Players on EU and NA can't meet.
Because NA players have their data stored in the NA data center, and EU players have their data stored in the EU data center. Moving data between the two takes up to half an hour. Players would likely be unhappy having to wait so long to join others, join instances, play together, etc.
I just found out I can’t even meet him in our Guild Hall. That’s just kittening ridiculous.
Again, if I’m able to join a Guild, then why can’t I meet up with its members? They should make it so that EU players can’t join NA guilds and vice-versa. That way people become aware of such a limitation.
Like, what the kitten. What CAN I do with him? Nothing? Matter of fact, what can I do with the rest of the guildies? This is absolutely ridiculous.
Not sure what to tell you, except it’s best to join a Guild in your own region?
It’s way better than it used to be, before MegaServers and joining Guilds on a different server, at least. =)
Not sure what to tell you, except it’s best to join a Guild in your own region?
It’s way better than it used to be, before MegaServers and joining Guilds on a different server, at least. =)
What bothers me is why can you join a Guild on a different continent if you can’t do anything with them? It’s like you get no warning whatsoever.
Unfortunately (or fortunately – depends on the perspective), not everything in the game is explained. We do, however, have a superlative Wiki.
If you just joined this Guild, it should not be too difficult to join another in your Region. You can still chat with the first Guild’s members, if you so desire; and do PvP missions, and other PvP, I believe.
You could also transfer to an EU server (at no cost if you delete all your characters) or with Gems from Gold-to-Gems exchange, or cash for Gems.
Again, good luck.
Because NA players have their data stored in the NA data center, and EU players have their data stored in the EU data center. Moving data between the two takes up to half an hour. Players would likely be unhappy having to wait so long to join others, join instances, play together, etc.
Right…
Yet if I remember correctly, GW1 did have a International Channels.
So it’s more like they don’t seem to have a middle-ground server for both regions, that could respond to both regions in a reasonable amount of time – in terms of decisions made in game (as in, did you kill something? what’s your health? where you are…).
Furthermore…. There’s already a bit of “communication” going on between the two regions. You can talk/whisper cross-regions, you can even see them on the map if you’re in party – their blue dot shows up but they don’t. You can talk and see people’s names in guilds/friends that are from another region, along with where they are….
In terms of “Moving data between the two takes up to half an hour.” – I’m not sure what you’re referring to, or how you’re quantifying things and what’s being moved…
DB’s? Tables of DB’s? Simply entries? It’s like you have some insight into this… I mean if you meant the logical decisions the server makes about the game, then no, not an hour – your latency will just shoot up to as if you’re playing on a foreign region from home (ping of +400ms). The only scenario I can see that takes more hour is someone requesting to region transfer. At which point the system will eventually (on whatever check cycle it’s on -as in check every 4 hours) pick up that someone requested a region transfer and will take a couple of minutes to send everything where yet another system will eventually check if someone is transferring… (But all this I made up in my head)
Because NA players have their data stored in the NA data center, and EU players have their data stored in the EU data center. Moving data between the two takes up to half an hour. Players would likely be unhappy having to wait so long to join others, join instances, play together, etc.
Right…
Yet if I remember correctly, GW1 did have a International Channels.
So it’s more like they don’t seem to have a middle-ground server for both regions, that could respond to both regions in a reasonable amount of time – in terms of decisions made in game (as in, did you kill something? what’s your health? where you are…).Furthermore…. There’s already a bit of “communication” going on between the two regions. You can talk/whisper cross-regions, you can even see them on the map if you’re in party – their blue dot shows up but they don’t. You can talk and see people’s names in guilds/friends that are from another region, along with where they are….
In terms of “Moving data between the two takes up to half an hour.” – I’m not sure what you’re referring to, or how you’re quantifying things and what’s being moved…
DB’s? Tables of DB’s? Simply entries? It’s like you have some insight into this… I mean if you meant the logical decisions the server makes about the game, then no, not an hour – your latency will just shoot up to as if you’re playing on a foreign region from home (ping of +400ms). The only scenario I can see that takes more hour is someone requesting to region transfer. At which point the system will eventually (on whatever check cycle it’s on -as in check every 4 hours) pick up that someone requested a region transfer and will take a couple of minutes to send everything where yet another system will eventually check if someone is transferring… (But all this I made up in my head)
It takes a few hours for a transfer from a NA world to a EU world or vice versa from what I believe for the average player. Remember, all of our character data is stored on ANet’s servers.
The servers aren’t likely SSD’s and it takes a while transfer data, which for this game would include: our inventories – bank & bag (and which slot something is in), what our characters look like, what’s equipped, what traits are chosen, what skills are chosen, which utility is in which slot, what step the character is on in the personal story/living story, what their map completion is, etc.
Just relaying what the Devs stated long ago. You can find the time information in the Wiki, even.
Good luck.
That’s an interesting question. If all account data is on either the NA or EU servers, I’d suspect that ought to include guild membership. Why, exactly, is that one aspect of one’s account cross server clusters when nothing else is?
Because NA players have their data stored in the NA data center, and EU players have their data stored in the EU data center. Moving data between the two takes up to half an hour. Players would likely be unhappy having to wait so long to join others, join instances, play together, etc.
Right…
Yet if I remember correctly, GW1 did have a International Channels.
So it’s more like they don’t seem to have a middle-ground server for both regions, that could respond to both regions in a reasonable amount of time – in terms of decisions made in game (as in, did you kill something? what’s your health? where you are…).Furthermore…. There’s already a bit of “communication” going on between the two regions. You can talk/whisper cross-regions, you can even see them on the map if you’re in party – their blue dot shows up but they don’t. You can talk and see people’s names in guilds/friends that are from another region, along with where they are….
In terms of “Moving data between the two takes up to half an hour.” – I’m not sure what you’re referring to, or how you’re quantifying things and what’s being moved…
DB’s? Tables of DB’s? Simply entries? It’s like you have some insight into this… I mean if you meant the logical decisions the server makes about the game, then no, not an hour – your latency will just shoot up to as if you’re playing on a foreign region from home (ping of +400ms). The only scenario I can see that takes more hour is someone requesting to region transfer. At which point the system will eventually (on whatever check cycle it’s on -as in check every 4 hours) pick up that someone requested a region transfer and will take a couple of minutes to send everything where yet another system will eventually check if someone is transferring… (But all this I made up in my head)It takes a few hours for a transfer from a NA world to a EU world or vice versa from what I believe for the average player. Remember, all of our character data is stored on ANet’s servers.
The servers aren’t likely SSD’s and it takes a while transfer data, which for this game would include: our inventories – bank & bag (and which slot something is in), what our characters look like, what’s equipped, what traits are chosen, what skills are chosen, which utility is in which slot, what step the character is on in the personal story/living story, what their map completion is, etc.
OP isn’t talking about region transfer but rather interaction in game – which can happen (and has happened in GW1 case) if there’s a middle-ground game server (the one that makes game decisions, not exactly used for storage).
As for trying to justify why it takes hours… besides processes checking every X-hours, or an employee going in after X minutes/hours and doing it… the transfer of such raw data should not take much. Unless they have it really poorly implemented – which given their shard/roll-over updates (as in if they could come up with this idea…), I’m guessing it’s just what I described above that takes time.
According to the wiki it doesn’t take. “A few hours.” I’ve done it once and it took a few minutes. I don’t remember the time exactly but it was closer to the 5 minutes stated below than the 30 minutes.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World
To transfer to a different world, go to the character selection screen (using F12 or when you first logon) and select the desired world; you will be logged out while the game makes these changes, which might take 5-30 minutes. You can transfer once every seven days at a cost determined by the destination server population. Free accounts cannot transfer to different worlds.
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.
ANet may give it to you.
That’s an interesting question. If all account data is on either the NA or EU servers, I’d suspect that ought to include guild membership. Why, exactly, is that one aspect of one’s account cross server clusters when nothing else is?
Guild servers are separate from game ones. That’s why the game can sometimes claim you’re alone in your guild (or not even a member) – it means that the guild data server is down). Possibly that server is simply not duplicated across regions.
As for trying to justify why it takes hours… besides processes checking every X-hours, or an employee going in after X minutes/hours and doing it… the transfer of such raw data should not take much.
Not knowing the amount of data that needs to be trasferred, it’s really hard to say. Just remember, that it isn’t just server-to-server transfer within a single data cluster. Those servers are in different physical locations (EU ones are in germany, if i remember correctly).
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Remember, remember, 15th of November
(edited by Astralporing.1957)
There is no reason to suspect a big save file. No personal textures or music or movies that could make transfert slightly more bandwidth consuming.
An inventory slot (guessing) would have what… id of the bag it’s in, slot in the bag, id of the item type, eventually a count for stacked items (max 250, one byte is enough), probably a few flags… im surely forgetting things but we’re talking a few bytes here!!
To that you add achievements (id + progression), quest status (% of hearts), other stats (currencies, pvp progressions, masteries, traits and build settings), actual item info (weapon type, stats type, skin id, original skin, flag for soul/account bound, sigils etc), character style and name, pet names… and more surely.
While this is a lot of information indeed, none of it actually takes a lot of memory to store.
This is literally a few megabytes to transfer. Your thousands of hours spend on guild wars is no more than that.
So why so long? Well guessing this doesnt have to do with the data itself but rather the process of transfering, which we dont know much about.
About the servers simply communicating with each other: I dont think it’d take much longer to retrieve stuff from one server or another and display it client side. The problem is pushing new info. Supposed you loot a legendary while playing on a europe instance, and at this exact moment the connection is lost between the two servers. That means the data would either be lost or need to be resent (so stored temporarily) and here come the issues.
I dont know how it works behind the scenes, just giving my two cens, seems more of a “we dont want to spend time on it” rather than “we can’t” to me, because these are indeed challenging issues. I do think transferring from europe to the us is ridiculously overpriced though. I understand the need for gems to move servers (because wvw) but it’s indeed an issue that players cant play with each other if they want.
I understand it would require a lot of work though and id rather see other things (build template ffs) first.
There is no reason to suspect a big save file. No personal textures or music or movies that could make transfert slightly more bandwidth consuming.
An inventory slot (guessing) would have what… id of the bag it’s in, slot in the bag, id of the item type, eventually a count for stacked items (max 250, one byte is enough), probably a few flags… im surely forgetting things but we’re talking a few bytes here!!
To that you add achievements (id + progression), quest status (% of hearts), other stats (currencies, pvp progressions, masteries, traits and build settings), actual item info (weapon type, stats type, skin id, original skin, flag for soul/account bound, sigils etc), character style and name, pet names… and more surely.
While this is a lot of information indeed, none of it actually takes a lot of memory to store.
This is literally a few megabytes to transfer. Your thousands of hours spend on guild wars is no more than that.
While this would be true if they were storing player data in a txt file for each player, no respectable MMO would ever consider doing so. The data is almost certainly stored in a multitude of tables in a database, and databases are fragile things. I am not surprised it takes time for them to do a full transfer of an account between the two server systems.
There is no reason to suspect a big save file. No personal textures or music or movies that could make transfert slightly more bandwidth consuming.
An inventory slot (guessing) would have what… id of the bag it’s in, slot in the bag, id of the item type, eventually a count for stacked items (max 250, one byte is enough), probably a few flags… im surely forgetting things but we’re talking a few bytes here!!
To that you add achievements (id + progression), quest status (% of hearts), other stats (currencies, pvp progressions, masteries, traits and build settings), actual item info (weapon type, stats type, skin id, original skin, flag for soul/account bound, sigils etc), character style and name, pet names… and more surely.
While this is a lot of information indeed, none of it actually takes a lot of memory to store.
This is literally a few megabytes to transfer. Your thousands of hours spend on guild wars is no more than that.While this would be true if they were storing player data in a txt file for each player, no respectable MMO would ever consider doing so. The data is almost certainly stored in a multitude of tables in a database, and databases are fragile things. I am not surprised it takes time for them to do a full transfer of an account between the two server systems.
Im not sure i follow. Obviously that data is stored in a DB, but we’re talking transfer here. I certainly hope they’re not sending lines after lines during a transfert but rather of package containing the whole thing.
If they can pull your inventory, your achievements, character stats and everything in the game very fast, what prevents them to retrieve all that info, serialize it and send it? even by chunks of smaller files. It doesn’t take hours.
First of all, it has been quoted as taking 5 to 30 minutes, not a few hours; let’s just get that out of the way.
Now, it’s the transfer of all the data between two database that are stored on entirely different networks in different physical locations. There’s a whole lot that goes into that regarding data security, integrity, etc. that doesn’t necessarily happen to as great of an extent when it’s just being accessed piecemeal during a play session.
The long and short of it is that as the servers are currently set up, it would be a poor use of resources to swap an account back and forth every time they’d like to group with the other side. Nobody wants the loading times that would be required.
The OP’s confusion is understandable: there’s no way any player can know why one set of data gets handled from any other; it’s all just “data” to most of us. The umbrage expressed in the original post, however, harder to fathom. Surely, the OP doesn’t think that ANet would restrict players this harshly without a very, very good reason.
Guild membership is tracked the same way that our list of friends/blocks is tracked, via an entirely different database. That data doesn’t have to stay up-to-date to the split second; latency of seconds is fine for transmitting mail, whispers, and keeping track of names (including the guild members).
In contrast, all the gameplay information does need to transmitted quickly. The devs tried and were not able to find a way to do this effectively before launch. (Near as I can tell, they were still trying when the first pre-launch invitation-only public tests were held.)
tl;dr guild membership is international because it can be; gameplay is restricted because it cannot be cross-region.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
Some GW2 streamers can transfer to NA/EU with the same account whenever they want. I guess it only takes them less than 5 min to switch.
This is just wrong.
If they can’t meet, why make it possible to join Guilds on worlds in different continents? I’m in an American world, and I’ve recently joined a guild whose players are all in EU worlds. Meaning, I can’t meet up with any of them in PvE.
What bothers me is why can you join a Guild on a different continent if you can’t do anything with them? It’s like you get no warning whatsoever.
This intercontinental feature makes sense if you move from EU to NA and wanna keep in touch with your buddies.
- but if you never lived in EU and join a EU guild from your NA server it don’t make sense to cause a fuzz at all..
I bet there is plenty of other friendly guilds in NA.
Trial, Error, Then progress!