Is milking money from server transfers bad business by blizzard?

[Niyari]

It gates people from mass transferring to particular servers, if it was free everyone would be moving around like wild fire.

no, the way it should be is the initial transfer is free and puts you on a 3-6 month cd and if you want to transfer before the cd is up, THEN you pay.

[Hodenkrieg]

I guess I would just sum up my opinion on the matter from a business oriented position.

Business is about making money. All of them. not a single one puts your interests over their profits.
Is milking money (aka profiting) from server transfers bad business?

Well, if it was bad business (i.e., its hurting their profit) then it wouldn't be happening. So I would say no, absolutely not bad business, because they are clearly generating plenty from it or they wouldn't be doing it anymore.


Now, from a customer standpoint, does it suck? yeah it really does. 55 bucks for a server/faction transfer combo? yikes. Considering they can complete it in minutes it seems like its just shifting around some 0's and 1's. BUT, as much as it sucks, I have yet to meet a person who has gone "Wow, its so much to transfer my character to a new server. I QUIT!"
Most would just re-roll...

[Rivellana]

I didn't vote...I'm torn.

I believe they have every right to make people pay for server transfers if people are willing, however I think the cost for a server transfer is too high and that they may be taking advantage of people on lower population servers.

I've been on the same server ever since I started playing right before BC launched...back then it was a healthy, active server but over the years it has dwindled away to almost nothing. Many people have left. I myself faction changed as the population imbalance was just too much to deal with but I just haven't been able to bring myself to leave my server. That being said, even being on a low population server with a huge population imbalance and people pleading with Blizzard to offer free transfers or merge the servers or do something about it, the only change was Blizzard opening the server as a "New Player" server on the alliance side. It really didn't bring in that many new people and the server still suffers from a population issue.

I honestly think if they were to lower the price of their server transfers they might be way more profitable for them as people would be willing to spend more to move all their alts somewhere else.

[ringpriest]

You sir, appear to either be enthralled by Blizzard so thoroughly it's affecting your reasoning, or maybe you're just astroturfing for them.

Questions you have to ask yourself before you continue to carry on...

1. Does Blizzard HAVE to provide this? answer. No.

If they wish to at least appear to give a damn about their playerbase, they do. Server xfer is pretty much expected from an MMO now.

2. Why should Blizzard provide it for FREE? answer, there isn't a reason.

I didn't say they should. Your knee-jerk defense of Blizzard is apparently so ingrained it doesn't allow you to read what you're replying to.

3. Is it required to play the game? answer. No.

So what? This is completely irrelevant. It is something people want, to improve their WoW experience, by playing on a server with friends/more population/different play type. Very little is technically required to play WoW, but I sincerely doubt very many people would like the game with bottom-end graphics, no sound, no mounts, no professions, and no dungeons.

As far as your claim that they are happy to let realms languish for 'years' is flat out Horseshit, they routinely offer free transfers, its called migration.... check out the blue posts, they just recently offered to let
folks from several realms xfer free.

Insults and no data - typical of Blizzard's defenders. I could refute this in detail, go chase down the posts you were too lazy to link, and show that yeah, Blizz occassionaly lets people xfer for free from a couple of high-pop, unbalanced realms to selected wastelands if they wanted, and that it has little to no effect. But you know what? The hell with that. You've obviously drunk so much Blizzard kool-aid that you can't even let yourself think.

[aztr0]

They're greedy for providing a service that some want? You have a choice to not use it.

[Seranthor]

You sir, appear to either be enthralled by Blizzard so thoroughly it's affecting your reasoning, or maybe you're just astroturfing for them.



If they wish to at least appear to give a damn about their playerbase, they do. Server xfer is pretty much expected from an MMO now.



I didn't say they should. Your knee-jerk defense of Blizzard is apparently so ingrained it doesn't allow you to read what you're replying to.



So what? This is completely irrelevant. It is something people want, to improve their WoW experience, by playing on a server with friends/more population/different play type. Very little is technically required to play WoW, but I sincerely doubt very many people would like the game with bottom-end graphics, no sound, no mounts, no professions, and no dungeons.



Insults and no data - typical of Blizzard's defenders. I could refute this in detail, go chase down the posts you were too lazy to link, and show that yeah, Blizz occassionaly lets people xfer for free from a couple of high-pop, unbalanced realms to selected wastelands if they wanted, and that it has little to no effect. But you know what? The hell with that. You've obviously drunk so much Blizzard kool-aid that you can't even let yourself think.

Clearly you don't pay attention, I slam Blizzard routinely and so harshly that I've gotten emails from Blizzard about my behavior, So, to accuse me of being a Kool-aid drinker is disingenuous on its face, just because I don't agree with you and your cadre on this particular point doesn't mean I don't have issues with Blizzard.

Knee-jerk defense? Really? I refuse to insult you or attack you personally, as that would lose me the arguement, but you seem intent on attacking based on no facts at all. Just a driving desire to attack.

Fact is and remains, its a service they provide, its not required, not in the least.

Insults and no data, yes... exactly, you've provide a myriad of insults and you've provide no data. Show your data, and I mean data, not opinions or claims that are not based in fact.

And you've yet to provide a single FACT in your attacks, just expectations and demands and attacks.

[ringpriest]

Clearly you don't pay attention, I slam Blizzard routinely and so harshly that I've gotten emails from Blizzard about my behavior, So, to accuse me of being a Kool-aid drinker is disingenuous on its face, just because I don't agree with you and your cadre on this particular point doesn't mean I don't have issues with Blizzard.

Knee-jerk defense? Really? I refuse to insult you or attack you personally, as that would lose me the arguement, but you seem intent on attacking based on no facts at all. Just a driving desire to attack.

Fact is and remains, its a service they provide, its not required, not in the least.

Insults and no data, yes... exactly, you've provide a myriad of insults and you've provide no data. Show your data, and I mean data, not opinions or claims that are not based in fact.

And you've yet to provide a single FACT in your attacks, just expectations and demands and attacks.

Orly?

your claim that they are happy to let realms languish for 'years' is flat out Horseshit

Here was a perfect chance to bring in some data. I can't find an example of a dying realm that was rejuvenated by Blizzard, via free server transfers or any other method. The forums on low populations realms like Hakkar, Chromaggus, and Azshara (the three lowest-population realms, according to RealmPop) have complaints about how dead they are going back years. But instead you just call my argument BS. I'm beginning to wonder if you even read your own posts, much less those you respond to.

Fact is and remains, its a service they provide, its not required, not in the least.

Here you repeat your initial statement, and don't respond to my points that 1) there's a significant demand for the service and Blizz would be hurt(maybe not a ton, but they would experience some player losses and no player gains) if they didn't offer it, and 2) server xfer is an expected service from modern MMOs.

Insults and no data, yes... exactly, you've provide a myriad of insults and you've provide no data. Show your data, and I mean data, not opinions or claims that are not based in fact.

And you've yet to provide a single FACT in your attacks, just expectations and demands and attacks.

I'm not insulting you when I point out that you did not read my post before replying. You're trying to cover up your own incoherence by raging and complaining about me, not the points I've made. Such as:

it's rent extraction. They are charging many times what the service - which obviously, only they can provide - costs them.

1) Blizzard is happy to let massively unbalanced or underpopulated realms languish for years, so obviously balance isn't that big of a concern for them

They [Blizzard] certainly aren't timid about radically changing aspects of the game that don't have a direct price tag attached.

You ignored all of these, bringing up irrelevant points to try and take the thread away from the fact that Blizz makes a ton of cash off of people transferring from dead and dying servers, while failing to fix the problem.

Your actions; dropping points that both of us have made, missing or reinterpreting points made clearly earlier in the thread (such as turning a reduced xfer cost for a limited time into "FREE" transfers), getting personally offended when your bias is pointed out - all of these seem to be the actions of someone who is more interested in making sure that people don't think too much about the fact that Blizzard charges $25 for an automated process that their own failures at server management provide a very strong incentive for players to use. Milking money (which is what Blizz is doing and while you've tried to justify it, you certainly haven't tried to argue that it's anything else) from your own customers is unethical.