A free account character comes with 45 slots in their inventory bags and can open up 120 slots in the vault for the cost of 18g. I just moved all of my housing items that weren't bound to account to my free account characters. Make as many different free account characters as you need. Mule alts carried all of the bound to account items. Bound to character items were returned to character until all of my houses were completely emptied out. Then I moved the kin leader followed by the house owners and repurchased all of my house locations. Zero problems
The latest on timing for Sting
- Thread starter Cordovan
- Start date
Yes, but what a totally insane way to work round a destructive bug that shouldn't have existed for 18 years, don't you think?
Long before there were carry-alls and an unlimited number of premium houses, there were alts on main and free accounts that carried every crafting item, dye, non-bound cosmetic, reputation and task item you could think of.
It's a shame they didn't test the transfer with filled premium houses first to see what would happen if...
Or that a lot of people didn't wait a few days to see what happened when...
But now that you know there are problems, adapt. Find workable solutions. Carry-alls are expensive at 1,995 lp a pop for 50 slots. 18g spent on a free acct character for 165 inventory slots is a pretty good deal. Two toons made on one free account = 330 inventory slots for 36g and no need to develop the characters beyond lvl 1. Delete them when they're no longer needed.
Thovald Banehammer
Mordor EU
My suggestion: A new item. The U-Haul Removal Truck Carry-All. (you can change the name if you like). A carry-all with unlimited space, but is only valid for 60 days. Plenty of time to pack everything into it, transfer, and unpack, but you only get one per account, in a year, and it expires after a certain amount of time so you can't cheese your way into unlimited storage using alts.
Lorianna
Well-known member
In a way we have that. It is called escrow. Escrow is supposed to hold all items that were in a sold/abandoned house until a new one is bought. It is part of shared storage and goes with your account like a character. Sadly, escrow broke.
The difference is where I think the core problems arose. In a Carry All or Character Inventory, the player has to pick up and store every item themselves as a single action apiece. With Escrow, players tried to rely on the game to do it all, and it just ended up fumbling the load when asked to do too much at the same time ("Hey you! Go pick up my furniture while you are counting up my gold coins, and make sure to carry me across the street along with my luggage at the same time! Don't look at me like that...get it done this instant!!").
As a retired software engineer I anticipated the problems that emerged over transfer of housing items. My experience dealing with data bases and program updates was that storage directly linked to my characters was safer than storage that was linked to my character via housing storage. In my experience as an engineer, I had seen how following data assiciations(housing and kinship storage) through links to basic data nodes(characters, alts) sometimes revealed unanticipated conflicts, side effects. Apparently, that is what happened.
What I did was to move all items into the carry alls that I already possessed. Since I needed more space than the carry alls provided, I used my character bank storage, shared and individual. This was still was not enough so I created new characters and put the remaining items into the new characters(2) storage and that was enough for me. Once I successfully transfered all my characters, with no item loss, I deleted the extra characters after off loading the housing items placed into their storage. Doing all this seemed like a bother at the time, but I didn't want to take chances on item loss. I also found myself deleting items that I did not like or need. I was surprised at how much stuff I had in storage only because I was too lazy to bother to remove junk I did not need or want. Bottom line is that I realized how sloppy I had been and continue to this day to filter through my storage items removing stuff I never use and don't need. So that is something I am glad I learned from this experience
Unanticipated conflicts and incompatibilities are impossible to eliminate until they are discovered. What changes to code over time reveals are unknown issues that remained dormant until code was used in a new manner from previously functional applications. Also, some expansions to app functionality require tweaks to functioning code written before new functionality was desired and cause some basic code to be rewritten and therefore introduce new opportunities for issues to arise. Which is why requests like changing the housing/neighborhood system is not so easily done. The changes can be made, but then a great deal of fucntional unit testing, regression testing is required to regain the reliability of the app that existed before the app was rewritten.
I like the new application. Not perfect, but software never is. There are always known issues, proposed changes and a todo list that is never finished. I worked as part of a small software team, somestimes just myself, with a larger team of electronic and mechanical engineers who were the users of my software. The users were always suggesting changes to make the code easier for themselves, not understanding that most of what they asked for was easier to say than to implement. I used to say that the last 10% of the project took 90% of the time to complete. Deadlines are a witch.
What I did was to move all items into the carry alls that I already possessed. Since I needed more space than the carry alls provided, I used my character bank storage, shared and individual. This was still was not enough so I created new characters and put the remaining items into the new characters(2) storage and that was enough for me. Once I successfully transfered all my characters, with no item loss, I deleted the extra characters after off loading the housing items placed into their storage. Doing all this seemed like a bother at the time, but I didn't want to take chances on item loss. I also found myself deleting items that I did not like or need. I was surprised at how much stuff I had in storage only because I was too lazy to bother to remove junk I did not need or want. Bottom line is that I realized how sloppy I had been and continue to this day to filter through my storage items removing stuff I never use and don't need. So that is something I am glad I learned from this experience
Unanticipated conflicts and incompatibilities are impossible to eliminate until they are discovered. What changes to code over time reveals are unknown issues that remained dormant until code was used in a new manner from previously functional applications. Also, some expansions to app functionality require tweaks to functioning code written before new functionality was desired and cause some basic code to be rewritten and therefore introduce new opportunities for issues to arise. Which is why requests like changing the housing/neighborhood system is not so easily done. The changes can be made, but then a great deal of fucntional unit testing, regression testing is required to regain the reliability of the app that existed before the app was rewritten.
I like the new application. Not perfect, but software never is. There are always known issues, proposed changes and a todo list that is never finished. I worked as part of a small software team, somestimes just myself, with a larger team of electronic and mechanical engineers who were the users of my software. The users were always suggesting changes to make the code easier for themselves, not understanding that most of what they asked for was easier to say than to implement. I used to say that the last 10% of the project took 90% of the time to complete. Deadlines are a witch.
Smart move, pun intended.
You almost got there on your own. Create "mules" fill up their storage, unload and delete after the transfer.
Easy, peasy.
So.....make as many new characters, mules if you will, and there you go.
Cordovan
Community Manager
Once this fix goes live this will likely correct the above issue, but we'll have more information on the fix once it is actually done.
I have transferred housing escrow in the past with no issues, including during the world consolidation of 2015/2016. Therefore I did not expect any issues this time around. Hindsight is 20/20.
On top of that, even after filling the bags and vaults of all 30 of my characters, I estimate that I have lost a minimum of 15k items. And while yes some of this is things I could probably do away with (like the one kin housing chest full of old LI relics that I didn't get to deconstruct before they removed the relic masters), other things missing include nearly 1k decorations, or items that I keep on hand to make my gaming experience easier such as festival maps and items required to complete deeds for easy LP, or rep items that can be used on alts that I have no plans to level past a certain point and were created for crafting reasons etc. I also have items that I keep as momentos for various reasons, including some gear that was crafted by a friend who passed away years ago, but at least a small part of them lives on in the name of their character that crafted these items.
So kudos to you for being so prepared, but not everyone has your work experiences or plays the same way you do.
Edit: and while I haven't worked out the math because it was never even considered as an option, but the amount of additional character slots or carry-alls I would have had to purchase in order to hold all of items I needed to transfer is an insane amount I'm sure. So again, not everyone has the option to simply "create mules".
Sorry for all my posts, but I am waiting for the latest update to finish so I can get back to the game, took a look to see if there was any news on Sting and found this thread. Since I had little else to do at the moment, I released my exasperation at some of the posts I found. Fortunately, most people use their imagination to fix their problem themselves.
Takes me back to my days as a minority software engineer in a team of know it all electronics and electro-mechanical engineers. Not exactly the same situation, but seems so familiar.
Entitlement is a witch.
Takes me back to my days as a minority software engineer in a team of know it all electronics and electro-mechanical engineers. Not exactly the same situation, but seems so familiar.
Entitlement is a witch.
maartena
Drinks Coffee All Day!
Just to clarify, we had a MASS transfer event in late 2015/early 2016 and none of these particular issues happened. If someone lost items, it was either explainable (e.g. item owner moved before kinship leader so item was returned to the void), or a very isolated incident, and we likely had more transfers then.
There have been three major changes since then:
1) They changed database software in 2019, from Microsoft SQL to PostGreSQL. This could have introduced unforeseen bugs when adjusting the transfer system for the new database software.
2) These are not 32-bit to existing 32-bit transfers as it was 10 years ago, but 32-bit to brand new 64-bit servers. This could have introduced some bugs that did not exist before, but cropped up here because of possible extra complications in the change from 32-bit to 64-bit.
3) The character footprint has grown a lot since then. Bigger wardrobes. Bigger shared storages. The ability to purchase multiple (premium) homes. General data use for a level 150 character that is 15 years old is much higher than a level 100 character in 2015 that was 5 years old. This difference could have caused issues not previously seen.
Many issues I think were partially caused by the massive onslaught onto the transfer system, where before it was maybe a dozen paid transfers per week, if that. They may not ever have found the above bugs during regular paid transfers, or even when Anor/Shadowfax emptied onto existing servers, which would have been several thousand transfers in a week or so - as opposed to a million in the first week alone here. Additionally, while the previous transfers were over a distance that could be measured in centimeters of cable within probably the same server rack in the same location..... these transfers were over several THOUSAND kilometers, to the other side of North America and to Europe. That alone brings in additional complications.
So it could really be that these escrow bugs could have NEVER been found because the environment (32 to 64, empty servers, long distance copies, massive onslaught, data footprint, etc) was completely different than any transfer done before in the past, including BIG ones such as the closure of previous Legendary Worlds.
auximenes
Well-known member
That was not really an option. People had names and kinships to save.
Rough ETA? Are you hoping for like a week? A month?
Many players have lost access to their stuff for two and a half months now.
well said
Someday they will include foretelling the future as a required course for a computer science degree.
Until then......
Ummm......log into each world?