The server has been locked for quite some time. I managed to transfer to Earthfury myself but some of my friends couldn’t. They took few more days than I did and now we are just separate and waiting forever to do it.
The realms population are constantly going down (just check the amount of auctions daily and you’ll see its less and less every week). There’s always so few people farming (aka bots). Anyway…, when is blizz unlocking Earthfury?
checking ironforge for us classic population! it is going down and down!
Keep going down! Unlock the serveR Transfer!
I thought they unlocked the transfers months ago.
They did not. I believe Faerlina is locked as well. The last blue post about transfers were adding more servers to the lockout instead of unlocking them, unfortunately… 
I believe this is the last blue post I’ve read regarding restricted realms.
There is a pinned post at the top of this forum titled “Character Transfer Restrictions”. So it’s easy to check. I assume any changes will show up there. The last change was May 28.
Chicken’s post gives the details. To summarize, there is 1 PvE, 1 Oceanic, 1 RP-PvP, 2 PvP West Coast, and 5 PvP East Coast servers. So a total of 10 servers out of 39.
I don’t remember all the details, but we didn’t start out with 10 locked. Originally it was just 2 or 3, then it grew. Probably the same thing will happen when realms get unlocked. But Blizz doesn’t t publish numbers, or their exact rule about unlocking…
Yeah…
There’s a bigger issue than just locking or unlocking servers, I’ll try to describe:
I basically play in eastern PVP servers. I have 4 lvl 60 in Horde Thalnos (which is a completely mess as you can see on ironforge stats) which is an unplayable server and I have 2 lvl 60 in Alliance Earthfury (which proves to be a good/decent server - but as I stated, I’m waiting forever to play with friends that were left behind before the server restrictions).
Currently, I can only leave Thalnos server if I pay for other bad available options (because the top 5 eastern pvp servers are locked).
I believe many people have issues that looks like mine and they just decide to quit the game or do something else because blizz doesn’t seem to want to solve their realm populations issues.
(edited for language fixes)
Why would they unlock it? Last time they opened transfers all of Incendius Horde transferred over and ruined the whole server. They though they could take over the discord and control bracket caps, I still dont get why they think their so high and mighty. They seem like the usual gang of 400lb’rs with walnut sized brains. You guys already F’d the server up once, you dont get to do it again, thanks though.
I agree that many players have “issues” (can’t do everything they would like). That doesn’t surprise me, in the current pandemic. Everybody I know has things they want to do and can’t.
Actually, Blizzard has solved their realm population issues. They added realm locking and 2 layers to locked realms. That seems to be working.
That doesn’t allow some players (like you) to do everything you want to do. I agree. But that isn’t Blizzard’s problem. Blizzard’s job is not to “allow every player to do whatever that player wants”.
Would something that lets you (do what you want) be better? Sure. Does such a solution exist? If you know one, post it. I don’t think Blizzard knows one.
Is it locked now? I don’t think it is.
EDIT:
No, it isn’t. This thread is not very good. Do some research before posting.
Do you honestly think the population from other servers are ok right now? Besides some of the locked ones. Even Pagle has weird pop.
Just tested in-game, right now (07:52am gmt-3), for Earthfury (realm in question) and Faerlina (your realm). The message shows: “The selected realm is not accepting character transfers at this time”. Either this is something some accounts cannot transfer or this doesn’t make sense.
Anyone else can try checking if Earthfury/Faerlina is not restricted at the moment like Frosto pointed out please? For science.
No news. Probably not unlocking it until the server ceases being too populated
Just now I tried a realm transfer to Earthfury from Netherwind. I got an error message saying “The selected realm is not accepting character transfers at this time”.
So Earthfury is “locked for realm transfers”.
But last night I was able to create a new level 1 character on Earthfury (where I had no characters). So Earthfury is not “locked for creating a new level 1”.
Earthfury is marked “High” (not “Locked”) on the in-game Realm Selection page.
So there are 2 or 3 different meanings of “Locked”. No wonder Frosto got confused!
A lot of people are confused on what others mean by locked.
Originally Earthfury and many others were locked down to both new characters and paid transfers. As of a month ago you could now create new characters here but cannot transfer.
While some make the argument that xfering is bad for servers, locking it can also harm them depending on the server size. According to ironforge we’re the 11th largest server, we’ve had no layering for a while, and we are not a destination server like herod or faerlina.
Earthfury has had no steady influx of new players and it hurts things such as guild recruitment or our economy over time, because players who currently play here also naturally burn out, so we’re just losing people to the point where it’s causing an inconvenience for the active guilds here.
In my opinion if your server isn’t big enough to warrant layering, you shouldn’t have incoming transfers locked as well. Either full commit to locking the server for stability, otherwise leave it alone and let the community figure it out.
thank you. that pretty much wraps up the whole “what’s really happening”.
Free character migrations are different than paid character transfers and the former has a history of causing servers to crater, and in this thread we’re talking specifically about paid transfers.
One thing to take into context was around the time servers like Incendius or Sulfuras filled up was when there was a lot of server stabilization still going on from the chaos that was the classic launch.
People were fleeing from all over trying to find a long term home which caused an aftershock to quiet servers that had medium-low populations.
We’re starting to approach a late stage game where people might be more tied to their servers and are not as inclined to pick up and move a guild anymore, as well as just a severe slow down in brand new classic players checking out the game.
At some point denying the people who might have quit early on, only then come back to the game and not be able to transfer and play with your friends really hinders the greater classic community. Especially when blizz gives us no communication around the topic as to when a server gets reevaluated for an unlock.
I totally agree with upper comment. I am not sure how we can directly talk with Dev’s team. Blizzard said forum is the only way to talk, but there is 0 comment on this topic, though there are ton and ton of comments on this.