How will Green merge to Blue work in practice?

[Makrill]

Only official answers please, no speculation. If you have the answers to this link to official posts or information about it.

How will Green merge to Blue work in practice?

If i have a toon with the same name on Blue and Green (which must be on the same account):
Will the toons "merge" or not if there is no room for the Green toons?
If they merge, what will happen with the No Drop items on the Green toon?
If i have a toon with the same name and class, will items (including No Drop) be moved to the Blue toon?

[loramin]

The short answer is that no one knows for sure, and if the devs wanted to tell us they probably already would have.

What I will say though is I see two reasonable options. The simplest is simply to give people new EQ Emu accounts. If I've got a "Loramin" account with 8 Blue characters and 8 Green characters, at the end of Green the devs just make a new "LoraminFromGreen19" account, and move all of my green characters onto it.

If I have a character named "Loramin" on Green, but I already have Loramin on Blue, the system could rename the Green one to "LoraminGreen" or "LoraminX" or something, and then I could petition to be renamed to something better in-game.

The only alternative to that I see ... short of the staff to creating an entire web-based admin or something to let you control your characters/accounts ... is for them to just say "we will move characters, in the order they appear on your Green character list, into FREE SLOTS on your Blue account only". In other words, if I have 8 Blue toons, I can't migrate from Green: I have to delete a Blue toon first, and then I also have to delete all of my other Green toons to make sure that the one I leave is the one that gets transferred.

(Again, duplicate names would get X's or something.)

But since the first one strikes me as the easiest and best for everyone (short of the "move your characters around using a web admin" dream), my money would be on that.

[loramin]

Oh and as for:

If they merge, what will happen with the No Drop items on the Green toon?
If i have a toon with the same name and class, will items (including No Drop) be moved to the Blue toon?

Again, I think it's clear the devs are being deliberately cagey on this. Maybe they haven't even made up their minds yet, who knows?

But I will say that I think it's interesting that while they have been clear that Green chars will migrate, they have very deliberately avoided saying whether (say) manastones from Green will become no drop when they come to Blue (or even if they will transfer at all).

It seems to me the staff are very deliberately leaving at least the possibility of items not transferring, or transferring but becoming No Drop, on the table. Again, if I were to bet, I'd bet they haven't even decided for certain yet.

As an engineer, kicking the can down the road isn't always a bad thing. If something doesn't need to be solved for three years, why not wait two and a half, when you'll have a ton more data, to make the decision? There's no benefit to making a (potentially worse) decision now, before you need to, and before you have all the info.

P.S. One thing I really doubt will happen though is any kind of moving items between characters. Green is supposed to be about having a classic experience for 3 years or so and then getting to keep your character afterward on Blue. It's not supposed to be about playing Green to build up a power character on Blue.

[soronil]

The short answer is that no one knows for sure, and if the devs wanted to tell us they probably already would have.

Rogean talked about it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/481146356

Paraphrasing/summarizing :
At the end of green, your chars will go to blue. You'll have up to 16 chars but only 8 visible (alphabetically). You must delete some of the first 8 characters to see the characters not shown.
They have not decided how to handle names, but likely add an "x" or something to the end of one (maybe based on level, or most recently played).
They will announce the plan probably before p99 green launch, so players can decide if they want to reuse their name and have to later deal with the server merge.
Definitely no merging one char into another.

[loramin]

Rogean talked about it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/481146356

Paraphrasing/summarizing :
At the end of green, your chars will go to blue. You'll have up to 16 chars but only 8 visible (alphabetically). You must delete some of the first 8 characters to see the characters not shown.
They have not decided how to handle names, but likely add an "x" or something to the end of one (maybe based on level, or most recently played).
They will announce the plan probably before p99 green launch, so players can decide if they want to reuse their name and have to later deal with the server merge.
Definitely no merging one char into another.

Oh cool. My guess was partly right, but I certainly didn't see 16 character accounts coming (although I kind of wonder how that's even possible without a web-admin tool ...)

Also, that solution seems a little short-sighted: what happens in 2024 (or whenever) when Green v2 merges back into Blue? I guess at that point they don't feel bad about making you delete toons?

[soronil]

Oh cool. My guess was partly right, but I certainly didn't see 16 character accounts coming (although I kind of wonder how that's even possible without a web-admin tool ...)

Also, that solution seems a little short-sighted: what happens in 2024 (or whenever) when Green v2 merges back into Blue? I guess at that point they don't feel bad about making you delete toons?

It's probably almost no work. The chatacter select just pulls from a database table right? Just copying rows over...

I mean it's a really easy thing to work around. If you want more than 8 toons, create a new account. That's not against the rules is it? Why should the devs create some elaborate solution when the players can manage it themselves.

[loramin]

It's probably almost no work. The chatacter select just pulls from a database table right? Just copying rows over...

Right, but what I mean is, how do you even know about toons #9-#16? How do you move toon #9 to slot #8 so that you can actually see/pick them in-game? Such a system seems (to me at least) to predicated on there being a place (and a web-based admin seems like the best option) for being able to control which characters are in which slots.

I mean it's a really easy thing to work around. If you want more than 8 toons, create a new account. That's not against the rules is it? Why should the devs create some elaborate solution when the players can manage it themselves.

I completely agree, and that's why I was surprised by this solution: if it were me I wouldn't have enabled 16 chars per account, I would have made people use multiple accounts.

[soronil]

Right, but what I mean is, how do you even know about toons #9-#16? How do you move toon #9 to slot #8 so that you can actually see/pick them in-game? Such a system seems (to me at least) to predicated on there being a place (and a web-based admin seems like the best option) for being able to control which characters are in which slots..

You can not control it, other than having the foresight to name your toons appropriately. The list is in alphabetical order. As he explained it, you must delete 1 character between 1-8 to see the 9th.

[loramin]

Ohhh, so if you have eight Blue and eight Green, and you want to play your Green toon Zzzzorbot post-merge, you'll have to delete eight other toons (unless you have another toon with a Z name) to make him show up?

But in that same scenario, if you have Abba and Babba on Green, they could make it impossible to play your Blue toon named Zorbot after a merge, until you delete them?

[Nilstoniakrath]

They were specific in stating that you can create a character on Green with the same name as Blue, if you use the same account. No mention was made of what would happen when Green and Blue merge, but obviously, one of the characters would need to have an -x or something added to it, since the game cannot handle duplicate names.

As for the "more than 8 characters" question, this is the same issue as on live, when they merged servers. Only the first 8 will show up. I don't recall for sure, but I thought Sony/Verant/Daybreak/whoever it was provided a way to request server transfers in game to access those characters in excess of 8. BUT, the good news on EQEMU is, accounts are free. If you have an account with characters on Blue, limit the number of characters on that account for Green so that you will not end up with more than 8 when they merge. Create a new account if need be. The devs know this and may not be that sympathetic to those who max out 8 characters on the same account for both Blue and Green.