@blizzard
hello all, I was wondering if a possible free transfer is in store for the lower pop servers in the near future? I just came back from a long break and my server is completely dead.
What I would like to know is when WOTLK comes out do you think either they will allow free transfers or do you think maybe the low pop servers will pickup again once it hits?
Also when is WOTLk coming?
I am just torn at what to do at this point. I mean do I reroll on a more populated server(doesn’t have to be a mega one} or do I bite the bullet and pay for the transfer?
I have read through many many posts on this forum and reddit and other sources about the server populations and the issues surrounding them.
One thing that I noticed that no one brought up yet , at least I have yet to see it. Is that I don’t understand why blizzard lets all these servers sit there. Aren’t they costing money to keep the lights on and also patch and update or shoot even just general upkeep on all servers = more man power to the company. So to me it seems odd for them to keep these servers running…? I would think that it would cost more money to keep them running and also counting on paid transfers. Maybe it doesn’t cost much to keep them up, but from what I have seen other games do is quite the opposite of what is going on here.
For example Trion Worlds brought back Rift classic or whatever it was called and when the servers died they merged servers instead of keeping the dead ones using up their resources. However, they gave plenty of time for people to plan their destinations.
As far as names went, you were either lucky that one one else had yours or you had to be creative, no big deal. The one thing I think that company did do right though was when ALL players were done with the reborn Rift experience they offered All characters to be able to go to any of the live servers and added free character slots for all accounts. So say you wanted to return to your OG server and your character slots were maxed, they extended so you could do exactly that. Which was pretty cool.
I’m not sure what Bliz plans to do once the classic series is over but, its something they truly should consider and it would benefit them as well to get folks back in retail if players ever wanted to try it or come back.
Another thing that Trion Worlds incorporated in Rift base game that was very cool and solved many problems with low pop servers was the ability to switch servers on a dime.
You simply click your character portrait and you had a change realm option and you just clicked which one you wanted to go to and instantly you were there. Now, you still had your true real home/realm/server that you were dedicated to as far as the AH went and your bank and ya know the main things. But the AH was cross server before they implemented the shard hopping thing, so it didn’t matter much when it came to that. It mattered when it came to guilds, your bank and your in game house but other than that it was a cool feature because , say you couldn’t find a group or mob on one shard but you could on another.
It opened up gameplay in so many ways. I truly think that those developers did an excellent job on some things. Maybe something like that would work well here. It didn’t turn around Rift because , well most people didn’t care for the game so it just wasn’t as popular as WoW. But maybe Blizzard should take note of this from their peers. I still think that Rift had some of the best writers and programmers I’ve ever seen. I was with them for four years and that was towards the end when they were bought out and stuff but its sad when a gaming company goes under. You get to know these devs and what happened to them was just pure crap and I just hope that this company learns and see’s from their peers mistakes.
But ya know as they say, you can leave WOW but you can never fully quit!! haha. 
Anyway sorry for the long winded post but, maybe some things might work well here. Just trying to help everyone involved, because lets face it if you are 43 years old like me and still playing games, you want to be a gamer for life, am I right? Lets help solve the problem, offer different solutions, look at other games, I mean it doesn’t hurt that’s for sure. Take care all, in this crazy world.