So are we any closer to getting some kind of Cross Save functionality?

Azurephoenix999

Before anyone says anything, I refuse to believe that it will literally never happen.

sarahthes

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.

sharquez

Without knowing precisely what the logistics of it entail, I don't think anyone can give you proper answer beyond, "Not going to happen this year" at least.

SpacemanSpiff1

no

Arunei

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.

The latter is something we'll never be "closer" to. The only time a transfer from one platform was done was when the console database opened with console release. The database was empty and people could do a one-time transfer. But moving an account to a database with data that already exists isn't anything I've heard of them doing. You either stay on your current platform or you start over on a new one.

Necrotech_Master

sarahthes wrote: »

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.

this is the biggest problem when "server merges" happen in games

allup8679

I would rather have consoles be on the same server.

allup8679

I miss my PS4 friends
@wazzz56

Dagoth_Rac

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.

Vrienda

I mean I'd love to get older versions of my Veteran Rank 12 characters from when they did the PC-Console transfer discount but I doubt we'll ever see the servers merge. Too much work and the whole fear of PC players having a huge advantage cus mods.

Azurephoenix999

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.

What if all accounts and characters from all platforms were moved to a single empty database, and the keys gained an additional digit during the import process that designated the platform of origin to prevent conflicts?

zaria

sarahthes wrote: »

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.

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.

This will need to be extracted, then inserted in the other database, updating all the primary keys. so all data points to new account id, the same for houses and characters. The old account would be blocked out and you would get an rename screen trying to log in to the new, once renaming is done you have moved and the old accounts names can be freed and it would be deleted.

This is quite some work, done something like it but on an much smaller scale.

AdamLAD

Just create a new Super mega server and transfer all accounts to it ? Unless I'm dumb and missing critical information

Danikat

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.

AdamLAD wrote: »

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.

Amerises

Well that would suck, would me PS4 account override my Xbox? Or vice versa? Or merge them? How many character slots then?

Stx

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.

jaws343

Danikat wrote: »

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.

AdamLAD wrote: »

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.

Not to mention, PS and Xbox players user names are their platform names. You can't just force override platform defining user names of two playerbases.

Tsar_Gekkou

Zos would have to manually recreate our characters, inventory, etc on another server if we wanted to transfer over. That would take more time and manpower than they'd want to expend.

kringled_1

Stx wrote: »

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.

The initial "transfer" to consoles is not a good comparison for what people are asking for now. That was a full on copy of existing PC characters to empty console databases. The same process happens regularly with the PTS. Note that every time we get a PTS wipe, it's either PC/NA or PC/EU characters, not both. So it's not a question of "allowing". I do agree that at least on the technical side, it's something that could happen with a lot of work on their side. And so far ZOS seems to have stayed with the decision that the costs of doing that work outweigh the benefits.

DMuehlhausen

Azurephoenix999 wrote: »

Before anyone says anything, I refuse to believe that it will literally never happen.

It will literally never happen though. Sony is never willing to agree to things like this. There is no reason we don't have cross play in every single game that is on multiple platforms. We don't because normally Sony says no. So it will literally never happen.

chessalavakia_ESO

My impression is that when you buy an item through a store, the owner of the store gets a cut.

Be it Valve for PC players that use Steam, Sony for Playstation users, or Microsoft for Xbox players.

Last I saw, for Sony specifically they literally make more $ from sales of in-game content than from sales of games themselves or the sales of their consoles.

As a result, unless the company making the game pays the stores or makes a deal with them cross-play and transfers will not happen.

https://www.pcgamer.com/sony-charges-for-crossplay-support-to-protect-psn-revenue-documents-show/#:~:text=Epic CEO Tim Sweeney just confirmed that Sony,only platform that requires compensation for crossplay support.

(This is ignoring the technical hurdles for doing it which can be quite real depending on your implementation.)

shimm

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

Arunei 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.

Microsoft owns ZoS now and cross play/cross save are big priorities for the MS/Xbox teams so I suspect in the next couple of years we'll get that functionality at least between Xbox and PC regardless of it Sony wishes to add Playstation into that equation.

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.

Bl4ckR3alm93

shimm wrote: »

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).

Exactly and ESO can do it better than Destiny 2 did. Destiny 2 everything transfers except your dlcs but in ESO, dlcs are in the crown store too so you wont lose anything except the latest expansion and even if the dlcs didn't transfer, we have ESO Plus and ZoS gives us all the previous chapters when you buy the newest chapter. Also ESO already allows us to link Steam, PS, Amazon Prime and Xbox right here on the website and you can login thru either platform account. We just currently cant login thru the a actual platform while being cross saved seamlessly. Honestly I think ZoS can do it and should do it

Tandor

Why would ZOS want to increase the data held on one platform's servers by transferring/allowing players onto them from other platforms' servers, given that they have already had to make reductions in the long established structure of the gameplay in order to free up the database for new content and have also had to meet the cost of upgrading all the servers because they couldn't handle their existing player numbers?

virtus753

Ragnarok0130 wrote: »

Arunei 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.

Yes and no. (Or rather, no, then yes.)

ZOS has explicitly said that they cannot use that same technology that they did at console launch, so the fact that transfers were originally offered has no bearing on the current or future state of things (unless we don't believe them). They have also said they are indeed capable of building the tool required to implement post-launch platform transfers, but they also say they have no plans to build that tool:

https://help.elderscrollsonline.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/25807/~/can-i-transfer-my-eso-account-and-characters-between-different-platforms-or

"We have not built, and do not plan to build, the capability to move individual characters from platform to platform. We were only able to move characters in bulk for consoles once on June 1st, 2015 because the database tables we copied to were brand new (empty). Now that the database tables are filled with other data, the techniques we used before no longer work."

They are free, of course, to change their minds in the future. They've certainly done it before. Plans can change. But this is the current state of things.