Combine low population servers

[Shnitel]

What about transfering an entire guild to another server ? but now serious, it can be possible if the entire guild wants it ?

[hexblot]

There are tons of easy ways to mitigate the email problem, here's just one:

1. Announce that server sx.gg is being merged to wx.net .
2. Develop a new game "version", that has only a single form (no game) - this should be [EDITED] easy for any dev team to do within a week tops (see next step for form specs).
3. Once anyone logs in to sx.gg , they only get a form/settings popup (whichever already exists) saying that the server is in "migration" mode. In this popup:
   • you can see your toon name. If it already exists in the new server, you need to change it (else it's locked).
   • you can see your email, locked if populated, required to fill in if not.
   • <enter policy for multiple accounts in the target server here, if it comes to that>
   • a migrate button to manually migrate your account when all the above are satisfied.
4. While the server is in "migration mode", you get this version of the game and cannot play or do anything until you migrate to the new server -- thus, no easy achievement hunting while most people are gone.
5. To lower operational costs, co-host all "old" servers as VMs in a single server after a week of migrations -- the resource requirements will be hugely less since all actually active players will be gone.

With this scenario, you get the added benefit of pruning old/inactive accounts without actually deleting them (you can keep tons of virtualized servers alive so that is anyone with shrooms from ye olde times decides to revive themselves can still login and move forward with the migration).

The only actual work is performing the migration (and all the relevant data, which is definitely a bigger task, but again - not huge, and probably already implemented), and preparing for a resource peak during the first week of migrations.

The "hard" decisions are about what happens to duplicate (ie same owner) in the same server, since multiaccounting is not allowed, but the owner may have legitimately created a toon in both the old and new server before migrations.

It all boils down to the management / business decision to move forward, not a technical reason.

PS Been a web engineer / devops specialist for more than 15 years now in total. No matter the level of difficulty, it is impossible NOT to be able to do this technically.

[Shnitel]

Originally Posted by hexblot

PS Been a web engineer / devops specialist for more than 15 years now in total. No matter the level of difficulty, it is impossible NOT to be able to do this technically.

You are a genius, swear to god ! Love this idea and i hope it will become real !