POTBS - Character Transfers are Now Live! : FPS / MMORPG / RTS Discussion

On Tuesday, April 15th, from 1:30a Pacific Time, there will be a brief, rolling outage in order to enable server transfers for your characters. [note: this outage is now complete]

When Pirates of the Burning Sea launched on January 22nd, we introduced our customers to 11 new game servers. Through feedback from our players and evaluation of our server populations, it has become clear that key game features require populations of higher density in order to function at optimum levels. When you take into account both the disparity in player time zones and the delayed launch of our title in some countries, we were spreading our overall population too thin. Also, in more recent builds, we were able to improve our server technology to allow for an even larger population than we were originally equipped to handle.

Providing our customers with the best game play experience is our first priority. Condensing our populations will lead to a richer, more vibrant game play experience for all involved, and our customers whole-heartedly agree. The character transfer option will not be available to our Australian customers on the Invincible server.
How is this going to work?

Tomorrow morning, during our usual maintenance period (1:30a Pacific), we will be restarting the servers in order to activate a configuration change. Each server will likely be down for only a half hour [note: this outage is now complete]
. When the servers are back up, you will be able to follow the instructions at this link to move characters from one server to another.
What servers can I transfer to?

Players will be able to transfer their characters to any of the following servers:

• Roberts
• Blackbeard
• Rackham
• Antigua

At the same time that character transfers are activated on Tuesday morning, we will be disabling the creation of new characters on the following servers:

• Bonny
• Guadeloupe
• Kidd
• Morgan
• Bellamy
• Bonnet
• Hornigold
How many transfers do I get?

You can transfer as many characters as you have but each character can only be moved once. We highly recommend you discuss your plans with your society and group mates before moving your characters. You do not have to transfer all of your characters to the same server; however you will still be limited to characters of one nation per server. You can transfer characters to Roberts, Blackbeard, Rackham, or Antigua. You are also welcome to transfer characters between Roberts, Blackbeard Rackham or Antigua, if you like.
What happens when I transfer a character?

When you initiate a transfer, most of your character’s data will be transferred to the new server. Information that will be transferred includes approved User Content, purchased User Content, character level, inventory (including economic items, mission rewards, and server victory rewards), money, ships, mission progress, skills and outfitting. They will keep the same structures in the same port. Any items a transferred character has listed in the Auction House will appear in the same port as an expired listing and will need to be re-listed.

There are a few pieces of character information that will not move with a character. Both the Friend and Ignore lists will be empty after the copy. The character will not be in a society on their new server. Personal unrest or contention points the character has earned will be cleared as well. It is important that these specific data points not carry over, in order to make certain that they not disrupt the destination server’s data.

Important: On the server the character is being transferred from,the character will be deleted and their auction listings expired.

This whole process generally takes a minute or two. You can begin playing your character on your new server as soon as the process reports it has completed.
What happens to my society?

In addition to resetting your friends list, if you are a Society Leader, transferring your character to a new server will reset your Society list as well. In order to assist Society Leaders with the task of keeping track of Society members, we have created the /dumpsocietyinfo command. Society Leaders using this command will create a file containing a list of your Society members titled societyinfo.csv,which can be found in the Pirates of the Burning Sea directory in your My Documents folder.
How long will I have to transfer my characters?

You will have over a month to decide which server you would like to transfer to and activate the transfer. It is important to us that our community is able to discuss the logistics of relocating their characters.

We want to allow societies some time to weigh their options and for everyone to evaluate their options in order to find the server that us the best fit. At the end of that transition time, Bonny, Guadeloupe, Kidd, Morgan, Bellamy, Bonnet, and Hornigold will be disabled until such time as there is a need for more servers.

Additional questions and concerns can be shared by joining in the discussion on our forums at this link.

Best,
Aether

http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/art ... e_id=10753