Tell you what, let’s make a deal: I’ll do a free transfer off Faerlina for you while the queue is obscene… if you promise to do a free transfer for me when the realm you ask me to join dies in two months like it always does without fail.
You promise that, I suspect the queue problem will die overnight.
You can’t have this both ways: you either want to solve the problem or profit off it. It’s pretty clear which you’re picking.
But if Blizzard were to do that, then there’s no chance the servers would survive. The idea is to have more servers with a healthy pop than just a handful of megaservers.
I’ve always thought this should happen.
Give people who make the sacrifice first priority in the future and make it convenient for them. They’re solving your issue.
Not, if through those incentives, they actually get enough people to go off and create healthy, good servers.
People have been asking for this a lot actually.
Too many people on these mega servers have been burned, often more than once. That’s actually a big reason why the mega servers exist because people do not want to pay money and move their guilds (which moving the guilds is also a risk you tend to lose people just doing that - a lot of guilds die from moving but this doesn’t get talked about) and then have to move again.
With that being said the transferring back is almost guaranteed to kill the realm that people move to so this is also bad.
So I don’t know what to say, but you’re right. It’s a huge issue. Group moves are the best way to ensure part of the community stays together but also that’s an issue and often creates a faction imbalance on the new servers.
broke: due to hardware limitations, servers maximum capacity ist 10,000 - 12,000 concurrent players so sad 
woke: UNLIMITED PAID TRANSFERS TO ANY SERVER YOU WANT
bespoke: plz take free transfers to fix problem we created and profited from. also, feel free to buy a transfer back in 3 months. maybe u can free transfer again in six months when queues are 3+ hours again lol
A huge, vast majority of the people queuing now and those who will be queuing on launch will play for a month at most, get a fix of nostalgia and move on.
In 2 months, no server is going to have a queue, much less 6.
There will be spikes when Ulduar and ICC are released.
I just paid to transfer 3 of my Alliance characters off a horribly unbalanced server a few weeks ago. It was balanced and populated when quit (2 years ago.) From what I gather they offered free transfers due to queues and most of the alliance left. WOTLK was going to be unplayable on that old server for me.
Now the server I transferred to is offering free transfers, is locked due to congestion, and if we learn from the past; the results will be an unbalanced realm.
I feel scammed.
Nah just add RDF and cross-realms.
*Tinfoil hat with 
*
I feel like they aren’t telling us something or they don’t even know because
these issues were all present 15 years ago and solved but now suddenly it’s absolutely
no way they can do it again.
Just come out with it and tell us which poor intern borked the codes already.
No one will be made if you guys just tell us the truth lol.
At this point, why are paid transfers even a thing? You already have a cooldown on it, so if these problems can’t be solved by Blizzard, remove the fee, lock full servers, and let players self organize.
Heck, try it as an experiment and just see what happens?
I mean they can solve it with sharding and cross realms. They have already mentioned this is the solution retail uses but they dont want to do it because the whole point of classic is to limit the QOL features from retail WoW.
Theres no tinfoil hat here.
Exactly this. I started out on Kromcrush in Vanilla Classic. Then I stopped playing for a few months during BC. Came back to the emptiest Org I’ve ever seen. Did a /who during primetime, and there were 6 people online. I checked the AH and there was literally nothing on it. Blizz gave me one free transfer on the character screen. I looked around and found that Grobbulus was a balanced, healthy server. So I transferred my 70 main and paid to transfer a 60.
So now they’re offering me free transfers. Cool, I’d be more than happy to transfer. But I’m working on my 4th 70 atm. If my new server dies like the last one, I’m not trying to spend even more money to transfer again. If they can promise me free transfers for all of my characters down the road, then I’ll go to a lower pop server. Otherwise, I’ll just deal with the Grobbulus queues until the hype dies down.
Because people pay it, have been doing so for a long time, and is completely automated now.
I’m pretty sure it would be pretty hard to give up that cash cow.
I think this one is less about limiting a QoL feature as it is fostering and preserving the community feel of the original realms. I think the mega-servers compromise that as much as cross-realm does though, so it’s not like we’ve succeed here.
To my point above though, if players could self organize onto realms capped at some appropriate amount of players (5k? 10k? 15k?), it might do well to preserve that small realm feel while also keeping queues under control.
I agree, but Blizzard did this with gender changes in a move that surprised a lot of people. So maybe we can hope? 
I guess the bottom line is, the transfer fee is touted as being there to give players pause before transferring to another server. My question is, does that still make sense today? Financial incentives aside, what would the impact of allowing players to freely migrate between servers on, say, a 2 month cooldown?
To be clear I am not disparaging on the their stance here. I can understand why they are not doing it. We dont need 33% of a regions population on one realm.
Their resolution was Cross-Realm Zones/Dungeons. It’s not really that they can’t fix it, it’s that the Classic community is pretty vehemently against them implementing that change, or at least a loud enough portion of the Classic community is.
Maybe they will see they’ve destroyed servers with these limited free transfers to ease congestion and the better solution is to offer free mobility (like modern games.)
Here’s to hoping… /cheers
Pretty much lol. My tinfoil hat was the fact that they said “the ONLY way we can solve this”.
Nah, we have the solutions and one of them being within this very expansion so I dunno. 
This is accurate. The Classic Andys that want Vanilla WoW cosplaying as Wrath without any of the things that made people like Wrath more than Vanilla.