Character Counts on Blight
Greetings Players of Istaria,
This note is about a change we're making to the character slots available on the Blight testing / preview shard.
Subscriptions in Istaria provide a number of character slots. We have this limit to manage storage and maintenance costs. In the past, Blight has been exempt from the character limit because it was a testing shard. What we are seeing today is that many accounts have 10 to 20 characters on Blight alone and we're running into performance and storage issues. We've always done our best to ensure a fun play environment on Blight with minimal down time, and contrary to a typical testing shard, have never done character wipes or resets. Blight is really a preview shard, rather than a traditional testing shard.
To encourage more reasonable character counts on Blight, we're going to include Blight characters when checking total character slots on an account. For most players, we expect this to have minimal impact. A Gifted Subscription provides 7 character slots - so someone might have 3 or 4 characters between Order and Chaos - and might decide to copy 1 or 2 characters over to Blight - still within the total number of slots. However, this will discourage someone from having 3 or 4 characters between Order and Chaos, and then 10 copies of those characters on Blight. If you're someone who has a large number of characters on Blight, we'd appreciate your help in bringing your total character count down. This change will help improve the performance of Blight, as well as reduce the total time needed to apply delta previews to Blight - the time it takes to apply a delta is proportional to the total database size. This will also help the development team because the database that holds Blight also holds the development shard database.
We hope this makes sense to Istarians. We'll turn on the additional check July 17th. Please note no characters will be locked out. If you're over the total character limit, you will not be able to create additional characters or transfer characters to an account over the limit. We're asking for the cooperation of players in reducing character counts and do not have plans to lock out characters. Please help us reduce the load on the customer support team by taking care of your characters.
To discuss this topic, please visit the forums here:
http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...d.php?p=227684
Thank you,
Amarië
