Unity Transfer

[Garfonso]

Ok, that is an interesting point, too, Painless.

[vahrokh_the_ancient]

You are too quick and forget why and European "branch" had been opened at all.

At Hz launch a lot of Europe did not even have DSL, I played on analog modem for 8 months.

The few with DSL still had to deal with the horrible EU carriers that had lines able to sustain 1/10 of the load.


Putting all servers in the USA would have been too much of a challenge.

Even a big company like Blizzard had to split servers (even more than us, they had to make an Oceania data center too).


The original AE's lines could not withstand the load as well, we WERE "many" in the beginning.


All what happened later is only because of utter incompetence by the companies involved, there is no technical difficulty mirroring changes worldwide, it's done since 30+ years ago.


About Blight being nuked: they probably have scripts to deal with cross server and regular maintenance for production servers, while Blight is trickier having stuff not implemented elsewhere.

For a new owner with no clue it's probably cheaper to undo the hard work made on Blight, cheaply reuse existing hardware, cheaply make another production server that can be cheaply administered like Chaos and Order.

It's possible that even without Unity around, Blight would be nuked and made "production" and then they begin doing their own re-development of new features in an environment they created and hence know.

[Takora Drakan]

Exactly Vahrokh, when I startet hz playing I also had only a crappy analog modem for long time Also the EU players even couldn't open a account in NA because they didnt accepted EU Creditcards in the beginning and redirected us to the EU loginpage.

[Amerelium]

Don't remind me. I changed net provider a year and a half ago, and spent an entire month in the Pickle on a 3.5 Kb/s modem...

- was Bite, then think, and wait, and wait, and wait........

Exactly Vahrokh, when I startet hz playing I also had only a crappy analog modem for long time Also the EU players even couldn't open a account in NA because they didnt accepted EU Creditcards in the beginning and redirected us to the EU loginpage.

[Sigi]

Don't remind me. I changed net provider a year and a half ago, and spent an entire month in the Pickle on a 3.5 Kb/s modem...

- was Bite, then think, and wait, and wait, and wait........

ooooh, while the waiting you could have done a lot of thinking

[MadDwarf]

what disturbs me about this is thus

they said before this that the transfer WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. Now they are deciding if its even practical ?

read between the lines... they are deciding if its profitable to transfer unity chars to a server of their own so they can keep their plots and chars. When in reality we might see the option of having unity players transfered to chaos or Order but without their plot info. After all why run another server for what ? 200 people ?

btw Amon and Smeglor both confirmed there is indeed a char transfer process in horizons. So I suspect its a plot and property issue thats the hold up here.

[BKBanzai]

Fact: We know that characters were able to be transferred to blight...and that's the extent of the character transfer process that I'm aware of.

We know that characters are transferrable to a new shard, i.e., the server merge 2 years back. However I don't know what method was used to do that.

I'm don't want to second guess what they meant by "practical". It could mean that the hardware available might not support a live shard, but that they are testing it to see what it is and is not capable of doing.

I can see that at least an attempt is being made, and I hope that it is successful. That, at least, is more than what has happened under previous ownership.

[Nalrach]

Unity and EU players have more suffered than Chaos, Order and Blight together.

No doubpt in my mind .. the end result was a roten deal foe Unity players.

And in this 3 years the Eu players have payed more than NA players for non existant support, wm and other crap.

Exactly my point, the old management was not technically ready to answer an public outcry request and made a political decision. Thus ending up in the EU players been short change.

[Amerelium]

I think the issue is that Tulga changed the US architecture at some point - that's why the patches stopped working on the Unity shard. I think they have to figure out if our database is compatable with their software...

[Garfonso]

the game database is exactly the same... it's a myth that there are differences. And the patches did work. GN just didn't get the last ones, because TG was to be sold.

The difference is in the account database, GN still uses the old system from AE, TG changed theirs in some way. Now they have to see if they can change our DB the same way... maybe there are still scripts lying round?
More difficult is, that a big amount of accounts from GN still reside as "ghost accounts" in the NA database... (that's why many of us still get emails from EI). So you can't just merge the databases, but have to handle a lot of dublicates and so on. Especially, if people have accounts on NA and Unity with the same email and so on.

Don't know how they solve that, but I hope they will find a way.
(So Tapsy on Order might survive.)

[Tzael]

And the patches did work. GN just didn't get the last ones, because TG was to be sold.

.....

The difference is in the account database, GN still uses the old system from AE, TG changed theirs in some way.

Invader Zim impersonation: LIES !!!

Jokes aside, I am surprised you decided to spread such nonsense Garfonso. Surely you remember when we got those patches, the extended maintenances, the rollbacks when GN acknowledged they couldn't get the patches to work. If you don't remember those incidents and are happy to make up 'facts' to be posted here then go ahead. Rest assured I'll be around to point out the made-up stuff.

As for the accounts database, I think you'll find it's the other way around. Game Network messed up the accounts database for Horizons (which led to the myriad of problems with regards to patching, reliable support from Tulga (how can Tulga fix what Tulga doesn't know and is rarely allowed to inspect ?) etc etc) when they merged the account databases from all the games they host into one. I'm fairly confident that the accounts database used for the North American shards is a much closer approximation to the original accounts database set up by AE and supplied to GN.

So innacuracy No.1 is false; patches were supplied to Game Network, and we know about the roll-backs due to failed application of patches from the information that was posted on the login page during those excessively long downtimes.

Innacuracy No.2; there's less evidence to back up my claim, though I'm sure if you look back in time at the point when GN made their online portal (and made great fanfares about centralising their accounts databases so they could offer features like single subscriptions for all hosted games etc) then you'll appreciate exactly where the problems started. That was when patches became more problematic - patching times became longer, we saw animosity between GN and AE (soon to be Tulga) because AE knew that it would be more difficult to support. In fact I seem to recall a particular incident where Jeff from Tulga went above and beyond the call of duty to assist GN with one issue which was a direct result of GN changing the accounts database structure, we'd been without Unity for over 24 hours at that point.

So please please please please please Garfonso, don't make stuff up. There is no point trying to slander Tulga. They are history, out of the equation, get over them please. There's no point trying to continually kick them.

[Garfonso]

Ok, I didn't know that some of the last patches weren't applied at all.. maybe I forgot that. I knew they had issues, but haven't followed it closer back then....

The rest of my post is based on statements from Luca. If you search for posts from Luca on this boards you will find some of them, other where in IRC.
Maybe he told me lies, I can't judge that...

I know that you hate me, and I am sad to tell you, that you begin to push me out of this "community"... so be happy, at last your work seems sucessful. A happy new year, to you.

[Tzael]

I know that you hate me, and I am sad to tell you, that you begin to push me out of this "community"... so be happy, at last your work seems sucessful. A happy new year, to you.

I'm sorry to hear that you think this. I do not hate you, I barely even know you. Certainly whenever we have met in-game we have got along amicably and so my personal feelings towards you are certainly not ones of hatred.

Garfonso, what really gets my back up are the constant references back to how Tulga supposedly screwed things up for us. People seem quite happy to make out that all the problems we currently have are Tulga's fault. Some are; most are not. If I hate anything, that is what I hate. I recognise both the good and the bad things that Tulga did, no reasonable person can deny the screw-ups they made, similarly no reasonable person can deny that Tulga went out of their way to fix problems that were within their control; carrying on the theme, no reasonable person can deny that Tulga effectively shaped the world we have come to know and love.

[Garfonso]

I just wrote here what I know about the differences between the Unity database and the NA ones. All I know about that, I got from Luca. I never heard any TG people talk about that, so I can only see part of the picture. I admit that. And yes, I forgot to write so.

I don't know how much of this is true... I don't have a reason to question what Luca said, maybe others have.
But I have no reason to trust TG devs more than Luca, when it comes to Unity... so I will always state, what he said, when I think it fits to the topic

It was not my intention to bash TG. It never was.

[Luca Mazzasogni]

Invader Zim impersonation: LIES !!!

Jokes aside, I am surprised you decided to spread such nonsense Garfonso. Surely you remember when we got those patches, the extended maintenances, the rollbacks when GN acknowledged they couldn't get the patches to work. If you don't remember those incidents and are happy to make up 'facts' to be posted here then go ahead. Rest assured I'll be around to point out the made-up stuff.

As for the accounts database, I think you'll find it's the other way around. Game Network messed up the accounts database for Horizons (which led to the myriad of problems with regards to patching, reliable support from Tulga (how can Tulga fix what Tulga doesn't know and is rarely allowed to inspect ?) etc etc) when they merged the account databases from all the games they host into one. I'm fairly confident that the accounts database used for the North American shards is a much closer approximation to the original accounts database set up by AE and supplied to GN.

So innacuracy No.1 is false; patches were supplied to Game Network, and we know about the roll-backs due to failed application of patches from the information that was posted on the login page during those excessively long downtimes.

Innacuracy No.2; there's less evidence to back up my claim, though I'm sure if you look back in time at the point when GN made their online portal (and made great fanfares about centralising their accounts databases so they could offer features like single subscriptions for all hosted games etc) then you'll appreciate exactly where the problems started. That was when patches became more problematic - patching times became longer, we saw animosity between GN and AE (soon to be Tulga) because AE knew that it would be more difficult to support. In fact I seem to recall a particular incident where Jeff from Tulga went above and beyond the call of duty to assist GN with one issue which was a direct result of GN changing the accounts database structure, we'd been without Unity for over 24 hours at that point.

So please please please please please Garfonso, don't make stuff up. There is no point trying to slander Tulga. They are history, out of the equation, get over them please. There's no point trying to continually kick them.

There's only one big inaccuracy in here and that's basically everything you wrote in this post.

To be more precise: the centralization of the game accounts you are talking about is more simply a centralization of their management through a main Game Network account. No change has been made to any single game's account database, including Horizons. We simply put one further management level above them, without changing a single bit of them... so how would this stop patches or anything else to work? I really don't know where you get this idea about the changes you describe and that have never been made.

Horizons in Europe has only had one account database structure and that is the one provided by Artifact Entertainment before European beta testing and that hasn't been altered since then.

Said this, nothing you have said matches what actually happened so I have to ask you to not make stuff up. Just two quick examples of made up things: "we saw animosity between GN and AE (soon to be Tulga) because AE knew that it would be more difficult to support" and "In fact I seem to recall a particular incident where Jeff from Tulga went above and beyond the call of duty to assist GN with one issue which was a direct result of GN changing the accounts database structure, we'd been without Unity for over 24 hours at that point".

About patches, yes they were supplied until a certain point and all the received patches were actually applied on our server. The patches that Unity is missing quite simply have never been supplied.

[Sigi]

hee, Luca.
Best wishes for 2007!

[Chaldor Itieles]

Thanks Luca once again fpr your words... was already afraid the old "who's fault" debate will start again.

[Ishar Xhaan]

Hehe Luca, once again coming when not really needed, where were you to post when nothing was working and European players left in the dark ?
As for the part " the patches were not supplied", I wonder why, did not you have any legal contracts with Tulga so they had to provide the patches ? If you did not have such agreement, how come you did not tell us ?
It s so easy to step up once the battle is over and say I would have done better.

[snickel]

Hehe Luca, once again coming when not really needed, where were you to post when nothing was working and European players left in the dark ?
As for the part " the patches were not supplied", I wonder why, did not you have any legal contracts with Tulga so they had to provide the patches ? If you did not have such agreement, how come you did not tell us ?
It s so easy to step up once the battle is over and say I would have done better.

Thank you, Ishar. Thats exactly what I was thinking when I read Luca's post.

[Luca Mazzasogni]

Hehe Luca, once again coming when not really needed, where were you to post when nothing was working and European players left in the dark ?
As for the part " the patches were not supplied", I wonder why, did not you have any legal contracts with Tulga so they had to provide the patches ? If you did not have such agreement, how come you did not tell us ?
It s so easy to step up once the battle is over and say I would have done better.

When incorrect information are spread and reported as truth, from my point of view it is needed to correct them (and that's everything that has been done with my post above).

Legal aspects of business, just like other aspects of the business, are not for public knowledge. For sure they would make things easier understand for the players, but as said not everything can be shared in public.