whats so difficult about merging it? couldn't they just have a field that asks for dci number when you create/update an account - that's pretty basic isn't it?
i mean its a minor thing, but it definitely feels like another in the many small missteps that alienate players and disconnect the company further from them, especially veteran players.
It may be a "minor" thing on the surface but underneath the hood, it's possible that the DCI database is horribly complex. When the original database was born, it very likely had a very small number of tables with a limited amount of interaction across them. But I guarantee that as the years went by, the original developers probably left. New developers came in. Time marched on and some pointy haired boss told those later developers to add a new feature or start tracking something else. They probably looked at the code and the table structure, looked at the clock, and said, "screw it, I'll just add a new table with some new keys and call it done." And that's exactly what they did. Added a new feature without ever actually touching the old code or old database. Then someone else came along looked at those tables , query strings and old code with orders to add a new feature. So instead of changing the table which would likely break old code, they added another table, or two, or three then added more code. Then some feature was obsoleted and that table sat disused but never dropped because dropping that table would break code somewhere else.
So twenty years later, you have a database with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of tables, half of which the programmer has no idea what they're for or why they're there with so much legacy code that they just write they're own functions to do their own thing because they have no idea what a similarly named function actually does and they don't have the time to figure it out because the boss said they have to produce the code by Monday 9AM and it's already 2AM. Oh, and don't forget that they have to fix an entire block of code they wrote 3 years ago on a whim because they read all about refactoring in "Code Complete" Chapter 24 but completely ignored all the commenting requirements because they thought they would never forget what they wrote at 2AM.
So yeah, there are times that a simple box that allows a specific entry can be extremely convoluted and far more complex that it seems on the surface.
This is cute, but it is nonsense.
We can still query the database successfully, even through the customer-facing web API. That means WotC can still query its database on the backend. Therefore they can still extract data from it to populate the new architecture with legacy customer data.
(I teach database design and I right now in the private sector I am transferring legacy content to a new database architecture)
You assume all businesses maintain ideal database architecture and content? You also assume that their existing programmers can actually untangle what previous programmers actually did? It must be nice but such ideals do not exist whole hog across all companies. It's something to always strive for, sure. But it's hardly a reality for everyone.
While it's true the system might be complex and horribly-maintained, a project my team and I had to finish last year revolved around porting a legacy db and API that only exists on an old mainframe and network system. We had no access to code, just a broken API; so we reverse engineered it through reflection and repeated database calls with various inputs until we created the whole API. It took some time, but is definitely doable. My bet is that WOTC knew they were doing this for quite a while, and could have done something similar if necessary.
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StaffWhile it's true the system might be complex and horribly-maintained, a project my team and I had to finish last year revolved around porting a legacy db and API that only exists on an old mainframe and network system. We had no access to code, just a broken API; so we reverse engineered it through reflection and repeated database calls with various inputs until we created the whole API. It took some time, but is definitely doable. My bet is that WOTC knew they were doing this for quite a while, and could have done something similar if necessary.