such a system doesn't exist. The WoW in-game mail system was designed from the start to be a realm-specific thing and has no "communication" across realms. That's what we need to change via some complicated programming -- like I said before, we don't want a symptom of implementing this feature to be that in-game mail is no longer realm-specific. Rather, we need a way for you to send yourself an item from one realm to another, but make that an exception to all existing rules/limitations of the current mail setup. |
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wysłany:
For those making honest suggestions or constructive comments on this topic, I thank you. Jumping out of line and tearing apart Blizzard or any of the other posters in this thread isn't cool.
I'm just stating the facts of our design intent and technical hurdles, folks. If you choose not to believe what I'm saying -- as if I'd enjoy spending this much time on a topic just to spread lies and misinformation -- there's not much use in us continuing this discussion. Please keep it constructive and recognize that I'm a human being sharing what I know about our development and programming processes. In other news, I've seen plenty of suggestions in this thread for ways in which some people think we could more quickly resolve the current limitation. I just want to point out that virtually all of the suggestions I've read would have very similar technical hurdles to overcome, but would also be less desirable solutions. If we're putting time into truly making BoA items account-wide, we want to do it right. <3 Zarhym |
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wysłany:
Hello all,
Zarhym here again. :) So, after making a trip to the doctor and having some blood stolen, I stopped by Ghostcrawler's office to discuss this and other topics with him. We talked about some of the feedback in this thread, as well as the developers' latest thoughts on BoA and heirloom items. Rather than potentially having my statements in this thread come back to bite me at some point in the future, I'm going to risk being confusing or sounding dumb. :p In short, they agree that the process of mailing heirlooms around constantly is a little annoying. We'd prefer to try and work ourselves away from the method of mailing out BoA items in the future, like pets, mounts, etc. To that end, we have some design goals in mind that would improve this sort of item distribution system. And with those design goals have come some ideas for changing heirloom mechanics. This is sort of contrary to the idea I stated in this thread about just designing the system to allow players to mail their heirlooms all around their accounts without realm restrictions. That's all of the information I can share at the moment, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that the design philosophy I stated earlier isn't so set in stone -- we're reevaluating these types of systems as we look toward the future. I apologize if I've caused any confusion. |
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wysłany:
No, this was my fault. I'm not playing developer. I'm being a community manager by speaking to you on behalf of the company. He's being a designer by helping develop this game, which doesn't give him the time to play community manager. I was operating on the knowledge of what our design philosophy has consistently been on this issue. The fact is, though, there have been a lot of design meetings as of late to discuss how this game should play and where it should be heading beyond patch 4.3. That means virtually all possibilities are on the table -- when talking about the continued evolution of this game, we dream big and go back to the drawing board. BoA items, in general, fit into that puzzle somewhere. You'll find out a bit more as to why soon enough. |
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wysłany:
I'm game. ;) |
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wysłany:
He'll be there as will we all at the "Ask Blizzard" booth we'll have. You're more than welcome to stop by. |
