Service Fees: Reasonable or Outrageous?

[loki504]

The fee for the service made sense when it was introduced as the most servers had a healthy faction/population balance.
Having suffered a sub hemorrhage since cata, the fee no longer makes sense. At all.

maybe on the us. but silvermoon stormscale and kazzak didn't had a healthy faction/population balance.

---------- Post added 2013-05-17 at 05:40 PM ----------

They charge a nice lump of money for transfers, considering exactly what's involved in doing one from a technical perspective.

It becomes rather hostile to the customer when you consider that in most cases, you're going to want to move more than 1 toon over to wherever you might be going.

"Do I transfer 3 of my favorites, or buy 5 new games on steam. Decisions, decisions."

all this can probebly be done with out any human need. because ptr realm transfer are most of the time on the fly. and on the ptr you can also faction/race change on the fly. and also name change can be done on the fly. so its cost them basicly noting.

[Zaqwert]

Blizzard is shooting themselves in the foot by trying to charge for transfers.

They think they can force people into paying $25 a character to move, but a ton of people will simply become bored of their dead realm and QUIT rather than pay hundreds of dollars to move their characters to an active server. The loss of subscription revenue from people doing this far exceeds the number of people they can force into paying for transfers most likely.

[Kazgrel]

Here's a crazy idea that could have been a poll option:

No transfer service at all.

The paid transfer service started around mid-TBC, I believe, and I vividly remember at that time thinking "people are going to transfer to the high pop servers with big name raid guilds and the rest will rot". For a long time, I was very wrong, because servers everywhere were booming nicely. Then as Cata and now MoP have progressed, my reaction way back when has turned out to be quite true. Not that I wanted it to be; I would love to have my current server (and all other servers) as active as they were in their heyday (Wrath, in my server's case).

Obviously, for dollar bill reasons, paid transfer is here to stay. I can live with that; I've even put it to good use. One idea that I believe GW2 implements is where the price to server transfer depends on the population of the destination server. Ex. Want to go to US-Illidan, Stormrage, or Area 52? Be prepared to pay out the nose. Want to move to some dead server to kickstart things? Pay pennies (not literally, mind you). It could help disuade the overflow of people to the already crowded "megaservers" or whatever you wish to call them, while possibly breathing life into some of the lower pop servers. No guarantee it would work, though, which is the problem.

[endersblade]

I'd love an option to pay $25 and get one transfer for each of my toons on one server. Or hell, ANYTHING better than what it currently is. The price is just too much. It's all automated, there is no manual work involved, why the hell does it cost so much? To prevent people from hopping from server to server constantly. Ok, understandable...then put a longer cooldown on it or something. There's absolutely no reason for it to cost MORE than a freaking month's subscription to move a character, much less more than a YEAR'S subscription to move 11 chars from one server to another.

[LocNess]

I believe all transfers from a dying realm should be free for that realm, and just have the realm shut down.

[Tziva]

In theory I don't object to there being a cost; Blizzard is a business and optional services are a good way to bring in money. If you had asked me this three years ago, I would have said the fee is entirely reasonable.

That said, times have changed and I think that position is now unnecessarily stubborn. I am starting to feel like server transfers are, for many people, no longer really an optional service. For those players stuck on such low population servers that they can basically no longer participate in many major aspects of the game, can't use the auction house, can't complete anything outside of LFG tool, etc, server transfers are really necessary for their sub fee to be worth it for them. Yes, technically they still don't have to, they can reroll but the time, resources and effort involved to do that after being long established on another server is so daunting and so significant that many of them would rather just stop playing. This isn't just an issue of saving them some bucks - I think Blizzard needs to start looking at this too if they want sub retention.

Personally I think server transfers should become cheaper, or free, or completely redesigned to be fluid. Faction transfers, race and name changes should continue to be optional pay services.

[melodramocracy]

all this can probebly be done with out any human need. because ptr realm transfer are most of the time on the fly. and on the ptr you can also faction/race change on the fly. and also name change can be done on the fly. so its cost them basicly noting.

Oh, it is done w/o human need. Most likely once your payment is approved for an xfer, it simply kicks off a database job. The 1 hour thing is them just saying how long it might take if the systems are busy (last xfer I did took less than 5 minutes).

No one is physically handling anything.

[brunnor]

They should add a rewards program for being subbed imo. Get a free xfer/race change/faction change for every 6 months subscribed. It would work proactively so everyone would get their past xfers and such now.

[Aquamonkey]

Blizzard have stated themselves that the sole reason for the fee is to discourage people swapping all over the place on a whim. From a technical standpoint there is no good reason to charge money for it.

Yay sin tax.

[Alaira]

Transfers should have tiered prices. Maybe $5 per character, but if doing bulk you could move all on a realm for $25 instead of the $275 it costs now. $25 per character is ridiculous. Having a cost associated with the service serves as a deterrent to whimsical transfers, but is not so limiting for those who have a legitimate reason to move.
They could even swing it the other way and ask for $25 to initiate a transfer, but additional characters would be counted in $5 increments up to $75 for the realm.

[Melorandor]

Free once but 15-20 dollars after.

[Chickat]

You can transfer one character for free once every 60 days. Any more after that and it costs 25 dollars, and you can do one mass transfer every 60 days for only 10 dollars. If you want to mass transfer after that, it costs 50 bucks.

---------- Post added 2013-05-17 at 02:39 PM ----------

Transfers should have tiered prices. Maybe $5 per character, but if doing bulk you could move all on a realm for $25 instead of the $275 it costs now. $25 per character is ridiculous. Having a cost associated with the service serves as a deterrent to whimsical transfers, but is not so limiting for those who have a legitimate reason to move.
They could even swing it the other way and ask for $25 to initiate a transfer, but additional characters would be counted in $5 increments up to $75 for the realm.

That is quite a good idea as well.

Free, and 25 dollars plus 5 per toon after the free one every 60 days.

[Huntaer]

should be even more expensive really. low pop realms alrdy hardly have any ppl, and it just gets worse when u leave those behind

[-Superman-]

If you're gonna compare Blizzard luring players to low pop realms to buying concert tickets, how about this...

You're paying $$$ to go into the concert thinking you're going to be able to hear the music, but instead you're stuck way out in the mud and cant even see which direction the stage is. There's something that vaguely sounds like music coming from a speaker somewhere but its nothing like the experience everyone else is getting. Now someone comes up to you and gives you the choice of either leaving, staying and 'enjoying' this, or shelling out double the amount you've already paid to enjoy the actual concert.

For a subscription MMO, players should NEVER be given the ultimatum 'get out or pay more' in order to enjoy the game.

If bribing the guy at the front gate not only gets me in, but gets me FRONT ROW CENTER, then yeah, I will come out of packet cause I am not cheap and I want to see the show

---------- Post added 2013-05-17 at 11:47 AM ----------

Here's a crazy idea that could have been a poll option:

No transfer service at all.

The paid transfer service started around mid-TBC, I believe, and I vividly remember at that time thinking "people are going to transfer to the high pop servers with big name raid guilds and the rest will rot". For a long time, I was very wrong, because servers everywhere were booming nicely. Then as Cata and now MoP have progressed, my reaction way back when has turned out to be quite true. Not that I wanted it to be; I would love to have my current server (and all other servers) as active as they were in their heyday (Wrath, in my server's case).

Obviously, for dollar bill reasons, paid transfer is here to stay. I can live with that; I've even put it to good use. One idea that I believe GW2 implements is where the price to server transfer depends on the population of the destination server. Ex. Want to go to US-Illidan, Stormrage, or Area 52? Be prepared to pay out the nose. Want to move to some dead server to kickstart things? Pay pennies (not literally, mind you). It could help disuade the overflow of people to the already crowded "megaservers" or whatever you wish to call them, while possibly breathing life into some of the lower pop servers. No guarantee it would work, though, which is the problem.

Not trying to remove options altogether. People like having choices. They might not LIKE the choices, but they would rather have them. Good point though. They were only offered after the 1st expac was in play. I remember when you could not play Alliance and Horde on the same PvP realm either. Change is always good, but we don't want to swing drastically in the other direction. I opted for Buy One, Get One on the poll. I think it would fit in today's marketing scheme.

[Kelimbror]

should be even more expensive really. low pop realms alrdy hardly have any ppl, and it just gets worse when u leave those behind

Yes, they should force more people to be severely unhappy so that others can be moderately unhappy. Worst logic ever.

[Agoonga]

You should be able to move 1 character per month for free.

[Saphyron]

none of the above i would say a bundle deal where for 2 days for 100euro you can move any amount of chars from that server.

[Deleted]

- lowest population realms should be closed/merged
- transfers good for load balancing (from full to low pop) should be free
- transfers bad for load balancing (from whereever to high pop/full) should be expensive

[Galaddriel]

should be even more expensive really. low pop realms alrdy hardly have any ppl, and it just gets worse when u leave those behind

There is no saving those realms. Blizzard has lost 1/3 of the playerbase.

Look at it this way: If you were to take all the guilds on Illidan and spread them to all the realms, you wouldn't have enough to add one guild to each server.

[muto]

Free and unlimited since they don't want to merge realms.

Only to medium pop realms though.

No free transfers to other low pop realms, or high pop realms.