Transfer - To Be or Not to Be

[Mokoi]

The moment is probably inappropriate to enter into this type of discussion but, after the latest events and a corrupted database, we can begin to ask questions about Neocron's future and the transfer.

All that we do is about the future of Neocron and ensure it gets back on track for a strong increase in stability and the return of active developement.
It has been just hours since we resolved the latest emergency. While I believe there should always be room to ask questions about Neocrons future in gerneral or on specific topics such as the proposed character transfer or balancing, I hope you can understand that we still have some major issues to resolve. We said that we would address the topic of transfers and we will - but not right now.

I am at the heart of this question myself, being an old player, and I was very motivated by the launch of a new server and a new economy.
But I must admit that, after all the maintenance, migrations, and crashes, I had to abandon the idea of beginning to play again.

I am sorry to hear that.
When I returned to the volunteers from retirement a few months ago I expected things to be difficult, but from the inside, things looked even worse - I found we had virtually nothing left that was not either completely fubared or on its way out (apart from a bunch of really dedicated and truly awesome people).
There was no access to any vital pieces of the infrastructure while the very infrastructure (outgame support, forums, website, launcher, basic account management) or what was left at that point was going down fast in the face of Reakktor Media GmbH shutting down business. Over the past weeks and months we have fought hard to keep NC not only afloat in the condition it was at the beginning of the year, but turned around. Be assured, we too would have prefered not having to deal with some of the difficulties that came up along the way. We are still far from being able to offer a AAA game service and it sure takes a little confidence in the game, the current volunteer staff and most importantly a love for neocron, to enjoy the game despite these limitations.

I still want to thank the Neocron support team, who were very reactive towards the different problems, and I'd like to point out their courage, as volunteer work is quite often thankless.

Well, thank you. We too are fond of our community and their strong support for our old lady and our efforts to get the game up to speed again.

Therefore, I wonder whether it's possible (technically or not) to implement a system to transfer characters from Terra and Mars to Titan,

It is technically possible to develop a system to transfer characters between servers, however no such system exists.
It will cost additional development time to implement such a system. The current stance on this is that we will re-address this issue when we see time fit.

so that players like me, who have lost several accounts and characters (WoC or not), may participate in this new adventure without starting with a definite handicap: motivation.
In fact, I no longer have as much time to play as during the creation of the first Neocron server. I have an active lifestyle that doesn't allow me to spend entire hours/days on a character to get to the same level as my accounts that disappeared (Terra server). The ephemeral situation of Neocron also doesn't motivate people to invest hours training characters like before.

The future of Neocron largely depends on the greater support by and from the people that play the game.
So long you view it as "ephemeral", any investment is pointless. We obviously disagree with that assesment and personally, I will continue to focus my efforts on catering for the community that shares our trust in the game.
That said, I understand that there may also be a significant amount of casual players (or players otherwise without much time at hand) who are primarily interested in endgame PvP and are held off by having to raise 0/2 chars again.

Would it be possible to offer, for example, a transfer that includes the following options?:

- All of the characters and equipment in the inventory and implants, with the money of the character at that moment.

- All of the characters without equipment or implants, with the MC5 starting money.

- One, two, or three transfers of characters, without any equipment or implants in the inventory, and with no money.

This transfer could give old players who no longer have time the opportunity to take part in this adventure, without hindering the arrival of new players.

Several friends of mine are in the same situation as me, waiting for information about a possible transfer and not wanting to completely start with a new character again. The simple existence of a transfer could revive that passion, despite the loss of equipment and implants.

As pointed out before, we will re-address the topic at a later point. Until then Mars and Terra are still on the grid.
I will not go into the specific scenarios you have outlined for no such decision has been made.
The only thing we have pretty much ruled out, is a full transfer including all items and money - this will not happen ever, sorry.

We can confirm however, that no character transfer will be available at the launch of Titan [EU].

Why ?

Our original idea for TITAN was a launch together with the release of patch #175. It did not get to this and we were forced to shift all efforts from work on the patch to DDoS mitigation and migrating each and every system of our infrastructure to new locations in Germany (minus Terra and Mars which remain hosted on Kirks behalf). To be frank here, the Canadian host was a catastrophy as we had no full access to the system and no SLA available to deal with the problems, but that is a different story. In short: we had to bring new hardware to the table and we chose to invest that hardware and the significant amount of work required to get it on the grid in the most future proof setup, which is the fresh Titan server. The overall feedback and population stats for the server show us, that this decision was probably the right one for Neocron at this point in time.

Again, it has been just hours since the last major stability was resolved and while we would very much like to get back to work on #175 and also backend tools (e.g. allowing us to transfer character data), our roadmap was dictated by events outside of our control for the past weeks.

In summary, I hope this message won't be simply edited and closed.

I do hope some of your questions were answered.