This is advanced stupid.
I might be okay with a free character move and faction change with the purchase of each xpac.
But there are many people with more characters, that have played for longer and spent more money than you.
I have easily spent over $800.00 worth of server transfers, factions transfers, and racial swaps.
You are NOT special, and thus deserve no special treatment.
Blizzard for a while now has really been discouraging the use of alts, regardless of what your reason for playing them is. That being said if they did offer a free service I would imagine it would be limited to one character. Hell they are really limiting you to 1 spec now, so chew on that.
As most people have pointed out your post could easily swap "need" for "want" and it would ring more true. Between battlenet ID and connected servers, there isn't a whole lot of NEED to transfer characters anymore, unless of course you WANT to play for the other team. But to accomplish anything in the game, being 1 faction or the other isn't holding you back.
Now that isn't to say that you don't have a valid issue that may or may not be a reason for why you do or do not resubscribe.
Do I think EVERY character needs to be given the opportunity to server/faction/race swap? No.
But I do understand that if you are coming back and all your friends and/or old guildies are now horde/alliance (opposite of you), for YOU the price to come back and play isn't simply the price of the expansion and the cost of subscription, for you it includes at least an additional cost of AT LEAST faction change, if your guild was planning Mythic content then yes, a server xfer may be required as well.
So like I said, perhaps the cost covered once per xpac purchasing... I could get behind, but for EVERY character... nah.
Plus at this point I think it be far more beneficial for them to simply have mega servers, drop the arbitrary requirement(s) for Mythic raiding etc. There are policies as technical barriers that can be reworked that would provide far better functionality than simply freebies.
Blizzard should sell you a value-sized bucket to carry your tears around in.
Blizzard should have moved my Oceanic server characters to the LA data center for FREE once they moved the servers physically away from those servers. I paid to move 2-3 chars from Oceanic but I have a few still left there...not paying to move them, ever.
I don't live in Oceanic but my work puts me in that timezone...so it was nice to have people to play with or see cities busy.
Also to the OP. I've spent more than anyone I know on faction changes and server transfers. It has to be over $1000 as I had all my characters on alliance back in Cata and I have moved over 15 to horde over the years. I only have 4 left on ally side that are max level and they aren't going Horde. I moved chars from US to Oceanic servers back to US PVP and then to US PVE...I don't want to think of how much I spent :P
I didn't have to do all that, but I wanted to. I also have spent a lot on race and gender changes too.
Well then i guess i wont be returning and giving them any money for wow. Cus im not staying alliance if i were to come back, and im not staying horde on a primary alliance server either. And im NOT paying 55$ on top of having to pay for the expansion and sub to come back.
Yes, the true attachment to a character that makes us need to change both their faction and their race, two of the most central parts of an RPG character rather than creating a new character of that faction/race, and leveling them as an individual.....
Your logic, it hurts me.
Be happy that the additional service exists. Could be playing a game without it.
Preaching about character attachments is weak, hell I played FFXI for years, that's attachment if anything. You made a char you stuck with it, tired of your looks after a while? Redo everything or suck it up.
There's still a lack of why this service is needed. Guild/friends faction changed?
Right now is the best chance for a while to make a new char, catch up and get on fairly equal ground. Already having gear at this point only simplifies questing/dungeons etc. Everyone gets the same quest rewards.
The hints that the loss of subscribers might have been quelled if said optional services were cheaper or free is silly.
People got bored, moved on to some other time consuming activity, mined salt in their mines they made. (no flying is back, deal with it.)
Also as a general note, veteran entitlement is bull, expecting discounts for your "loyalty" is sad. Your money, my money or some newbies money have the same value.
As stated earlier, is your need worth the cost?
Without getting caught up in some of the silly arguments others have, I will say that Blizzard is long overdue for a character services sale and/or some kind of bulk modification/transfer pricing.
“Nostalgia was like a disease, one that crept in and stole the colour from the world and the time you lived in. Made for bitter people. Dangerous people, when they wanted back what never was.” -- Steven Erikson, The Crippled God
Pretty much. I doubt they'll ever make such a big change with the game at this point if its life simply because that would cost a pretty penny. Based on their auctions they used to have individual 1u rackmount servers up for grabs that were for specific servers.. I imagine that aspect has changed significantly with blade servers and such.
I do have to say that when you buy a faction or race change it should be that you pay the fee one time and then change as many characters as you want. I play a main and I have 5 toons for crafting alts and I keep them all humming so I can stay on the edge for my raiding guild. Then my raid guild decided to move to a bigger server so they could go from heroic to mythic and they also decided to go to the other faction and I told them there was no way I was going to pay $330 to follow them and I absolutely hate leveling all of those characters again, so I waved them good bye.
I understand they made server/faction changes expensive to cut back on gold sellers moving gold around freely but now the faction auction houses are tied and you can buy/sell pets cross server because they are attached to your account not your character so money is already freely flowing across server/faction and that $55 per character is just stopping me from following my guild to a better server.
Free character services as loyalty rewards isn't a bad idea on the surface. Like if you have 3-5 consecutive years of unbroken subscription payments you can pick a free one-time character transfer or race change. I could get behind that.
I won't comment on OP's particular situation...
^ The above should be taken with two grains of salt and a fistful of "chill the F* out".
I know it won't be your same toons but you can level new toons on your guilds new server in hours now using the invasions.
And at most move your main or not. But it doesn't have to be costly. Also you can raid with them all the way thru heroic on a different server. So it isn't as bad as it seems.
I agree that the prices for character services are just too high but it has to be this way. Plus those services are not mandatory to have fun with the game so nobody forces anybody to spend money on them. So as you said you can buy 2 years of gametime with that money and spend time to level up new characters. It's so easy noawadays. They share almost everything like the gear, the titles, the achievements. It shouldn't be a big deal.
i understand having that be the case with your main. one character. i personally am very attached to my main. ive done every available quest in the game, and have every possible legendary on her, bar atiesh.
one character is very easy to budget a transfer/faction change on. for the rest, i dont really see there being a significant attachment to the point that they just cant be rerolled, especially with things like the wardrobe.
my first toon ever is my rogue that i still have, i played it for a good four years, give or take... but it has nothing that cant be fairly easily replaced if need be. most of the impressive stuff is in my wardrobe now anyway, like my nightmare blade from taerar for example.
I have to admit, I do feel for the OP, and I really feel like we should earn the odd character change or particularly realm-change for free with long-term subscriptions. I don't think Blizzard have thought about it quite hard enough - I've dropped by a sub a few times when, if I could have realm-changed for free, they'd probably have got another 2-3 months out of me for sure, maybe a lot more than that.
Personally, I think at least one race/faction change, name change, and server change should be free for everyone once per account, but that'd never happen.
Certainly not, like, 10 characters, but at least one.