2004-02-19: MrTact Comments on the Character Transfer Service
MrTact Comments on the Character Transfer Service
Feb 19 2004 3:54PM
This was originally posted to Development at uo.com. [1]
I haven't done one of these in a while, and since a lot of folks have (ahem) vociferously objected to the dearth of information lately, I thought pulling one together would be a good idea.
Presently, as most people know, we are hard at work on "character transfer." (This is an upcoming new service that will allow players to move their characters from one shard to another—you can read more about it here). There has been some question as to why we are "wasting" a publish by doing character transfer. The answer is, "housing phase 3." That is to say, we wish to avoid another sword of Damocles hanging over our heads for a year. We are committed to delivering this service, so we want to focus our efforts on completing it, make sure it is as polished as we can make it, and then move beyond it to resume our regular schedule of bug fixes & new content. Yes, we do expect it to make us some money, and yes, we like money (it lets us continue to have jobs). I would be lying if I said that was not a consideration. But it's not the whole story by a long stretch.
At the moment, we have transfers working on our internal-only test shards, and the core functionality is pretty solid. QA is still finding a few bugs every day. A lot of these turn out to be new conditions in which we have to disallow you to transfer. The major development work that remains is in-depth error condition handling and revert recovery. Other than that, it’s mostly grinding off the rough edges.
Finally, a big question on a lot of peoples’ minds is "when?" Unsurprisingly, I don’t have an exact date on that yet. Our goal is to make public test centers available for beta testing starting next week—so that players, such as yourself, can test the transfer process firsthand—but there are many outstanding dependencies on that and this external testing could very well slip to the following week.
MrTact
Lead Server Programmer
Origin Systems
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