New Server Labels on the Launcher and a question.

[Frelorn]

Many folks here, myself included, are snowed in still thanks to the blizzard.

[Valamar]

Now I can copy my character to bullroarer (at least I have in the past) from an EU server so is it an EU/CM server backend allowing this or a NA server? As you say they must have done a fair bit of work to allow this already, can't help but think they must have got close to the end goal.

Can you actually copy a character from an EU server to Bullroarer today? (under 15.2?)

There have been times in the past when Turbine has "changed their translators" to allow a copy from an EU server to Bullroarer, but when they did that it was no longer possible to copy a NA character to Bullroarer. In the past they have always had to do a database wipe on Bullroarer to allow this change in character copy capabilities.

Kehleyr has not posted anything since July on the Bullroarer Character Copy thread, so I assume this still stands:

3. The database conflict between EU and NA servers is preventing the copy

[Urwendil]

Many folks here, myself included, are snowed in still thanks to the blizzard.

That's unfair to you. We dispersed all them blizzard grims, we did!!

[Xhiu]

Can you actually copy a character from an EU server to Bullroarer today? (under 15.2?)

There have been times in the past when Turbine has "changed their translators" to allow a copy from an EU server to Bullroarer, but when they did that it was no longer possible to copy a NA character to Bullroarer. In the past they have always had to do a database wipe on Bullroarer to allow this change in character copy capabilities.

Kehleyr has not posted anything since July on the Bullroarer Character Copy thread, so I assume this still stands:

3. The database conflict between EU and NA servers is preventing the copy

That changed some time ago. They fixed it so both EU and NA could copy toons to BR at the same time without hving to shut one side out.
K was laid off in the last sweep so no, she's not going to be posting with a blue name

[Snowlock]

Many folks here, myself included, are snowed in still thanks to the blizzard.

You guys blame WoW for everything.

[Thorgrum]

You guys blame WoW for everything.

You're getting better at this 6.5/10.

[peachykins]

You're getting better at this 6.5/10.

LMAO I thought it was kinda lame... :P

[Thorgrum]

LMAO I thought it was kinda lame... :P

not for snowlock

[Geventh]

Many folks here, myself included, are snowed in still thanks to the blizzard.

Is there an ETA when you will release concrete information about server-transfers?

[Urwendil]

You guys blame WoW for everything.

Good one!

[West-northwestook]

That changed some time ago. They fixed it so both EU and NA could copy toons to BR at the same time without hving to shut one side out.

Sapience mentioned once that they allow both NA- and EU-characters on Bullroarer at the same time because of the limited existence of that build. If the worst happens and a character becomes unplayable because of data corruption the player is only affected until the next wipe.
But that's nothing (general) you want to ever see happening on the live servers with your freshly transferred character(s).

[Snowlock]

LMAO I thought it was kinda lame... :P

It was. He just wants to tell me he's still around. Apparently that's important for him. /shrug.

[Tuco]

It was. He just wants to tell me he's still around. Apparently that's important for him. /shrug.

Welp, *I* thought it was funny. I'm still smirking.

Frelorn - all my characters are doing fine... don't bother digging out on *my* account! Enjoy your VPN.

[Galadhloth]

Is there an ETA when you will release concrete information about server-transfers?

Yes, please - I don't mean to be impatient, and I know how bad the weather has been (digging out of the snow myself), but I've been obsessively refreshing the Dev Tracker to find out what the fates of my servers will be. Any information would be very much appreciated!!

[Xhiu]

You guys blame WoW for everything.

You're getting better at this 6.5/10.

I thought that was an 8 at least. And I don't really care for Snow.

[Thurallor]

I will have threads on transfer details including Kinships, Housing and names as well as schedules in the coming week.

The above was posted eight days ago. But then the blizzard came.

[Snowlock]

I thought that was an 8 at least. And I don't really care for Snow.

You mean lower case 's' right?

[Grimsin'sRiders]

Even now, the character copies made to BR are not "completely functional copies". there simply are some things that cannot be "translated" correctly even when transferring to BR from US servers - For Example: All My transferred toons from Dwarrowdelf to BR cannot use the auto-leveling function in the Tavern...why?... probably because somewhere in the code is one of those 1s or 0s that blinds BR's software to the fact that those toons should be allowed to auto-level, & thus the NPCs to do so are never even spawned while playing on those toons, Whereas if I create a toon from scratch on BR, there are no such inabilities to auto-level. Same thing goes for certain other character attributes - things like marks & medallions (sometimes they transfer - other builds they don't) shared storage & wardrobe sometimes get bugged up as well when placing account bound items into them that happened to be in your chars bags at the time of transferring. & that's just from US to BR transfers. I can only imagine the nightmare it would be to make EU to US (& vise versa) Character transfers function with any semblance of acceptability in the end result - let alone the amount of customer complaints that would surely be spawned from any unacceptable transfer results.

As for the server-closing details... I think the longer Turbine takes to provide them - the longer it will be before anyone's servers are actually shut down, so take all the time you like Turbine! as I'm in no rush to see ANY of them ever actually closed...

[Freawaru]

It may just be me and my friends that I game with noticing this but some of the names that have been popping up in chat lately is getting worse and worse, and it is no coincidence that the attitudes of many of those folks is poor. It just feels like the friendly, helpful, and great community on Landroval is beginning to suffer from all of the people transferring there from other servers already. What's it going to be like once the free transfers begin? When there are names like : bigmacncheese, cupofsoup, pacmanfever, jacksonfive, and so forth running around and flooding chat it really takes away from the overall gaming experience and atmosphere one expects from a roleplay server.

It's not just you. I've noticed this as well, and it's very frustrating. World Chat in Landroval is increasingly unhelpful and immature, and the main perpetrators of said unhelpfulness and immaturity seem to be self-professed transfers from Riddermark, Crickhollow, and the like. Whenever anyone asks for help in chat now, they all chime in with idiocy of the "Alt + F4" variety or rudely tell them to check the wiki. My ignore list has never been longer, and I have to turn off World Chat 90% of the time. I occasionally had to turn off GLFF back in the day when Landroval was still Landroval, but that was only ever due to one or two players stirring problems -- not great big handfuls of them.

And yes, the naming violations on Landroval are getting out of hand. I'm not a role player, but I am a Tolkien lore junkie, and one of the things I loved about Landroval when I first joined the game was the dearth of silly names you typically find in online gaming. Old-school Landroval players generally respected naming conventions on the server, even if they didn't role play. The current transfers are already starting to ruin that, and I shudder to think about what it's going to be like when free transfers are in full force. I, too, would love it if Landroval was a designated RP server with naming rules enforced, but it doesn't sound like it ever will be. :/

[Yula_the_Mighty]

Landy was always RE not RP and when CM servers moved to T that was a hot button issue at that time.

I do not remember it being this way. When the game launched, none of the North America - Turbine operated servers had any labels. It wasn't until the Codemasters take over that Landroval got the RE label. Turbine did not do a proper job of labeling NA and EU servers.

I believe that when Turbine was in the process of combining the two services. Turbine expected that they would be able to over come the data differences. Turbine did not see the need for EU and NA labels because this problem was supposed to go away. But it did not. I suspect the reason that the EU and NA labels were not added later was because it would be a "in our face" admission that Turbine had given up. Back in those days, the possibility that the former Codemasters servers would go back to Europe was discounted as be so low a probability that is near zero.

It is cases like what is going on now that make people wonder if a different choice in the past would have been better. It might not have been better. Companies, products, organization and people have a history that exists the way it does due to what seems to be choices and decisions that should have no major impact.

I sometimes wonder in my own life if I had changed my choice so to avoid some unpleasantness when I was younger. Had made a different choice. I wouldn't have ended up flipping burgers in a fast food restaurant. This young lady had she picked a better choice. She would not have started working as a cashier in the same restaurant. She and I would not have met. Married. Had four children.

[Valamar]

Even now, the character copies made to BR are not "completely functional copies". there simply are some things that cannot be "translated" correctly even when transferring to BR from US servers - For Example: All My transferred toons from Dwarrowdelf to BR cannot use the auto-leveling function in the Tavern...why?... probably because somewhere in the code is one of those 1s or 0s that blinds BR's software to the fact that those toons should be allowed to auto-level, & thus the NPCs to do so are never even spawned while playing on those toons, Whereas if I create a toon from scratch on BR, there are no such inabilities to auto-level. Same thing goes for certain other character attributes - things like marks & medallions (sometimes they transfer - other builds they don't) shared storage & wardrobe sometimes get bugged up as well when placing account bound items into them that happened to be in your chars bags at the time of transferring. & that's just from US to BR transfers. I can only imagine the nightmare it would be to make EU to US (& vise versa) Character transfers function with any semblance of acceptability in the end result - let alone the amount of customer complaints that would surely be spawned from any unacceptable transfer results.

The fact that Copied Characters cannot use the "Level-up" PCs is a policy decision which was made around Helm's Deep beta.
Auto-leveling had gotten out of hand.
Basically, the Devs do NOT want everybody playing as a Level-Cap toon. They want to see what a "normal toon" encounters in the testing.

Far too many people were using Bullroarer as a way to gain "bragging rights" when the new content was released, rather than providing the Devs with feedback on problems with the content.
Sapience explained all of this a long time ago.

As for problems with other things transferring -- I've never had a problem with any of my toons transferring from Gladden (US) to Bullroarer - Wardrobe, Vaults, Housing storage, etc.
(I have two Founder/Lifetime accounts.)

As for things that transfer on one build and not another -- yeah, that happens, and is one of the things the Devs are looking for people to write bug reports about.

Bullroarer is all about testing content -- not simply about seeing what the new world looks like.

[Valamar]

I believe that when Turbine was in the process of combining the two services. Turbine expected that they would be able to over come the data differences. Turbine did not see the need for EU and NA labels because this problem was supposed to go away. But it did not. I suspect the reason that the EU and NA labels were not added later was because it would be a "in our face" admission that Turbine had given up. Back in those days, the possibility that the former Codemasters servers would go back to Europe was discounted as be so low a probability that is near zero.

When Turbine, the independent company, launched LOTRO, they entered into a separate contractual agreement with Codemasters (similar to what exists today with the Russian servers) whereby Codemasters would implement LOTRO on their own servers using their own technology. It was a licensing deal, pure and simple. There were two separate Game Clients, just as there is today for Bullroarer. NA players could not see, let alone access the EU servers and Vice Versa. However, the Internet being what it is, punched holes in that structure.

When WB bought turbine, they wanted all aspects of the Toliken IP "in-house" -- Plus, the Internet technology had matured sufficiently that European players playing on hardware in North America was a very reasonable thing. The Internet was still in its infancy and traffic volumes much lower than they are today. Until recently, there was not an "Amsterdam" to move the EU servers back to! I have not tracked the explicit dates and times of the Internet expansion since I retired, but the chances have been rocket-propelled! When I retired in 2003, it was NOT feasible to move things back, but those of us in the Internet Backbone community expected that it would only be a matter of time. Today, "The Cloud" is all about that capability. Are you running on hardware located in North Carolina? Colorado? Amsterdam? or ??? you simply do not know... nor care, most of the time. It is all pretty transparent.

Back when Codemasters and Turbine were developing LOTRO, and yes, they were duplicating efforts, Turbine chose one Database solution and Codemasters another.
In the Spring of 2012, Turbine realized that they had "made a bad choice" and needed to upgrade their database. They planned a repair/migration-whatever they called it for the spring of 2012, and wham-bam, promptly fell flat on their face. LOTRO was down for almost 2 weeks because the database upgrade planned for 6 hours, failed miserably. And that was when Turbine was fully staffed working hard on Riders of Rohan!

Today, I have no idea where things stand. From what I have been able to tell, there WERE significant efforts being made via Bullroarer to deal with the Conversion issues -- but then apparently another round of layoffs last year brought that to a screeching halt. Such a conversion effort is extremely labor intensive and when you have a situation where the documentation does not match the "hot-fix" changes... you get Giant Avancs or Toads running amuck in Bree. All because the people who knew about them are now gone. It's called "Loss of Institutional Memory."

Sadly, as players, there is nothing we can do about the issue except sit back, take it on the chin and roll.

[Thorgrum]

I thought that was an 8 at least. And I don't really care for Snow.

Your instincts are correct, you should avoid fools. Just watch the boards, I suspect, in the near future, you will have more reason to laugh.

[Snowlock]

Your instincts are correct, you should avoid fools. Just watch the boards, I suspect, in the near future, you will have more reason to laugh.

I already saw you little fella, do you need me to see ya's again so soon? Clingy is not very attractive.

[bucko39]

The above was posted eight days ago. But then the blizzard came.

Are you being sarcastic? Honestly, I don't see what one has to do with the other. Obviously Frelorn is still "working" from home and posting here so...yeah.

But it's only Thursday...let's see if they deliver by tomorrow.