[DEV] Question about "Characters created during phase 4"

[Blaize]

I looked at it this way:

The progress and stuff accomplished in P4 will be saved and carried over. All being there are no need for rollbacks/resets.
(There is no mention of Data wipe in the timeline/roadmap like with other phases)
After BETA they will probably bring the servers down for maybe 2-ish weeks to finalise things.
Early access maybe means instead of 2-ish weeks, us addicts only need to go without our fix for 1 or 1.5weeks, maybe?!

Thats all guess work of course but thats how I personally thought/hope it might work

[indira]

i would guess we have to wait till phase 4 to find out.

im not even gonna bother till i can save my progress.

[Cer]

I think they would need to be explicitly clear if they meant just appearance. Since it's open beta, i think they would make a lot of enemies wiping progression. Lots of potential on-the-fence customers will quit if they have to start over.

[Orophin]

I think they would need to be explicitly clear if they meant just appearance. Since it's open beta, i think they would make a lot of enemies wiping progression. Lots of potential on-the-fence customers will quit if they have to start over.

They just need to be clear about it. There are several games that wipe your progress in open beta before retail. IIRC, the only thing that was saved from 1.0 beta to retail was your character template.

[Seirra_Lanzce]

I've been asking since road maps published :X

[ArkhamNative]

In my experience, "closed beta" = definite wipe, "open beta" = almost always wipe, "early access" = never wipe. So ARR's "open beta = hopefully no wipe" (as I interpret it) was a very pleasant surprise.

If they did only mean appearance, it's a very unfortunate translation, as in, I wouldn't consider it a point worth making a big deal about.

The 1.0 CE gave "1 week early access" as a perq. However, with every v1 purchaser and the rest of the planet in open beta, and probably carrying forward their character progress, it kind of serves no purpose to restrict logins to some of those for a week or so.

Anyway, I'll be glad if SE wants to clarify it soon. Might be better to get it out of the way before the headache of Server Transfer v2.0 descends upon us all.

[Doki]

Beta Phase 4 starts:
You import your 1.0 data, and start playing and doing stuff. You can't change your name or appearance.
You play and level and get loots all the way to end of phase 4, when Official launch starts.
As long as no game breaking exploits are found that would allow stuff like leveling to 50 in an hour, duping items, or generating massive amounts of gil, character data from Phase 4 will carry over into official release intact.

So for instance, 2 weeks into phase 4, they notice that there's an NPC that buys an item for more than another NPC sells it for, and the economy tanks as that infinte gil floods the market. At that time, they would likely bring the server down, fix the issue, wipe character data, and bring it back up. You could then create a new character or re-import your 1.0 character and keep going.

Once official release happens, you would log in with your Phase 4 or 1.0 character, and go talk to an NPC that would handle changing your name and appearance.

At least that is how I interpreted everything the devs have said over the last few months of updates.

[Joshster]

I would love to see some official feedback on the OP. As vague as the details are, I believe any character progress during Phase 4 will carry into the release. Unless I hear otherwise, I plan on treating Phase 4 as such. I think the early access will be separate from the open beta, entirely.

[Spectre]

This is my guess, but official clarification would be nice:

You might be able to keep the character it's self you create in phase 4, progress and whatnot are unlikely to carry over. They do state there may be early access offered between the end of Beta 4 and release, but typically no beta progress carries over to the live version.

Where my reasoning comes from:

Q: When characters are carried over to ARR from Version 1.0, will we only be able to change our character's appearance one time at launch? Can we use our one time change during phase 4 of the Beta as well? Or will it be possible to do it twice, during phase 4 and at launch?

A: Please keep in mind the Beta is a testing period meant to check data. All character data has been examined thoroughly, and there are no bugs. However, I would like our players to understand that they will not be able to change their character's appearance until ARR is officially released. The problem with allowing this before then is that if something goes wrong when changing a character's appearance, it'll be difficult to determine if whether it was the result of a bug, an error with the data transfer, or some other process that occurred between beta and release.

they give little hints about not changing the character data until release, just in case there is a problem. Now ganted they are just talking about apperance here, but if apperance is that big of an issue to change and save, then progress may be a bigger issue.

[Kinseykinz]

This is my guess, but official clarification would be nice:

Where my reasoning comes from:
they give little hints about not changing the character data until release, just in case there is a problem. Now ganted they are just talking about apperance here, but if apperance is that big of an issue to change and save, then progress may be a bigger issue.

They aren't truely worried about changing character appearance in BETA somehow affecting launch. They are more concerned that if someone had an issue changing their character during beta (lost their inventory for example), they wouldn't know what caused the issue (in the Beta), and therefore would have a hard time fixing the issue. They are being extremely careful with our initial character data because they don't want anyone to lose their character/inventory/or progress from 1.0. This however, does not affect progress, as a matter of fact, saving our progress in Phase 4, actually helps them protect our character data as they would at least have 2 save points to reference and use if issues arose.

Basically, importing characters and allowing us to progress on them could be considered a 'test' in and of itself. Adjusting imported characters, looks, names etc. is a whole separate issue and stress (test). Therefore, doing both at the same time, could make problem solving hard if a bug was found.