Thread: My expansions

Originally Posted by Amthurin

First of all, who says all these ancient characters are still in the currently functioning databases? They are probably kept in a backup which would have to be restored.

character names still exist in my kin and friends list for people who have not migrated their accounts, friends and kin lists detail more than toon name which must mean most or all details for toons not migrated still exist on the servers BUT are no longer claimable by their owners

And have you ever tried running a query on dozens of servers through millions of tables at once without the use of an index?

your assuming the database isnt indexed, with a database the size your describing this is crazy, realistically your going to at least have indexes on the most common data that is required to load toons and other related items. inversely if you had millions of tables your also not going to be indexing all the tables, columns etc because this will negatively impact performance

regardless of whether the database is indexed or not it still takes time and money to build and run a query, its not as quick and simple as picking up a lost item left in a shop.. and weve been told that the data structure used by the old codemasters servers is somewhat different to that of the turbine systems which will also add to the difficulties and cost

but this is a moot point, turbine have said there will be no more migrations after the migration service closes, emails sent by codemasters warned "you will no longer be able to access your account" or words to that effect if you do not migrate

Originally Posted by Elfern

That was not my choice - as I told, I tried to migrate but the service wouldn't accept my password. Since I didn't play at the time, I let it be like that, because I had no idea that the account would be gone.

So you can go back and retrieve the data that is NOW so valuable to you that you'll endlessly argue with folks who cannot help you (including Turbine, who no longer has the access to your protected account info) but that you couldn't be arsed to sort out when you actually knew there was a problem, and it could have been resolved.

Start saving the tinfoil.

Perhaps I was busy and didn't have time to start investigating why stupid migration system wouldn't work for me, specially when I had no idea that the account would be gone. Nowhere in the Codemasters email it says that I won't be able access the characters if I don't migrate - it only said vaguely that "in order to keep playing".

So you can go back and retrieve the data that is NOW so valuable to you that you'll endlessly argue with folks who cannot help you (including Turbine, who no longer has the access to your protected account info)

Turbine has all the means to help me - at the moment it seems that they just won't, for the lulz. You see, I'm pretty damn well aware of their side of this as a programmer, specifically web developer. We once tested how long it would take from sql to find all entries of randomly generated 4-digit text-cells amongst (IIRC) 3 million entries. On our server it took a few seconds. I'd expect Turbine to have better servers than we do.

And as I've stated "a few" times in this thread, I know that they can't return my account. It's the character(s) I want, and they're still intact. I'm not going to tell how I can prove them as mine, because you can check it from few posts above.

And as Finglonger_UK already said, the characters are on the active DB, not on backups (or surely they're there too), as I can add my main to my friends list with my F2P character.

regardless of whether the database is indexed or not it still takes time and money to build and run a query

Perhaps a minute or two, it isn't really time-consuming to write one/two lines of code. Besides, I offered to pay character undelete fee for it, currently waiting for an answer.

Originally Posted by Elfern

And as I've stated "a few" times in this thread, I know that they can't return my account. It's the character(s) I want, and they're still intact.

And therin lies another gotcha. Turbine has no mechanism to transfer characters between accounts, something that has been asked for for years.

So, they can't undelete them to restore them to your old account which no longer exists, and even if they could restore them to a temporary account, they can't transfer them to your new account. I can't see any way this can end as you wish. I sympathize with you, but some causes really are lost.

It's hard to provide an accurate description without knowledge of Turbine's database structure, but what you mean is that
Turbine has no pre-made (pre-coded, whichever you prefer) function where you can input the character and the account you want to transfer it to. However it can be made in a minute on the database, manually.

Originally Posted by Elfern

It's hard to provide an accurate description without knowledge of Turbine's database structure, but what you mean is that
Turbine has no pre-made (pre-coded, whichever you prefer) function where you can input the character and the account you want to transfer it to. However it can be made in a minute on the database, manually.

Speaking as someone who has worked with software that lasts for decades, and is increasingly complex every year... this type of a manual database edit would send anyone concerned with database integrity into screaming fits. We're talking hundreds of tables and millions of records and a VERY high probability of missing something.

Originally Posted by Shukar

Speaking as someone who has worked with software that lasts for decades, and is increasingly complex every year... this type of a manual database edit would send anyone concerned with database integrity into screaming fits. We're talking hundreds of tables and millions of records and a VERY high probability of missing something.

not to mention that since the system isnt even set up to transfer characters between accounts that will just heighten the chance something will go wrong if they tried to attempt it in this case.

As this is a long standing support issue, I'm going to have to close our conversation here. The long and short of it is that we cannot verify your characters on our end because we literally do not have access to Codemasters account information. The migration system that we set up was create to link your old account and characters with your new Turbine account. During that period of time, your old account information was verified by Codemasters. At this point in time, that account information is no longer being kept (in accordance with the law) and we cannot (and could never) directly refer to it.

I'm very, very sorry... but the support team is simply unable to aid you with this particular issue. We simply no longer have the information required.