Astral Shards not to transfer to 64bit worlds!

mikarddo

Well-known member
back when i was young, i always wondered about server transfers. one time i thought, why even have individual transfers? and today i again thought the same. why not just prepare the 64bit server, then take the 32bit one down for a day or two, and copy the whole database over to the new one (instead of individual voluntary customer transfer), then put that blade into the server and voila, the same server, but now new and improved! everything is there, nothings missing, its just a big pile of save-files anyways.

..oh right, astral shards... welp, guess ill stay for a bit longer on wayfinder then.

Because a major part of the xfer is to drop the dead wood - meaning the 1000s of characters that noone play anymore. This will free up room, names and possibly avoid copying some old corrupted data.
 

Matuse

Join Date: February 2006
It cannot be that difficult to code in a vendor that will sell astral diamonds for shards and vice versa. Diamonds stack to 1000, each diamond is 3 shards.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

That they are not doing this means they don't want to do it for some nefarious purpose.

Oh, and it's probably illegal. Just recently my father had an old gift card get closed down. The bank that ran the gift card account went through the effort of tracking him down across 6 state lines to contact him and issue him a check for the remaining balance.

That's functional customer service. SSG doesn't have to make 1/100th the effort for every player that this one bank did for a single individual.
 

Chacka

Well-known member
To me, it’s also quite clear that it’s unacceptable that we are not allowed to transfer our Astral Shards to the new servers. Technically, this shouldn’t be a big problem. You could add a vendor to the game who sells tokens for Astral Shards and also buys them back. That way, we could buy these tokens on our old server, transfer them to the new server, and sell them there. I’m sure that’s not rocket science for a DDO developer and wouldn't take much time to implement.


The real question is whether SSG is willing to let us keep our Astral Shards on the new servers—or if they actually intend to take them away from us.


And please don’t tell me we can just buy things like Hirelings with our remaining Astral Shards to use on the new server. There’s simply nothing worthwhile to buy from DDO vendors. If you use the Shard Exchange, you lose about a third of your shards—and besides, who’s going to sell anything there if everyone is leaving the old servers?


For me, it’s absolutely clear: if we can’t transfer our Astral Shards, it’s yet another big affront to us players.


Also, just to mention it: it’s already an unnecessary restriction that Astral Shards are server-based instead of account-based. If SSG really cared about its customers, this would be a perfect opportunity to change that. Sure, making Astral Shards account-wide is probably more work than implementing the token system I mentioned—but even a simpler solution could work. For example, automatically transfer the shards in our inventory, retire the server-based system, and add an account-wide Astral Shard pool. Then, we could simply click on our shards to move them into this new shared account. Again, not rocket science—if the will is there.
 

Dalsheel

Well-known member
Sux to be a shard duper.
Personally I welcome this. We have cleansing cards selling for 8.5k shards on Argo because there's accounts with millions, yes millions, of shards on them.
It, really, boggles the mind why they don't ban these accounts, but in any case this is good, as long as the duping process is fixed on the new servers.
 

Anurakh

Little Nixie
Dupers are the ones who have the least need to worry about leaving their Astral Shards behind. They'll be able to dupe on the new server, or they'll have plenty of duped items that will allow them to restock quickly. We, the non-dupers, who earn our shards with patience and effort, are the ones who will be hurt.

And if someone on SSG thinks it won't lose players with this move, they are seriously mistaken.
 

rabidfox

The People's Champion
There are players that dont care if shards transfer or not, our whole guild never uses astral shards, so they are a meaningless currency to our two dozen members. We will transfer is it makes sense to do so when the server is released, with little to no contention. Our one big restriction will be if the server is VIP only, that will be a hard no for us. Most of us have been hurt/impacted by some previous game decision in one form or another and have limited our spending or have become free to play due to the behaviour of the corporate office, game designers and moderators.

Hopefully the new 64 bit servers allow full access and are an improvement to the current laggy game and immobile mob AI.

Thats my 2 cents, no further comments are required.
It's been previously stated that your guild paid for its airship via the sale of curse cleanse card(s?) for shards. So while you might not use AS on the day-to-day, it was a practical aspect to the creation of your guild. How would you feel if you couldn't move your airship over?
 

nix

Well-known member
It shouldn't be difficult.

One possible solution:

Transfer one character over to the new server.
Create a web form for the account to state current amount of shards on old server.
CS checks account on old server (the population isn't in the millions) to confirm count.
CS sets value of shards on old server to zero.
CS gives transfered character a credit note with a code.
CS either credits shard total to transfered character or the code is used in the store to "buy" x amount of shards.
Given ssg record what could possibly go right?
 

Jasparius

Well-known member
Sux to be a shard duper.
Personally I welcome this. We have cleansing cards selling for 8.5k shards on Argo because there's accounts with millions, yes millions, of shards on them.
It, really, boggles the mind why they don't ban these accounts, but in any case this is good, as long as the duping process is fixed on the new servers.

How lazy are SSG to not just scan the database and inspect every account with more than 30,000 AS.

Can also scan looking for more than 30 Ottos Boxes/Shards.

Then do a Please Explain. Then wipe them or ban the account.

Problem is Im sure many of the dupers also spend huge amounts on the game so they get away with it.

If someone had 1,000 AS one week, and 100,000 a week later you check sales and transactions then ban.

Same with 50% xp pots, medium eb shards, Ottos boxes and all the other things duped in huge amounts.
 

vik

Well-known member
SSG, I understand that you have to balance the concerns of the devs and the customers, and try to put out enough new content to keep the lights on. But please respect our purchases and our hard-earned cash. If you're not willing to put in the effort to do this right, I guess I'm not moving to the new servers then. I'll stay on 32-bit until they shut it off and I'll be done with the game. I can guarantee I won't spend another dime. It's a shame because I like this game and have had no problem supporting it financially. I've left other games like Neverwinter Online for the same reason. I pop in on their forums every once in a while and it's a ghost town. Check out their steam chart numbers if you want to see how treating customers like this worked out for them.

You can't tell me you can't manually move shards between accounts on servers if you can't figure out a coding solution.
 
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Blerkington

Well-known member
The problem is there is no magic threshold number where you will always catch the guilty and spare the innocent. So those numbers you are throwing around are meaningless. There's also the complication that anyone with any brains may have spread the proceeds of duping out over multiple characters or accounts and possibly also transferred AS into other goods that aren't obviously duped.

I'm starting to agree with the people who are suggesting no AS transfer is to prevent duped AS from being brought across rather than a technical limitation. But the underlying problem here is you can't punish innocent people for the sake of trying to punish the guilty. So if you are going to punish people you need to be able to show your proof.

It's taken me years to build up my stock of AS from my early purchases because I am not a particularly astute trader and I would enormously resent losing it. It took me a lot of effort to farm all the crafting materials and filigrees to reach a relatively modest amount. But the person who has just purchased and spent 10k ddo points on AS would have far and away more cause to be upset. For some of you, apparently in both cases it would just be okay to take this away. That is ridiculous.

Refusing to bring AS across, including for those people who can show receipts for all of them, is a non-starter. If SSG tries to do this they are crossing a red line into the territory of no longer being a serious business, one that cannot be trusted with and does not deserve anyone's money because sometimes they won't honour the transaction of money for goods. That has to be an inviolable part of our agreement with them if they are going to survive as a company.

I think they are hoping to get a groundswell of community support on this issue from those people who start foaming at the mouth about duping and demanding a scorched earth response. I am hoping that good sense will prevail and people will see the wisdom in not punishing the innocent for the sake of trying the hurt the guilty. Let's not cut off our nose to spite our face, all right?
 

Jasparius

Well-known member
The problem is there is no magic threshold number where you will always catch the guilty and spare the innocent. So those numbers you are throwing around are meaningless. There's also the complication that anyone with any brains may have spread the proceeds of duping out over multiple characters or accounts and possibly also transferred AS into other goods that aren't obviously duped.

You think 100,000 AS with no record of purchase is possible? 50 Ottos boxes with no record of purchase? 10,000 hours of 50% xp pot with no record of purchase?

Of course there is a threshold. And you test it by telling the person to explain how they managed to get an insane amount of whatever it is you discovered on their account.
 

vik

Well-known member
Why are we even talking about dupers? SSG said they wouldn't move any AS to the new servers, period. Dupers or legit. If SSG is not willing to honor anyone's previous purchases then they don't deserve our money and deserve to go out of business.
 

vik

Well-known member
I watched the Fridays at 4. He addresses it at 20:20 if anyone is curious. He is not saying it will not happen period, but they don't have a mechanism to do it currently. He mentioned spending down your current shards before the transfer, which IMO is not a good solution. Due to the 30% cut and the fact that you will have a massive influx of goods after the server transfer and no one to buy them.
 
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Seldarin

Active member
Been playing the game for 19 years, been paying VIP subscription since day 1, have spent thousands on it over that time. If everything i have bought/quested/traded for etc, isnt being transferred, then plain and simple i wont be going. I mostly solo as is, and if the population becomes more dead on Khyber than it already is, so be it. If this is how SSG treats its customer base going forward, good luck on your 64 Bit servers. I for one wont be starting over from scratch, i have invested too much time, too much money, too much effort in a game that still has 19 year old bugs in it to start again. I am only one player and I know in there eyes I dont amount to a hill of beans.
 
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