I believe that it is not possible because of being different databases. Character and account name reconciliation (as there will likely be thousands or tens of thousands of duplicates) would be the real issue.
Dagoth_Rac wrote: »This is unlikely to be a platform issue. You cannot even move a PC-NA character to PC-EU.
This is a database key issue. Your account and each of your characters has some giant number associated with them, like 869567253689. Now, that 869567253689 goes on everything in database related to you. What quests you have completed, what step you are on in partially completed quests, what achievements you have, what guilds you belong to, what gear you own, what motifs you know, what mounts you have collected, etc., etc. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of database tables involved. And probably tens of thousands of individual records involved. This is why you can already change your name. Because if you change your name from John Doe to Joe Schmo, that underlying 869567253689 key is unchanged, so everything linked to John Doe is now linked to Joe Schmo.
But if you move to another megaserver, 869567253689 might already be in use. That might be the key of Jane Lane. So now what do you do? This would not have been the case when consoles first came out and databases were empty. There was no possibility for key conflicts. But now you have to change every single record, and there are probably tens of thousands of them spread across hundreds of database tables, with 869567253689 to another key. And you cannot just plop your data into the new database and start updating it there, because then it is already mixed in with all of Jane Lane's data and now you have a mess on your hands. So you need to take all of your data out of megaserver X, put it into some kind of temporary storage, change all the keys, and then insert them from the temporary storage into the megaserver Y. And you have to do it while still maintaining integrity of megaserver Y. You cannot just say, "1123456789012 is not in use on megaserver Y, so I'll use that." But then while you are setting everything up in temporary storage, 1123456789012 goes into use on megaserver Y and you find yourself back to square one, with a database key conflict.
This is not an impossible problem. It can definitely be done. But it is complicated and doing it wrong can cause serious problems. This is not like a bug where you can just fix the malfunctioning behavior. Losing database integrity is an incredibly difficult problem to recover from. Kind of like how it is easy to add milk to black coffee, but very hard to remove the milk and go back to black coffee.
Doable, but quite some work, You will need to collect all the account data, who is not only the account but houses, collectives and houses with their furniture, the character data, with skill, cp and inventory, also character achievements with places discovered and quests done.I believe that it is not possible because of being different databases. Character and account name reconciliation (as there will likely be thousands or tens of thousands of duplicates) would be the real issue.
Just create a new Super mega server and transfer all accounts to it ? Unless I'm dumb and missing critical information
If you're looking for an official answer the only one we've got is that they're not planning to do it. Regardless of whether or not it's possible or what players imagine might be involved in making it happen ZOS are not planning to try.
They're not likely to update us on that unless it changes because they could probably spend the rest of their lives listing and updating all the things they're not going to do with this game.Just create a new Super mega server and transfer all accounts to it ? Unless I'm dumb and missing critical information
For one thing character names have to be unique on each server, but can be duplicated on seperate servers (I've got the same name on both PC EU and PC NA). If they merge them all together they'd have to either find a way to allow duplicate names or a way to choose 1 person to keep each name and force the rest to change it.
There are a number of ways to allow duplicate names in a database, just like with any other bit of info, but it wouldn't surprise me if because the game was built with the assumption that character names would be a unique identifier all kinds of things use that and would sotp working or throw up weird errors if there are duplicates.
Obviously they CAN do it, because they allowed you to do it when consoles first launched. Why they won’t allow you to do it now.. who knows. Probably the same reason we don’t get most requested features, it would take work to make it happen.
Azurephoenix999 wrote: »Before anyone says anything, I refuse to believe that it will literally never happen.
Do you mean cross play? Or being able to move information from one platform to another?
The forner isn't possible unless Sony agrees to it, and even then it's something the devs might not really bother with trying to code.
Destiny did it when they went cross play/save… you picked which account you wanted to be your primary (Xbox, ps or steam) and that was the account that is now used for both (in my case Xbox and pc). So it can be done, destiny was around 7 years at that point… so it’s somewhat comparable, although there may be more database variables with eso (inventory, bank, housing etc).
Ragnarok0130 wrote: »Do you mean cross play? Or being able to move information from one platform to another?
The forner isn't possible unless Sony agrees to it, and even then it's something the devs might not really bother with trying to code.
When ESO came out on console ZoS offered PC players free character transfers to console if we wished to play there so the technology exists regardless of ZoS' current willingness to provide it for general use. Even if the previous transfer was only available to a new/blank server I'm convinced either the engineers at ZoS or at big brother MS can find a way to implement cross play/cross save or at the minimum platform transfers - especially if ZoS can monetize platform transfers.