I grabbed a lifetime account on Free Realms for both of my kids. One of the perks of becoming a member is that you get a house as well as the free apartment everyone gets. Problem is, the house is only for one character and it is not shared over the account. Even though you can have 3 characters (I’m not sure why you’d want more than one) only one of them gets the house. The rest get apartments. I really do not understand why you wouldn’t share it to all 3 but hey that’s the rule.
The first thing my daughter does is create a new character (again it was a perk of gaining member status to get 2 more character slots) and the “you have an item to claim” icon shows up so she clicks it and next thing you know she has a house. Excitement! Decorating! Then she logs into the character she has been playing since the game came out and hey what’s this apartment thing? Where’s my house? She had no idea. So she deletes the new character thinking that the house will show up on the only character left. Oops! She just deleted her house. It’s gone for good. Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m sure it warned her that the house is tied to one character only when she claimed it but for whatever reason she did not digest that information.
SuperDad steps up to the plate and contacts Free Realms support. After a few emails back and forth they grant the house to her main character and remind me to remind her not to delete that character because if she did she would be out of luck and have to buy a house in the future.
I really only have one question for them: Why would you do it that way?
– Ethic
The last line of the paragraph before you ask the question answers it. “… and have to buy a house in the future.”
True.
Aww at least SuperDad got through and FR Support was kind enough to restore it. They should just make it like LOTRO housing where all your characters own the house.
No one would design things like this from the ground up, but it’s a result of evolution of code. You have a code base that works, and want to add new features. No doubt doing it more intelligently would have required rewrites of existing code or database tables, something that would have resulted in a large increase in cost (labor) since you have to regression test everything. Instead it was written to maximize the cost benefit ratio.
Well that or someone was very lazy, one of the two.
A year or two back I got two 12-month Wizard101 subs; one for me, one for my son. A month or so later I saw that if you had Referred-a-Friend who then bought a 12-month Sub you got a unique Dragon Pet. I emailed KingsIsle saying I had two 12-month Subs and would it be possible to get the Refer-A-Friend Dragon Pet on my son’s account. They said No, they couldn’t do that, but they were kind enough to credit both our accounts with 5,000 Crowns (W101’s RMT currency). I was happy with that.
Call me naive, but when I heard Free Realms was offering lifetime accounts for a reasonable price, I actually thought that meant they were selling accounts to the full game. But then, I’m also the guy that figures calling it Free Realms is misleading.