However I do know that I hate feeling like I’m being unnecessarily penalized if I opt to spread my play time around multiple characters compared to the players who just concentrate on 1. That said, outfits are one of the things I’m somewhat torn on. Typically speaking I like my characters to look different, so don’t always want outfits shared. That said, I’d still probably like to be able to wear seasonal type stuff w/o having to buy it multiple times. Additionally, many of the outfits look different enough on the different races that my characters would still look fairly different even in the same outfit.
I still think the best system is something like Star Wars: The Old Republic. When you bind a store item to a character, you unlock the ability to make as many more (character bound 0 cost) versions of that item as you’d like. For a small additional fee, (and it is small) you can unlock that item for all characters on the account. So the person who only really has a single character doesn’t feel like he’s “wasting money” buying unnecessary functionality, (buying an item for 12 (or whatever max number of characters is) when he only has 1), but the person who does use all his slots doesn’t feel like he has to pay 12x as much for a particular outfit he wants to always wear regardless of which character he’s playing.
I’ve played various games that character locked, or didn’t lock costumes. I can tell you right now I bought far more costumes in the games that didn’t lock them with the help of Blade & Soul Gold, or at least were account bound locks. Not being able to shuffle my costumes around, especially if they were kinda pricey always made me think at least twice about buying them, often resulting in my not buying them at all. Although, when I could swap them around, I found myself doing various splurge purchases, especially for the limited time ones.
I also want to point out (to NCsoft) that the frequency of sales during TA-CBT shouldn’t be used as guidelines on what the player-base wants and are willing to pay for. I saw a lot of people spend their 7.2k coins to buy bunch of stuff that they don’t even care much just because they know it’s only TEST coins. Same applies to something like a 2,000 (25$) worth of costume, lots of people could grab it during TA-CBT, but that doesn’t mean they are all willing to do it during actual launch. This is a very important thing to consider that I hope NCsoft knows.