Character transferring

I would like people's response to the subject of transferring a character you like from one account to another account on same server, would it be nice or would it hurt if daybreak games would allow that like sony online entertainment did years back
thank you

#banlevinPoFire

Its not Sony vs DBG. And its not if they would allow it.

It can no longer be done technically so it makes no difference what the players think.

With the advent of FTP accounts, it easier to make another toon, another class you want to experiment with, or a buff bot. There are multiple threads on the subject of account to account transfers and the answer is always the same... "Not at this time(maybe never again)!"

I feel your pain though, Id love to be able to separate some of my favorite toons into different accounts.

There's numerous threads about this
No-one's told us why this is impossible (sound familair?!)
This could be a massive cash generator for them so it seems very strange it's no happeneing

Yeah at some point they have mentioned something got broke and no longer works.

And yes they could make money on it so if they could easily fix it it for a cost that would allow them to make money and not take away from other things they are doing instead of fixing it I am very sure they would just fix it.

Every time this comes up folks go on about all the money daybreak could make if they fixed this. So ummm yeah they would know that and so fix it if it was such a money maker. Trust me the company's sole purpose is to make someone money. Note I said the company I can't speak for individual staff.

How come no one ever talks about the other reason people want this?

It would make it easier to sell just a character instead of a whole account. Those people who PL toons up to sell could keep their accounts instead selling those too.

Because accounts are free, with vet rewards for all, no one would ever bother to do it this way again.

So you mean people wouldn't try to sell leveled and developed characters now? Free accounts or not, some people would rather buy a 115 level toon with great gear etc. than to have to do it themselves. The only way to sell a character is to sell the account. I know it happens.

I think what he means (and I could be wrong ) is that why would people who PL toons to sell accounts bother with transfering a single toon off of an account to sell .. when now accounts come with all vet rewards now so making a F2P account and lvling a toon or 2 and selling whole account is nothin now adays ..


Sure I get why some people would buy a lvl 115 toon with gear and aa's and stuff . however they make it so easy now with F2P accounts and everyone getting vets that account to account transfers really are not needed ..

What do you mean it can't be done "technically"? They just merged servers... again. Which technically is either transferring 1 set of characters on a server to another or transferring both servers' characters to a new server. Ok so how's that relevant? If your characters 1 thru x exist in a database table each character has a index / unique identifier along with a foreign key to a parent table which is most likely "accounts". Each account has a unique identifier i.e. myaccount#123 has a parent relationship to mytoon1/mytoon2/mytoon3 etc.

If I created another account myaccount#456 and wanted to transfer a character to said account db-wise I could insert a new mytoon record by using a nested query copying the toon's data if the primary key is auto incremented. If not then I just need to dump that mytoon record, edit the foreign key account relationship so it points to the new account and update the existing record maintaining a single instance of said toon.

There's multiple ways to skin this cat, assuming the dev's are also dba's and they break all normalization best practices and deal with ungodly schemas the fact that this feature existed prior and the "statements" about all the old code still intact that would mean they have a multi-part process integrating both modern & legacy functionalities. It's simply not a priority.

SO yes I over simplify it but literally nothing on your toon changes if you are simply moving accounts, it's not like moving an account & server at once. I suspect there's a policy / business reason why they don't want to move accounts.

I'll admit that I don't know the exact reason why they will not transfer characters but i can almost guarantee there's no "real technical reason" rather a policy. I put in a ticket the other week for this after returning from 7 years and they said they don't currently offer the service but hope to in the future.

Getting to 115 and AA’s might be easy.. going through and redoing progression/hunters/heroic AA’s not so much. We’ve put a lot of work over the years into our characters.

Personally if I could transfer I’d probably buy 3 more xpacs every year and keep 5 accounts subbed instead of 2... they’re costing themselves A TON of money.

The knowledge was probably lost on how to do this during the mass layoffs that impacted staff during the transfer from SoE to DBG.

They only recently had got the server merge script working again & we saw how problematic that was despite their best efforts, these kinds of things really are not easy at all.

Account to account transfers are very unlikely to see a return, even if they have an old script around trying to make it work now would be very problematic as the team who worked on it then are probably not even with DBG and the code may have very poor or even no documentation to go with it.

This topic has been argued every which way but loose.

I am not going to rehash all the reasons or what people think are the reasons which is why I posted that it cannot be done.

You can start reading here
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...t-transfers-please.264520/page-3#post-3904504

But some of the highlights:

***nah, it only got disabled for technical reasons when they modified character storage formats.

***They broke it, and don't have the customer support to manually do it. If they ever fix it, they will, if they don't, they won't, c'est la vie.

***It's "broken" the same way McDonalds' ice cream machines "break" every night around 10-11PM

(AKA: It's not broken at all, they just don't want to do it because it has to be done manually and takes a lot more time+effort because they have to verify it).
*** a 'script' written by one dev that no longer works there. It doesn't have to be 'done manually'. But they may not actually have anyone who knows the old language/shell it's in AND/OR doesn't have the time or will to re-write that into something they can use.

***But the fact is that it is a technical and manpower issue. Look back to 2017 when support for Windows XP/Vista was dropped in the game and soon (within 6 months) the transfers stopped. The transfers that occurred during that 6 months after Window XP was dropped were manually done.

At that same time they had a change in databases.... software change or upgrade we went through a lot of pain with server crashes, housing zone issues, account issues etc. I suspect the account to account transfers are a victim of this same issue.

If it were only done manually then they had a bunch of inept techs since there was a problem with the old transfer process where sometimes people would get duplicate characters. Account to account transfer one character and then both accounts have said character.

And EX- EQ community leader Roxxy even said it would not be for a long time since they weren't even looking at getting the tech to do it. Meaning the technical ability not the tech repair person. Geeeek squad!!!!

Changing something in a customers account is a Legal and Security issue unlike a entire server where DBG owns that.

ETC ETC ETC

If you're banking on the server merger as a model for account-to-account transfers, I hope you don't want things to remain intact during your character transfer. Almost two weeks later and they still haven't cleaned up all of the snafus from the merger (nor do I actually believe they will . . . they haven't even acknowledged all of the problems incurred during the merger, much less addressed them).

Selling in game items for real world cash (which includes accounts and characters) is against the eula.

My personal opinion is such..

I do not feel anything is broke . I feel that if and when they do start to allow this that they will have developed some type of system to track it.

And by it I mean tracking the characters and or accounts so as to know if they are being sold on 3rd party sites for money which is against the rules.

And the reason they say it's broke currently is that they have absolutely no way what so ever right now to stop or track real life money for characters or accounts .. so they simply say it's broken for now.

That's my opinion on it.

And for all y'all tryna say people won't sell characters in today's EverQuest..

Y'all stupid bwhahaha stop playing tryna act like that bwhahahahahaha

I wish they would add it back. I’m aware, they’ll probably never add it back and I could roll a new character and do everything over again. I just don’t have the will to ever go back through all the progression, hunter, collections, challenger, conquest, evolving items, tradeskills, levels, AAs, exploration, augment farming, Artisan’s prize, earring of rallos, obtain necessary quality of life clickables, etc. The time involved doing inane tasks over again would far outweigh like $100 for transfer.

Anyone who has worked with databases (I have plenty of experience in that area) knows that you can transfer data fairly easy. I don't know the way data is structured on Darkpaw's side but I imagine now that their data is stored via SQL instead of flat files, the whole transfer process would of the data wouldn't be that hard to accomplish. It would take a bit of research to figure out everything that needs to be transferred and then tested but it can be done.

However there is probably more to this than just data transfer. Most likely they shut down the character transfer to other accounts because of stolen accounts and other problems in that area. They probably don't have the man power to manually scrutinize and research into every character transfer to make sure that it's legit. When you're running with a smaller team you cut out the processes that are time intensive so this is probably one of those things just like dealing with guild issues and not responding to petitions about kill stealing.

They could make some simple rules to safeguard
For eg that the account *from* which the account is being transferred must be paid for from the same account as the one it is being transferred *to*. That that payment method (bank acc etc) must have been used for x many years for that account.
That wouldn't completely stop dodgy sales, but if you can't flog your PL'd character for 3 years it's going to be a very small market indeed.
It would mean those who pay by 'other' means for their accounts wouldn't be able to avail themselves of the system, but better that than folk losing their toons.

As for manpower, as others have suggested - do a survey - if there's 5k players willing to pay $200 a pop to move their toons, that should cover it