Hey there,
since things have calmed down a bit now, I thought this might be the time to address this issue - character copy. I didn't mind it until now, but with the Homestead patch, and the achievement requirements for many things, it has been quite the pain in the bottom.
I remember filing a number of bug reports because of visibility issues with items I didn't meet the achievement requirements for. Instead of providing you with correct and helpful feedback ("There are visibility issues with the items"), I filed "I'm a stupid user"-kind of bug reports ("HALP! I can't find..."). That is not what I'm on PTS for - I want to find bugs for your devs to solve, not create tickets to make people facepalm. The EU players couldn't test all the Master Writs because we didn't have access to Eyvea.
Another thing that I have frequently reported on live, but never found on PTS, are item art bugs with armor and/or costumes. Those new robes that I crafted on PTS are clipping with my Kagouti? Too bad, will never find out, because while I've been checking out the robes, I didn't have my Kagouti.
Long story short - we can't properly test things with the template characters, because of their limitations. What you actually want, and what we want to provide you with, is data outside of lab conditions. That's why we
all need our characters on PTS, at any given point.
I am aware of this matter not being trivial, or else you would have implemented it already. However, since everybody knows that you aren't actively coding between PTS cycles and are only sitting around watching youtube
livestreams of kittens, I wanted to suggest something productive that you can kill your time with. (I'm kidding. I know you're crazy busy, but I'd appreciate it if you could make this work anyway).
My suggestion (without knowing your infrastructure at all) would be as follows:
Import any given server first. Then, run another import on top of that for the other. Only overwrite account entry if the total number of character levels or the amount of achievement points is higher.
You're probably using character names as unique keys at some point, given how they are case sensitive and there cannot be duplicates. However, the fact that character renaming exists proves that these aren't immutable. To avoid any issues with duplicate names I suggest adding EU or US to the names of any characters that are being imported in the second loop. We can buy renaming tokens for one Crown anyway (and it would be interesting to see who of us has a doppelganger on the other server...
)
If this cannot be done I suggest that you expand the lab conditions as follows:
- Give any account on PTS any collectible that has been for sale on the live server up to the current point and that will be for sale until the next character transfer (I found myself without my hairstyle of choice)
- Give the maximum CP template all achievements, including the completion of the main quest. That will enable us to better test otherwise inaccessible content.
- Give the maximum CP template all wayshrines.
In addition to that it would be awesome if the character template boxes could be banked. I would have liked to add the new recipes to my crafter character, to have it all in one place, but I wasn't able to. I'd like to create a template character on my account, store all the boxes and then continue as if I was on live. I think that would also produce better test data for you folks.
I hope you can do this, it would be awesome.
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