The reason people stay on overpopulated servers or transfer to the dominant faction of an imbalanced server is the legitimate fear of getting stranded on a dead server or faction. This leads to the current equilibrium state of extreme queues and few balanced servers.
The solution is simple: unrestricted, free transfers to any server, with a nominal cooldown to maintain consistency. This would allow individuals and guilds to search for what they value in terms of queues, population, faction balance, or even the number of toons leveling without the fear of getting stuck on a server they don’t enjoy or trying to get everyone to pay transfer fees again later.
With easier transfers, an equilibrium would be reached with a better population spread and significantly greater player satisfaction.
I have always liked the idea of Blizzard giving us a free transfer to anywhere like once every 6 months or something.
Let’s not lie to ourselves though; Activision Blizzard is all about micro transactions now regardless of any deterioration to the quality of the game.
I’ve witnessed something similar first-hand. When a company focuses entirely on profits rather than the quality of the service or products they offer, they make less money. Oh the irony.
If you want to try a server with balanced WPvP, come to Grobb.
If you want the maximum number of players on one faction, try Benediction or Faerlina.
If you want to level a toon with an active world and people to group with, there could be a server known for that.
If a popular server fulfilling a certain role gets too big and has unbearable queues, another server would naturally take over as a transfer destination and outlet valve.
If you end up not liking a server or wanting something different, that’s fine, you can always transfer, including back to a server you left.
Basically we would have a more fluid population where servers could step in to fulfill particular player desires without people feeling locked into or out of choices.
I’ve been saying this for a while now. No fee on server transfers, just a one or two month CD. I do think bots might abuse this though so perhaps a few restrictions on what you can take with you on the short CD moves, or pay to move everything.
Still, enable the players to sort out the server issues, since Blizzard says they can’t.
Six days isn’t a necro. A bit quick on the draw now, aren’t you? So quick on the draw you had to edit your post to try to be even more insulting. Man, your little fingers must have just been a blur there!
Moving on, just someone starting a thread on an alt, then necrobumping it because it did not get the attention they wanted. Move along folks, do not feed the trolls.
Nope, Unless you didnt play Classic or you were a flithy Horde at the same they were 100% needed. Me and my guild had a choice of quitting/rerolling on new server or praying for transfers from how bad horde camped us. Without transfrers many would have quit its just blizzard didnt handle the aftermath well
I think an important question to ask is, does the classic community care about maintaining server culture?
If no, which the mega-server trend seems to suggest is true, then cross-realm is an appropriate response.
If yes, which is a nostalgic and traditional goal of a lot of classic players, then [semi] unrestricted transfers seems more in line with classic goals.
Personally, I like the idea of keeping servers small and community driven. Having those interactions with players that you might not be friend with, but see fairly regularly just hanging around is really nice and makes you feel more like you’re a part of a world than just in a lobby.
With that said, the obvious player choice is a mega-server where that’s just not a thing that happens. I also tend to make my own communities, having a small but close guild and keeping a few non-guilded folks on my friends list that I can regularly interact with. So cross-server wouldn’t actually have much of an impact on my WotLK life.
you mean after a few weeks once bg’s were in the game then that stopped. So we should ruin all servers for bad game mechanics for what a few weeks in the years of classic.