What is the obstacle for transferring Guilds in a server merge?

[Fenrisulven7]

I'm just curious, what is the obstacle that prevents Guilds from being transferred to a server merge? (aside from double names)

If you need someone to take notes on current guild levels, confirm them, and then recreate them with their ship & level on a new server, I'll do it for free. (players would have to redo their amenities)

So what am I missing here? Is it a manpower issue or is there something trickier in play here?

[shores11]

I'm just curious, what is the obstacle that prevents Guilds from being transferred to a server merge? (aside from double names)

If you need someone to take notes on current guild levels, confirm them, and then recreate them with their ship & level on a new server, I'll do it for free. (players would have to redo their amenities)

So what am I missing here? Is it a manpower issue or is there something trickier in play here?

This is an irrelevant topic as server merging will not occur and is not needed. If you as an individual player do not like the server your playing on transfer to another of your choice.

[Gniewomir]

and is not needed.

This is irrelevant reply, cause big part of community wants server merge, and for example in my opinion merge is really needed. Also not easy to choose other server when all of them are equally empty.

[shores11]

This is irrelevant reply, cause big part of community wants server merge, and for example in my opinion merge is really needed. Also not easy to choose other server when all of them are equally empty.

I hope the comments made on the forum do not reflect your internal self-poll that a 'big part of the community wants a server merge'. For me I can only speak to the 30 plus players I play with daily in Team Speak on Khyber. Myself and 2 or 3 others that actually visit the forum relay topics discussed from the forums at times. Regarding a server merge I can say that 100% of those DDO players do not think a server merge is merited.

[Chai]

From our experiences on the HC server, Id say the community would benefit from a merge.

We encountered more than a few people who were playing over there because of the number of LFMs up for lower level content, and the willingness to cooperate to complete content.

I also point to the myriad of server merge threads over the past few years as evidence. We can also aggregate the number of people still posting from those older threads as less than 50% in common with handles posting in newer threads for the same topic. It is highly likely that folks who used to post but no longer do, also used to play but no longer do.

If a big part of the community no longer wants a server merge, this is due to most of those who asked for this 1-5 years ago attriting, so congratulations, a big part of the community no longer wants a server merge. Not the way a business wants to solve that issue I'm thinking.

And btw, 5 years ago was when Sev made his comment that theyd revisit the topic, not when people first started asking for merges. Those threads popped up regularly years before he made that comment.

Whats the progress on this "revisiting the topic?" Which issues are resolved that were not in that era? Which still need to be resolved?

[Clemeit]

This is an irrelevant topic as server merging will not occur and is not needed.

Unless you have a magic crystal ball that told you that, your reply is as irrelevant as you believe this thread to be. That's your opinion, and it's not the opinion of the community as a whole. If you can't answer the question asked by the OP, it's perfectly acceptable to just move on. The rest of the community will continue discussing server merges - something that has been brought up many times by many different players lately.

Regarding a server merge I can say that 100% of those DDO players do not think a server merge is merited.

Regarding a server merge I can say that 100% of [the players I play with regularly] think a server merge is merited. See how ridiculous that statement is? Your minimal personal experience is admirable, but it's not that important.

Go back and read the other replies to this thread and the many that have been brought up in the past. There is support for server merges. You just have to reach beyond the echo chamber.

[Zaglor]

Unless you have a magic crystal ball that told you that, your reply is as irrelevant as you believe this thread to be. That's your opinion, and it's not the opinion of the community as a whole. If you can't answer the question asked by the OP, it's perfectly acceptable to just move on. The rest of the community will continue discussing server merges - something that has been brought up many times by many different players lately.



Regarding a server merge I can say that 100% of [the players I play with regularly] think a server merge is merited. See how ridiculous that statement is? Your minimal personal experience is admirable, but it's not that important.

Go back and read the other replies to this thread and the many that have been brought up in the past. There is support for server merges. You just have to reach beyond the echo chamber.

tElL hIm hE dOeSnT sPeAk 4 Teh Kommunitiy *Insert Stupid Spongebob Meme Here*

[MistaMagic]

For me I can only speak to the 30 plus players I play with daily in Team Speak on Khyber.

Probably why I have no idea who you are as you are running in a closed group, but then again WHY would you be against a server merge when it will not influence you at all?. Personaly I do not care one way or the other

[Gniewomir]

I hope the comments made on the forum do not reflect your internal self-poll that a 'big part of the community wants a server merge'. For me I can only speak to the 30 plus players I play with daily in Team Speak on Khyber. Myself and 2 or 3 others that actually visit the forum relay topics discussed from the forums at times. Regarding a server merge I can say that 100% of those DDO players do not think a server merge is merited.

Well, at least i'm not omniscient enough to claim i prefectly know what is needed and what is not despite what others might think and instead of it i highlighted that im sharing facts and my own opinion.

Oh, if that's what your TS boyband says then it must be truth for everyone here. I can only speak for my 15 in game friends (guild and other, friend-guild) as well as around 30 who already left + maybe 50 random people i met in game in last 3 weeks who i talked with about population, all of them wanted server merge. Also there's at least few threads in last days with posts from people who would like to see merge. Examples? Sure: Changes The Community Would Like To See, LAG and Server POPULATION a rational view, Concurrent Population and LFM Trends for the Month of December 2019, Want to double population?, With an average player concurrency of 1800-3000, what choices do you make? And few other. I would give you links, but i'm sure you're aware of their existence since you're so good in judging what is needed and what is not (you should know what everyone here thinks to know that). I won't even mention the fact that there're new merge threads literally almost every month for last few years. Seems like everyone don't want merge, just like you and your static group/fanclub.

It's pretty easy to be blind to everything that do not agree with your own point of view, isn't it? I'm glad you're visiting forums, but if you're doing it only to tell everyone what is needed and what is not instead of trying to make any attempts of joining conversation/listening to other people, then i'll be even more glad if you'll be visiting them less.

EDIT:

Probably why I have no idea who you are as you are running in a closed group, but then again WHY would you be against a server merge when it will not influence you at all?. Personaly I do not care one way or the other

And probably thats why he have no idea about the condition of pugging and grouping outside his channel.

[concavenator]

and is not needed.

says who? u? tell that to all the ppl who left cus there weren't enough ppl to play with

[Fenrisulven7]

This is an irrelevant topic as server merging will not occur and is not needed.

LOL. This guy thinks he's in charge of the forums or something...

If you as an individual player do not like the server your playing on transfer to another of your choice.

...although he certainly told that Strawman a thing or two! Poor Strawman.

I'm going to pretend that was meant as parody.



But back to my question - so what I'm hearing here is that Guilds are no harder to transfer during a server merge than toons? Has SSG transferred Guilds (at current levels) in the past?

I was just curious if there was any special problem that would make everyone have to restart their Guild over from scratch.

I take it SSG does not allow you to transfer an established guild to a new server on your own, but that if SSG did a server merge then Guilds would be transferred at their current level?

Thanks
Fen

[Clemeit]

Proposal 1: The guild leader gets a Token of Guild Renown equal to the total amount of renown the guild currently has, and an Official Guild Charter certificate. The guild is disbanded upon transfer. The guild leader can reform the guild under the same name (if available) or a new name, and use the token of renown on the new guild.

If the guild leader is inactive, that token goes to the next in line. If the next in line is inactive, it goes to the most recently active officer. If there are no active officers, your guild is probably dead. Sorry.

Proposal 2: The guild and all of its members are transferred together and fully intact. If the guild name conflicts with one on the new server, the guild leader is given a renaming token.

[lyrecono]

This is an irrelevant topic as server merging will not occur and is not needed. If you as an individual player do not like the server your playing on transfer to another of your choice.

This is irrelevant reply, cause big part of community wants server merge, and for example in my opinion merge is really needed. Also not easy to choose other server when all of them are equally empty.

Some servers have a severe lack of players in certain hours.

To qoute what SEV stated at the end of 2015


"We plan on revisiting the idea of server merges after we've moved to the new datacenter which is slated for in sometime in the new year.We want to make sure we have lag under control before we concentrate the players. We recently made some fairly large changes to help combat lag, particularly in the Stormhorns and other places where monsters can use persistent AoE effects. We haven't heard any feedback that lag is reduced, but the nature of that beast is that we only hear about it when lag is bad.There are some obstacles to overcome, like making sure shared storage and guild move over and players have good tools to deal with name collisions for both characters and guilds.Sev~"


DDOWIKI

To repeat if we are going to get a merge it will be when SSG has it all ironed out

I will not go into whether one is needed or not, it would be a pointless exercise in rumination over things beyond our control

That explains their lackluster attempts to fix the lag XD
Then again, i have painfully learned that claims made by certain turbine/ ssg members should be treated lightly....

I hope the comments made on the forum do not reflect your internal self-poll that a 'big part of the community wants a server merge'. For me I can only speak to the 30 plus players I play with daily in Team Speak on Khyber. Myself and 2 or 3 others that actually visit the forum relay topics discussed from the forums at times. Regarding a server merge I can say that 100% of those DDO players do not think a server merge is merited.

says who? u? tell that to all the ppl who left cus there weren't enough ppl to play with

Claiming you have an amazing population during your playtine on your server is like sending pictures of you wasting waters by the gallons to some drought cursed village on the edge of some dessert. It helps no-one.

IMHO , if we have lag now on seperate servers, I would not want to find out what would happen if all servers were merged into one. Lag would be have to be reduced to near zero before a server merge would be a good idea.

Not possible as long as people:
1) continue to play on potatoes, i'm sometimes amazed to hear what kind of 15 year old pc and laptops some of you use with the lowest possible settins and on screens a modern tablet would laugh at, some of you even try playing it on a mac......

2) people don't play on a decent connection, actually, some of the playerbase plays from truck, mobile homes,drilling platforms, cabins in the woods and untill he went dark, in the Australian outback, something to do with seeing a lot of smoke and and an orrange glow comming his way, least thats the last i heard from him on discord. (If you're reading this on your phone mate, drop a message to let us know you're fine)

3) the devs may use a sub par hosting service maybe?

4) we're dealing with an outdated architecture 64 bits might help some of the memory drain, roughly 2gig vs 64 gig would atleast postpone the memory leak and subsequent issues.

5) a list of issues we're not even previewed to, ranging from internal politics at ssg, financial decissions that might be out of the hands of the devs and technical limitations due to the old code not fully being understood by all the devs.

[Brutuscass]

Some servers have a severe lack of players in certain hours.


That explains their lackluster attempts to fix the lag XD
Then again, i have painfully learned that claims made by certain turbine/ ssg members should be treated lightly.....

Very nicely put and interesting points all of them

I do hope all turns out well for your friend in the outback, I can only barely imagine their plight. here we are worrying about a game, I hope they get those fires under control soon.

[sirgog]

This is an irrelevant topic as server merging will not occur and is not needed. If you as an individual player do not like the server your playing on transfer to another of your choice.

I for one check every couple of months.

Has there been a server merge? No? OK, still not interested in playing. SSG doesn't get a cent.

The community is dead outside American peak hours. There are enough players to make this feel like a multiplayer game again, but they are scattered across multiple servers.

I'd buy Sharn in a heartbeat if a merge happens, because the game would be worth playing again.

[Sho-sa]

I for one check every couple of months.

Has there been a server merge? No? OK, still not interested in playing. SSG doesn't get a cent.

The community is dead outside American peak hours. There are enough players to make this feel like a multiplayer game again, but they are scattered across multiple servers.

I'd buy Sharn in a heartbeat if a merge happens, because the game would be worth playing again.

Good to see you again.

Listen to Sirgog, he is wise.

[SirValentine]

This is an irrelevant topic as server merging will not occur

And yet server merging has occurred in the past in DDO. There's no reason they couldn't do it again.

Do you know something we don't? Would the the devs rather pull the plug on 7 dead servers instead of have 1 server with a healthy population for a long time to come?

In a game where our quests/raids/wilderness, and even potentially our public areas, are all instanced, there's no need for separate so-called "servers" anyway.

and is not needed.

That's your opinion. Not everyone agrees.

[Grimtooth333]

And yet server merging has occurred in the past in DDO. There's no reason they couldn't do it again.

There can very well be many reasons that it might be problematic today. Merging servers was no small thing back then, for a seemingly larger team when the game had far less systems, today that would be even more things/issues to add to the list for a merge to happen, with a seemingly smaller team.

As someone here when that happened the process was not quite a flawless one, with extensive downtime's, and some inconveniences. However there have been many additional things added to the game since then, guild-ships, shared storage, ASAH, character slots, etc.

For example, I ended up receiving someone else's mails with items the last time, the items were not bound because then most non-raid loot items weren't, so I was able to track down the owner and give them to them normally. With the ASAH and possible bound items in the mail it would be a different story today, not one easily solved between players on their own. Can warnings be issued by the Devs? Sure, but there are always those that might not read it or be able to log on and do something about it in time.

Then you also could have the FTP people whining about losing the first time bonus favor DP on the different servers if you condense to one or two, that is another wrinkle that might have to be addressed as well today with a merge. The list of possible concerns for various players can go on, and on.

Now personally I don't care if they merged servers, but I do remember it was not all 'rainbows and unicorns' the last time. With a larger Dev team and less in-game systems.

For those of us who were here last time and may remember this... RIP Xoriat!

[Jerevth]

I started off on the "No Merger" side but my guild has shrunk to around twelve actives, a few partially active (Once a week for gold-rolls) and a long list of friends who've drifted away.

-Condensing the servers into one would very likely reduce lag because it isn't a resource 50/50 split to run two servers. There is a moderate efficiency loss to run separate servers. i.e. Multitasking requires more computing power. (At least with the systems I'm familiar with). Because I am not familiar with the hardware SSG is using now I could be mistaken.*

-A single server would afford new potential gameplay opportunities; server-wide events?

-When the community reaches a certain point I surmise that the loss of players will actually accelerate.

Given the cost to transfer one character- 2495 DDO points- and many of us have upwards of 8 mules, well established (Amenity-wise) guilds, and all the pitas a transfer would impose (Name's taken, clearing the TR cache, friends lists lost) folks may just decide to start fresh, with a more populous game. https://www.ddo.com/en/world-character-transfer-guide

DDO is facing a point where they need to condense the player base or watch the players evaporate. With years invested farming gear, training skills, gathering lives, tomes and so forth, just starting fresh is not an option for many. It would be best for SSG to begin orchestrating voluntary transfers to a single server building on lessons learned to make it more efficient- guild ships mirrored, toon stables transferred, under a controlled process- rather than losing more players.

There would need to be limitations, too. Minimum guild sizes and only those with multi player activity (Not mule guilds- I have one, I'll say good-bye to it.) 20+ toons on each server are not going to all be brought into one server. We all have our mains, our test toons, our name holders and our mules. Some are going to have to go to the bit bucket. Let's face it; being able to bring our primaries and some of our mules onto one server would be much better than starting from scratch in a completely new game. We'd still be somewhat in our comfort zone.

Or...

Faced with a game that is essentially a ghost town and having to start completely fresh (or pay much to transfer all our hard won bits and abandon some significant investments- guild, friends, etc- we may just decide to find a new, more alive game. Not a threat- so long as I have time I will play DDO into its dying days. But I think a decision soon that provides a developed and incremental transfer for free- or at least at a significantly reduced cost- to make it as small a pain in the butt as possible would extend the games life.

SSG plans to stay alive for a while- ongoing development, balance, and they're looking at the screen size increase issue (Bigger screen, smaller GUI) and reducing lag. This is a discussion they need to have.

The OP has a valid concern, the conversation needs to be had. Hearsay doesn't have a place in the discussion- "I know thirty people who don't want it," doesn't fly. If you know six people who agree with your thinking- real people not six accounts with three posts to their name- ask them to join in.

I'll just speak for myself- my mind changed already since the last discussion. I'm for a merger, at this point. The HC server showed what a huge population was like and I really enjoyed it despite my soloer ways.

*I've been careful to temper my own input on the technical aspects as limited to my own understanding. Some of you may be able to correct me if I'm wrong in this instance.

[myliftkk_v2]

I started off on the "No Merger" side but my guild has shrunk to around twelve actives, a few partially active (Once a week for gold-rolls) and a long list of friends who've drifted away.

-Condensing the servers into one would very likely reduce lag because it isn't a resource 50/50 split to run two servers. There is a moderate efficiency loss to run separate servers. i.e. Multitasking requires more computing power. (At least with the systems I'm familiar with). Because I am not familiar with the hardware SSG is using now I could be mistaken.*

-A single server would afford new potential gameplay opportunities; server-wide events?

-When the community reaches a certain point I surmise that the loss of players will actually accelerate.

Given the cost to transfer one character- 2495 DDO points- and many of us have upwards of 8 mules, well established (Amenity-wise) guilds, and all the pitas a transfer would impose (Name's taken, clearing the TR cache, friends lists lost) folks may just decide to start fresh, with a more populous game. https://www.ddo.com/en/world-character-transfer-guide

DDO is facing a point where they need to condense the player base or watch the players evaporate. With years invested farming gear, training skills, gathering lives, tomes and so forth, just starting fresh is not an option for many. It would be best for SSG to begin orchestrating voluntary transfers to a single server building on lessons learned to make it more efficient- guild ships mirrored, toon stables transferred, under a controlled process- rather than losing more players.

There would need to be limitations, too. Minimum guild sizes and only those with multi player activity (Not mule guilds- I have one, I'll say good-bye to it.) 20+ toons on each server are not going to all be brought into one server. We all have our mains, our test toons, our name holders and our mules. Some are going to have to go to the bit bucket. Let's face it; being able to bring our primaries and some of our mules onto one server would be much better than starting from scratch in a completely new game. We'd still be somewhat in our comfort zone.

Or...

Faced with a game that is essentially a ghost town and having to start completely fresh (or pay much to transfer all our hard won bits and abandon some significant investments- guild, friends, etc- we may just decide to find a new, more alive game. Not a threat- so long as I have time I will play DDO into its dying days. But I think a decision soon that provides a developed and incremental transfer for free- or at least at a significantly reduced cost- to make it as small a pain in the butt as possible would extend the games life.

SSG plans to stay alive for a while- ongoing development, balance, and they're looking at the screen size increase issue (Bigger screen, smaller GUI) and reducing lag. This is a discussion they need to have.

The OP has a valid concern, the conversation needs to be had. Hearsay doesn't have a place in the discussion- "I know thirty people who don't want it," doesn't fly. If you know six people who agree with your thinking- real people not six accounts with three posts to their name- ask them to join in.

I'll just speak for myself- my mind changed already since the last discussion. I'm for a merger, at this point. The HC server showed what a huge population was like and I really enjoyed it despite my soloer ways.

*I've been careful to temper my own input on the technical aspects as limited to my own understanding. Some of you may be able to correct me if I'm wrong in this instance.

There's 2 problems with dumping mules (which nominally I'm in favor of). One is things a player has bought for said mule (usually more storage space). This could be offset by giving a player the refund in points, or by giving equivalent storage elsewhere (like shared bank).

The other problem is character bound stuff we've received over the years on old Mules (though most is obsolete).

I'd be in favor of dumping my mules if SSG traded me for shared bank storage to replace what I bought on the mules (I think I have maybe ~15-20 mules), and offered a generous bump in storage during a merge beyond that to account for the ~100 spaces free you lose on each mule. If SSG straightened out the shared bank with additional tabbing and sort capabilities, the whole mule concept could be dropped altogether.