Interoperability standard

[kriavj]

I was thinking as a way to promote a larger user base and encourage new shards, there should be an interoperability standard. The servers can give an export of a players toon and their wealth. A shard then decide to delete the export items or toons. So a player take his toon with him. A receiving shard can decide to accept or not based on many factors exporting shard and which items.

All this can be done with modern dual key encryption with digital signing.

the idea is to allow people to come into the uo universe and not feel any time on new or unkown shards is wasted. Lets say a very popular shard is now just losing population. People quit but because the macroing is hard. of course it varies shard to shard.

This of course allows for multishard universes provided you can get a group of shards to agree on interoperability.

i dunno just throwing it out there

 

[Po0ka]

the only resultings would be:
1: drama.
2: compromises.
3: lack of uniqueness.

Drama is bad, as it can make many players flee a server.
Compromises are bad, as both party don't have what they want in the end.
I can only see server prepackaged packs dominating such a playerbase sharing method.

In the end, may as well make a character on each, keeping the distinct and unique shards aspects, and making sure that the shard isn't remotely affiliated nor abiding to "agreements" along the way.

To me, such a system is only additional restrictions for everyone.

 

[Vorspire]

It has been talked about before quite a lot and it always comes down to what @Po0ka has said.

It is also a maintenance heavy type of system to manage, and even with shard owners having to approve character transfers, there's nothing to stop any one person from spinning up a shard to create a character transfer without having to put in any effort on the character. This doesn't even touch on the fact that some shard owners would likely abuse the service in a similar way.

The only time this kind of collaboration is viable is when it is done by a single entity; a company or like-minded group of individuals who have already established a trust network.