Well I don’t know if I’d say our that’s our “current stance”, holistically speaking. We have seen established guilds transfer, and hope to see more. I was merely saying, I can understand why you’d be hesitant to move, its a big decision with a lot of ripple effects.
If anything we are hoping that some of the less attached players are willing to move in some larger numbers to help alleviate the current and immediate concerns. It’s not a long term fix or strategy on which we can rely on its own.
We have considered it. Nothing to share just now though.
Trying to chase faction balance with transfers is even more difficult than trying to reduce server population, historically. If there’s any perception that someone will be an underdog, they generally won’t make the move. But, there’s definitely a possibility we will try it. I think if we really leaned into that, we’d want to try and pair it with some sort of incentive to move, which is something we are working on designs for, and talked with a few members of the community council about a few weeks ago in a zoom call. Unfortunately it’ll take a bit of time for that to get fully implemented though, should we decide to go that route.
So the fresh realms are a very unique situation and we want to be extremely careful about adding more realms. Adding a 2nd fresh PvP realm is very very likely to do one of two things:
- Lead to both realms being unhealthy in the long term.
- Essentially guarantee that one of the two realms becomes the “horde” server, and the other becomes the “alliance” server.
Additionally, Fresh realms are also much more likely to experience a bit of a decline once the game actually launches. Many people are leveling in fresh now during pre-patch but we expect some number of those players to return to their normal established servers and guilds once the expansion launches. This might be a situation where its better for us to weather the storm, as it were.
Lastly, the fresh realms’ total “footprint” of players isn’t nearly as large as a server like Faerlina or Benediction. These established older large realms will continue to swell as folks return who may be inactive unless moves occur, which is a different situation than Skyfury is in. While the queues on Skyfury are long, they aren’t as long as the other queuing mega-realms. If everyone in the queue for Benediction went to another realm, that realm would be queuing as well. That queue is more than double the capacity of the realm. If everyone in Skyfury’s queue went to another realm, it would be a fairly busy realm, but not nearly full. Skyfury and the 2nd realm may not survive that division long term.
Fast reactions to immediate problems are part of what got us here, and while our goal is to get everyone into the game as soon as we can, we also want to make sure Fresh realms are a long term success as well. We want to be extra sure that the only option is to open a new fresh realm before we do so.