For sure, you might be right here, we’ll keep an eye on it.
Yeah definitely, and long term its definitely possible that we may want to undertake such a thing.
One thing I will say (and I might regret this later depending on how our first round of realm consolidation goes :P) is that we don’t actually think characters will be unavailable for two full weeks. That’s mostly a “worst case scenario”. If all goes to plan, most of these characters should experience little to no interruption in availability. It’s mostly just that performing database changes at this scale is a large and complex operation with a lot of moving parts, and as a result we want to ensure that players are aware that–if something unforseen does occur–there may be some impact to the availability of these characters. That’s why we felt it was also important to announce far ahead of time and remind players that all of these realms do have FCMs enabled to other active, healthy realms. It’s definitely preferable that players take advantage of those free moves before August 9th in order to have the most agency over where their character ends up and to avoid potential interruptions, even if the chance of that actually happening is small.