Forbin_Project

The reason I mentioned what SWG did is because we all (myself included) sometimes take what we have here for granted. We are very lucky that NCSoft doesn't treat us as poorly as other companies treat their customers.

My use of the term frivolous was meant to describe someone that wants to bounce his or her characters from server to server frequently. The problem as I understand it lies in how the transfer feature works. I believe they remove all trace of the character from the original server before placing it on the destination server. So if the tranfer feature crashes because too many people are trying to use it at the same time some or all of the characters could be lost.

Now they can probably restore the characters from a back-up, they've done similar things in the past, but things will be missing because the back-ups aren't current.


I didn't mean to imply that you felt the fee was unreasonable, I was just explaining that there were other reasons than making money for the $10 dollar fee.

Sorry for any misunderstandings.

Hey Sam have you given any thought as to the vampires concept? If not may I offer this suggestion. Your vampire character is the Rogue Islands ecumenical leader. A cardinal or bishop that feeds on his flock, and corrupts them spiritually with his twisted interpretations of the faith, leading them away from the light into everlasting darkness.

This is the Interwebz, not the real world. People always overreact and assume the worst. People will have no dealings with rationality and common sense here.

I think you need to actually read the posts because of the four people that posted before you, only one can be interpreted as a "no" response.

Agg couldn't think of a Tolkein joke.
M_B said it wasn't necessary.
I said I wasn't against the idea but don't bet on it happening
Techbot only commented on my example of SWG's policy.

And just so you know there's a reason they set the fee at $10 bucks. It's just low enough that everyone can afford it if they feel they really want to make a transfer and just high enough to discourage people from making frivolous transfers all the time.

That's right. And we were so poor we had to get up to go to work a half hour before we went to sleep.

To be fair in SWG's defense, it's my understanding there was a period of time (I don't know how long because my information is incomplete) where they allowed free transfers off of those now defunct servers.

I stumbled across the announcement I quoted in August-September when I was responding to a forum complaint that our transfer fees were too expensive.

We do appreciate your concern and as this is your first post on the forums let me say that this has been brought up before. Don't get offended if you get what may seem as negative feedback by some people because there are those among us that can be less than diplomatic.

<.<

>.>

(grins sheepishly)

I'm one of them.

Just to confirm what someone else has said we do in fact have one of the lowest transfer fees on the market. other MMO's charge $25, $30, and even $50. per character.

For example just a month ago Star Wars games shut down 12 servers and forced it's customers to transfer their characters to the remaining servers. Here's the stunt they pulled. (this is an excerpt of what they told theie customers)


Now imagine you have taken a break from the game, as many players here do, and when you come back you find that not only is the server you like playing on has been shut down but you are expected to cough up $50. per character if you want to continue playing them. $10. bucks is a blessing.

Don't get me wrong I'm all for more freebies and 1 token a year isn't asking for a lot, in fact it's a reasonable place to start negotiating. It's not greedy and has precedent. I'm just saying don't be surprised if you don't see this idea being implemented.

Ok, that's fair reasoning.

This.

Why do you assume that the villains would be forced to do heroic things? They could just as easily make it so that heroes are forced/tricked to do some villainy in order to accomplish what they think is some greater good.

I had been talking about smoothing out the population between servers but I see your point about having too many zones. One question tho, how many zones is too many? If there are too few, like redside, then players will get the impression that the game is too linear. Too many and a server can seem empty.

Thanks for chiming in. I didn't want to say no one accepted the challenge because I'm not privy to your private messages, and it was possible someone contacted you that way.

I'm not saying your experiences are incorrect but there are a lot of forum members stating that their experiences are quite different when looking for teams. They come out of the woodwork every time someone drags out the server merge dead horse.

Westley even has a thread down in General Discussions where he stated he is willing to make himself available to anyone that asks and help them form teams on any server. Strangely very few if any of the people that claim they can't find teams have taken him up on his offer.

Also please don't make the mistake of assuming a dip in the number of players online means there is a coinciding dip in subscriptions. As a 63 month vet you have seen that every year at this time there is an annual dip as players reschedule their lives around the start of the school year. We see the same fluxuation at the beginning of the summer vacations.

Then there's what I call the "seasonal" players. They are the ones that only activate their accounts when a new issue, or new game is released. They only stick around until the new wears off and then they go back to their main games, so we see a burst of activity for a bit that slowly dies down.

These players also work for us in the reverse. Many of us went to CO to check it out when it was released in September and as the free time expired we came back here. We also went to check out Aion, and we'll be going to check out STO when it comes out. At no time did we cancel our subscriptions here tho.

Then there are the players that take occasional breaks from the game to play other games because they want to prevent burnout, or they share various gaming interests with their real life friends. I myself have accounts in 5 different games. If STO is any good and they offer lifetime subs, I'll have an account there as well.



Now as to the "Load Balancing", I'm assuming you mean forcing transfers onto people to equalize the number of players on each server. Well here's why that won't work. (thanks to Memphis Bill from whom I am stealing this)

1. Just because one player likes living in New York City doesn't mean others can't like Kansas. That means some players prefer to play on low pop servers while others like crowded servers. Best case scenario will be that the players moved will simply say screw the devs and either pay to transfer their characters back, or they will simply start brand new characters on the servers they were forced off of. Worst case scenario and most likely, they will say screw NCSoft and cancel their accounts.

2. Each server has it's own personality and communities. Aussies/NZ have a server they prefer, There are Brazilians/spanish speaking players that have their own home server etc. Splitting them up will have the same results. Players will either go back to their preferred server or cancel their subs.

3. Supergroups are also small communities. breaking them up and causing many of them to lose their bases they worked so hard to build will cause a lot of cancellations.

4. Unique names. Forcing people to move to other servers will cause a huge problem with names. No one is going to be willing to give up their characters name or their SG name just because they were forced to play on another server. Bill isn't going to give up his names because he didn't want to be moved in the first place, and Ted isn't going to give up his names because he was on that server first. There will be even more cancellations over naming issues.

5. Then there's the issue of character slots. What happens to a players characters when there are no slots left on the server they are being forced onto? Now you are forcing them to buy extra slots on a server they didn't want to be on in the first place. Even more cancellations if that happens.



Now don't get me wrong, I'm sorry you can't afford to pay to have your characters transferred but "load balancing" isn't the answer.




And again I remind you that Champions only has one server.

Suggestion 1: I'm sorry but I must disagree with you on this. We don't have enough servers. In fact we need to combine the EU and NA server lists so everyone has 15 servers.

CO doesn't have multiple servers. Everyone there is on the same server. What they actually have is multiple shards. Just like we have when zones get overpopulated during a special event.

Here you'll occasionally see Atlas Park 1 and Atlas Park 2. In CO you'll see that all the time. They also keep the shard population cap a lot lower than we do. I think it's 100 per shard.

Suggestion 2: Despite the fact that we've been asking for this for 5 years the devs have remained firm about not putting it into the game. We can only hope that our constant requests for it will one day change their minds.

For a short time they allowed people to transfer between the EU and NA servers. So they could offer the EU players that want to get away from the OP a free transfer to the NA servers.

How can you deviate from a rhetorical question? The OP knows darn well that the game isn't going to stop working if he doesn't buy GR.

I know. I saw a few responses when someone linked the You Tube demo and their envy was palpable before the thread got deleted.

Believe me we've all asked for an AE terminal in our bases. Especially since the base raids and CoP are down indefinitely. I wish they'd let us use the base raid teleporter as an AE terminal/entrance.