I think your whole premise is skewed here. 6 months to a year ago (or beyond) many of us were on healthy, stable, active servers. Many of us picked said servers based off current Ironforge.io numbers and trajectories. During this phase of TBCC and on many servers, much earlier, those numbers started crashing. Some of it had to do with player fatigue, the many controversies surrounding Blizzard, natural attrition, and normal transfers. Regardless, I started playing on a server that was stable. That lasted all of Classic perfectly fine.
So to say it’s a “player driven problem” might be true, to an extent, but Blizzard’s solution it to profit off of our misery by charging us to transfer to servers where people are actually playing the game. It just adds insult to injury. I didn’t choose for my server to die. It’s no individual player’s fault lol.
Free transfers (account wide) with a cooldown should ALWAYS have been the case imho. (If they were going to allow transfers in the first place)
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I think paid transfers back in the day made sense for what they were going for. $25 was actually a deterrent back when a significant amount of the player base was dependent on their parents for money. Not to mention that, due to inflation, $25 was effectively more money back then, and the fact that the servers were physically separate then. So the process wasn’t automated.
All that said, the transfer system should be reworked. I think transfers should be free every six months. If you want to transfer before the CD is over, then you should be charged.
No doubt, the fact that millenials make up the bulk of the Classic playerbase has led to some really interesting ramifications.
Many players want the experience that we lived in the early 2000s but we wanted to do it “right” this time. Meaning our characters have the best gear, instant epic flying, grinding through reputations as quickly as possible, skipping the leveling experience via boosting, and, of course, swiping/buying gold rather than farming or working the AH.
Like the aforementioned, looking to just pay your way out of the problem of a dying server rather than finding another solution has made it so that Blizzard doesn’t actually have to address systemic issues with faction/server balance and instead gets Devs (and players like those above) saying that it is a “player caused issue” and that paying our way out of it is a valid and just choice.
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I don’t often agree with you but damn, this post is on the mark.
If Blizzard would just update the list of low pop servers available for free transfers from November, I think a lot of people would be very pleased.
That could be a stop gap solution. I think they should do that.
If they updated the list of low pop servers and still only gave them free transfers to the mega servers I think just as many people would be displeased. It appears to me that blizzard is attempting to find a once and done solution to the server pop problems. Incentivize everyone to move to a few mega servers and be done with it.
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You think so? An MMORPG consists of players. Now that we all have the benefit of hindsight, I’d like anyone to think of a solution that would have been bullet proof that would have prevented the situation we have now. Let’s hear it.
I’ll bet you there won’t be one.
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Connected realms + warmode.
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This doesn’t exist. As people have stated before in this thread. Any solution that would work for everyone would have had to be put into the game from the start. Needing to act proactively to what we all knew the player base would do instead of acting reactively after the play base did what we knew they would do.
At this point, the solution that has to be taken is the one that affects the least amount of players. Which in all honesty would be either leaving things as they are and letting realms die, players quit, and others transfer off.
The other options would be to open up free transfers between all realms and remove all cooldowns players currently have, and allow players to organize themselves before deleting all dead realms.
What this second one would hopefully accomplish (if these groups of players actually exist in large enough numbers) is to allow for those who want a normal size realm and smaller realm to organize themselves in those locations. So they end realm list would look like
Alliance PvP Mega Realm
Horde PvP Mega Realm
RP-PvP Mega Realm
RP Mega Realm
Balanced PvE Normal Realm
Balanced PvE Small Realm.
Granted I don’t have much hope for anything actually being balanced but there is always a chance.
After whatever occurs. Bring transfer price back to normal. Players can now only blame themselves if they don’t like what happened. They had the chance to organize themselves.
Like this will ever happen
I would of loved to see the amount of crying on the forums had blizzard started with that.
They would of carried Kaivax out and burned him/her at the stakes.
This cannot be stressed enough. Immediate action has to be done to stop the bleeding.
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If they are given the opportunity to group with like-minded players freely and actively choose not to. Then they didn’t really want that thing and we can all tell them to shut the hell up and they didn’t want it.
Allowing free transfers anywhere would be my solution - if you can call it that. A bandaid to stop an artery wound.
Indeed, but at this point. It is the best we can actually do if Blizz wants to go with this “not upsetting people despite already upsetting people” route.
The problem is most players will act conscious of a history of neglect. I think there would be some who would transfer off the mega realms but don’t trust that blizzard won’t leave them there on a dead end street, or dead realm street. Many will conclude it’s better to stay on a mega realm they’re barely ok with then to take the risk of being very unhappy on a dead realm. Your idea is one of the better ones though.
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Wouldn’t that just prove they didn’t really want a normal or small realm, or at the very least prove that there isn’t this large demand for those size realms. If with the ability to freely organize with other players who want those size realms and their decision is “I’m going to stay on the mega realm because it is safer”… It kind of proves they didn’t want those normal or smaller realms. Unless Blizzard was around to force people who didn’t want those realms to play with them.
I really like the medium pop realms and am even ok with a low pop realm. I stuck around and stuck around and stuck around my low pop realm until it was almost totally dead because I thought surely blizzard would do something before it got this bad. Then I transferred. If you think that experience doesn’t color people’s thinking and choices going forward or it means they really don’t like medium or low pop realms /what ever.
I agree with this, I’ve heard it from a lot of people.
It’s gone down like this. A server starts having problems and people loved that original server but decide they now have to transfer, because it’s dying. They and their guild research and research and they find this really great new server. We had a lot of transfers to Earthfury for this exact reason, but it could have been any server. People wanted our population and they wanted our balance. It looked good.
So then my example, people were happy at first. Then 3 months later Earthfury alliance starts having problems. People have been through this before, they have seen it before, they have paid money before to fix their situation. They don’t want to get burned again. So they go to the safest choice, even if it’s not what they really want, because being only moderately satisfied is better than having to pay to move servers again.
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