I looked on several threads, but none seem to answer my question. I have a silver account. It has been a long time since I've played. I logged in last week to take a peek. I had 8/4 character slots. One was a lowbie toon still in the tutorial. Probably created on one of the "Come back to Norrath" free trials. I wasn't planning on keeping that toon, so I deleted it. However I didn't get a character slot opened out. Now I'm setting at 7/4. My questions: If I by more character slots, will it open it up to give me the option to create a toon or will it change to 7/5. Meaning I would have to buy 4 slots? Or do I not even qualify to create more character slots? If I go gold for one month and open up that slot will it stay open once I go back to silver?
You'd have to buy four slots. If you went gold, you'd probably still end up having to buy the slots afterward (I think -- not entirely sure how that works as I've never had it happen to me before -- so I'll defer to someone else's input about that). Characters created prior to the game going free-to-play are grandfathered in as being playable regardless of the maximum character limit on your account, but new characters created after that point on the same account are affected by the character restrictions. Though, if you don't plan on taking the character in question all the way to endgame in a hurry (or if you do, but don't mind spending money on the account) you could also make the character on a new second account.
You are deleting characters, you had 8 now you have 7 total. 4 is your current cap. To create a new character you need to be 3/4, creating a new one then will make you 4/4. The cap is 2 for FTP accounts, 4 for Silver, 8 for Gold. To increase the cap permanently you can buy up to three more slots from the SOE Store. One slot is 800 points, and buying 3 at once is 2000 points. You can also check your Loyalty points (rightmost panel in the Inventory screen,listed at the top), and buy 3 more using Loyalty points. The ones you purchase with SC points stack with the loyalty ones, and they all add to your total no matter what plan you are on. On Silver, you have the 4 slots, plus can add up to 6 more this way for a total of 10. Depending how long you were away, you might have a bunch of Loyalty tokens built up. Check those first since you get them for free, they accumulate over time. They cap out at 2.880 for Silver accounts as I recall, but enough to buy 2 slots for free if you are near that. If you are considering going gold for a month ($15) just for extra character slots, you might try to buy a Walmart card for $15 with the 500 bonus points (sold in stores, not online). That gives you 2000 points for $15, just enough to buy 3 more slots.
