It's Time For Free Server Transfers and Faction Changes.

[Mammoon]

Everyone needs to relax.

As soon as 5.4 comes out Blizzard is fixing this problem with connected realms. They have been working on them since CRZ and perfected them on the PTR. It is going to drastically change realms for the good, just like CRZ did. Blizzard would definitely not take months to release this cool feature, they know the playerbase has been in need of this for 3+ years now and it has definitely been a top priority since then. Despite what people say, Blizzard hasn't been abusing server transfer fees to make tons of extra money, they are in it for the customers and the customers are first priority, and they know how bad the customers want servers to simply be merged.

Just a few more weeks. September 10th is just around the corner. Your realm will be fixed and we can celebrate by killing SoO bosses.

[Salted Beef]

Most of the criticism towards connected realms seems predicated on the belief that low-population realms will be the ones tied together while high-population realms are left alone.

huahuehuahue

[Animaneth]

Everyone needs to relax.

As soon as 5.4 comes out Blizzard is fixing this problem with connected realms. They have been working on them since CRZ and perfected them on the PTR. It is going to drastically change realms for the good, just like CRZ did. Blizzard would definitely not take months to release this cool feature, they know the playerbase has been in need of this for 3+ years now and it has definitely been a top priority since then. Despite what people say, Blizzard hasn't been abusing server transfer fees to make tons of extra money, they are in it for the customers and the customers are first priority, and they know how bad the customers want servers to simply be merged.

Just a few more weeks. September 10th is just around the corner. Your realm will be fixed and we can celebrate by killing SoO bosses.

copy & paste? Sarcasm? Trolling?

[Deleted]

I'm sure most players would be fine with free server transfers. But how many would be ok with that if Blizzard increased subscription fees to cover the lost server transfer fees? Not many I think.

I believe that the server transfer fees are a significant part of WoW's income. Otherwise they would have fixed faction imbalances and dead servers long ago. Now they took action only when they absolutely had to and even then they tried first a method that didn't endanger their income (Cross Realm Zones).

I must admit that I'm a bit sceptical about Connected Realms. The main goals seem to be:

- to prove that they are actually doing something
- to make sure that the transfer fees keep on flowing in

I hope that I can say "I was wrong" when we see the final list of Connected Realms.

[OscaR]

What a brain dead arguement, it costs blizz nothing for server transfers, but they make too much money off of people.

not sure if you can be the person to call someone else brain dead here. It costs blizz "some" thing for transfers. And how much do they make? How much is too much?

[Deleted]

Everyone needs to relax.

As soon as 5.4 comes out Blizzard is fixing this problem with connected realms.

If this fixes the problem then why will Blizzard still be offering and charging for the realm xfer service?

Surely, if the new 'connected realms' tech fixed the issue then they would remove the service from the cash-shop right?

[Deleted]

not sure if you can be the person to call someone else brain dead here. It costs blizz "some" thing for transfers. And how much do they make? How much is too much?

To blizzard the transfer costs are practially nothing, if Rift can do it for free then blizz could easily afford to.

I have no idea what you are talking about on your second point.

[NMX-]

Do you guys think that a free transfer and/or faction change once in a while would result in more and more players clustering up on high-population servers?

"Hey a lot of players are transferring to servers X, Y, and Z. Let's go!"

*Server X sucks up all the players from various realms, making dead realms deader*

The charge on these services help prevent that problem from starting.

[Salted Beef]

Do you guys think that a free transfer and/or faction change once in a while would result in more and more players clustering up on high-population servers?

That is the exact reason why free transfers aren't offered on occasion to the general populace.

[Aleksej89]

They definitely should reduce the price to a maximum of 10 euro per any kind of service.

Having server changes cost 20 (or 25) euros is ridiculous - especially since it is ZERO spending on the blizzard's side.

Making server changes cost like 5 euros would increase the number of server changes by ten fold!

I myself have ~10 characters i want to server change, but certainly not at 25euro per char!!

[Deleted]

Don't be dense. Only certain realms will be connected. What if I wanted to play on a different server that some friends were on and isn't included in the connection that my current realm is in?

Why am i being dense... i was responding to a guy who thinks that the new cross-realm tech solves the issues... like u say, it doesnt. That what i also think. It certainly goes part-way to fixing alot of the issues associated with low-pop realms but it isnt the complete solution.

- - - Updated - - -

They definitely should reduce the price to a maximum of 10 euro per any kind of service.

Having server changes cost 20 (or 25) euros is ridiculous - especially since it is ZERO spending on the blizzard's side.

Making server changes cost like 5 euros would increase the number of server changes by ten fold!

I myself have ~10 characters i want to server change, but certainly not at 25euro per char!!

Ive been saying for a long time that Blizzard need to show their long-serving customers some love and give them some freebies for their loyalty... i dont see any reason that they shouldnt offer 1 free xfer for people who have subbed for a long period of time*.

*that time is open to discussion.

[DeadmanWalking]

Server fees keep gold sellers from moving their wares around easily, as do faction changes. If you ever log into a major city in FFXIV you would realise very quickly just how well Blizzard has kept gilseller population low, in the major cities of FFXIV you can't listen to guild chat because the gilseller spam is so fast you can't actually read anything.

Also on PVP servers once alliance players decided that can't win unless they go horde its way to easy for them to leap to the winning side and you will have over night pvp server imbalances.

[Holtzmann]

Take US-Balnazzar on "prime time" a /who in orgrimmar returns: 5 90's, same on SW: 3 90's... and that situation is not happening in Balnazzar only. Even if you merge 5 realms like that, you would still have less than 100 players per faction during peak hours. That situation already happened there, there was a point at wich there would be no more than 100 in each faction and the server died anyway. So being skeptical about this connected realms feature is not wrong. Actually being skeptical is good in general, never take what a company says as the TRUTH.

In my country we say: "el que se quema con leche, ve una vaca y llora" ("the one that burns with boiling milk, sees a cow and cries" that would be a rough translation) I've already seen this attempts to fix dead servers. That CRZ incident was the same. This time the idea is to finally link cities and AH also. (what was missing in CRZ) but we saw how CRZ was introduced, it was a mess and a bugfest (have they finish squishing its bugs?) So, yes, gonna be skeptical for a while.

Have you considered the possibility that they'll pair US-Balnazzar with four other "dead" servers and a healthy medium-population server, resulting in a single "high" population connected realm?

They don't need to link servers with the same populations. Nearly any combination of servers will do, as long as the final coalesced server is at the target usage level. It doesn't matter if they have to merge 15 low-pop realms or 5 low-pop and 1 medium-pop or 2 medium-pop, the result is the same.

[Marema]

One of the worst ideas in the history of Azeroth.

[Vanisari]

Been 3 weeks since patch 5.4 and connected realms are still not a reality. Blizz said in either 5.1 or 5.2 - no more cueing in bgs with groups of more than 5, ever play a regular bg - every horde team is premade - <5 per cue is not a reality. Blizz said in patch 5.3 - healers will be equal in bgs with the new cue a role of a bg system yet another Blizz feature that doesn't work. Connected realms will be a reality, but it may not occuer until the next xpac.

There have already been 2 servers that have become connected, so you're wrong.

[Akraen]

Definitely support a free migration holiday.

My Guild is only here on Stormrage for recruitment purposes. We unanimously hate it here and wish we could all leave.

We have hundreds of members all with characters on a variety of servers including 3 guilds running on Ysera and Argent Dawn.

If we could get a discounted or free migration it would be the most positive thing for so many people.

[Deleted]

Server fees keep gold sellers from moving their wares around easily, as do faction changes. If you ever log into a major city in FFXIV you would realise very quickly just how well Blizzard has kept gilseller population low, in the major cities of FFXIV you can't listen to guild chat because the gilseller spam is so fast you can't actually read anything.

So the fact that Blilzzard are impotent against goldsellers is the reason they continue to charge so high to xfer realm.... hmmm

Dont u think that only promotes the point that Blizzard should do more against the goldsellers and show some love towards all the loyal and fair players?

Why should the vast majority of players be penalised in their pocket just because Blizzard are incapable of policing their own game...

Also on PVP servers once alliance players decided that can't win unless they go horde its way to easy for them to leap to the winning side and you will have over night pvp server imbalances.

This has nothing to do with cost of xfer.

They simply add in a mechanic which stops players xferring more than once per 3months maybe? or per month?

The second argument which blows this point out of the water is that pretty much every single Wow realm is very imbalanced anyway, so charging for faction changing clearly hasnt stopped this. Im pretty sure that the amount of balanced realms can be counted on 1 hand across both EU and US realms.

[Senudo]

I like the concept but don't see blizz ever doing it when people are still paying for it.

Increasing the number of toons per realm - now there's a concept I fully endorse. Blizz showed they can do it with 1 extra slot, now allow us to have as many as we want. It's not like it's going to flood the realms with extra people, not like you can play more than 1 toon at a time per account anyway and I wouldn't be forced to switch servers to play a class I don't have on my main realm....

[Shadowblade945]

Blizz needs to start merging low pop servers - they are going through a lot of extra crap with this 'connected servers' BS just so they don't directly have to say 'there are less people playing and we are closing and condensing servers'

[Mirishka]

I think it's time Blizzard gave out free server transfers and faction changes as part of it's subscription. I think the service should be one free faction change or server transfer per toon per year. If you wished to do either more often then you would pay.

Here's the main reasons I think this should be done:

1. The game is almost ten years old. People should not be expected to be stuck on the same servers forever unless they pay or re roll. Things change and people should be able to move to other servers more freely.

2. Dead servers. There is many many dead servers, there is no way a player could know or expect a server they play on would go dead. It's not there fault it has done so and this would give them the chance to escape the dead server. World of Warcraft is a mmo and on many of it's servers it's feeling less and less like that and more and more like a bad single player game.

3. Broken factions. There is servers where you have a near 100 to 1 faction balance. No one should be expected to pay to leave that. It's not a lot of fun to play on a server where your faction is out numbered in a huge manner.

4. People would come back to play. There is a decent amount of people that have left the game due to the fact either the server they play on is dead or the faction they belong to is dead. If you gave those people a chance to come back and play on a server that was better suited to them, they would take it and subs would increase.

I know people will point out that this would cause servers to go further dead or for the mega servers to grow even more beyond where they are, let me address both.

For the servers going more dead, yes that's true but if you were to do this, the only people that would remain on them would be the people that wanted to play on such a server.

Blizzard could limit the options of servers people could transfer to, to prevent more problems with the mega servers and to help prevent any other server from becoming to large as well.

You could have summed this wall of text up by simply saying "I want to be able to do something but don't want to have to pay for it." Optional services are optional, therefore it makes sense there are fees attached to them. I've used both, and wasn't bothered by the cost in the slightest.

Also, you are not psychic, you have no idea whether or not Connected Realms will fail. Hyperbole like that doesn't help you make your point. At all.