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

[Kinerd]

What if we dont want your server population coming to ours? What if the culture on your server is what caused it to be a ghost town. How do we know your servers people wont do that to ours? Fears come in many forms.

if it did then some servers would still be thriving

since no servers are, it is not a plausible explanation

[lyrecono]

I have the same kind of lag most people have, server lag, and no, its not all the time, but seems to be more prevalent at hours where there are more people online. Also, theres the problem of porting lag, or even the game hanging or becoming non responsive when attempting to port to a different location. And of course, theres bank lag, where you try to move stuff around in the bank and it takes forever.This is why they restart the servers at least once a week, so it must be a server problem. Its kind of ridiculous to be able to play the game, getting over 200 fps and not being able to move. I have a 3 month old gaming comp, albeit a lower end machine with a decent graphics card and the rig is definately op for an older game like this, for a newer game, it might not be so great. And i still say, no matter what Chai says, the more players on a server, the more lag there will be. This is proven by the fact that during busier times of the day, the lag problem starts popping up, where early in the morming, my time (est), there is rarely any problems. This has been going on for years now, and apparently there's no way for the devs to resolve it, unless its a matter of better equipment which they probably cant afford.

"People lag" is due to 1 or more having a ****** connection or pc, the server just makes all of you wait for the slowest in the map or group to catch up. Finding the culprit and exlude him/her from grouping and quests and raids should be fine.

Teleport lag is due to your pc loading a new map, if there isn't enough room in your ram or your hd loads it up too slow, it creates lag, especialy with big maps like kings forrest and the sands.
Remember, due to ddo's old and archeic 32 bit architecture, you can have only a limited amount of ram for ddo, regardles of it's actual size. For a time i used a homebrew aplication that was able to force ddo to use more memory, worked just fine.

200 fps is a.meaningless number when it comes to lag, a pc with 1 gig of ram and dail in connection but a 2080 gtx card will likely preform much worse then your rig despitethe grafix card being more powerful.
And to be fair, ddo barely supports 1080p, a graphics card that can handle ddo well at that resolution shouldn't cost that much money these days.
Take it from someone that used to play this game with 3x 4k monitors, ddo's support for those kinds of resolutions is non existent.

@devs
On the other hand... Doom 2016 (and the hopefully the upcomming doom eternal), looks amazing on that resolution.
Plays a lot more ballanced too.....
Now that is my idea of a first person shooter devs, so stop trying to compete and make ddo playeble for all playstyles through all dificulties.

#melee
#2hf
#stealth
#server mergers

[Fenrisulven7]

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

[Tist]

so what I'm hearing here is that Guilds are no harder to transfer during a server merge than toons?

At the end of the day, all characters, guilds, bank contents, player arranged objects, player shared banks, everything, come down to being an entry in a database.
These things can be copied very easily.

At some point in the past, they had staff with the database skills, scripting skills and knowledge of what was stored where, and what might need to be changed during a server move, and they wrote character transfer scripts. They didn't write guild transfer scripts. So, to move a guild in the same fashion as the character server transfer, they would need to task someone to write a script to move some values from one database to another. That person would need scripting skills, database skills, and system knowledge of what values were unique to a server and needed to be altered as the move happened. Any script needs to take into account various issues like name clashes, missing people at the destination server and so on.

There hasn't been any sign that they have this in mind. This is why players suggest alternate methods, such as methods to "reclaim" guild resources into DDO items that would auto copy with a character holding them. EG, give me a guild renown token and a guild create token, and a token for each airship I have, and for each airship room I have, and disband the guild. When I copy across to new server, I use the items and have something similar to my original guild, but created fresh and new. There are still potential issues with this - if a player paid for the airship but is no longer playing, does the airship token go to them? And so you can't re-create it easily on the new server. However, this method, of "cashing in" all your guild things to tokens, and using them on the destination server, doesn't require deep knowledge of the database, or the scripting checks and fallbacks. It could be implemented by staff with a lot less overall knowledge, using existing code - give item to create guild (already exists). give item to have ship (already exists), give guild renown of X value (already exists, but would be sensible to create much higher value tokens - not hard, copy existing item and increase value). This leaves players to sort out the "problems" like destination server has a guild with same name.

[Fenrisulven7]

staff with the database skills, scripting skills and knowledge of what was stored where, and what might need to be changed during a server move, and they wrote character transfer scripts. They didn't write guild transfer scripts*. So, to move a guild in the same fashion as the character server transfer, they would need to task someone to write a script to move some values from one database to another. That person would need scripting skills, database skills, and system knowledge of what values were unique to a server and needed to be altered as the move happened.

Ah. That's the information I was looking for. Thank you.


*emphasis added

[concavenator]

mergemergemergemerge

[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.

[myliftkk_v2]

"People lag" is due to 1 or more having a ****** connection or pc, the server just makes all of you wait for the slowest in the map or group to catch up. Finding the culprit and exlude him/her from grouping and quests and raids should be fine.

This is not at all how client-server processing works. The server does not "wait" on any client.

All clients "wait" on the server.

[myliftkk_v2]

At the end of the day, all characters, guilds, bank contents, player arranged objects, player shared banks, everything, come down to being an entry in a database.
These things can be copied very easily.

Copying isn't relevant to the problem of moving data.

It's conflicts around identity and unique columns that have baked in attributes at the data definition language level. Depending on how the tables themselves were constructed, can impose serious difficulties on adding data without resolution of potential conflicts in keys and foreign keys spread throughout the data to be moved. The chaining effect only getting worse when you expand beyond a single account to multiple accounts. Then you add in guilds which have data relationships to accounts, and any whether those accounts are also coming.

It's like pulling on a single strand of spaghetti and next thing you know the whole mess is in your lap.

[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.

[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!

[Chai]

Copying isn't relevant to the problem of moving data.

It's conflicts around identity and unique columns that have baked in attributes at the data definition language level. Depending on how the tables themselves were constructed, can impose serious difficulties on adding data without resolution of potential conflicts in keys and foreign keys spread throughout the data to be moved. The chaining effect only getting worse when you expand beyond a single account to multiple accounts. Then you add in guilds which have data relationships to accounts, and any whether those accounts are also coming.

It's like pulling on a single strand of spaghetti and next thing you know the whole mess is in your lap.

Combine that with not having prioritized the thought that there might need to be a server merge down the road when constructing the tables, then when adding microtrans to the game later on.

They did say they were going to revisit the topic 5 years ago however. Would be nice to hear what the progress on that is, what issues they have addressed, which can be addressed, and which barriers still exist. These issues are not un-solve-able. We know they take time. 5 years has passed. /shrug

[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]

Combine that with not having prioritized the thought that there might need to be a server merge down the road when constructing the tables, then when adding microtrans to the game later on.

They did say they were going to revisit the topic 5 years ago however. Would be nice to hear what the progress on that is, what issues they have addressed, which can be addressed, and which barriers still exist. These issues are not un-solve-able. We know they take time. 5 years has passed. /shrug

Exactly. One either designs for what we used to call "multi-client" (where the client is the server) at the data level, or one doesn't. Most places don't because it's cheaper not to, and then they inevitably get painted into a corner when data needs to cross into a different domain. The fact that individuals received "erroneous" mail is pretty much proof the problem lies in the identity and foreign key relationships (which of course get worse with every set of tables added) across everywhere those are stored. It gets even worse if at the DB level one is assigning the identity values according to things like sequences because you can't just override that type of behavior without breaking the DB level sequencing (and DB level sequencing is very effective for most usages).

One either designs for merging data or they don't. Most don't. I've experienced it a lot in healthcare because facilities can easily mis/un-identify patient within digital systems especially in scenarios like unconscious emergency room visits with no, or erroneous id present. There's a long history of technical expertise and electronic data interchange standards on how to move medical data around without killing someone accidentally.

My guess is each time they revisit it, it goes back into the "too hard" pile.

[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.

[Fenrisulven7]

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.

Do we want a server merge?

Or do we want a server merge with sprinkles and chocolate icing and a slice of apple pie on the side?

Because I think the more we insist on the latter, the less likely it will happen at all.

[Jerevth]

Do we want a server merge?

Or do we want a server merge with sprinkles and chocolate icing and a slice of apple pie on the side?

Because I think the more we insist on the latter, the less likely it will happen at all.

I think we can certainly ask for everything.
They can determine what can and cannot be done and list it as such.
I also think incremental transfers, early, would help identify any issues when comes the M-Day, if they decide to move ahead.

We do know that free transfers are possible, just not how many can be supported per account.
We don't know about guilds or their assets. (Apple pie)
We don't know what the limits (number-wise and character based purchases) are. (Icing)
We know, with transfers, that mail will go away. (Sprinkles)

There are two possible methods- transfer vs merger. I think a new server to transfer to from the old servers might be best; it provides the potential to clear up old names that haven't seen the light in years (abandoned accounts).
Should the owner of said account come back they can transfer via the launcher if the server is offline (maintain the old servers database to transfer toons but logging in is impossible). Reduced resource requirements.After a certain time frame *delete*.

[myliftkk_v2]

Do we want a server merge?

Or do we want a server merge with sprinkles and chocolate icing and a slice of apple pie on the side?

Because I think the more we insist on the latter, the less likely it will happen at all.

I don't think increasing shared bank space is icing.

If players keep the mules, SSG merges the mules. The more toons you merge, the more intertwined conflicts you have to resolve.

If you expand what is already probably infinitely expandable (shared bank - which has grown tremendously since I started playing), then almost all need for "mules" goes away, including moving them. Increasing the shared bank could decrease the overall merge workload at a toon level by a factor of ~40-80% (since mules are not 1:1 with played characters).

[Tist]

It's conflicts around identity and unique columns that have baked in attributes at the data definition language level

My next sentence addressed that. Your whole reply post feels like you just talked about the exact same things I talked about, adding nothing except "it might be badly designed" which frankly is already assumed.

I was replying to, and quoted :

so what I'm hearing here is that Guilds are no harder to transfer during a server merge than toons?

And that is totally the case. Guilds are less complex than characters, way less data and relationships. The issue is solely that there is no guild copy / move script that rectifies the issues I mention and you go over again for some reason as if I had not mentioned them. What was the point of your post?

Guild transfer scripts are still possible. It just requires development time. Knowledge would make it faster but I already said exactly that in my post. The alternatives, such as refund items are also possible at less time cost (and less expensive developer to do it cost). You aren't suggesting it's just impossible are you?

For the sake of the schwing, I also worked (and developed) in healthcare, and international banking, insurance, internet hosting, education, online sales based companies, and I've done work on both server and client mmorpgs and emulators. If you want to see messed up embedded identity keys and so on, look at the Everquest client which has that stuff badly built into the wire protocols and memory structures for it let alone the back end data storage which was basically data dumps.

Don't try and make out like it's black magic. It's not. Transferring a guild is easier than transferring a toon, only the toon transfer script is written and the guild one seems not to be.


Full merging of an entire server's toons, guilds, etc, is obviously more involved than a single toon transfer or a single guild transfer. It's still possible, but I think I would choose (as has been suggested) people to be given guild refunds and free transfers to a designated server, maybe a "new" server with 2 or 3 old servers transferring to it. As I mentioned before this pushes lots of the error checking burden onto the players before they even move. Empty mail, empty shared bank, refund guild. Name clashes resolved by existing transfer system. First come first served, others given name change tokens and appended x or whatever. You sort out which mules and alts from which of your play servers you really want or care enough about, and you buy more slots if you want to have more on the same server, or you dump them when you don't.
Everyone has to move - in a month the original servers will be locked - ideally just like the recent permadeath server, where people can come log in to them only for the purpose of sorting out their stuff and triggering their server transfers if they are after the fact. Leave the resulting one instance historic servers up forever so any returners can do this process at any future point. Reclaim all the "original" server hardware or virtual-ware, and re-allocate it to the new server.

A plan based on technology they have in place or can easily achieve, rather than dealing with the more time- and knowledge- consuming automated server merge.