A plea for the return of paid character transfers

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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This was posted on the EU Classic forum by “Mizane-Blutmund,” but its sentiments are equally applicable on the US servers:

This is Blutmond’s desperate prayer to the faceless powers that guide the destinies of the European Classic Era realmpool Heartstriker-Venoxis-Dragon’s Call.

Nigh three summers past the world has changed drastically over a single night. We woke in empty cities with our guild tabards pale and grey, wondering whether we might ever again measure our skills against the mighty evils that lurk in Azeroth’s dungeons and instances.

Not a day had passed however, when a brave leader of the pack had gathered together what little forces remained. He formed the German guild “Blutmond” and set out to strengthen its members by taking on the Soulflayer in the temple city of Zul’Gurub. Supported by seasoned raidleaders, Blutmond soon progressed to smother the fiery elementals in Molten Core, rid Blackwing Lair of its dragonspawn and cleanse the ruins and temple of Ahn’Qiraj of its insect infestations.

In early spring 2022, Blutmond was ready to enter the floating necropolis of Naxxramas and tackle the undead. With unrelenting patience and willpower, Blutmond’s colourful assembly eventually achieved steady weekly full clears of all instances. We unite WoW veterans and greenhorns, minmaxers and memespeccers, fulltimers and parttimers, as well as people of different origins and tongues all under one banner. Our community has thrived by an unrivalled spirit of sharing and caring, where those who own stock, skills and resources provide for those who have little or nought. Committed heroes have carried our raids through many a hard season. Our leaders have established an intricate rule system which ensures fair and generous participation, loot distribution and conflict resolution.

We proudly believe to have kept alive the true WoW Classic spirit.

However those past seasons various adversities have started to haunt our realmpool. Most threatening of all a surge of soulless beings, come to drain our resources. They bear unspeakable letters for names, need not rest or sleep and possess inhumane capabilities of finding and gathering herb and ore. We call them “Bots”. In the beginning we desperately addressed the powers that govern our world, including our tormentors names in our prayers, but to no avail. Our pleas went unanswered and the invasion only grew. The resources we so direly need to muster the necessary strength to keep the evils of Azeroth in check are being carried off to a faraway place called Firemaw, which is driven by a toxic capitalistic economy that has no place for the poor, the weak or the different. From time to time, we are forced to send a brave traveller to this hell to buy goods which can no longer be gathered because of the Bot-plague.

A fortnight ago, without warning, the bridge between our two realms has shattered one way and some of our travellers are since stranded far away with no possibility to return. Firemaw-“misfits” who have sought refuge on our peaceful realm every now and then now have nowhere to turn to, while the parasites that drain our realms are still allowed to carry away our resources unhindered.

We have carried many a burden without resentment or outcry. However this latest doom shakes our carefully built and sustained community to the core and threatens to ruin our existence. Thus we must take our last stand and turn to those all-powerful beings, hoping they might bless us with grace and justice:

Please reinstall paid transfer from and to our realmpool, so that our lost brothers and sisters as well as Firemaw-refugees may join us and strengthen our ranks once again, while the plague might be eradicated.

Thank you.

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normally id agree with the sentiment, but you made me read through 3 paragraphs of RP to essentially restate the thread title. so im going to change my position to non support. now i want a compelling well thought out argument.

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Nah, I don’t really care whether “Pemmin” agrees or not, suffice it to say there are a lot of people ready to give Blizzard their money to play on the server they want to and some who will cancel their accounts rather than be stranded somewhere they don’t want to be. I suspect that factor will ultimately prove to be the determinative one, not your support or lack thereof.

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you understand how information is communicated to the devs right?

they dont read the forum everything is done through CM reports regarding player sentiment on any given topic. the less agreement you have in this topic the lower the odds of you getting your already unlikely ask. so yes you should care. you need both positive sentiment and critical mass outcry

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We have been begging for the return of the paid transfer service for over a month. Our main post is in the classic era bug reports section.

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We have a blue reply on this thread about it:

Legacy and the Grobbulus Era realm have been able to grow in part because of the Paid Transfer service enabling Whitemane misfits to stumble on over to our little village on Grobbulus, similar to the sentiment shared above.

We still have a few folks who are leveling new with us, and we’ll see more of them, but without the Paid Transfer Service, new friends aren’t able to transfer their existing 60s to play with us, even though they have been able to for the last 4 years.

If anyone else wants the Paid Transfer Service reinstated, please go reply to the blue post there demanding it back.

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They should do the following.

Re-enable paid transfers, but you can’t bring any items that aren’t soul bound or any gold whatsoever.

This way its a pure play move and not a move for bot profits

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Unfortunately Aggrend has told me in conversation that he believes the bots exporting mats from realms like Grobbulus to Whitemane is healthy for the Whitemane economy. We’ll never see them do anything to prevent that side of it… which is why Paid Transfer Service to these realms was shut down, yet Free Character Moves being exploited by exporters and bots remain today

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“Please let us pay you money so we can used a paid transfer to buy materials and pay another transfer back because you would rather soak bot subscription money over actually giving a damn about your playerbase.”

(Sucks yall are stuck like that)

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Even worse than using the PCT+FCM to mule mats on a rare occasion from Whitemane to Grobbulus…

We have to tell new recruits the only option is to reroll. It’s a shame when for the last nearly 4 years they’ve been able to join us with their existing toons simply by transferring.

And to add insult to injury, the blue post states:

Rich to hear blizzard talking about protecting their customers from money traps lol!

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Yeah I’d bet a large sum of money that the real reason is some bug they are too lazy to fix.

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I think so too. I believe it was accidently removed, then spun to sound like a favor for us.

Just like when we got Might of Stormwind, Druids with polearms, and some other SoD changes in Era.

They pushed change for SoD, it impacted Era, they didn’t realize until the players noticed and complained, then they made a blue post saying they’re making these changes to SoD and Era… yeah because we always wanted druids with polearms, and we even had warlocks noticing SoD spells in Era for some time.

This time, it was a change for the launch of anniversary realms. This removal came the day they launched Anniversary realms… surely not a coincidence. They had to modify something related to transfers to prevent HC from going to PVP and adding a message to the PvP realm saying you can’t ever transfer off of this realm. Again, no communication about the change. Only once it was raised on the support forums did they reply saying “oh yeah it was a money trap you’re welcome”.

This is a consequence of merging code and clients for all game types. They’re struggling to isolate changes to just one version or another and we’re seeing changes and bugs consistently leak into other game variants… every single patch something happens.

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Don’t alienate people with this kind of very poorly thought out commentary.

  • Contradiction.

That said, Blizzard should enforce their own rules on botting, taking much more aggressive action to eradicate bots.

Paid transfers should be enabled for realms of the same type unless there is a specific reason that is both presently valid and communicated.

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Also, what the heck does this even mean? Makes no sense.

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This is why we are requesting that the paid character transfer service be reinstated for Era. It was an accident. Please fix it.

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Then he’s an idiot because right now, now that there are so few bots playing on ERA the WMC economy has started to heal from all the damage that’s been done to it.

Right now I can make so much gold from crafting because I can compete and actually make gold by crafting mana pots and so on due to the fact that the botters are not flooding the market on some items, and marking other things way the hell up.

The botters need to go plain and simple, and any one who says that the bots don’t pay subs, and that they’re stolen accounts is a simp addict addicted to blizzard lies.

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Yep thankfully anniversary lured the botters and farmers away from Era for the most part. They do still exist on Grobb and are exporting mats over to WM via the FCM. He told me this a year ago, and it was very bad then on era.

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You’d have to click through on the quote to see the full context from the Blizzard employee. But essentially, they are claiming that the Paid Transfer Service was a “money trap” because all realms are connected already (which is untrue) and therefor all PTS purchases were taking money in exchange for nothing of value to the customer, given the false narrative that all Era realms are already connected.

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They need to END the free transfers… but I suspect he allows it to go on because the bots pump his numbers up. Remember its corporate, and people do shady things for their projected goals.

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I’m convinced that something is going on behind the scenes, especially regarding whether or not we can move anniversary characters to existing era realms once anniversary progression completes.

I was getting ready to buy two 5-packs of transfers… thanks for helping me to avoid the trap!

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