Characters without a server

NCSoft/Cryptic recently announced that they would start testing character transfer and character rename service on the test servers. Nice to have definitely, but not anything revolutionary.

However, the latter part where they say that they are considering making character server-less is however a more interesting topic. Basically a character would not be limited to a single server/realm/world as it is now, but rather be able to enter any available server.

That would perhaps be something similar to Guild Wars, although there would be plenty of common outdoor zones as well obviously. I like the idea and hope they will pull that off.

A concern may of course be – how many character slots will there be in that case? Currently an account can have 12 slots per server if you have both villains/heroes – 8 slots if one only has one of them. Many people have filled their slots on more than one server and would probably not like a reduction in available slots and be required to delete characters.

I am quite sure Cryptic is aware of this though and my guess is that they would allow more slots in this case, although that would perhaps be associated with a fee. Everquest 2 has sort of done that and Final Fantasy XI has that model also, that you paid extra for any additional characters you added.

They could also still keep the server association as it is today, but with the difference that the associated server is only the default location for the character.

Either way, I think it is good that they are considering such a change. After all, with global chat channels and auction houses also being cross-server, server-less characters is a fairly logical step to continue with.