Charters gone on PTS?

tfraley

Good day guys,

Is this just me? All my charters on PTS are gone.
Even charters that were transferred from LIVE and the one's I create with template.. prior..

Paulington

I assume you're on the NA megaserver?

During the testing periods, NA get their characters copied for the first two weeks of testing. Following which the server is wiped clean and EU get their characters copied for two weeks of testing.

You can re-make templates and such if you wish, this is the normal testing process.

tfraley

Thank you for letting me know.

I was unaware it was standard practice.

Remaking characters from templates are all good and dandy but when you crafting different sets and testing them back and forth to see what works and what doesn't, it just doesn't pay to remake everything. Idea is to have a base and doesn't work when you have to recreate the base.

I would of at least thought they would copied characters over again at the very least.

Paulington

tfraley wrote: »

Thank you for letting me know.

I was unaware it was standard practice.

Remaking characters from templates are all good and dandy but when you crafting different sets and testing them back and forth to see what works and what doesn't, it just doesn't pay to remake everything. Idea is to have a base and doesn't work when you have to recreate the base.

I would of at least thought they would copied characters over again at the very least.

As far as I am aware it is a technical limitation. Due to character names being megaserver-unique if they copied over NA and EU characters there could be name collisions which would be bad. So to combat this they give each megaserver two weeks of testing.

Perhaps in the future they will be able to alleviate this issue but for now we must live with it, recrafting is a pain but doable. .

tfraley

Paulington wrote: »

As far as I am aware it is a technical limitation. Due to character names being megaserver-unique if they copied over NA and EU characters there could be name collisions which would be bad. So to combat this they give each megaserver two weeks of testing.

Perhaps in the future, they will be able to alleviate this issue but for now, we must live with it, recrafting is a pain but doable. .

That is very logical, but at the same time seems like an easy fix. Couldn't they just add NA or EU to the beginning of everyones names to make them unique or something similar?

There were quite a few things I was in the middle of testing, I know it's beta and all but if I knew I would have finished up faster. Maybe it's my fault and didn't read the documentation fully of Beta or missed and in game mail or notification saying this way going to happen prior.. but kinda sucks.


Thank you again @Paulington for clearing it up for me.

wayfarerx

tfraley wrote: »

That is very logical, but at the same time seems like an easy fix. Couldn't they just add NA or EU to the beginning of everyones names to make them unique or something similar?

Because that would imply changing a full database copy (something that is quick and easy) to a row-by-row copy and update (something that is much more difficult and prone to error). It would likely add hours of time to each PTS update and cause a bunch of extra headache for the IT guys.

tfraley

@wayfarerx

I don't understand why it would add hours to every update.

Yes, this could have taken hours but not days or weeks.This could also have been done prior to the first PTS for both NA & EU servers.

I'm not saying sit there and edit the database cells by hand. You make a script that would prefix a character's/Cell name.

It also is not something that needs to be updated every time and at the same time both NA & EU players would have 4 weeks not 2 of testing.

Again it very well is me not knowing or noticing this was standard practice and 2 weeks of test would have been fine for me, however if changes continue to be big for the next two weeks then, what we tested already becomes useless.

Paulington

wayfarerx wrote: »

tfraley wrote: »

That is very logical, but at the same time seems like an easy fix. Couldn't they just add NA or EU to the beginning of everyones names to make them unique or something similar?

Because that would imply changing a full database copy (something that is quick and easy) to a row-by-row copy and update (something that is much more difficult and prone to error). It would likely add hours of time to each PTS update and cause a bunch of extra headache for the IT guys.

I would assume that ZOS use some kind of SQL database in which case CONCAT would do the job for them to append or prepend "NA" or "EU" to character names but even then you run into issues like max character name limit and such.

It is something that needs doing though!

wayfarerx

tfraley wrote: »

I don't understand why it would add hours to every update.

Yes, this could have taken hours but not days or weeks.This could also have been done prior to the first PTS for both NA & EU servers.

I'm not saying sit there and edit the database cells by hand. You make a script that would prefix a character's/Cell name.

It also is not something that needs to be updated every time and at the same time both NA & EU players would have 4 weeks not 2 of testing.

Again it very well is me not knowing or noticing this was standard practice and 2 weeks of test would have been fine for me, however if changes continue to be big for the next two weeks then, what we tested already becomes useless.

Well you admit you don't understand, that's a good start ZOS is probably taking frequent snapshots of their databases for disaster recovery purposes, and in general loading up one of those snapshots in another database cluster is very, very simple. You just point your PTS database at a recent snapshot and say "GO" and, depending on things like network layout and whatnot, it just loads the snapshot and is off to the races.

What you want is for them to go through the database row-by-row and make changes to millions of little pieces of data. Of course they would be doing this with a script but that doesn't magically prevent things from going wrong or make it as fast as a direct copy. All that decoding/encoding/editing takes time, every second of which would be added to the time it already takes to muck with the PTS database. Then there's always the possibility that the script could fail and you either have to start over or have sophisticated failure recovery logic involved.

Paulington wrote: »

wayfarerx wrote: »

tfraley wrote: »

That is very logical, but at the same time seems like an easy fix. Couldn't they just add NA or EU to the beginning of everyones names to make them unique or something similar?

Because that would imply changing a full database copy (something that is quick and easy) to a row-by-row copy and update (something that is much more difficult and prone to error). It would likely add hours of time to each PTS update and cause a bunch of extra headache for the IT guys.

I would assume that ZOS use some kind of SQL database in which case CONCAT would do the job for them to append or prepend "NA" or "EU" to character names but even then you run into issues like max character name limit and such.

It is something that needs doing though!

They might use a standard SQL database, or they might be using any number of other, more easily shardable database architectures. In either case there is probably at least one pre-computed index on the character name column, if not other derived structures like views or secondary indices or w/e.

It's not that they can't do it, it's just something that would add a lot of headache to the PTS update process and which, understandably, is not something they likely want to invest a lot of engineering/IT resources in.

TerraDewBerry

Yup all characters gone.. I'm a maxed out vampire.. and was really happy when they copied over my main character so I could see first hand how the vampire changes impacted me as a max vampire.. Please ZOS, can you copy over the characters again? please?

Epona222

It's not just due to having character name duplications, it's because each one of us on PC has 16 character slots, regardless of whether you personally only use half of them - 8 on the NA server, and 8 on the EU server. Many of us play on both servers. How are ZOS supposed to guess which set of characters we would prefer to have on the PTS? They cannot copy over all 16 characters for each of us into 8 character slots. I would rather they spent their time on the job of what the PTS is FOR - fixing bugs prior to an update going live, NOT making sure that each individual has the characters they want copied over.

Just use a template, like a lot of EU players have been doing for the last 2 weeks.