Character transfers should be allowed--WITHOUT ITEMS

[Tina Small]

It is ironic that you accuse me of hoping to profit from the idea when it is you who admits to profiting through cross shard sales.

???????????????? When I mentioned doing transfers to profit from a better economy, I was merely repeating one of the reasons EA mentioned for doing character transfers. I've never done cross-shard sales other than to bring a recipe and a ring to Sonoma for guildmates, who paid me on Sonoma what the items cost on their original shards.

You know, there's every possibility in the world that character transfers are disabled right now because EA has a server problem. We've noticed problems lately with logging in. Could be that the server(s) that house these programs and the data they use are having problems and the program that was easiest to shut down and would have the smallest impact on most players was the one handling character transfers. And it could be that it's still down because this is the middle of summer and many people are probably on vacation. If that's the case, I doubt that the people who fix a hardware program are the same people who work on adding new content to the game or addressing issues with Siege. Also, working on changing the character transfer program so it only works with naked characters will take up more development time. Is that really what you want, especially if you play on Siege and transfers don't affect you anyway?

 

[MoonglowMerchant]

It is ironic that you accuse me of hoping to profit from the idea when it is you who admits to profiting through cross shard sales.

???????????????? When I mentioned doing transfers to profit from a better economy, I was merely repeating one of the reasons EA mentioned for doing character transfers. I've never done cross-shard sales other than to bring a recipe and a ring to Sonoma for guildmates, who paid me on Sonoma what the items cost on their original shards.

You know, there's every possibility in the world that character transfers are disabled right now because EA has a server problem. We've noticed problems lately with logging in. Could be that the server(s) that house these programs and the data they use are having problems and the program that was easiest to shut down and would have the smallest impact on most players was the one handling character transfers. And it could be that it's still down because this is the middle of summer and many people are probably on vacation. If that's the case, I doubt that the people who fix a hardware program are the same people who work on adding new content to the game or addressing issues with Siege. Also, working on changing the character transfer program so it only works with naked characters will take up more development time. Is that really what you want, especially if you play on Siege and transfers don't affect you anyway?

I see that you interpreted "moving to a more beneficial economy" differently than I did. I can also see how you might interpret it in the way that you did.

I concede that I have no idea why character transfer is shut down right now. I do know in the past that character transfer has been used to dupe items and move scripted gold from one shard to another.

That is really as far as I need to go to explain why this affects Siege and all other shards.

Resources (i.e. subscription fees) were used to develop the service and continue to be used to maintain it. You may be correct that this is done by "hardware people", but subscriptions pay for them too.

Resources (i.e. subscription fees) continue to be used to combat duping and scripting. Since we know that character transfer has been used for these activities, then the ongoing battle against scripting and duping is made more difficult by the transfer service as it exists now.

The service is not going to change. I know that.

I wish it would because as it is, it drains resources in at least the two ways I described. That means less money is devoted to improving game features and game content.

That hurts everyone with a primary interest in playing the game rather than profitting from it.

 

[Tina Small]

Unfortunately, a lot of people have enjoyed using the service in the past for legitimate reasons. Get rid of transfers and I think you lose a lot of those folks too, especially people that have characters on another shard temporarily for something like factions or PvP. Pull the plug permanently on transfers and those people might just walk away permanently too.

 

[MoonglowMerchant]

Unfortunately, a lot of people have enjoyed using the service in the past for legitimate reasons. Get rid of transfers and I think you lose a lot of those folks too, especially people that have characters on another shard temporarily for something like factions or PvP. Pull the plug permanently on transfers and those people might just walk away permanently too.

That is why I suggested the naked transfers...to eliminate duping and cross sharding scripted gold but allow people to take characters with finished skills elsewhere.

I'm not sure a "lot" of people have used the service. A few people may use it a lot, but as a percentage of the total playerbase I'd be surprised if there is a significant portion moving around regularly.

 

[Tina Small]

That is why I suggested the naked transfers...to eliminate duping and cross sharding scripted gold but allow people to take characters with finished skills elsewhere.

You might as well just not offer transfers then, because I think UO has become too item-dependent for most of us. If items were standardized and easy to obtain once you have achieved a certain skill level, maybe it would work. But that's not UO.

As an example, why in the world would you move a character naked if you spent spent mega-millions in gold and months if not years building its suit and finding good weapons? The only characters that I think most people might consider moving naked would be crafters, but then I'm not so sure about that one either, especially given the randomization of resources and how long it would take to build up a good supply of resources again.

And in spite of what you may believe, there are many people who have used the service to transfer to do things completely unrelated to moving items to sell to others. Do I have numbers? Of course not. But I have been playing UO long enough to have done it myself quite a few times and to have played with and read about quite a few different guilds that like to do shard tours for various reasons. I've done it a couple of times to move characters from a shard that felt too crowded and because I wanted to play with people who had their homes on shards where I didn't already play. I've also done it to participate in factions on various shards. At this point, I'm not sure how many more times I will use the service myself, but I like knowing that it's available if I get the urge to shift any of my existing characters around (with their suits and weapons and/or pets, of course) rather than start them all over again from scratch.

You and I could battle this out forever and not change each other's positions/viewpoints. So we might as well call it a draw and just wait for news from EA.

 

[chad]

All stopping transfers would do, is cause people to dupe gold rather than items. There have been dupes FAR before xfers were ever introduce.

 

[envinyatar]

While I don't claim to be part of the rare collecting community, I do read the rares boards (I fancy myself as a rare admirer). There was a rares convention recently where alot of the rares collectors all transferred to one shard, many of them with their rares for sale or display. None of these people (as far as I'm aware... no accusation here) were doing this for ill-intentions. I think its great that this is possible and I would love to see something like this on my own shard (Chessy).

I have personally used the transfer system about 10 times. Several years ago was using it to transfer to Japanese shards to buy items at lower prices and resell them at home. Recently I have used them to transfer characters on a new account from Atlantic to Chesapeake, along with the items from the account and trained pets from the tamer.

I understand that people are angry and frustrated at the rampant duping and scripting and all around cheating that goes on, but when you penalize the group because of a few people, you decrease the playing experience for the whole. I am not saying that we should turn a blind eye to the dupers and scripters, but jumping on a new topic every week as the reason for all the "problems" is not the answer.

 

[Doomsday Dragon]

I can understand the frustration above all when the service abused pretty badly.

The problem is that transfers were designed so you could completely move your account from one shard to another and without the items you should forget moving and just create a new character on the desired shard like before when there was no transfer.