Player Database Service

[Atriana]

Would it be possible to have the player database hosted as a service that multiple twow servers can subscribe to? that way your characters are accessible from a new server in the event that 1 gets shut down? There would have to be some sort of fail safes engineered to keep people from logging into the same account on different servers and mailing items and what not and trying to duplicate stuff, but I'm sure the giga nerds out there could figure something out.

or am I just crazy.

[Zvyrhol]

It's possible but I don't think current technology would allow it to work efficiently. What you've described would work similar to Bitcoin. Decentralized database that would make private server impossible to shut down. Everyone would be able to store their own database on their PC and changes to that database would rely on 50% of players accepting every action that is performed on the server.

This is the idea. I don't know the details, I only know it's possible but I suppose the latency in such system would be tragic and unconvenient to play with. I'm not an expert though, correct me if I am wrong.

The other, simpler but riskier idea I can think about is to somehow encrypt whole Octo database (all characters, accounts, items, basically all data) and make it open source so if the main owner of Octo goes to jail or something, someone else can copy data from Octo and host their own server with all the progress and accounts saved. The only issue is that all logins and passwords would be encrypted and accessible to everyone so it's huge risk. I don't know much about cryptography. I don't even know if encrypting logins and passwords and making it open source making them safe is possible. But if somehow it is, I think this is the future of private servers.

As an aside.
Octo owners don't want to make this project open source and in my opinion this is just sad knowing the past. They say they are passionate and yet, they keep their code secret while receiving money from donations. Who are they afraid of? Competition? They block it's own community from fixing bugs and implementing Vanilla+ features.

[Dzielkus]

So you want open BN on wow private servers ?

[Atriana]

So you want open BN on wow private servers ?

no i just don't want to lose 5 years of characters again. Imagine this...

twow has their player database backed up on a weekly basis or nightly basis to this service.. they get shut down. Octowow comes along and is like.. I would like to launch 2 new servers one with Twow's database and a fresh clean server. At this point they can purchase the Twow database then they can use this as advertising "pick up where you left off" or some shit like that.

the backup service could even purge accounts that haven't changed in the past 6 months or year to keep the database small or what ever.

or just straight up call it VanillaDB and when a new server comes online they could be like.. we have vanilla DB come play your toons here, all users know their characters are saved in VanillaDB and can be used on any server using the service.

Octo wow's perspective.. we're a new server but just acquired 30,000 accounts. Players perspective.. sweet i can continue playing. Twow's perspective we got shut down but just got a shit load of money for our DB. Everyone wins.