Aside from "normal" play, there've been two housekeeping matters on my mind in regards to playing on Classic era: names and bag space.
As far as names are concerned, my Horde characters were created on Pyrewood Village at launch and could therefore keep their original names once I activated/cloned them on era, but my Alliance characters all had to be transferred from Hydraxian Waterlords... onto a server where tens of thousands of names are already taken, including all the ones I had originally chosen for them. I quickly tried out different variants for my transfers until I found something that was available, but I immediately ended up hating almost all of my choices, either for being too different or for being what I call "accent abominations". (Some people are perfectly happy to play as "Lüké Skywàlkër", but I'm not one of them.) To be honest, this has been one major reason I haven't really felt like playing my Alliance clones so far.
However, with the retiring of the cloning service, there was suddenly hope. You can't buy name changes in Classic, but you can effectively force a name change during a server transfer by creating an appropriately named alt on your destination server. And since era has connected multiple servers into clusters, you can move from one server within the cluster to another without really going anywhere. Or that's been my theory anyway; I haven't had a chance to test it. I do feel vaguely dirty even thinking about the idea since it'd essentially mean paying Blizzard a premium for being awkward (a character transfer costs more than twice as much as a name change in retail), but names are important to me, damn it!
Unfortunately though, even though it's been over a week since the official retirement date for the cloning service and the relevant support article was updated to state that "all clones that were not activated before July 26, 2022 have been deleted", this has not actually been the case. I know this because I had some inactive clones of my own left, and they are still there, making the current situation the worst of both worlds, with people being unable to use the cloning service, and era players still locked out of all those names taken up by inactive clones. Responses to inquiries on the forums have been unhelpful.
All I can keep doing is check on those inactive clones of my own every other day to see whether anything has changed. Because as soon as those tens of thousands of inactive clones are gone, maybe there'll be some hope for reclaiming some "good" names for my characters - the number of actually active era players is relatively low after all.
The other issue I've been wrangling with is bag space. It's nothing new that Classic is quite stingy in that regard, which is why "bank alts" have been a thing pretty much since forever. I'd so far resisted making any in Classic though, because with only ten character slots per server I wanted to actually use them on playable characters, not on some level one doomed to sit in town and shuffle mail around. I tried to be efficient with my storage to some degree, e.g. by sending all my cloth to my tailor, but that was as far as it went. This is also another reason I've always been an active auction house user - because I'd rather sell things to people who need them right now than hoard them for some unknown future requirement, while hoping that I'd be able to buy anything from other people in turn that I actually might end up needing later.
However, Classic era has finally broken me in that regard. My troll mage tailor is only up to small silk packs, which are quite small, and my high-level characters just don't have room for all those currencies and endgame materials that I definitely can't rely on finding on the auction house later. Plus, with all those servers in the cluster adding up to thirty character slots, I figured I could spare a couple, leading me to create not one but two bank alts, one for food and consumables and another for currencies and other miscellaneous valuables. I still couldn't resist playing them a little though and got them up to level six - plus I could see myself levelling them even higher as time goes on. I just can't create characters and not play them.
P.S.: I already mentioned it on my SWTOR blog, but I'm taking part in Blaugust again! Whether you're a blogger yourself or just a reader, there's something for everyone. Read all about the event here.
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I carried two bank alts in Classic --not one per faction, but two Ally bank alts-- just because of all the junk I accumulated that I was unwilling to give up. So I feel ya there.
ReplyDeleteI always try to level bank alts to 10 if they're storing valuable stuff. The reason is that Blizzard didn't backup low-level characters (and I presume still doesn't, though I haven't read anything one way or the other in the last decade).
ReplyDeleteThey did back up my two as L1s. Thank goodness.
DeleteThat's another thing I do not miss at all from Vanilla, having to make all those bank alts and guild. Cough, maybe I have a hoarding problem.
ReplyDeleteI mean, it's not that the game has changed so much that it's not worth to keep everything anymore but a few things did.
First of all the game is old enough that some bank toons have been max level for several expansions. The profession bag really helps. Most importantly, not having to level crafting skills from 0 to 900, but being able to skip old expansions is the most important change for me. And finally, I guess I've not had gold problems since WotLK or MoP, I was only really poor in classic and TBC, for some reason.