My answer to the Free Transfer thread on the official forums

[Aurabolt]

I saw the following message and after reading some of the responses I felt inclined to actually offer some ideas rather than just say what I think about the server population issues we all know about.

We've found over the years that people would rather stay on high population realms with long queues than move to very low population realms.

Obviously we're exploring some new ways to solve low population issues in 5.4, and we'll have more details on how that will all work (as well as a final name!) in the near future.

I made a character on Stormrage last week just to see what it's like. When I logged out I was unable to get back into the server again until a few days ago.

I wasn't planning to move to Stormrage and after what I saw the que time ALONE is a deterrent enough for me to not want go there or any other Full or Locked server. I'd been warned when I logged in the first time the server frequently locks up during peak hours but at the time WoW was between Midsummer and Darkmoon Faire. Am I to believe "Peak Hours" are 18 of 24 hours?

I pay a monthly subscription just like everyone else here. Why should I spend 20-90 minutes waiting to play? The way I see it, the people who "justify" playing on these overcrowded servers need to realize what the Vanilla Generation and most of my fellow TBC Generation (still) need to let sink in: It's not just about them.

From a financial standpoint Blizzard stands to lose subs in people on the low-pop servers who have been told for YEARS now that something will be done. Some have already left. Some are waiting for that "quick fix" they know deep down is just wishful thinking.

To clarify I've never played on a low pop server. Medium-Low Pop yes but not an actual low pop server. I'm just amazed with this response. Basically what I'm reading is despite the fact obvious options are staring Blizzard in the face they refuse to use them.

The biggest one that comes to mind for me is Blizzard just selectively moving people and guilds from full servers to low-pop servers. Give notice yes but at the end of the day, everyone knows that option is technically on the table.

A more inclusive alternative would be to survey people and guilds on the high-pop servers and offer to transfer them free of charge to the low-pop server of their choice. If they agree to it they get credited with WoW time or virtual store credit to buy a mount or a pet (form the Blizzard Store).

Another carrot is giving people who agree to move to low-pop servers a Feat of Strength ("Big Fish to Small Pond" or something similar) and the option to consolidate all of their characters on the full server to low pop servers. If a whole guild moves, for the first month their Fast Track and Cash Flow Perks are increased to 75% for a month.

Yet another incentive program to give folks who voluntarily move to low-pop servers (free of charge) is to give them all three past and present Recruit a Friend Mounts. They would also get a Feat of Strength recognizing their selfless act of charity.

Look. I understand Server Loyalty. I know that for some people just being on the same server as one of the Top US Raiding Guilds is important. It's all the more reason they should take the initiative and just move to low-pop servers. There is talent to be found on servers like Maiev and Darrowmere. You just gotta go get it.

Don't forget there's also the old saying about trying something new.


Fee free to post your thoughts on what I said or the server population issues in general.

[Zic]

Or, you know, they can just keep going with virtual realms, instead of those terrible, terrible ideas you suggested. Forcibly moving guilds? I don't know of any possible good outcome from that. All the other stuff is superficial which won't get people to move.

[Vaelorian]

I think that giving people an incentive to move (free obviously) to a lower populated server would be nice. But this wouldn't solve the overal problem of lower populated servers. There are just too many damn servers to have a nice population if we spread the whole playerbase amongst those servers. If Blizzard did that then everything would be low to medium.

But let me say this then:

If you are on a high populated server with queues and whatnot.... yes it would suck. But recruitment for guilds is very nice. Why would a guild transfer itself even for the rewards you suggested to a lower populated server? The very lifeblood of a guild = recruitment. Why would a guild knowingly put its existance at risk for any ingame reward?

Again to me the only option is:

merge servers and notify guilds/people when that merge is going to happen and to what server it is going to transfer. If they want to transfer before the "official" transfer time then that is fine etc. Ofcourse before this, Blizzard should inform those guilds/players how the new server is going to be populated. Will it ultimately be a medium server or whatever server. And what other servers will also be apart of the merging to this new server? If people do not like those servers, people will have enough time to decide to transfer to another server instead of their own choosing (free of charge?).

Anyone stuck in limbo due to an inactive account will receive the same information, so they will be notified. But imo they shouldn't be able to choose another server for free if they do not agree with this merger. Atleast if they do not activate their account before the final date. People who do not pay shouldn't be able to choose.

Oh yeah and the name issue again would either be solved by the * # % marks behind their names or whatever. But in all fairness I think that the toon with the most days played on, should be able to keep the name. (so unused alts would lose the name vs active mains, which is fair imo)

[Ronduwil]

A more inclusive alternative would be to survey people and guilds on the high-pop servers and offer to transfer them free of charge to the low-pop server of their choice. If they agree to it they get credited with WoW time or virtual store credit to buy a mount or a pet (form the Blizzard Store).

They do this periodically, but they haven't offered pets before. The fact is you'd be crazy to move off a high pop realm. It's easier to log in 90 minutes early knowing that you're going to be in the queue than it is to spend 90 minutes in the city spamming trade for people to come raid with you.

Look. I understand Server Loyalty. I know that for some people just being on the same server as one of the Top US Raiding Guilds is important. It's all the more reason they should take the initiative and just move to low-pop servers. There is talent to be found on servers like Maiev and Darrowmere. You just gotta go get it.

You haven't raided much, have you? There's more to being on a progressed server than basking in the "awesomeness" of the top raiding guilds. There's the fact that the pool of talent to recruit from is huge. The typical pug on Stormrage is more experienced, better geared, and better organized than a top 10 raiding guild on Sentinels. I know that from personal experience. If you're already established on Stormrage you'd be crazy to leave it. Compare these:

Maiev Progression
Darrowmere Progression
Stormrage Progression

Note that the #1 guild on Maiev is not even in heroics yet. In fact, there are 174 guilds on Stormrage that are further along than the #1 guild on Maiev! Where is this talent that you're talking about??? It's certainly not in raids! Darrowmere is marginally better. They actually have four guilds progressing through heroics but their #1 guild still falls shy of the top 25 on Stormrage. I would much rather experience a predictable 90 minute queue than spend 90 minutes every raid trying to replace a no-show. That's why low pop realms are dying. Blizzard has put all their focus into raiding and raiding is pretty much impossible on low pop realms.

Don't forget there's also the old saying about trying something new.

I seriously doubt that Stormrage's population is native to the server. I wouldn't be surprised if the top 10 raiding servers were 60% transplants or greater. The move to the high pop server was the "something new" that players tried and they discovered that it was far better than the alternative. You quit while your character was still low level and unable to reap the benefits of the raiding scene so all you see are the bad queue times. Once you experience raiding on a high pop server you're going to be extremely frustrated with how different it is from low pop servers.

[Deleted]

I am from low population Aliance server Burning Blade EU - almost Czech and Slovakia only server. We are lets say Heroic raiding 25man guild which has a HUGE problem to stay alive after MoP comes out. This server dying. We all know it. In Cata here was 5 * 25 man Heroic raiding guilds. Now we are LAST ONE and we have a Huge luck that another Czech and Slovakia server died before us (EU-Thunderhorn) and we recruit those to our guild. Thats why we stay alive. But who know how long ?
Biggest problem is recruit new players although we are raiding only 3*per week. Which is not Hardcore/ not semi-hardocre. Thats just normal raiding time.
We are limited to recruit only Czech or Slovak speaking ppl. So we cannot move to another mid population realm (only to Horde Drak Thul).
We are like family - We all know who is sitting behind PC. We have many guild face to face interaction. We have two day events twice a year and many others - go to beer - thru all year. We are family. So no I will not transfer to another realm without them...even Blizzard will offer me whatever.

CZ/SK peaking realms are:
EU-Thunderhorn Aliance - CZ/SK community died there (mid pop server)
EU- Burning Blade Aliance - still alive (low pop) - problem to find skilled ppl which will want to play (2* 11/13 HC, 6* 3/13 HC)
EU- Drak thul Horde - Alive (mid pop) - no problems at all (3* 13/13 HC, 1* 12/13, And 20* 3 plus/13 HC)

We all know that we will transfer in future whole guild to Drak Thull EU ( some guilds are already transferred) but as I say we were saved by another dying cz/sk community on another realm for now. But we will need to transfer to Drak Thull EU or our guild will end in near future (dont know when..may be in 1-2 yers). So it will be really nice to have opportunity to transfer where we must to go (EU- Drakthul) for free . I have 5* 90 lvl and will not pay for transfer all of them. And it is what suck the most. Blizzard will delete my alts because they will be stucked on low pop server forever....Virtual Realms doesnt help because Horde and Alience wont raid together.

The biggest mistake Blizzard do is Free transfer from High pop server - Thats obvious ppl will stay there. They shoud switch off low pop servers and marge those together. Cross realm zone doesnt help at all. Virtual realms can help a little. But Why they do simple thing that complicated I didnt understand.

Analyze it:
Whooh we have 10 low pop servers and 2 High pop what we will do? We want balance it little bit.

1- offer High pop Free transfer to low pop - After 4 years of trying - this didnt fix the problem
2- OK we will put a lot work to make exping better - lets release Cross Realm Zone - And many ppl works on this bullsh*
- well this found another problem -There is not enough resource to gather to level professions - ok we will do Catch Up mechanic to gathering in Non CRZ - Pandaria - fixed
- well, this didnt fix the problem at all
3 - Lets release Virtual Severs - and many ppl working on this right now - we dont know how it will work but crossing fingers for shared trade-chat, action house, current raids - this can help little bit

BUT WHY???? They just could do simple thing - Marge 10 LOW POP SERVERS to 4 MID pop servers. = Problem solved and ppl which working on realesing CRZ - correcting CRZ and releasing Virt.Serv. can work on another things to make us more happy.

[Robert3620]

The solution to this entire problem is to give everyone free transfers with a cool down. Every person should be able to transfer each of there toons once every six months free of charge. This would allow the player population to sort it's self out the way the players want. Blizzard's handling of this entire problem has been shameful. People shouldn't be paying when this game has a sub.

[Darsithis]

The solution to this entire problem is to give everyone free transfers with a cool down. Every person should be able to transfer each of there toons once every six months free of charge. This would allow the player population to sort it's self out the way the players want. Blizzard's handling of this entire problem has been shameful. People shouldn't be paying when this game has a sub.

I would like to see this implemented. A good-sized cooldown would prevent overuse and guild hopping while allowing people to move out of a dead server. 6 months seems a bit long. Maybe 90 days and the cooldown covers the entire account (but you can move more than one at a time), not just one toon.

[Normie]

The reason that people flock to a handful of high-pop servers is that they are where the sexy kids are. It doesn't matter whether it's free or $5 or $25 or $250 to transfer there, the people who transfer for purposes of idol worship will do it.

And the idol worshipers are the reason those servers are full.

Blizzard didn't create the problem and Blizzard can't fix it other than with, hopefully, solutions like VR.

[Bluesftw]

The reason that people flock to a handful of high-pop servers is that they are where the sexy kids are. It doesn't matter whether it's free or $5 or $25 or $250 to transfer there, the people who transfer for purposes of idol worship will do it.

maybe for you , i like populated realms simply because economy there is so much better, prices are often 10x lower than on my old dead realm

[squall14716]

Analyze it:
Whooh we have 10 low pop servers and 2 High pop what we will do? We want balance it little bit.

1- offer High pop Free transfer to low pop - After 4 years of trying - this didnt fix the problem
2- OK we will put a lot work to make exping better - lets release Cross Realm Zone - And many ppl works on this bullsh*
- well this found another problem -There is not enough resource to gather to level professions - ok we will do Catch Up mechanic to gathering in Non CRZ - Pandaria - fixed
- well, this didnt fix the problem at all
3 - Lets release Virtual Severs - and many ppl working on this right now - we dont know how it will work but crossing fingers for shared trade-chat, action house, current raids - this can help little bit

BUT WHY???? They just could do simple thing - Marge 10 LOW POP SERVERS to 4 MID pop servers. = Problem solved and ppl which working on realesing CRZ - correcting CRZ and releasing Virt.Serv. can work on another things to make us more happy.

CRZ is a solution for low-population zones, not realms. That is a different issue entirely. Virtual Servers are literally server mergers while not forcing name changes on everybody, which they stated that they don't want to do. People are attached to their names.

[Ronduwil]

The biggest mistake Blizzard do is Free transfer from High pop server - Thats obvious ppl will stay there. They shoud switch off low pop servers and marge those together. Cross realm zone doesnt help at all. Virtual realms can help a little. But Why they do simple thing that complicated I didnt understand.

I really don't understand the logic behind CRZ. First they redesign the game so that you don't need (or even want) to group with anyone while levelling, and then they implement the CRZ feature to throw players together while they're levelling. The time you really need other players is when doing end game content like raids, but CRZ doesn't address that in the slightest. Flexible raiding will be cross-realm so that is a better solution, but it still doesn't address problems like yours where the pool of players to recruit for normal and heroic raids has dwindled to nothing. I know Blizzard "enjoys" watching competition between servers for world first titles and so on but at this point I think the competition is done and won. I think the smartest thing they could do if they want to emphasize raiding is to make all raids (including current tier) cross-realm.

[Galaddriel]

There are just too many damn servers to have a nice population if we spread the whole playerbase amongst those servers. If Blizzard did that then everything would be low to medium.

QFT

The servers they are offering transfers from have active pops between 21-27k characters.
There are currently 165 US servers with less than 5k active characters. A realm that size typically has only 4 or 5 active raiding guilds if that.

[Thetruth1400]

I would like to see this implemented. A good-sized cooldown would prevent overuse and guild hopping while allowing people to move out of a dead server. 6 months seems a bit long. Maybe 90 days and the cooldown covers the entire account (but you can move more than one at a time), not just one toon.

I disagree. I think that's just going to lead to more problems, not less. You will have people moving from low pop realms to high pop ones. That will leave the low pop ones even more barren then they already are, and high pop ones more overinflated then they already are.

I personally feel the problem has a simple solution.

1) No new characters on high or full pop realms. Now what I mean by this is no new players on that realm. If you already are on that server and want to roll and alt, that's fine, because you were on that server already.
2) Mergers. All those low pop realms that are dying, time to merge them into one server. Not only will this lower costs on Blizzard's end by not having to keep as many servers up, but communities will thrive again. As for names, I see two solutions to that. A) A point system determined by length of account ownership, character played time, and player activity among a few other things determines who gets a name if more then one person has it or B) Add last names. The second I see as a much easier option.
3) Incentives for people to move off of full / high pop realms. The only way people are going to move off these servers is if they're given something worth it. Sitting in a queue is worth it to not be on a dead server where you can get nothing done ever because there are no players to play with. Sorry low pop realms, but the truth is, you have nothing to offer the majority of players.
4) Admitting and owning up to the problem. Frankly, Blizzard seems to say they see the problem but does nothing about it. That shows that they either are incompetent to fix the problem, which I don't understand as the community has come up with literally hundreds of solutions, or they just don't care. They need to stop force feeding us content at such a rapid pace, take a step back, and start addressing the issues we have at hand.

[Darsithis]

The reason that people flock to a handful of high-pop servers is that they are where the sexy kids are. It doesn't matter whether it's free or $5 or $25 or $250 to transfer there, the people who transfer for purposes of idol worship will do it.

And the idol worshipers are the reason those servers are full.

Blizzard didn't create the problem and Blizzard can't fix it other than with, hopefully, solutions like VR.

I doubt people are transferring for "idol worship". I left my high population Proudmoore server for Feathermoon, a medium population that has a crappy economy. People congregate on high-population servers because their friends are there, the economy is better, there are more social/leveling guilds, and the raiding/pvp scene is better.

[Lanthanum]

The positives of being on a high pop realm far outweigh the negatives IMO.

I used to be on Nagrand-EU and at some point during Cata it got so bad that it was flagged for new players (Horde side). The economy was dead, PuG's were non-existant and it was just a miserable place to be despite having been there for 4 years. I then moved to Draenor-EU and the difference was night and day. Recently, two very progressed raiding guilds transferred there and they had to lock the server due to population issues.

I do believe though that the low pop realm issue should have been addressed a long, long time ago but Blizzard in their infinite greed conveniently ignored it and is now only being addressed due to plummeting subs.

[Aurabolt]

Clearly some of you just DO NOT GET IT.

Blizzard has already taken steps to shrink both the achievement gap across the board and at the same time ensure ALL who want to are able to experience Raids, Scenarios and Heroics while they are current.

You know the LFR feature some of you hate so much? That was created in part to address the problem players on low-pop servers have of not being able to raid like those of us on higher pop-servers are able to.

Ideally one would WANT to raid with friends or at the very least a group of people they'll enjoy raiding with. The fact of the matter is this is simply not possible for one reason or another on lower-pop servers. While yes I will admit it also solves the problem the "Casuals" have of not being able work with "traditional" raiding guilds but first and foremost it gives those who play on low-pop servers the opportunity to experience tiers while they're current.

I have never used LFR myself. The reason being I simply haven't had the need. For those who are unable to raid with guilds/friends due to real life commitments (which should always take priority without question like it or not) or because they are on a low-pop server LFR evens the playing field for them. It also solves the problem of people who've never done a raid the opportunity to learn the mechanics and etc. Difficulty differences aside, some experience is always better than none.

In my opinion, WoW Raids demand firsthand experience if you want to become proficient. I never never once watched a video for any Raid boss I encountered. I've raided BT (When it was current) to Maddness of Deathwing (When it was current) and never once did I bother to watch a video or participate in the PTR beforehand. I use vent. I research the mechanics on websites. That's all I need. Even so I am mindful of people who might not be even half as seasoned as I am Raiding when our guild fishes extra DPS/Heals from /Trade for 25-mans.

I've raided on Uther, Cenarius, Cairne and now Suramar (Same chars in each instance). When I joined PUGs created server side for a raid before LFR I had no idea WTF I was going to walk into. I've seen it all. From what my friends who have used LFR tell me it's no different from that aside from it being cross-server and rushed.

Getting back to the root discussion, I can say the exact opposite also applies. The full servers have the same issues as Low pop servers have socially. And like I said in my OP I get Server Loyalty. When I started on Uther I FUCKING LOVED IT. After 30 months the big raiding guilds either disbanded or moved to other servers (this was before Guild Transfers were introduced, mind you). My first--and last--encounter with an Elite Raiding Guild ultimately led to my transferring to Cenarius. I met the gear and raid time requirements but I didn't like the attitude. It was on Cenarius I learned what a Raiding Guild that works together is supposed to look like. I took that experience with me to Cairne but the guild I was with for two years decided I was too good for them last summer (their loss, lol). An old friend of mine from the Cenarius Guild I was with invited me into the guild she helped build on Suramar a few months ago.

The good times haven't stopped since.

Look, let me be direct: Legally Blizzard can do whatever they want. Yeah it would cause bad press but there's nothing to stop Blizzard from just mass-migrating people to low-pop servers or even just a few thousand servers containing only Darkmoon Faire if they wanted.

I have a strong suspicion Blizzard is going to take even more drastic measures to address the server pop issues. And alot of people probably won't like what they go with. We can all say "they'll never do it" but at the end of the day, they'll do what they feel is necessary. ALWAYS REMEMBER Blizzard can do whatever it wants with it's product. At the end of the day it's a product first and foremost.

If it sounds like I'm digging on this whole mass-transfer move thing I am. Like it or not it'll come sooner or later. For all we know this Virtual Realms idea could have a part to play in that. And I will be there to drink the tears of the Q.Q'ers who while not directly effected will Q.Q at the fact people are being given a fighting chance to better enjoy what they pay for. We all pay the exact same mothly sub, after all.

So instead of just dismissing the idea entirely I would suggest thinking of wha Blizzard can do for you in exchange for moving to a low-pop server.