Cataclysm Beta - Retail, VisualID - SourceID

[Reconbravo-illidan (Reconbravo)]

The following is an issue affecting a good portion of the collecting populus. One way or another.
Crieve, the Author of All The Things has written up a presentation I think many could learn from, potentially advocate for.

"Did you know - Unique Source and Visual IDs coming to Cataclysm Classic?

Hey @everyone, since no one at WoWHead or MMO-Champion or Blizzard has mentioned this, I wanted to bring to light something that was discovered on the Cataclysm Beta earlier this week once Transmog was officially made available for testing.

This is a fairly technical problem, so I’ll try to keep it as short and simple as I can.

The ID numbers used to represent appearances (visualID) and sources of appearances (sourceID) for every transmoggable item on the Cataclysm Beta are completely Unique to Classic. They have no cross over with the Retail versions of the same items in any capacity. An item like Corrupted Ashbringer has a sourceID of 8925 on Retail and the same item has a sourceID of 133090 on the Cataclysm Beta.

This means, on a technical level, should an account merge or a character transfer going from Classic to Retail ever be made available, your transferred character would lose every transmog it has ever collected after making the transition. I know that currently they don’t have any plans to allow for this sort of transfer to exist, but should they ever consider this as an option down the road, they could not provide this service without incurring an insurmountable amount of technical difficulty for little to no benefit.

Once this goes live, fixing this would become a huge problem as it would impact player database tables, item database tables, etc for millions of characters on hundreds of thousands of accounts. This needs to be fixed now while on the Beta should there be any realistic chance to get ahead of the problem since anything in the player database table can simply be discarded on beta. Fixing those tables after launch would be problematic and potentially take several hours/days depending on the complexity of the conversion and the amount of collecting players have done over the years.

I know most of you have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s fine. If you know someone that’s working on WoW or works at Blizzard, please relay this information to them so that they can speak to their higher ups and escalate this issue before it becomes a problem for us. If you want to read more about my concerns with this, I’ve written a post on the WoW Forums here: Transmog SourceIDs - Unique IDs to Classic?! "

[Azelon-stormrage]

I don’t see why this is a problem. I don’t think the game should be modified to accommodate an add-on. Add-ons should be modified to accommodate the requirements of the game, not the other way around.

I have already commented on why any transfers from Classic to retail are not a good idea:

Classic to Retail Character Transfer - or at least Share Account Wide Classic Earnings

I don’t think this is a good idea. Reasons: It is unfair to those collectors who didn’t play Classic because it was announced transfers between Classic and Retail were not possible. If it was announced from the beginning they could have farmed their desired items. And at this stage items like the Amani War Bear are not possible to obtain. Some items like the Shadowmourne were easier to obtain in Classic than the original release. We have many guides on what the meta specs are, what mats to fa…

[Safeguard-garrosh]

@Azelon-stormrage

I don’t see why this is a problem. I don’t think the game should be modified to accommodate an add-on. Add-ons should be modified to accommodate the requirements of the game, not the other way around.

The addon simply exposes IDs used by the game, it doesn’t magically make these up. Regardless of what one thinks of a potential merge, there’s no real reason for them to have different IDs. And as Recon pointed out, changing this later would be a huge undertaking.

[Ferkin-old-blanchy]

I think what they are trying to do is make classic more “unique”. I think they are going to hold the rule of never transferring between classic and retail, thus having the ability to make it unique. Just announced that they wont be “requiring” void storage. Yeah its going to suck for these addons going forward and having to be rebuilt, but at the same time its a risk that they were going to have to take because so much of the code is being changed to fit the new framework that is currently on retail.