Any word on when Account to Account transfers will be available?

It probably makes more money not to transfer between accounts. Everyone and their brother would be transferring off heroics bought with their free monthly SC.

There are many stories, some guy left who had the code or when they stopped supporting Windows XP it broke the mechanics for transfers which is also why they had to switch off flat character storage or they don't have the employees to do it or the timeshare association got involved and wanted a percentage or it compromises account security....

Bottom line is what Chan said in her interview: Not happening.

I now think the real reason is that they don't know why it broke to begin with.

But keep in mind - The Truth is out There.

It's easy enough to make heroic tag you as non xferrable.

In addition to all the reasons cited above, I suspect there is an additional element of paranoia involved. Things broke when they first discovered the original automated script wasn't working anymore, and they briefly tried to do the account transfers manually. Things broke when they switched away from the flat-file character data storage system and to the shared DB we're using now. Things broke in the most recent round of server merges (some of that still unresolved). Commit to doing something that will likely break more things and cause a CS nightmare? I wouldn't if I were them.

It's a database problem, and as I understand it they don't have a database specialist on staff.

This sounds like, as a company looking to make money with customers, they should explore the costs and analysis the potential revenue from offering a new (reestablishing an old) service. If the cost means they would have to sell transfers at around $50, do they feel people would use it? Or, at $100 would people still use it? I am sure there is enough data from the market place that would indicate profitable price points. At some point, the cost per transfer would be prohibitive.

Based on the theories listed here, the leading idea is that the knowledge was lost or the current code would be hard/time consuming to work with. So, how much would each transfer cost the players? I know I would pay $100 to move a character, I would think $50 would be more reasonable, and $25 would be a steal. Shoot, in those bundles of bags and stuff given on TLP releases, if a transfer token was included, I would drop bank each TLP I play on to get bags and a token to give an alt a free ride to a fresh acct when I decided to box as the server starts to die down and you cant find a group.

To be fair, it's not like it's illegal or unprecedented for a company to hire someone and have them legally bound to not use any personal details they see on the job during contract work. I did a contract job where I was running across federal tax info constantly. I got fingerprinted and signed like 30 documents before going through a 40 minute training video showing that I'd go to federal prison if I used any of it for anything.

That being said, you're probably right on your last point, there's probably an ulterior motive that boils down to something along the lines of "We just don't care to mess with it".

Most of the things in EQ that get discontinued are due to either a lack of interest versus effort, a high cost in either manpower or server resources, or a negative customer service backlash. This was probably the third. For example, having a character transferred to a new account and then a year later having someone petition for their account back because it was stolen (aka likely they sold it and want it back) creates a huge headache. It's hard for me to imagine this being lack of interest and I also struggle to believe they couldn't figure out how to do it if they needed to EVEN IF the story of lost knowledge is true.

If there was no negative backlash like they above they would do it or figure out how and then do it. Not doing it means losing the fee for the service plus the potential revenue from additional subscriptions. So if you ask me, the people to blame are anyone you know who RMT'd an account and then recovered it, which includes the people who "lost" an account and then "rediscovered" it later.

The only thing in EQ that I struggle to understand was shutting down LoN, unless it had the same problems as here (tons of CS tickets), everything else even if I hate the choice I at least understand. This one seems simple. CS nightmare.

LoN was a Smed thing, kind of a delayed reaction after shutting down the Denver studio. Most of the people involved with LoN in Denver refused to relocate to San Diego. There were only a couple of devs in San Diego who even attempted to work on new card sets and scenarios, so there was no money to make there, since the new content was a trickle. The only revenue they had incoming was loot card sales, and no new sets = no new loot cards. Things got worse when they had to shut down the SWG:TCG game (which was basically a reskin of LoN) due to losing the license to the IP. Smed was convinced that strategy gaming wasn't a money-maker on its own, and that was that. He applied the same backwards logic to shutting down Free Realms, which interestingly had its own strategy TCG hidden inside.

LON was on its own server. And no one knew how to play it but a handful of die-hards. The rest of us were just in it for the goodies. Yes, that's right. We were loot hoeses (SP?) .

So they saved money when they took the physical server down. And that is why they can never bring that one back. But at least they allowed us to get stuff over to the EQ server for claims or to give stuff away to others before it died.

You now have Overseer. LON revisited. Kinda. And by leaving the decks in the marketplace and allowing players to use their $5 monthly claim it keeps the players happy they can still maybe get some of the old loot.

They actually moved the character blobs to a relational database? I hadn't heard about that. I knew the character storage has been a huge pain point for years, but didn't think they would ever dedicate the time or resources to actually remediate the situation.

'Legends' of Norrath got shut down right when Bethesda launched their own similar (also now defunct) game named 'Legends'; and they are notorious for not sharing names, like suing over a game named 'Scrolls' because they TMd 'The Elder Scrolls'

I *suspect* DBG got offered more cash for the name than they were making in card sales.

LoN had no developers for a while before it was closed, which to me seems to suggest it simply wasn't making enough money to make supporting / developing it further worthwhile.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...gends-of-norrath-closure-notification.570655/

so it's simply the RENAMING of a flat file... omg hard!

It's not that.

Flat File databases such as an XML database are more limited than relational databases like SQL ones.

https://techterms.com/definition/flatfile


I am sure that the type of database EQ uses for character files now has probably been mentioned somewhere on the forum or in interviews with devs but I don't recall what that was if I have seen it.

Databases Relational over Flat File

Advantages

• Data Integrity, You Only need to change the data in one of the tables, it will then update itself
• Data Redundancy, By having a relational databse it ensures that no attributes are repeated
• Data Consistency, There is no chance of the same attribute being stored in a different format in a different file
• Data Flexibility, When dealing with queries, it gets much easier creating deeper queries with a relational Databse
• Greater Efficiency, as you only have to input the data only once into a relational database it saves time and human resources

Disadvantages

• Complex, Relational databases can be very complex and without the necessary training can be very hard to break down.
• Expensive, Relational databases are mostly commercial and require the user to buy that piece of software or licenses for more than one machine

Evaluation

Relational files can be linked into more than one table than are linked from one to another.