Server Transfers When?

Wildberryjack

Will yall please find a way to connect the NA and EU servers so we can transfer characters and stuff across?

I started characters on EU because of a friend who played there but RL issues have pulled them away and it looks like they won't be back. For a while now my latency on EU has jumped significantly and it's become unplayable most of the time, but my crafter there has a lot of good patterns I'd hate to lose and also I got crazy lucky with the free crates yall used to give and got apex mounts I'd hate to lose. But at this point I'm about to say F it and just delete every character on EU.

Also this isn't just about me, what happens to people who move from Europe to North America, or from N.A. to Europe? They're stuck with the same bad latency issue then.

Unfadingsilence

Wildberryjack wrote: »

Will yall please find a way to connect the NA and EU servers so we can transfer characters and stuff across?

I started characters on EU because of a friend who played there but RL issues have pulled them away and it looks like they won't be back. For a while now my latency on EU has jumped significantly and it's become unplayable most of the time, but my crafter there has a lot of good patterns I'd hate to lose and also I got crazy lucky with the free crates yall used to give and got apex mounts I'd hate to lose. But at this point I'm about to say F it and just delete every character on EU.

Also this isn't just about me, what happens to people who move from Europe to North America, or from N.A. to Europe? They're stuck with the same bad latency issue then.

You just have to do whatever what everyone else has done and start over Thousands of people of asked for the same thing and it's never gonna happen

lucky_Sage

Doubt it would happen I have the same issue but on ps4

cheifsoap

It's kind of goofy that this isn't a thing. Even if its a paid service. It couldn't be that hard to implement

Nestor

It won't happen because of duplicate names across the servers. Also, they can't move a single player's record over, they have to move the entire database enmass, which means replacing every single player record in EU with the ones from NA or vice versa. Which is a bigger issue than the duplicate names.

Taleof2Cities

Wildberryjack wrote: »

Also this isn't just about me, what happens to people who move from Europe to North America, or from N.A. to Europe?

You aren’t required to change severs if you move.

Players that have to qualify an opinion by saying it “just isn’t about me” really mean that “it is all about me” ...

Tandor

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Wildberryjack wrote: »

Also this isn't just about me, what happens to people who move from Europe to North America, or from N.A. to Europe?

You aren’t required to change severs if you move.

Players that have to qualify an opinion by saying it “just isn’t about me” really mean that “it is all about me” ...

I agree, although I'm only speaking for a friend, you understand.

idk

Likely never. Zos has spoken on the issue and they pretty much indicated that it will never happen when they said they would never offer it again after they did account copies from PC to consoles when console launched and that was only to people who started the game on PC near launch and paid attention to get opt into the copy when Zos asked. Essentially they never built a tool to copy from and to live servers and are not interested in doing so.

Zos never took care of those that missed the window to opt in. They were stuck even though they had bought the game in time.

Tandor

idk wrote: »

Likely never. Zos has spoken on the issue and they pretty much indicated that it will never happen when they said they would never offer it again after they did account copies from PC to consoles when console launched and that was only to people who started the game on PC near launch and paid attention to get opt into the copy when Zos asked. Essentially they never built a tool to copy from and to live servers and are not interested in doing so.

Zos never took care of those that missed the window to opt in. They were stuck even though they had bought the game in time.

They claim that the reason for that is that they could only copy to an empty database, so of course those who bought the game in time but missed the window to opt in couldn't then be copied because the console database was no longer empty. I've no idea if that is technically accurate, but it sounds plausible and there's no real reason to doubt their integrity on it given the potential revenue they are losing from not admitting to be able to make such transfers.

Cross-platform transfers are a different matter altogether, of course, due to the likely contractual restrictions between ZOS and the console providers - as are PC transfers to ZOS of Steam accounts.

goldenflameslinger

At this point, if they ever offer this, it probably means the server populations are so low that they have to merge them to save the game. I hope it doesn’t get to that point any time soon.

MyKillv2.0

Other MMO games offer cross server transfers. Why not ESO?

I am not sure why a NA to EU same platform would be a massive issue. I can see plenty of smaller issues but nothing in Elder Scrolls Online's make up is different than lets say World of Warcraft or Everquestion, both of which offer server transfers. I get the problems that would present in cross platform transfer and I am not sure if Microsoft/Sony would even allow such a thing, something that WoW or EQ does not have to deal with when conducting business since they are PC only. However the question isn't "can I move from Xbox to PC". The question is, "why can I not move from NA to EU or vice versa". I can see where there were be minor issues such as name (as previously stated) but nothing that would completely prevent the issue OUTSIDE of the fact that it would be work and this company..... well, when presented with the option to do nothing or work hard to fix an issue, often chooses the "do nothing" option. Sorry 'ESO Fam' bois... the history is there and you are simply foolish for attempting to argue anything other than this fact.

Now, do I think the offer/feature will ever be made from Zo$? Nope.

Do I think that it is possible? Of course. That fact is not argueable. Plenty of other games do this. If Sony could do this almost two decades ago in Everquest, I think the Dark Ages of Camelot bois have had plenty of time to figure it out.

Tandor

MyKillv2.0 wrote: »

Other MMO games offer cross server transfers. Why not ESO?

I am not sure why a NA to EU same platform would be a massive issue. I can see plenty of smaller issues but nothing in Elder Scrolls Online's make up is different than lets say World of Warcraft or Everquestion, both of which offer server transfers. I get the problems that would present in cross platform transfer and I am not sure if Microsoft/Sony would even allow such a thing, something that WoW or EQ does not have to deal with when conducting business since they are PC only. However the question isn't "can I move from Xbox to PC". The question is, "why can I not move from NA to EU or vice versa". I can see where there were be minor issues such as name (as previously stated) but nothing that would completely prevent the issue OUTSIDE of the fact that it would be work and this company..... well, when presented with the option to do nothing or work hard to fix an issue, often chooses the "do nothing" option. Sorry 'ESO Fam' bois... the history is there and you are simply foolish for attempting to argue anything other than this fact.

Now, do I think the offer/feature will ever be made from Zo$? Nope.

Do I think that it is possible? Of course. That fact is not argueable. Plenty of other games do this. If Sony could do this almost two decades ago in Everquest, I think the Dark Ages of Camelot bois have had plenty of time to figure it out.

Please tell us the basis of your intimate knowledge of the technical workings of the ESO game and server coding which enable you to reach that conclusion contrary to the counter-claim by ZOS that they know their system doesn't permit it.

Goregrinder

Next Tuesday at exactly 5:00am PST!

JamieAubrey

Nestor wrote: »

It won't happen because of duplicate names across the servers.

This ^^^^^^^

scorpius2k1

I agree completely. You pay for a service and should be able to use it anywhere within that service even if they charge for it, at least have the option to do so. It's funny because all of us in the community over the years have been basically spelling out the things that were going to be problems in ESO later down the road, and they decided to put it on the back burner and here we are now where those little things are going to become problematic. All the small things add up quick. I want ESO to be absolutely successful in a massive way for many years to come. ZOS needs to step up their game in a lot of the weaker areas in this game quick, especially being in the MMO big leagues now.

Coatmagic

duplicate names is a copout. just have to add an x or e or whatever to the ends of the dup names and offer free name change

very surprised they havent offered this since it would be a lot of coin in their purse

but lazy gonna be lazy

whatever; they are just bleeding eso dry for their new phone games anyhow xD

kargen27

MyKillv2.0 wrote: »

Other MMO games offer cross server transfers. Why not ESO?

I am not sure why a NA to EU same platform would be a massive issue. I can see plenty of smaller issues but nothing in Elder Scrolls Online's make up is different than lets say World of Warcraft or Everquestion, both of which offer server transfers. I get the problems that would present in cross platform transfer and I am not sure if Microsoft/Sony would even allow such a thing, something that WoW or EQ does not have to deal with when conducting business since they are PC only. However the question isn't "can I move from Xbox to PC". The question is, "why can I not move from NA to EU or vice versa". I can see where there were be minor issues such as name (as previously stated) but nothing that would completely prevent the issue OUTSIDE of the fact that it would be work and this company..... well, when presented with the option to do nothing or work hard to fix an issue, often chooses the "do nothing" option. Sorry 'ESO Fam' bois... the history is there and you are simply foolish for attempting to argue anything other than this fact.

Now, do I think the offer/feature will ever be made from Zo$? Nope.

Do I think that it is possible? Of course. That fact is not argueable. Plenty of other games do this. If Sony could do this almost two decades ago in Everquest, I think the Dark Ages of Camelot bois have had plenty of time to figure it out.

Are you sure nothing is different? Do you know how each game structures their servers? For PC ESO has two servers. WoW has around 250 servers, or did at one time. That really isn't accurate though as what you are thinking of as a server is an instance on a server. Your character information isn't saved in that instance/server but a central location. They can allow you to switch instances/servers because your character information is already shared across them. With ESO your character information is unique to either the EU or NA server. A character switch involves much more than a name change.

MartiniDaniels

Lol, so ZOS can copy characters in packs to PTS just fine, but can't do it between live servers.. Knowing ZOS, they probably don't have space in database to keep all characters on all servers.

MartiniDaniels

Mobile phone subscribers can be moved between network operators with all the legislative and personal info protection actions provided. Or even easier example, when you travel abroad you have roaming and so other operator receives copy of your account to "visitors" database and all works like clock for dozens of years and for billions of people. This is all doable, and it was doable 30 years ago. It's just somebody is lazy.

Acrolas

MyKillv2.0 wrote: »

Other MMO games offer cross server transfers. Why not ESO?

Because those technically aren't server transfers. They're transfers to different partitions on the same server.


Something like WOW creates a home instance called a 'realm' for any given player and you can communicate with anyone on that realm but you need to pay to transfer to another realm. Any realm you can transfer to is on the same PC server.

Something like ESO creates as many instances as it needs to and you can communicate with and port to other people in different instances. You never have a 'home' instance. But each series of instances is on a regional platform-specific megaserver, each geographically and communicably isolated from each other.

The substantial difference is that moving an account on the realm system poses no risk of damaging your data or the data of others. The database doesn't really change, just some account identification information.

Moving an account from one megaserver to another poses a much higher risk to user data. Especially if you're fairly constantly doing it.

Dagoth_Rac

The big problem is database keys. The various details in game are almost certainly not linked by character names but big gigantic numbers unique to each player. So your character named "Joe Schmo" might have character_id 67897895637. And that 67897895637 is all over the place linking what inventory belongs to you, what achievements, what quest progression, what mounts, what pets, what guilds, what friends, your guild trader listings, what daily rewards you have claimed, and on and on and on. There are probably dozens or hundreds of tables. Someone on another megaserver, regardless of their character name, probably has character_id 67897895637 on that megaserver. That causes conflicts. So you would not only have to give the transferred player a new character_id, but update all those related tables to have the new character_id. And I am sure there is also an account_id. And probably even more keys that are not obvious if we do not know details of database structure.

When ZOS were copying into empty databases at console launch, there was no worry about those database keys already existing and causing conflicts. So it was just a flat copy. Now it would be copy into some kind of temporary storage, generate new database keys that do not overlap with megaserver you are transferring into, reassign all the existing database keys to new database keys in that temporary storage, then copy from temporary storage and merge into megaserver you are transferring to. And all without messing up and having your items or other details suddenly appear or disappear or get duplicated because of database key errors or overlaps.

I am sure this is not impossible, but it is also not trivial. It is not just renaming a character. And it is a "high risk" change. The kinds of things that can go wrong are very serious.

scorpius2k1

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

The big problem is database keys. The various details in game are almost certainly not linked by character names but big gigantic numbers unique to each player. So your character named "Joe Schmo" might have character_id 67897895637. And that 67897895637 is all over the place linking what inventory belongs to you, what achievements, what quest progression, what mounts, what pets, what guilds, what friends, your guild trader listings, what daily rewards you have claimed, and on and on and on. There are probably dozens or hundreds of tables. Someone on another megaserver, regardless of their character name, probably has character_id 67897895637 on that megaserver. That causes conflicts

It makes perfect sense if that is how it's implemented, but I sure hope they didn't create the system that way because it's a bad design and there would be no way to scale it. Why wouldn't those account ID numbers theoretically just be global regardless of server? There should be a "master server" of sorts that stores ID's globally that are tied to a users account when they sign up, then when they connect to a server all the data is tied to that number from there on out. A simplistic way to think of this is how Steam accounts work, they have a unique global SteamID attached to that account and any game can pull that data from the master server if needed. In the case of ESO, when you want to transfer to another server/realm, etc, a simple transfer of that data attached to the account number is moved into the destination database. I'm sure many of you have worked with databases before so you know how easy it is to transfer data from one to another when associated with an ID. The only difference here is we have a primary database with account id's (master server) and secondary databases that store the related data (megaservers). A basic example of a working transfer with this method:

• Player initiates an account move from Megaserver "A".
• Megaserver "A" then sends a request for the players account ID from Master Server
• Master Server gives ID back
• Megaserver "A" then copies data to Megaserver "B" from that associated ID (or whatever server location comes along as the game grows)

We could get into all the commentary about the performance metrics of everything and optimizations do so, etc, but this is just to give a basic example of how it could work at it's core. Other systems could be put into place to do the heavy lifting. I believe this is very similar to how WoW and other MMO's do it. WoW uses realms which are also similar to ESO's megaservers in functionality, but on a smaller scale due to user count limitations. Anyway, again, if they allow multiple account ID's with the same number to exist within the same game regardless of megaserver, that is just bad design. I hope that's not the case because if so, I agree, we would likely never see transfer options come to light.

With that said, you can also see the other side of the coin and why it could also easily work. It just depends on how ZOS designed their system, which at the end of the day we all can only speculate on.

corpseblade

Also the issue of Crown Store purchases. If they merge the servers do people get all their crowns back for what would now be duplicate houses, mounts, costumes etc? What about character limits?

I guess a new account could be made for your transfer, but then you have to buy chapters and subscriptions for both? Or would we move and transfer each character one by one on a fee-based service?

Wildberryjack

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Wildberryjack wrote: »

Also this isn't just about me, what happens to people who move from Europe to North America, or from N.A. to Europe?

You aren’t required to change severs if you move.

Players that have to qualify an opinion by saying it “just isn’t about me” really mean that “it is all about me” ...

So playing with double the latency, or more, which could in fact make the game unplayable isn't a problem to you? M'kay. And no honey it isn't just about me. I have seen a lot asking to move off the EU server since their ping has gone through the roof but they don't want to lose everything and have to start over either.

It sure is strange that crowns are cross server but nothing else can be.

Nestor

MyKillv2.0 wrote: »

Other MMO games offer cross server transfers. Why not ESO?

Other MMO's have lots of Servers. So, they have to offer file transfers. ESO is on one Mega Server, so, its a different animal with regards to files. 10's of Millions of Character Saves are stored on each server. Not a few hundred thousand or a million. You build a different kind of database for each population size.

dpr999

cheifsoap wrote: »

It's kind of goofy that this isn't a thing. Even if its a paid service. It couldn't be that hard to implement

I'm a programmer (not games, but business software). I often get requests for changes, with the requester adding, "that should be easy." Nobody ever makes a request and says, "That should be hard."

SoLooney

If server transfers happen, console would be dead, there are so many players who hate playing on console cause of the trash frames, it is poorly optimized for console, I will def be moving to pc

idk

Tandor wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Likely never. Zos has spoken on the issue and they pretty much indicated that it will never happen when they said they would never offer it again after they did account copies from PC to consoles when console launched and that was only to people who started the game on PC near launch and paid attention to get opt into the copy when Zos asked. Essentially they never built a tool to copy from and to live servers and are not interested in doing so.

Zos never took care of those that missed the window to opt in. They were stuck even though they had bought the game in time.

They claim that the reason for that is that they could only copy to an empty database, so of course those who bought the game in time but missed the window to opt in couldn't then be copied because the console database was no longer empty. I've no idea if that is technically accurate, but it sounds plausible and there's no real reason to doubt their integrity on it given the potential revenue they are losing from not admitting to be able to make such transfers.

Cross-platform transfers are a different matter altogether, of course, due to the likely contractual restrictions between ZOS and the console providers - as are PC transfers to ZOS of Steam accounts.

It was not that it was an empty db but one that is not live. It is much easier and fewer possible issues copying to a db that is not live.,

They did not want to build out what would be needed to do server transfers. But it could also be agreements with one or both console hosts prevents it. Further, the only possible transfers their could be is cross platform as our accounts exists on both NA and EU for the platform we are on.

Dusk_Coven

scorpius2k1 wrote: »

I sure hope they didn't create the system that way because it's a bad design and there would be no way to scale it.

^THIS

They are stuck now with just expanding servers. They can't really make new ones because if it doesn't populate really quickly they can't move people to it. And the longer you stay on a server and be invested in achievements and quest progress and accumulating stuff, the less likely you are to move to a new server and start all over again, unless they give you one helluva incentive.

This said, the life cycle of MMOs seems to be that eventually lots of servers become merged servers and fewer servers. It's happened a couple of times to SWTOR and they may well merge again in the future. So ultimately ESO might end up with just the servers they have right now even if they did pause to change their infrastructure to allow transfers and/or make more servers.

r34lian

Nestor wrote: »

It won't happen because of duplicate names across the servers. Also, they can't move a single player's record over, they have to move the entire database enmass, which means replacing every single player record in EU with the ones from NA or vice versa. Which is a bigger issue than the duplicate names.

They could just add a tag to remove that issue just like Blizzard has done and it does work.

Chelo

Tandor wrote: »

MyKillv2.0 wrote: »

Other MMO games offer cross server transfers. Why not ESO?

I am not sure why a NA to EU same platform would be a massive issue. I can see plenty of smaller issues but nothing in Elder Scrolls Online's make up is different than lets say World of Warcraft or Everquestion, both of which offer server transfers. I get the problems that would present in cross platform transfer and I am not sure if Microsoft/Sony would even allow such a thing, something that WoW or EQ does not have to deal with when conducting business since they are PC only. However the question isn't "can I move from Xbox to PC". The question is, "why can I not move from NA to EU or vice versa". I can see where there were be minor issues such as name (as previously stated) but nothing that would completely prevent the issue OUTSIDE of the fact that it would be work and this company..... well, when presented with the option to do nothing or work hard to fix an issue, often chooses the "do nothing" option. Sorry 'ESO Fam' bois... the history is there and you are simply foolish for attempting to argue anything other than this fact.

Now, do I think the offer/feature will ever be made from Zo$? Nope.

Do I think that it is possible? Of course. That fact is not argueable. Plenty of other games do this. If Sony could do this almost two decades ago in Everquest, I think the Dark Ages of Camelot bois have had plenty of time to figure it out.

Please tell us the basis of your intimate knowledge of the technical workings of the ESO game and server coding which enable you to reach that conclusion contrary to the counter-claim by ZOS that they know their system doesn't permit it.

His argument is 100% validated, if games with less technology could get this feature 15 years ago, why ESO couldn't?