Thanks, Devs, for finally putting more uniform slots on the C-store. I bought a pack of two, and was surprised to see three more slots waiting for me at the tailor.

I guess the one we were given on Tribble carried over somehow? Not that I'm complaining - just means I can have an open-flap TWOK variant.

Seriously, thanks again.

I'm not sanguine that they're per-character, unlike in CO.

Me either. What gives? Especially since the price (400 CP) is hardly trivial for the service being provided.

Well, maybe it is because characters in STO already use a lot of space in the database? You've got:

1. Your captain and his/her uniform slots
2. Your bridge officers, each with their own space in the database (for their appearance and equipment)
3. Your ships, and all the information that must be saved for each one
4. Your personal bank, and personal inventory.

Every ship slot, every uniform slot, every character, takes up space in the database. Let's say they were account-wide, and you buy a pair of uni slots, a pair of BOff slots, and a pair of ship slots. You then go on an alt-making rampage. Imagine the additional space in the database you "Took up" as soon as you hit the "Create" button.

Now, imagine a large number of other players doing the same thing. Imagine the resultant load on the database.

Long story short, it probably has to do with space in the database being a bigger consideration than it is with CO (I've never played CO, but I have played CoH/CoV).

Just my thoughts and opinion.

Dont care If its not bought for all on the account I will not be getting it.

That justifies the lower base number of character slots. Additional costume slots per character don't scale that way, though. Actually, since there are fewer characters per account and fewer customization attirbutes per character on STO, the resource load of additional costume slots should be less than CO. But it's 400 CP for two extra costume slots on all characters in CO rather than 400 CP for two extra costume slots on a single character in STO.

I did this math in another thread but it has a place in this one too I think. Below is why I think 400CP is more than a bit much for per-character costume slot expansion:

MATH TIME!

So when you save a costume in the costume creator STO creates a 300x400 pixel JPG in your screenshots directory. Using some technomagic, STO is able to interpret this image to assemble your race, body and costume parts in the creator when you load your costume save file. These files seem to average roughly between 30 and 40 Kilobytes, or Kb.

It seems reasonable to assume that our costume files are saved on the server in a similar manner. If that is the case, then when buying 2 costume slots for one character I am spending $5 on the ability to conveniently access 80 kilobytes of data. We could even round that up to 100 Kb if we want.

So, let's see:
$5/100Kb = $0.05.

5 cents per kilobyte. How much would a 5c/Kb iPod Touch (32Gb) cost, I wonder?

$0.05 x 1,024 (Kilobytes in a Megabyte) x 1,024 (Megabytes in a Gigabyte) x 32 (Gigabytes in the iPod)

And the pricetag would be: (can I get a drumroll..)

$1,677,721.60

That's a pretty nice iPod! Now I know there are other forces at work... namely bandwith and server clock time and what have you. I have no way of estimating how much more costume slots cost Cryptic in those terms.

I also know that they want to make a profit on these things, not just break even.

And that's why I'm happy to pay for items in the C-Store. I'm even happy to pay for costume slots in the C-Store. But I'm not happy about paying top dollar for a service that isn't account wide.

I didn't get the extra slot - that is, I got it, but it won't let me use it. I make the adjustments, changing everything to what I'd like it to be, and then when I press "Purchase" it just goes back to the previous screen, with the new slot still un-created. Did this happen to you, as well? Or is it just that the game hates me (again), and didn't carry over the extra slot from Tribble?