Copying over your Garrison to PTR

Hi everybody,

Our server engineers were able to work some magic and get Garrisons to travel along with you when you copy your character over to the 6.1 PTR realms! Your followers, buildings, blueprints and active missions should copy over, but pending work orders will not.

The Character Copy system leverages the same technology that the Character Profiles on the web armory site uses. This means that if you've recently transferred or if your armory profile isn't loading properly you may not be able to transfer your character to the PTR right away.

We had to push some code to live 6.0.3 retail realms to enable the garrison copy. Without getting into too much technical detail, you need to make sure that your character armory profile is updated:

Log onto your retail character.

Travel to your garrison.

Fully log out of the game and wait a few minutes.

Launch the PTR client via the Battle.net App (making sure the account drop-down says PTR)

On the character selection screen, click the Copy Character button located under the Template Character box.

Select your region in the upper-left corner.

Press the Copy Account Data button in the bottom left and select Okay.

Once that window closes, re-open the Copy Character screen.

Your characters should be listed here.

Copy your character over to the PTR, and login! You should be in your garrison!

If you're not sure your Character Profile is updating, an easy test is to remove a piece of gear (boots, for example), and log out. Once you see your character on the armory without boots, you know it updated properly!

01/16/2015 06:21 AMPosted by Kalrihk

There is still a problem. On characters that are copied over, you have an unrealistically long mission timer sat up.

http://i.imgur.com/y7Y2rfq.png

Can we get vendors in that sell Insta-mission Finishes for about 100g a pop in or near our garrisons, or perhaps in the center of Warspear/Stormshield?

Hrmm, weird. We'll take a look.

In the meantime as a quick fix I'd recommend copying over a character with no active missions. Remember, you can always delete a character on the PTR and re-copy your retail character over.

Sorry to hear that some of you are having issues copying your garrison over, investigating into this now.

Hmm, I'm having trouble reproducing with a fresh copy.

Using one of my live characters on US realms:

Ported to Garrison

Unequipped a few items, logged out.

Waited until armory (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/RealmName/CharacterName/) updated to show his missing items.

Loaded up the PTR Build (19480 patch 6.1.0).

Clicked the copy button on the main screen, selected his name from the displayed list, copied him over and logged in.

Showed up in Garrison.

If you're having trouble copying over, I'm curious what steps you're taking. Is your armory profile not updating correctly?

01/20/2015 01:40 PMPosted by Kidcriticus

I am so flabbergasted that one thing, taking off my weapon and logging out comepltely worked.. CRAZY!!!

Well it's not so much that randomly unequipping weapons and putting them back on fixed it, that's more or less a visual indicator to know that the armor profile has been updated.

In reality it's probably related to the Tuesday Morning restarts we had. Without getting too technical, the ability to even save Garrison data on the armory profile wasn't hooked up until last week (code hotfix), and we had to do some magic to get that working without restarts. It's entirely possible that some of you didn't have that code hotfix on your realm for whatever reason, but picked it up today when full restarts happened.

01/20/2015 02:04 PMPosted by Dwarfeey

Everything seems fine cept toy box it has only 23 of my 103 toys in it.
I also retried my Garrison hearthstone and it still does not work

I'll look into the toy box issue, but it doesn't surprise me that not everything carried over. Collections and achievements are tricky to copy.

And the Garrison hearthstone is an entirely unrelated issue - it just doesn't work in 6.1 (which is a bug).

01/20/2015 01:54 PMPosted by Rathenn

So, not only did it work today for me -- despite me trying exactly those steps prior -- but it also resolved the Garrison Campaign quest issue (so insult to injury or something!)...

This is part of the reason why it's been so tricky for us to track down issues with the Garrison Campaign quests. Part of our normal troubleshooting steps for live reports like that is to copy over a version of your character from retail to our internal QA realms. When we do that for people reporting issues with not getting the Garrison Campaign, it doesn't reproduce: we can pickup the next quest fine.