Thoughts on characters being locked into one ship?

[Nuclearranger]

Honestly this bugs me more than anything. I normally make 1 or 2 characters and play them till max. I don't want 10 characters (one per ship).....

Opinions from others on this?

[Fujiko]

I don't like that characters are locked to one ship. Feels like it goes against the "global" servers idea. Unless they just let every region pile into all 10 of those ships.

It also makes organizing with friends or communities that much harder.

I felt PSO had the best setup for this, with connecting to your home region (mine is NA), then have the option of moving to EU or JP ships. It is probably too late for them to rework any ship ideas at this point, assuming they keep to the summer release.

[Maverick_Arcane]

I believe this is because, since each ship is a server, it's kind of a special scenario to have a character moved from one server to another. In PSO1 characters were stored locally and data about them was sent to the server you chose. But not the characters are stored on their servers, probably to stop character modification or hacking. It's a little annoying, but completely justifiable if it makes the game more legitimate. This is also why I'm not expecting an offline mode.

[Xaton]

its like any MMO Game oi WOW did this even the new TERA

[BWS-1]

I can't understand how the data - stored online - has to be locked to one ship on a global server.

Access character data online, send said data to whichever server I'd want to go to and there you have it! No offline data used, just a couple ''directions'' sent from the user as of where to point that ''online character data''. It's not f***ing rocket science.

The only thing then that could prevent someone to get on a server with their character data would be if it's full. No big deal, you pick another one. But if the ships are ''parallel universes'' where anything online there cannot be seen by anything else online another ship, it would be pointless to have friends as you'd only see them if they are on the same ship as you... and I'd be failing to see what is remotely ''global'' about their servers anymore.

I mean, if they want to simply restrain people to have an excuse to capitalize on it later, at least do it right: make it so that you can see friends from any ships with a card system connected to your SEGAID or whatever account used to login instead of having it character-specific. I dunno, are they afraid to mimic Blizzard too much or is it how it'll be? They already got the separate server thing going, so why not go all the way?

[Griffin]

Ask friends to decide on a Ship. Done.

[kyuuketsuki]

I can't understand how the data - stored online - has to be locked to one ship on a global server.

Access character data online, send said data to whichever server I'd want to go to and there you have it! No offline data used, just a couple ''directions'' sent from the user as of where to point that ''online character data''. It's not f***ing rocket science
No offense, but unless you set up servers for online games for a living, I don't think you're qualified to say how difficult or not it is to do. I can confidently say it's probably not as easy as you seem to think.

PSO was obviously a completely different situation because the character data was stored locally and much of the game was run locally. That's not the case with PSO2, where characters are stored at the server level, and much more of the game depends on code run by and received from the server. This is the price we pay for the security of server-side data, since it has been thoroughly demonstrated people can't be trusted not to screw up other people's gaming experience when they have the ability to mess with the game.

Considering every other online game that uses a model like this requires you to select a single ship/server/whatever and cannot move your chars around willy-nilly, it seems pretty certain there is a good reason for it.

Pick a server and talk to any friends you intend to play with to ensure you all get on the same server. It doesn't seem that big a deal to me, and I certainly don't understand why you'd think you need 1 character on every server.

[alphaxaon]

Doesn't bug mee~! :-)
But that's because, like Griffin said, me and my friends decided where to meet up in advance.

I'm sure there's a justified reason for this because all mmo's do that. It's probably the most efficient way to run mmorpg servers.

[Dokudoku]

It's probably so they can make a costly AC item that lets you switch ships.

[Dragwind]

It's slightly annoying, but it doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I see it two different ways from playing other MMOs. Keep in mind this is factoring in if you decide to play alts.

1. Do you have a bunch of friends on one server? If the majority of them are there that play daily, or on your time schedule, stay on that ship. If you play one or more alts, also stick to this server.

2. If you have friends spread out between servers, figure out which one you want to make your home for your main. As for playing with your other friends, you can always make an alt on their server, and only play that character when they're around.

[Alenoir]

Nothing out of the norm, with each ship being its own server and whatnot.

In fact, I don't think I can list out any MMO(RPG) that allows you to use one character on different servers.

[BWS-1]

No offense, but unless you set up servers for online games for a living, I don't think you're qualified to say how difficult or not it is to do. I can confidently say it's probably not as easy as you seem to think.

PSO was obviously a completely different situation because the character data was stored locally and much of the game was run locally. That's not the case with PSO2, where characters are stored at the server level, and much more of the game depends on code run by and received from the server.

From what I've seen of PSO2, it doesn't seem as much different from the original PSO other than the extra barriers put in the way for the sake of security - which I find legitimate, while still being unfortunate - and the novel content. I mean, how big is the beta alone? Nearly 4 gigs? Sure it's nothing compared to WoW, but for the TYPE of game we're looking at (read: not a free-roaming world where constant PvP and PvE is open and possible across a land the size of RUSSIA), I don't believe THAT much more will be handled by the server. Unless... off the 3.35 gigs is 3 gigs worth of video files <_<

While I understand there IS definitely some work behind it all that I may fail to comprehend, would that mean that the way that I've appeared to have taken for granted, that which was used back in the days where a mere 33.3k modem could send data over and back and allow everyone to be on any servers around the globe, was ''the hard way'' of doing things and that now it would be unthinkable to have but a fraction of what has been done already a decade ago with today's technology instead? If so, then... fine. I guess that makes me an ''unrealistic'' dreamer. I'll have to ''deal with it'' at some point I guess haha.

[Nuclearranger]

PSOBB and PSU both did the characters on any server you want method. So they know how to do it.

I am a software engineer myself and I can tell you, this is NOT that hard.

LOGIN -> CHARACTER SERVER -> GAME SERVER

instead of...

LOGIN -> GAME SERVER -> SELECT CHARACTER

This was done as a ploy to sell AC character movements.

[AnnabellaRenee87]

At one point they where talking about allowing people to pay to move to another server.

WOW lets you do this, and its like $20.