General Reminder: Your servers are dying. You need to merge, and foster community.

[Riddle_of_Steel]

These can be converted into an in-game item in your inventory

Care the explain that part?

Are you converting a guild into an item? If you are who gets the item? What happens to the other guild members when it's an item? As an example I run a guild of about 8-10 players, but I didn't put most of the shards in for the amenities and ship, at most I put in 25% of that, and that is not insignificant by the way but still not most of them. How does that get divided up appropriately?

If you are just talking about converting Astral Shards to an inventory item that is a bad idea. Astral diamonds did that and they were getting duped. It's patched for sure but making Astral Shards anything more than a number in a record is a bad idea and makes it ripe for exploitation again.

I think that there are simply too many issues with doing character transfers to clean up servers and the ONLY way to do this would be to do a server merge. Prior to the merge they would need to embark on a campaign to consolidate inactive names. What I mean by that is flag any account that hasn't been logged in say in 2 years, hell make it 3 and archive them. Players can still select that toon later post-merge but would need to rename it first.

Guilds are a trickier beast for sure but something that would need to come over. A lot of the reason I have kept playing is to keep my guild level from slipping. Take away the accomplishment and force me into a new guild of some sort and frankly I am done. That would easily be the straw that broke the camels back, with the exception being that the straw is actually a steel I beam.

Moving the data is relatively easy, and in some cases perhaps even trivial but managing the process and by extension players expectations is a far more complicated matter entirely. Sure you can copy a record from database A to B but the number of things that can be broken by a simple update statement never mind an add is terrifyingly immense. DDO has acknowledged issues with code and data so the potential for catastrophic failure has to be assumed as moderate at a minimum.

Moving data is easy is like saying playing Jenga is easy. The concept / rules are simple the implementation is entirely a different matter and at some point the more complex that "easy" action becomes the closer the whole **** things comes to toppling.