Multiverse Work Visas

[Starhammer]

I'm sure it's beyond the ambition of the dev team, if not the technical capabilities of the game, but given the opportunity, I would love to be able to queue up for teams/TFs/Trials/etc across server boundaries. Sure, I could transfer, try to find a team, transfer back, then have to rejoin SGs, and burn two transfer tokens for the week in doing so, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to, just to take advantage of higher server population elsewhere when most of my server is in bed or at work 😞

[Rudra]

You're better off making the same character on each server. To the best of my understanding, our characters are stored on each specific server, which is why you have to transfer your character if you don't make a new copy on the other servers. So, not really a possibility.

[SeraphimKensai]

Engine won't allow it. I have my own server and it would require a pretty significant rebuild to get somewhere close to what you're looking at doing mainly because of how character names work, as globals we're originally implemented as an after thought and the original devs thought if you needed your character on another server if you rebuilt it would keep you actively working on rebuilding and paying a subscription.

[biostem]

3 hours ago, Starhammer said:

I'm sure it's beyond the ambition of the dev team, if not the technical capabilities of the game, but given the opportunity, I would love to be able to queue up for teams/TFs/Trials/etc across server boundaries. Sure, I could transfer, try to find a team, transfer back, then have to rejoin SGs, and burn two transfer tokens for the week in doing so, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to, just to take advantage of higher server population elsewhere when most of my server is in bed or at work 😞

I don't intend to sound mean, but do you understand that each server is a separate entity?  What I mean by that is your character, their name, etc, doesn't exist on the other servers, and their name is not reserved for you on those other shards.  In effect, what you would need to do would be to reserve 1 name across all servers once someone makes a character with that name, then run some sort of batch file or process that would keep all instances synced up, and finally lock that character on all servers when you are playing a particular version of them.  And this doesn't even address things like friends lists, supergroups, etc.  Your best bet is to create a character to play on each server.

Edited September 26, 2022 by biostem

[Canadian Anvil]

5 hours ago, biostem said:

I don't intend to sound mean, but do you understand that each server is a separate entity?  What I mean by that is your character, their name, etc, doesn't exist on the other servers, and their name is not reserved for you on those other shards.  In effect, what you would need to do would be to reserve 1 name across all servers once someone makes a character with that name, then run some sort of batch file or process that would keep all instances synced up, and finally lock that character on all servers when you are playing a particular version of them.  And this doesn't even address things like friends lists, supergroups, etc.  Your best bet is to create a character to play on each server.

I get where he's coming from. In live I ran to all the servers and created a toon based on my global, and I did here too when I joined; but the TTL on names going back to the pool makes it a pest to log on to each server after X days.

[TheZag]

Data transfer between servers obviously exists since we have cross server chat and auction house.  But i dont think cross server teams would be possible for the majority of task forces since they send you into the city zones.  It could potentially work for content that is entirely instanced since you get 'transferred' there to begin with.  There have even been bug reports in the past of people getting sent to the wrong instance and ending up on someone elses mission map.  None of that was cross server to my knowledge though.

 

I dont think people having the same name from different servers would be a problem.  I recall a story from a GM that used commands to give players the same name and the server handled it just fine.  The server doesnt use your player name to identify you,  it displays what is in the player name field to chat and above your head but not 'X loot goes to $playername'.  If running into 2 of CoolHeroGuy was the only thing preventing this then i would say fire this up right now.

 

I imagine the technical limitations that would need to be overcome would include transferring an online character to a seperate shared instance server while keeping a character copy on the origin server as a backup.  And then another online transfer back to your server after leaving the instance where your updated character data is either merged with or replaces the backup that was left behind.  I see plenty of room for something to go wrong here and thats assuming there is a way to transfer an online character to begin with.  Perhaps an existing light load server could serve as the shared instance since the total load should be about the same as it is now and wouldnt exceed excel's load anyway.  But i have no idea how the server would handle up to 48 simultaneous server transfers for an iMSR.

 

All that said,  if its possible it would be great for revitalizing the lfg menu so random ques of instanced content actually pop on lower population servers.  The arena should be added as well since its all instanced and the entire population would be enough to get matches started.  I know i never que up because a TF or arena never starts when using the menu for a random group or battle.

 

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, TheZag said:

It could potentially work for content that is entirely instanced since you get 'transferred' there to begin with.

No, it couldn't, because even in a totally instanced environment, the players on a team have their character information stored in their server's database; an instanced mission has to be run on a single server, and that server won't be able to read the character data from another server's database. It's theoretically possible to fiddle with the database engine to share databases across multiple instances, but I wouldn't want to have to write the code that utilizes that functionality to manage character data from each individual server; I can see where it could introduce some nasty lag.

[TheZag]

Thats why i mentioned having to transfer online characters to another server and back as being a problem.  World of warcraft couldnt have cross server instances either,  until it did.  I cant imagine the nightmare it took to get it working and they certainly had more income to pay for more employees to make it happen.

 

I doubt this is on the teams list to explore if its even remotely possible.  But these guys have made several other previously impossible things work ingame so i wouldnt put it past them to make it work if its what they wanted to spend their time on.

 

[srmalloy]

3 hours ago, TheZag said:

I doubt this is on the teams list to explore if its even remotely possible. 

As I said, it's theoretically possible; I've spent enough years working with databases to know how I'd do it. But that's predicated on being able to work with organized and structured code, not with the rat's nest that makes up most of the CoH server code. I shudder to think of how much code would need to be rewritten to clean things up to where a sweeping change could be made, and that doesn't even consider the other things that would need to be updated -- a final solution to name collisions, cross server chat, and a host of other things.

[Starhammer]

Yeah, as I said up front, "probably beyond the capacity of the game"

And of course I can build the same character on multiple servers. Quite aware of that. That's really, really not the point though.

Otherwise, I appreciate the discussion of what can and can't work and how, as long as it doesn't get condescending.

[Zepp]

Here I was thinking you wanted Goldside access to Ouro... I don't think what you want is possible. Each server is basically a separate entity, Server transfer is literally erasing your toon from one server and moving it to another. Setting up an infrastructure to allow inter-server movement would be very difficult and time consuming with not much payoff.