So much this! =_= It aggravates me to no end that my main character is towards the middle of the realm list. Surely it couldn't be that hard to implement?

Could always try the official website's Suggestion Forums. I must admit, I'd really, REALLY like the same thing. It's the curse of being an altoholic; one day, so-and-so's your main, the next it's something entirely different.

Since the character order is cached in a remote database and not locally I doubt it will ever happen. Giving that many people simultaneous read/write access would probably bring their servers to their knees.

Agree times 10000000000000000!!!!

I hate this oldest on top stuff. It makes me break out in hives. Blizz needs more OCD staff. yus!!!!!!

@cowfodder: Nothing prevents a local order from being stored on the local HD. How things are ordered on the remote database is utterly irrelevant, nor would implementing the ability to display them in any order you desire put any load at all whatsoever on the database.

cowfodder: Um.. what? That makes no sense whatsoever. Tacking on a column named "order" and adding the commands to change the values in it will hardly bring a server down.

@cowfodder
You don't need to change the order of a record in a table to change the order a record is displayed in. The could add a seperate field for display order and provide an up down arrow on the login screen.

Well there was that fateful day, I think in early TBC or late vanilla when character lists got slightly jumbled and never went back, as I recall the servers didn't crash.

Drag-and-Drop would be nice.

@cowfodder

It's easier than you might think. Now I am not a game programmer, but I am a programmer that has to work with databases and user front ends.

The game sends all of your characters to you and then the local software takes over the presentation of that data. You add some buttons to let users rearrange the character screen and when they hit login, or possible a separate save button, it sends that info back to the server and saves that in the character_order table. If a user makes no changes, then don't send a request to write it to the database, simple!

They could even put in an update to keep these changes locally using a simple text file, but I imagine they'd want to retain control on their end.

Cowfodder,

The game already remembers exactly which order I want the hundreds of items in my bags and bank. How could this possibly be any harder?

lol... this blog is full of programming geeks. XD

Yah.. hope this is implemented.

For a while, it actually looked like this was going to make it into one of the more recent beta builds. During a small period of server confusion in which characters were temporarily unavailable, there were two buttons on the character selection screen, an up button and a down button.

They disappeared when characters became accessible again.

It wouldn't even require all that most here are saying...

given that each realm has its own folder in my WTF folder
given that each character has its own folder and settings in my WTF folder

How hard would it be to look for a file(s) with an order preference? The rest is just coding it to work. In fact it already scans all these folders and some of the files inside at the character screen as it is.

It is annoying that they can't be moved but I find it even MORE annoying that they keep changing order. Am I the only one this happens to? I mean I made them at different times and they hit 80 at different times. I just don't get it. Maybe I am slightly OCD too. I could see them being in the order that they were created but they are not even in THAT order :(

Dont know what you mean about them changing order, my characters have always been in the same order that they were created, never once changed.

I also would love to change the order though, right now my main is my first character, but my #2 and #3 80s (my main alts if you will) are in the (slot 5 and 7 I think).

While they could do the ordering locally with text files as they do numerous other things, I'm sure if they did this they would probably choose to do it by saving the changes remotely in the database, just as they have moved things like macro's and key bindings into their remote database. This way you can pull up wow on any machine and the game is more or less the same, minus addons/some interface options.

Theoretically this should be very easy to implement.

I program Visual Basic and work for clients who often have systems put in place that "work" but are terribly designed. With this in mind, I suspect it may not be as easy as it would seem. I've had to modify code that used copy and paste 10 times instead of a for loop. I've seen been dumped with a pile of GoTo spaghetti. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code so, if this particular part of the game was not designed well, I can picture this being a bigger mess to fix than it should be.