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

[Chai]

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



Just grant people more slots. There is an imaginary shortage of character slots.



All the things you just listed are moving data, only. No one disagrees that there is labour involved and I think Drawingguy stated that labor succinctly.

They also cause the company to lose money. This is the logistics issue having a cash > game currency > microtrans situation creates. Its not just a matter of moving data, but understanding that when solving the issue with "just grant the players X" you no longer get the potential ability to sell players X later on, as you gave it to them for free to solve another issue.

Also, most players typically have no idea how long alot of this stuff takes, or what the labor cost is. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a dev laugh after reading a post by an obvious non dev of how something is "just a minor change" or talk about how solving an issue is easy in non dev terms, I could retire on some random bought and completely paid for island in the Pacific.

Most of the stuff that could have a hilarious mess made of it during a merge havent even been spoken of on the forums yet.

Keep in mind Im not saying they shouldnt ever merge for these reasons, Im just saying all this dismissal of concerns based on non dev proclamations of how easy it would be arent really valid.

[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.

[Niminae]

Its more than just moving data around at this point. The store and AS have presented some account/server logistics issues, such as:

Guild ships - people paid AS for these, dont follow character in transfer (and if they did who would they follow, the leader or the person who paid)
Astral shards - is a per server amount.
Character slot maximums (hilarity is bound to ensue with this one as well, you mean I cant play X# of characters post merge until I buy enough slots?)
People who already paid for transfer off a server, getting merged back onto the same server.

Im all for having one populated server, but there are more logistics issues than simply moving data.

No, everything you mention is all just moving data. Data migration can be tricky, it is true. And the specific issues you raise are things which need to be handled in some specific way, but it's still just moving data. As long as SSG clearly communicates what is being moved and how they will minimize the player impact.

Not that things would have to be done this way, but here would be my implementation for the specific issues you raised:

- Guild ships - The guild leader is the guild owner. The ship and all amenities remain the property of the guild leader. Others who contributed lose nothing as long as they don't leave the guild. Or phrased differently, they lose exactly the same amount as they would lose if the guild leader disbanded the guild, which is within their power to do at any time regardless of how much anyone else has invested in the airship or amenities.
- Astral shards - Adding the Server A amount to the Server B amount seems like simple arithmetic.
- Character slot maximums - The prior server mergers are before my time. But from my discussions with people who went through prior server merges, in the past character slots were simply added together. If you had 45 characters and slots on Server A and 45 characters and slots on Server B you'd have 90 characters and slots on the merged server. So there was never any loss of character slots or any need to make a purchase before playing your characters.
- No one is being merged onto the same server they left. They might be merged into a server which is the amalgamation of their old server and their new server. I'm not sure I see a problem here. They are not losing anything they had on their new server, they are simply gaining the population of their old server. The same thing would happen if everyone from their old server decided to pay for a transfer to their new server, just as they obviously did.

[zehnvhex]

Unless they implement better grouping and social tools a server merge would do feck all. Think about it, the servers used to have a lot more people playing and yet they hemorrhaged players. Merging servers now wouldn't do much. Maybe a short burst of livelihood but it wouldn't last long.

They need to start removing the road blocks that discourage people from playing the game. Here's a start:

Fixing group finder

[Chai]

No, everything you mention is all just moving data. Data migration can be tricky, it is true. And the specific issues you raise are things which need to be handled in some specific way, but it's still just moving data. As long as SSG clearly communicates what is being moved and how they will minimize the player impact.

This is not the entirety of the situation - and as I outlined - there are logistics issues created by the monetizing model.

Not that things would have to be done this way, but here would be my implementation for the specific issues you raised:

- Guild ships - The guild leader is the guild owner. The ship and all amenities remain the property of the guild leader. Others who contributed lose nothing as long as they don't leave the guild. Or phrased differently, they lose exactly the same amount as they would lose if the guild leader disbanded the guild, which is within their power to do at any time regardless of how much anyone else has invested in the airship or amenities.
- Astral shards - Adding the Server A amount to the Server B amount seems like simple arithmetic.
- Character slot maximums - The prior server mergers are before my time. But from my discussions with people who went through prior server merges, in the past character slots were simply added together. If you had 45 characters and slots on Server A and 45 characters and slots on Server B you'd have 90 characters and slots on the merged server. So there was never any loss of character slots or any need to make a purchase before playing your characters.
- No one is being merged onto the same server they left. They might be merged into a server which is the amalgamation of their old server and their new server. I'm not sure I see a problem here. They are not losing anything they had on their new server, they are simply gaining the population of their old server. The same thing would happen if everyone from their old server decided to pay for a transfer to their new server, just as they obviously did.

If this is how it goes down, please let me know a day or two in advance, so I can inflate my share count on pitchfork and torch stocks beforehand. Both will split twice in the same day.

- Guild ships - The guild leader is the guild owner. The ship and all amenities remain the property of the guild leader. Others who contributed lose nothing as long as they don't leave the guild. Or phrased differently, they lose exactly the same amount as they would lose if the guild leader disbanded the guild, which is within their power to do at any time regardless of how much anyone else has invested in the airship or amenities.

My guild leader purchased full amenities and then was deployed. He transferred leadership so someone else could run the show when he is gone. When he is back he plays. Youre giving all the assets ot the current "leader" - Who wants to take those CS calls?

Then you also have to deal with the number of people who will end up on one server who bought 2 different full on guild boats who would have only bought one if they were going to all be on one server anyhow. Refund requests galore.

- Astral shards - Adding the Server A amount to the Server B amount seems like simple arithmetic.

But theres a reason someone bought them twice - as they were on two separate servers. Would have only bought them once if they were only playing on one server. Refund requests galore.

- Character slot maximums - The prior server mergers are before my time. But from my discussions with people who went through prior server merges, in the past character slots were simply added together. If you had 45 characters and slots on Server A and 45 characters and slots on Server B you'd have 90 characters and slots on the merged server. So there was never any loss of character slots or any need to make a purchase before playing your characters.

Character slots werent purchasable the last time they did server merges, which was 2007, so this was a non issue logistics wise as it didnt cost anyone any money they would not have spent if circumstances were otherwise.

DDO loses that money if they just hand out double max character slots to all.

- No one is being merged onto the same server they left. They might be merged into a server which is the amalgamation of their old server and their new server. I'm not sure I see a problem here. They are not losing anything they had on their new server, they are simply gaining the population of their old server. The same thing would happen if everyone from their old server decided to pay for a transfer to their new server, just as they obviously did.

You dont see an issue with people paying to transfer from server A to server B them server A and B merge? I see refund requests galore.

Whats your CS team going to look like when the refund requests go straight to plaid?

How are TR caches going to be handled? Simple data transfer? They dont have that in place currently. If it was simple I think they would.

How are server unlock -vs- account unlock going to be handled. Is this another logistics issue "easily" solved by giving people stuff for free they would have paid for a week prior? Free all classes all races for all?

Basically summed up as: Any time something is given for free which people had to pay for in the recent past, regardless of circumstances, will cause a tidal wave of refund requests. Heck, all you have to do if you want to keep your CS dpt busy is drop the price on something a few bucks. Everyone who bought it within the last week at the slightly higher price will be jamming up the phone lines.

So basically eat the cost on the labor transferring the data for free, that you wouldnt transfer when it was a paid service, then....
Not give people refunds on "double purchases" when people dont need 2 of every server wide amenity they bought straight cash....
Sounds like a good formula for a 6 month long PR disaster. Makes the offer wall debacle look like a nice quiet Tuesday at the office.

[slarden]

Lotsa armchair developing going on from people that have never seen the code.

I think there would be a lot more people on the servers right now if they didn't introduce the reaper enhancement tree and racial reincarnation. Sometimes doing nothing is the better answer. Sure there would be complainers with threads "Why should I run reaper instead of elite - increase rewards", but the devs could have easily ignored that.

While there is risk of losing people without a server merge there is a risk of losing people with a server merge (disgruntled someone else has their name, loss of guild members, etc.).

They should pick Sarlona and maybe 2 other servers and let people move there for free. Perfect? No, but probably less disruptive and less work than a server merger.

[Sam-u-r-eye]

Lotsa armchair developing going on from people that have never seen the code.

I think there would be a lot more people on the servers right now if they didn't introduce the reaper enhancement tree and racial reincarnation. Sometimes doing nothing is the better answer. Sure there would be complainers with threads "Why should I run reaper instead of elite - increase rewards", but the devs could have easily ignored that.

While there is risk of losing people without a server merge there is a risk of losing people with a server merge (disgruntled someone else has their name, loss of guild members, etc.).

They should pick Sarlona and maybe 2 other servers and let people move there for free. Perfect? No, but probably less disruptive and less work than a server merger.

+1

[Renvar]

A) I would be fine with server merges, in theory. I like playing with a wide variety of people There are a lot of people on the forums that post from other servers and I think "I bet they would be great to run with." But I'm not paying for a server transfer to do that and I'm not interested in starting over on a new server to do that.

B) There are too many customer relations quagmires associated with server merges. The guild stuff is problematic. The TR cache stuff is problematic. The character slots issues are dicey. The naming issues are kinda dicey. Paid transfer issues are problematic. Assuming the can instantly code any way they want with no mistakes, no issues. (Obviously false, but even excluding the technical, the service side is flawed) They still have customer service issues with all of this. (BTW - Problematic = No matter what you do, someone will be ****ed off to no end. Dicey = To resolve this well will require giving away things that you pay for or giving away more than what someone currently has and will still probably **** off a few people, because you can't please everyone).

C) For the above reasons, I doubt SSG invests the development time or customer service time into server merges. I think transfers for free or a low cost are a more likely possibility. But that doesn't really solve the problem. It's a half measure. One that will alleviate some problems, but not all, and comes with new problems of it's own.

D) If you do server merges, keep Khyber, Thelanis, Sarlona, and Argo. Planes and continents are better than houses. Also, Khyber must stay. It isn't just the Dragon Below. It is the source of Jedi lightsaber power (and the death star)

[Six_Gun]

Excuses, denials, and willful ignorance at this point is just accelerating the deterioration and eventual death of the game.

Merge or die.

One mega server is what the game needs.

[nokowi]

They lost me because they made the game not fun to play by 2016 (run to end). I had an active guild (daily raids) and plenty of friends to run with.

I would have been playing (likely for the last 7 months) if they had not broken melee assassin beyond playability.

Destroying play styles and builds is a good way to loose players.

Diversity of play style and build (truly unique play choices) has really not been a priority since the bard pass.

"Why shouldn't bard be able to do everything that build XYZ does? - It's not OP!"
"Nobody wants to be forced to provide Buffs!" (insert anything unique)

In this case, players fully supported sharing everything and actively discouraged preserving/strengthening what was unique about a bard.

Bards could be an awesome boost to make DPS work in high reaper. They could spec towards spell penetration, healing, or DC boost. They could be super powerful in cases with antimagic (buffs remain) and vs objects/constructs. They could be fully functional everywhere else.

I hope the lesson has been learned, because done correctly, the diversity of one build actually adds to the diversity of other builds.

Homogenization benefits nobody.

Give everyone a place to shine, and stop trying to make every build shine everywhere. Even the people that need this can switch builds from new content to new content - it provides them with variety without needing to continually break existing builds.

[KidDiscordia]

I always get a chuckle reading these merge treads where everyone demanding a merger always list their home server as being one that remains.

[nokowi]

I always get a chuckle reading these merge treads where everyone demanding a merger always list their home server as being one that remains.

Nobody demanded anything.

[masterofthewand]

I think there would be a lot more people on the servers right now if they didn't introduce the reaper enhancement tree and racial reincarnation. Sometimes doing nothing is the better answer. Sure there would be complainers with threads "Why should I run reaper instead of elite - increase rewards", but the devs could have easily ignored that.

+10

[Jasparion]

Not because it matters much, but at what time of the day was this SS taken?

When I play there is maybe 30 people online, and 5 or 6 of them are level 30. This is on Argo.

Last night I think our pug group in Haunted Halls was everyone at cap on the server. Maybe there was 1 or 2 others on.

We had 3 or 4 LFM up the entire night. And outside of my HH run, one of the LFMs was mine - which no-one joined.

Luckily I usually play with 4 or 5 friends so we make our own groups, but this game would just plain suck for someone who wanted to join groups.

[Niminae]

Instead of server merger why not cross server LFM's?

Is this even possible to implement?

It's been possible in WoW for ~10+ years.

It would solve the issues around moving things they don't currently know how to move, as well as keeping the player base distributed across more servers for whatever that might do for the lag experience.

But any server should be able to absorb Wayfinder's population without notice.

[Sam-u-r-eye]

It's been possible in WoW for ~10+ years.

^^

[Avocado]

A server merge would end up making more people leave then it would get people to come back or get people to stay. The amount of f-ups that could occur during a server merge would probably be a lot. People above have already made this point that how do they account for guilds, tr caches (I guarantee these wont be transferable), character slots, etcs? Server merges are a logistical nightmare and things would have to be a lot worse then they are now for them to consider a merge. Merging servers would not foster community, the servers are the same as they have been for awhile (the meta has shifted tho), you dont need to merge.

I think its a little late to fix grouping because reaper rewards are too good for vets to do anything else and new players arent good enough to do reaper. The only way they could fix this is to somehow get all styles and levels of players to play with each other and that isnt going to fixed by merging servers. The power gap will stay the same, the split difficulty player base will stay the same, and others. Permanent grouping bonus might foster some grouping but not much. So how do you fix this? Balance? that word has no meaning. Make the new players better? yes! Make players decent at the start. Let the community make paths and you implement them. I could make an elite/r1 viable first life for any class. Its really hard to put myself in the shoes of new players because I am not new. I dont know what they want. I wish they would create a survey for ddo players that awarded each player that completed it like 200 points for feedback from everyone.

[Krell]

They would only need to address things that have changed since the last server merges. DDO has done it twice already.

http://ddowiki.com/page/Server_merge

Quote:
Originally Posted by (executive producer) Severlin Source on November 10, 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~

[Astoroth]

Unless they implement better grouping and social tools a server merge would do feck all. Think about it, the servers used to have a lot more people playing and yet they hemorrhaged players. Merging servers now wouldn't do much. Maybe a short burst of livelihood but it wouldn't last long.

They need to start removing the road blocks that discourage people from playing the game. Here's a start:

Fixing group finder

I agree The lfm panel is a joke, work arounds aside. The friends list is broken as well, pick current character info and go with that if you can't get it right, which obviously you can't. How can the in game store be left to rot for what is basically 6 months now. The in game bug reporting tool for years, the lfm panel for years, hirelings wonky for years. There are so many basic things just wrong with the game. Not to mention decreased performance since server move.

All this before topping on massive power creep with the new random loot and cannith crafting change. Now with quadruple the grind. Class balancing that has drug on for years and is very inconsistent.

My friends list is more of a list of people who have stopped playing than anything else at this point. But server merges without fixing the fundamental issues with the game are mostly pointless. And more likely to annoy a portion of your remaining player base, than be a source of new or returning players.

I haven't even bothered to log in to pick a new server for my lotro characters for instance. Who knows if my house and all my stuff will make it? better to just write a game that does server mergers off if you aren't really playing. Saved me the trouble of logging into lotro to pay rent and get my weekly gold roll. Clearly a server merger wasn't the solution to lotro's problem of raising the level cap every update and out dating all the previous loot and raids along with it. Need a consistent end game with lots of raids as an option not just the latest one. DDO could learn a lot from lotro's failures; same guys making the same mistakes for years on end and never learning from them.

I always get a chuckle reading these merge treads where everyone demanding a merger always list their home server as being one that remains.

Lol yep, there does seem to be a lot of players picking their own servers without any empirical data. It's been years since the api stopped working and the latest data from that is very old. Best bet would be to close down the 2 busiest servers and keep the less populated ones just to mix things up. Forced random transfers for all the people on the two most populated servers. Limit the pain to just 2 servers and give all the other servers a boost.

Seriously any work spent on server mergers is a zero sum game. Fix your game and advertise it instead, at least to previously active players. Assuming you can fix enough stuff to attract returning players.

[PermaBanned]

This is not the entirety of the situation - and as I outlined - there are logistics issues created by the monetizing model.

DDO loses that money if they just hand out double max character slots to all.

They also lose money when folks leave because of a perceived lack of people to play with. Between their heavily incentivizing character focus vs character variety, and an ever shrinking pool of people to sell those slots to... It might be a good time for them to do a cost/benefit analysis on that one.

With all the issues - both known & potential - that accompany a forced merge, I'm definitely leaning towards the "free & encouraged" transfer model. Pick one Destination server and make transfers to that one server free, and have some reward/reimbursement plan for lost Guild stuff & lost gear hords from only being able to take what's in your Inventory & Character Bank slots.