Dyvet Poll - Merged NF areas across different servers?

[Raven]

well thats certainly interesting. It would be nice for them to confirm yes or no whether they can do it. Seems strange to say its impossible and then have a poll on whether people would be happy with it happening.

Another cynical scam to get people to resubscribe/hold out a little longer? or a genuine move to attempt to prolong the life of the game?

 

[Haldar]

just in case - conv dates back to 16 Nov 2007

 

[Hestethun]

i would start playing i would even start playing if it would increase some now too , i leik my chars there! i miss em!

 

[Zede]

id resub, feck ive been trying to resub but failed, bloody D/L'er wont feckin D/L

 

[SoulFly]

Share the frontiers, leave the PVE zones alone. That would float my boat.

 

[prodical]

i spoke with a gm about this on ventrilo and he was very tight lipped about this. i suspect something is afoot with regards the frontier zones.

 

[GReaper]

If they can do it then it needs to be done fairly quickly. If WAR is coming out in Q2 2008, GOA can't wait for Mythic to add some miracle patch and then take 6 months to convert, translate and test the patch.

Also, I'd hope that the clustering would be with a fairly decent server. Nearly all of the people I know playing on other EU servers have gone to German servers, so something like this would be most ideal from my perspective.

 

[Gahn]

It's at least conforting to realize that someone's actually hearing, shame it takes 1 year and more to ring a bell.
Well ...

 

[Cromcruaich]

Guys, guys. Dont get your hopes up. The message has nowt to do with the Dyvet situation.

Nasty goa for making people think salvation could be on the horizon.

 

[partyanimal]

1. No account , no vote... if u want yer opinion to be heard renew

2. Out of the thousands of active accounts, most the owners play on healthy servers. So u cant predict the outcome.

3. dont expect anything happenin till summer when everyone will be on vacations or exams

4. even if goa will merge rvr zones, most of those who reactivate accounts, will have to pve for dragon templates ( some wont mind tho)

 

[devaline]

Can't they just copy/paste all our chars?

 

[illu]

I don't believe that there is no solution to dyvet's problem.

Generally, most I.T. problems have a solution, no matter how complicated.

The simple fact in dyvet's case is that the population is way too low. I come on and play a bit, but frankly it pains me when I do /stat rp and see less than 20 names on there.

There has to be another way.

There should be some way of copying character data from one place to another. How hard can it be? We have a certain amount of RP, are specced a certain way, we have houses. The population is so low, surely it wouldn't take that long to copy people's accounts over?

I just want to play the game, play solo on my sb, play in groups on my healer and sm, and just have fun the way the game was designed. No one seems to be doing anything about it, and it is the small hardcore population that is keeping this server going, but when it gets to the stage where it is hard to make 1FG to PvE something, or when you get 1-2FG maximum of each realm roaming, or when you get beaten by a FG of hibs and you feel like you have been zerged - something is wrong!

I'm just not convinced that there isn't a solution to our problem, and clustering our NF area with the German Servers would be ideal, and I don't care if the NF language is in German, as long as my items remain in english :>

Someone somewhere must know how to un-cluster/cluster/port accounts, whatever is necessary to keep this great game going, because at the moment, the population is just too damn small on our server.

Oli - Illu

 

[Gibbo]

In the Friday news last week GOA said they weren't willing to...erm...I mean...it wasn't possible to transfer characters.

 

[devaline]

with the money they earn with us they could get more employers and re-create our characters on another cluster... 1000 players or so that care to re-activate acc's x 10 (max chars) = 10.000 ...dont u think they could be able to do that?... or wtf maybe ppl would be happy with just his main or a fav. char.. dont think that hard to do

 

[Shamealot]

I cant believe the story about not being able transfer chars to other language servers. Its all about database management. I cannot imagine that the entire program environment is re written in another language. They must have used translation tables. Where every english word is translated to its equivalent. So in the original database you can always find the original item key name. And translate it to the server language. At least that is how most program and database environments work nowadays.

Be fair goa and just tell us it is an economic reason. I can believe that it is a waste of money to invest loads of time in clustering dyvet, or move chars to another language cluster. Especially when everybody is telling that they will move to warhammer as soon as possible.

 

[kirennia]

It's simply not impossible...nothing is impossible with regards to what a computer can do, especially something like this. How on earth a large company such as this can get away with just out right lying is beyond me.

The chances are, the item databases are structured the same; items with be given a unique key identifier and could be replicated as such. If they havent then LOL at their database management. Even if they haven't, it's still just a case of taking a copy of the database, making a program with a long list of if statements for each item/class or whatever and running it on the database to rename the items with their current stats. They have test machines to run such a thing on to see if for example english characters are being copied into german and to see if they work. If they don't, scrap the copied database, try again while tweaking the algorithms which went wrong.

I mean really, they could just recreate a dummy account with every item on it and test that to cut down on time. Looking at it from a computing mind set, it can't take a team of a few people more then a week to work together making such a conversion program if they so wished to transfer the accounts onto a new server. The only problems they should come across are duplicate names and such.


On the otherhand though from a business perspective, they may see it as non-profit effecient with warhammer just around the corner thus they'll just tell the masses that it can't be done to try and get them off their backs. If they said they could do it but just aren't going to, they'll more then likely think they'd lose more customer loyalty for future games by saying they aren't going to due to money reasons. The point is though, when there is still such an actively talking community which isn't filled with non-computer related people, they can't expect people to not point out their flaws in saying it's simply impossible.

No matter what way you look at it though, if they say it's impossible, they're LYING. No two ways about it, there is no database in the world that cannot with some work be converted to work with another database of a different format and personally, I cannot see them having made it of a different format in the first place...so it wouldn't even be that much of a job to do.

I don't see how it wouldn't have made them money if they had of done it 6 months ago when the cluster was first in dire straights...Licensing problem maybe?

 

[eble@work]

QUOTE=kirennia;3308161]It's simply not impossible....maybe?[/QUOTE]

I'm sure in the depths of the agreements between Mythic/GOA an English Language server/cluster 'must' be maintained - hence all the can't be clustered smoke screens.

Lets not forget classic english server got merged in a heartbeat with the german one, so to say its impossible isn't really telling the truth.

Unfortunately this is all too little too late, by the time anything might be able to be done WAR will be upon us and with it the last remaining hopes of any decent population from Dyvet will be gone.

We can only hope and I honestly do, that Goa/Mythic are decent enough to give the remaining players on the low population servers a free copy of WAR and send them on there way.

Found this on the WOW Forums seems lots of people hanging out for WAR:
this post was aimed at putting them off:

For all the bored and disgruntled members of WoW's pvp community; I feel your pain, I'm one of you. But unfortunately I have little hope that Warhammer Online is the answer to our prayers, mostly because EA has the most horrible history in MMORPG games. Here's a brief history for those of you who don't know how many online gamers Electronic Arts has failed in the past.

Electronic Arts, as the parent company of Origin Systems Inc., funded the development of the world's first Massive Multiplayer game, Ultima Online, which was released in late 1997. The game was groundbreaking even though it suffered from numerous bugs and flaws, but it was uncharted territory. The game was a success, drawing in over a million players during it's lifetime, and achieveing a high subscription point of 180,000. Sure, nothing compared to WoW's numbers, but we're talking about the beginning of MMORPG's, most people were still on dialup.

Around the same year, EA began to experience unprecidented success in the videogame industry. They purchased Maxis and funded the runaway hit The Sims, which became the best selling computer game series in history. The next year, 1998, they released Black and White from another purchased subsidiary, Bullfrog. Again, it was an amazing hit. EA had many successfull sports titles released in 97 and 98 such as their very popular Triple Play baseball series. In short, EA was on top of the industry, and had made shrewed developer buyout decisions that allowed them to capture many gaming genre's, such as sports, role playing, and simulation.

Enter the corporate goon-squad. EA's execs, who's egos must have been inflated from taking the credit for their developers successes, began to get involved in the decision making of their subsidiaries, and it was all downhill from there.

In 1999 EA announced the development of UO's first mmorpg sequal, UO2. It was highly advertised and heavily promoted by EA. They brought in celebrity comic phenome Todd Mcfarlane, the creator and illustrator of the wildly popular Spawn comics, to design many of the creatures of UO2. The sequal, in typical EA tradition, featured LESS pvp, and a dumbed down interface for newbies to online rpgs. UO2 was meant to directly compete with Everquests shiney 3d graphics, and was intended to be appealing to a broader audiance. Without warning, and for no apparent reason, EA CANCELLED IT. Bam, it was gone. All the world modeling by it's developers, all the character and creature creation by Mcfarlane, all the money invested, wasted. Some of the character and monster models were adjusted to fit into an expansion for UO, Blackthorn's Revenge, which also was promoted as carrying McFarlane content, and players who bought the upgrade got a Mcfarlane designed figurine....

EA decided it was more profitable to continue to milk it's current mmorpg, rather then take a risk on something new.

In 2003 EA decided it was time for another go at a sequal to Ultima Online. This time it was billed as "The Next UO", UXO for short. The game was announced in a press release, with the selling point that it featured the hottest graphics engine at the time, the Unreal Engine. Thousands of hours of development commenced, and images of UXO's beutiful 3d environments showing the full capacity of Unreal's engine were posted online. Players drooled over the detail of the polygonal monsters, finally, UO would make it's way to next Gen MMORPG. It was not to be.... again EA CANCELLED IT. In typical EA exec fashion, they got spooked. The comming release of WoW had them scared, and once again EA's execs stepped in and killed the project rather then take a risk. A disgruntled and truely angry developer of UXO went online and made all the character models he had created available. Somehow, the game's code itself leaked and today their is a fan based community of programmers who are close to developing a single player Ultima game based on UXO's unreal engine coding. The fans just didn't want to let EA kill it completely, again.

2004 was a fatefull year for EA's Online games division. Their wise and game savvy Execs had decided that their next mmorpg attempt was not going to fail again, it was going to be the safest bet possible, a game based on their most broadly popular franchise, The Sims. Oh EA, do you do ANYTHING right? EA invested in a whole new internet gaming infrustructure. They secured their own routers for their upcomming online games, bought bandwidth from major providers, invested in state of the art servers for The Sims Online. They would need it to handle the massive player load, they thought. The Sims Online was released in Late 2004. Initially the game's playerbase numbers were on track to meet expectations. But then... something was wrong, subscription numbers were not exploding like EA's Execs had predicted. Bad buzz about TSO was all over the internet. Players had found the game very boring. It was simply completely unsatisfying. There was no conflict, none whatsoever. Players could only collect items, and gossip with "friends" that they would never meet, or should never meet. TSO turned out to be exactly what it's name implied, it was just The Sims, Online, old hat. And it's player numbers fell through the floor. It became sort of a joke in mmorpg circles, a pariah of a game, populated by a few chatty housewives.

Also in 2004, EA cancelled the first version of Warhammer Online. Yes, it's been partially made before, it couldn't live up to WoW, and EA axed it.

2005 was a year of fear and loathing for EA. The company became very timid after it's string of online failures, and instead of abandoning their "sure bet" mentality, instead took it even further, bringing the "more of the same" philosophy to their single player games. Sequals released in 2005 and 2006 such as Black and White 2, and The Sims 2, and 2004's Simcity 4, should have taken concepts introduced in these franchises to a whole new level. They should have continued to let their subsidiaries, such as Maxis, innovate, they did not. EA's execs wanted safe bets, more of the same, and that's what these sequals delivered. Only, they served less of the content and imagination that made the originals successes, and again, these games failed on the market for the most part.

In 2005 EA still had hopes of developing a UO sequal. For the thrid time they began early planning for another attempt at a UO sequal, only this time, they decided to try to keep it a complete secret. Their "take no chances" mentality had reached full circle, on this go, there would be no press releases, no advertising, no hype, so that they couldn't dissapoint their loyal UO fans again, for a 3rd strikeout. EA execs pitched the idea of a possible exclusive coverstory to several major PC game magazines, including PC Gamer, behind closed doors. PC game writers were sceptical, was it really going to happen this time? Nope. EA again CANCELLED their third attempt at a UO sequal before it even entered coding. It became a joke around the PC game magazine industry as, "The MMORPG that never was."

Now I ask you, do you have faith in Electronic Arts ability to even release an online massively multiplayer game, let alone produce a good one capable of challenging WoW? They would have to abandone their philosophy of only totally safe bets, but they're too afraid of failling from the top position in video game publishing. Which of course, they already have, thanks to the creation of the merged Activision Blizzard company. A look at the game itself shows a great deal of similarity to WoW, down to it's very name, Warhammer. Looks like EA is still forcing it's developers to chase the tried and true.

I played Warhammer; Shadow of The Horned Rat in 1997, and it was a horrible fantasy battle sim. In my opinion, Warhammer Online is hype, the future of mmorpg's is Conan; Hyborian Adventures and the possible Worlds of Starcraft.

Eble

 

[Eeben]

1. No account , no vote... if u want yer opinion to be heard renew

2. Out of the thousands of active accounts, most the owners play on healthy servers. So u cant predict the outcome.

3. dont expect anything happenin till summer when everyone will be on vacations or exams

4. even if goa will merge rvr zones, most of those who reactivate accounts, will have to pve for dragon templates ( some wont mind tho)

but dont think it will be any problem getting dragon armor since lots of people will want it, and i im pretty sure lots of people would open their accounts again for this.

 

[Vodkafairy]

What kirennia says makes sence. I'm pretty sure there is a frightening amount of complicating factors that we don't think or know about, but still. However, if clustering would mean a language change, GOA doesn't have the licence for it (iirc Gahn posted a confirmation of that somewhere) - but:

if GOA'd offer a (single) character transfer service for a char with ml, rr, cl, looks, items equipped and in inventory, maybe those in vault too - for 10 euro, people'd reactivate and use it like mad.

For that price they can hire some student who recreates the chars, no effort for them, one happy student. Only problem is it would be a french one :F.

Daoc most likely has at least a year left of life in it, maybe even two, fuck knows, but as it is now both german clusters are still healthy and there is always the option to cluster them.

 

[Kinetix]

What kirennia says makes sence. I'm pretty sure there is a frightening amount of complicating factors that we don't think or know about, but still. However, if clustering would mean a language change, GOA doesn't have the licence for it (iirc Gahn posted a confirmation of that somewhere) - but:

if GOA'd offer a (single) character transfer service for a char with ml, rr, cl, looks, items equipped and in inventory, maybe those in vault too - for 10 euro, people'd reactivate and use it like mad.

For that price they can hire some student who recreates the chars, no effort for them, one happy student. Only problem is it would be a french one :F.

Daoc most likely has at least a year left of life in it, maybe even two, fuck knows, but as it is now both german clusters are still healthy and there is always the option to cluster them.

I have to agree with VF. Maybe we arnt seeing the hole picture on clustering but one thing i can tell for sure, the creation of characters with items and mls is quite possible since during the prydwen crash i lost some chars wich were restored and re-equiped. Ofc this service takes time but like VF explained if GOA would follow the path that blizzard made not long ago allowing char transfer/creation for a acceptable fee sounds pretty reasonable

I really would like an answer from GOA actually more on why isnt char copy (creation in new server/delete on previous server) isnt possible tbh.

 

[Manisch Depressiv]

Good suggestions as always, but I fear that GOA will do fuck all, their and Mythic's ignorance on this matter and their view on long-term customer relationships is cutting edge, the only field they're industry leaders on.

 

[GReaper]

Stuff

Big copy/paste!

EA are useless with MMORPG's, this is probably why Mythic is trying to take as much control as possible instead of just being assimilated into EA. I'm not saying that Mythic is perfect, but they've got a clue on how to run a subscription based game.

In general, you do not create a sequel to an MMORPG. Yes you'll get some new subscribers, however old subscribers are likely to switch leaving the old MMO with fewer players. EA trying to turn every game into a sequel is typical of them.

I wouldn't judge Warhammer Online based on EA's history though, judge it on Mythic's history.

 

[Manisch Depressiv]

I wouldn't judge Warhammer Online based on EA's history though, judge it on Mythic's history.

What's Mythic's history? A lucky shot with DAoC and then one more lucky shot getting hands on Warhammer IP after someone else couldn't deliver Warhammer Online followed by not being able to deliver too so EA got hands on them?

Mythic doesn't exist, it's EA and an EA title. How many employeers who invented the "good" DAoC are still with Mythic?

 

[Elkie]

Hm well if they clustered I know I would return. Septina will be uber happys then. Have not got my hopes up though.

 

[Mirt]

Speaking as pretty expirenced coder (10 years, christ were did the time go?) I can state there are no fundamental technical reasons to make further clustering impossible. Mind you I doubt it's easy or cost effective for them to do (or they'd have done it long ago).

I can only speculate that DAoC's character database was never designed to allow character migration, and some aspect of it's design makes this task unduly difficult. Perhaps GoA's localization somehow makes matters worse too.

It would be nice to have a reason to play my old excal chars again, however I fear it'll be far too late by the time this arrives (if it does).

WTB GuildWars 2 beta!

 

[Gahn]

This whole Mythic licence issue is altho laughable, if they HAVE to keep an english speaking server up, buy a new one, put some ghosts in it and recreate Dyvet situation. Then cluster NF Eu zones in 2 clusters and be it tbh.
That way they save the contract and regain player base.

 

[Kinetix]

This whole Mythic licence issue is altho laughable, if they HAVE to keep an english speaking server up, buy a new one, put some ghosts in it and recreate Dyvet situation. Then cluster NF Eu zones in 2 clusters and be it tbh.
That way they save the contract and regain player base.

Tbh i dont really think GOA has that much money income from Daoc to be willing to spend it on improving tbh. 7000 player base (EU) income over a month aint that much tbh, at least considering the expenses they could have, workers, servers, parts, networks, licenses, external contracts.
Dont really know how hard theyr DB is to change but im sure there are some Daoc players that know about it and like Manisch said they would be willing to do it if they would pay the trip plus some pizzas

 

[Gahn]

Tbh i dont really think GOA has that much money income from Daoc to be willing to spend it on improving tbh. 7000 player base (EU) income over a month aint that much tbh, at least considering the expenses they could have, workers, servers, parts, networks, licenses, external contracts.
Dont really know how hard theyr DB is to change but im sure there are some Daoc players that know about it and like Manisch said they would be willing to do it if they would pay the trip plus some pizzas

Might as well shut down the lot if they don't see that investing 10k Euros in a cluster, just for the sake of having a "English Speaking" Server up and running, and cluster NF zones of Dyvet with German Clusters would give em a long term subscription income. If they have any sort of Business Vision (which i highly doubt of course judging from the past) that's it.
That said if they could just cluster the NF zones (as it's hinted) the problem is solved itselves cause there would be an English Speaking cluster -.-
If after all this mess they do cluster with Italian and Spanish servers altho, i bet that some1 must be really stupid or have a really bad grudge against Uk speaking Player Base.
Oh and 7k eu playerbase every month it's 90k euros incoming. If the whole operation makes that number increase to 8k (it's a pessimistic gamble btw cause Uk cluster had 3k playerbase at its maximum) it's a 13k more incoming every month, ie the roi is spanned over a single month. It's a win win situation over a losing one, can't see why they shouldn't try it at this point.

 

[Frozensolid]

Doubt i'll be able to resist the temptation of reactivating the valy if a part of the old community (friends) gets back into the rvrgame

 

[partyanimal]

it quite simple...
goa, lets say, its a restaurant...
some ppl have been eating there hot dogs for years n they liked them.
one day they ask for bratwurst...
goa says it not on the menu, if u want bratwurst, plz visit our 1st floor. there is free beer too.
some ppl eager to taste these bratwurst, run upstairs.
others insist on sittin on their ass n waitin for the bratwurst to walk all the way to their feet.