There\'s a lot to be said for wiping characters. Some people here have 20 characters that they never use, and as Vengeance said, over 400 guilds...lots of cruft that can be removed. Also, character creation will probably do something useful in Crystal Blue (or certainly in future releases), so recreating your character would be useful. Also there will be new races, so people may want to change and end up abandoning their old character anyway.
Still, some people have played for months here, and I\'d like to see them be able to keep things. (Note that I don\'t have a vested interest in seeing a galkard transferred or anything...I have no weapon yet.) However, transferring items directly may not be feasible since the types of items may change.
So here\'s a thought. For Crystal Blue, why not:
Start with a blank slate for Crystal Blue - no existing accounts transferred. However, put up a page similar to the merchant page now, where you could enter your old Molecular Blue username and password, and your newly created Crystal Blue username and password.
The page would look in your old inventory, and see what your old character had, and provide your new character an appropriate \"bonus\" in Crystal Blue. So if you had a Longsword, you could get a certain amount of money/tria: if you had a Silver Falchion, you would get more tria. (Again, not items since the items available will probably change.)
Once you receive your bonus, your old account is deleted from the molecular blue database. After about a month or some reasonable timeframe, the transition site could be removed along with the Molecular Blue database. This separates the cruft from the new release, and in due time kills it entirely. Yet anyone who is still seriously on board for Planeshift can get a bonus to use toward whatever they want - the ultimate in flexibility.
This idea would require some judgement calls upon how much of a bonus to award on the part of the developers - but in future releases you could potentially use it to correct problems. Say the next release made it too easy for some people to get extremely rich and powerful, by mistake. Then the developers could just adjust the bonus factor for the next release accordingly.
