So I recently logged in to my character on Cataclysm Classic just to check out the transmog system…
Strangely enough, all of my Naxx items were transmoggable. It would make sense if they were just the quest reward items, the tier set stuff etc, but I’m talking about weapons and off-set armors that direct drop from bosses.
How would the game know that I owned this stuff even though I sold it back in early TBC Classic?
Answer: because it was going off of the snapshot that was used to create the clones in the pre-tbc patch, when I still had these items in my possession.
This would be an unlikely scenario, imo. It would be more likely that there would be a record of the event of your character having looted or equipped the item, in some sort of event log than them using a snapshot to track historical events.
Absolutely. It might require some work that may not currently be automated, but for sure it would be possible.
I don’t have enough information or context to give an explanation here.
I think that the snapshots they created that (I think?) they have said they deleted have likely been deleted, and that they don’t want to offer the cloning service any longer, and certainly not for $5.00 or whatever the cost was at the time, since there likely isn’t any automated process already set up, and it would require either well over $5.00 worth of manual effort, or considerably more to develop and maintain such a feature.
But who knows? Maybe they will. Maybe someone within the company would champion the idea, and come up with a presentation that makes sense to some decision makers that give the go ahead.
I don’t really wanna get suckered into a conspiracy theory argument, one way or the other. If you’ve seen my posts about these forums you’d know that while I wasn’t affected by how the cloning service shut down was handled, I am extremely dissatisfied with what went on there.
Having said that, I would challenge your premise here based on the fact that Blizzard does, in fact, track what you vendor for the purposes of item restoration. If you sold off items in TBC, then that character was ultimately migrated to Cata, it’s reasonable to suggest that the data could then be used to award your character transmog progress for Naxxramas.
Do with that information what you will. Regardless of whether or not the data is there, it’s been over two years and they haven’t budged. Your only options are to reroll or to unsub, citing the loss of character data as your reason for doing so.
Retail had a bug, years ago, maybe 2020? they ran into that affected several characters across several realms that randomly yanked them backwards in time to a random point in that characters life. Bringing their level and gear back to whatever snapshot of it that the server dredged up.
So, max level characters went back to their old cataclysm level or MoP and so on and had their old raid gear on, old quests, dead guilds had been reestablished by placing them back into them, characters renamed to whatever they used to be, characters that had been transferred off server, back to said server if it was one of the ones affected, characters deleted years ago, reappearing on their own and so forth.
All character data is preserved in some way, this bug showed that the servers got confused on what was the most up to date version of these characters and that it never fully forgets what you’ve done and what you had.
When they say the clones are deleted, it doesn’t mean there is literally a line item in a database somewhere called [Zipzo-Clone] and that gets deleted.
It just means that to you, the customer, the data is gone as far as you are concerned because blizzard is no longer going to be supporting that feature.
You own none of the data in WoW - it all belongs to blizzard.
Character data sheets are microscopic, they likely keep them indefinitely. The myth propagated by forum goers that they take up space on the servers and are expensive does indeed make me laugh.
A while back like a little over a year ago, I attempted a character restore on a character that shows up that was formerly deleted in “Vanilla Classic 2019” The attempt was not allowed but I was able to view the character on the “ERA” realm Whitemane.
What I think is the situation is that they shut down the Clones to keep Era alive in more aspects of the game, despite the fact that they could make a few bucks off selling them.
I’m not sure what you mean by “data sheet,” but what I am referring to is the database snapshots they took during the maintenance that introduced the TBC Classic prepatch.
According to this support article, “All clones that were not activated before July 26, 2022 were deleted.”
I take that at face value, and am skeptical at claims that it is some nefarious lie. Though, what it means, and what that means in relation to the ability for Blizzard to restore characters as they were is not clarified by such statements.
With regards to a file being small, sure a 1kb file is 1kb. 1000 1 kb files are 1000 kilobytes. 1,000,000,000,000,000 such files are not so small anymore. Not that that matters, but a $0.01/month saving over a spending adds up, especially if it’s per account that ever existed.
Now, to be fair, you may be right, and maybe what they have done was for reasons they haven’t stated, but I don’t think there is any clear indication that anything has happened or is happening other than what has been stated. Though, I’d be open to reading up on any information were it to be presented or made available.
Character data sheets are how your character information is stored, its component of one of the databases of the WoW Server structure. For example, there is a Database that is spells, this is how the spells are cast per the client (your PC install) request; they are not cast local but instead a call for the spell is pushed to the server, then the server checks game state and casts if possible the spell. Movement, and everything works this way.
The Character sheets are individually small, they’re like a .txt file for reference of size.
But I don’t think the reason for removing the service is because of space, I think it has other reasons; and after re-rolling 2 new characters I think its for the best anway.
To me it feels more likely that because wow classic is just a recreation of 1.0-4.0 in the Legion client, they didn’t actually get rid of the transmog system as it existed. I used a thing that lets you explore the assets and, in wow classic (at least at launch) were de-textured assets associated with the void elf and lightforged character screen for instance.
So rather than keeping a clone in limbo, they probably just flagged your gear as being in your collections. >_>
Do you mean the data in the combination of tables such as character_settings, character_skills, etc.? It isn’t clear to me what you mean by “character data sheet” as if that is an entity that is stored somehow.
A .txt file can be very large. That’s just a file format that let’s you know what type of encoding to use, but any file can be whatever size the filesystem supports, so saying a insert-type-of-file is small or large is similar to saying how long is a strand of time?
But anyway, I’m not sure how they handled clones. One way might have been to make a database dump (replication or copy) of the state of the tables at the time they took the servers down for maintenance and patched them with the TBC prepatch. This would be a (roughly) 1-to-1 mapping of the database size. Yes, a single line entry in a single table might be rather insignificant, but copying the entirety of WoW Classic’s data is less insignificant. They could have then added a reference to the additional data, the replicated data, as clones, which they later took offline. I could easily see the maintance of this sort of system being more than the cost of a few subs/month.
OK. I think there may be multiple reasons, but if they provisioned resources that came with costs that accounting understood to be temporary increased fees for cloning, then whatever meetings discussed topics like, “Do we need to continue paying these additional fees for the cloning resources? What is the ROI on this?” might have led to them shutting them down.
It isn’t clear to me that what you are referring to is something that exists.
EDIT:
Look, for example, if I pull up the SQL for a private server, I can see there are several tables of relational data that are used for any given character. It isn’t clear that this would be stored as a single file per character somewhere, and I’m not sure that that would even make sense. And if it did, you’re talking about what? A million files or so? How many people played WoW Classic? And how many characters were ever created?
And would it make sense to keep a backup of those millions of files from a particular moment in time on a live system?
Oh, that’s interesting. I noticed that the reference I was looking at was for a WotLK pserver from about 12 or so years ago, and then looked at what seems to be the more canonical pserver source for vanilla, which has a characters.sql and seems to be somewhat simpler, though that also has several tables of relational data per character, as one might expect.
Being unfamiliar with the codebase, and having not explored it yet, it isn’t clear to me that the client would reference data tables (I would imagine it shouldn’t) directly, so whatever pservers are using may be entirely different (likely is entirely different) from whatever Blizzard uses, though the idea that they are using an RDBMS for relational data and have modeled character data to be stored across multiple tables would seem to make sense.
Talking retail here people come back from really long breaks, the current achievement and transmog systems are built on it, there’s the restore feature from individual items to whole characters and the list goes on. Keep in mind there’s also tons of data Blizz pulls from all that for their metrics as well. They got your chat logs.
Seems to me the client “knowing” your toon had once equipped certain Naxx pieces to be trivial as its kind of designed to do that. All iterations of WoW you can get with a sub share that client so it seems possible to me that you might get nice little surprise crossovers like this. Whether or not you can bring back the clone system because of this is another story by itself.
Now I suppose someone might say that what Ive posited means it very possible for them to actually rebuild or restore your character at that point in time and maybe they could but assuming thats the case it begs the question of whether it be would be worth it for them to do that. It would be hard to convince me that’s true.
Im of the belief that Era’s uniqueness as its own permanent version is somehow a kind of hindrance seeing as cloning was technically a TBC feature and disappeared with Wrath and now even Wrath is a memory. The cloning service was tied to two specific versions of the game. In other words, its not as simple as piping in some data and flipping a switch.
I think that whatever structure the cloning system used and was based on couldn’t be tacked onto Era alone which made the decision to part with it altogether that much easier since you couldn’t sell them at $5. They would have to do some “heavy lifting” to keep it rolling and it didnt make financial sense. People abandoned Era - never forget that folks. And you wonder why you dont have clones? Cmon now.
Could they still conceivably overcome all obstacles and do it? Im sure they could. Why though? I guess Im a denier or whatever dumb label people wanna work with. I’ve been with Blizz on this one because I didnt want it in the first place and they did absolutely nothing wrong when they did away with it.
Too late to be crying over spilled milk and its not like we deserve any better is my take.
let me cook
