First off, for those people who are saying free transfers were open for over a week, that’s not actually true. Free transfers were open for two periods of less than a week each. That’s fine for solo players without guilds, but it would be difficult to organize transfer of a large guild in that time; it was barely enough time to transfer our tiny 10 character guild, and we ended up leaving a few behind. During the first transfer period, you couldn’t be planning on transfers during the second period, we didn’t know if the second period would exist yet.
Secondly, whether or not to continue free transfers should be based on whether the game needs them.
In my opinion, free transfers from established servers to other established servers, such as Grobbulus to Deviate Delight, aren’t really necessary any more, though one more week of these transfers might be good.
We do, however, need continued free transfers from the truly overcrowded servers to the servers that were created to accept transfers from them, such as Arcanite Reaper. Such transfers weren’t socially acceptable in the first transfer period due to expectations that the receiving servers would eventually die from lack of population, resulting in only a small cadre of transfers. This changed during the second transfer period, when the newly created servers got enough of a cadre to look like they might be viable and transfers became generally socially acceptable.
However, the social acceptability of these transfers was established too late to organize group transfers effectively. These new servers are still way smaller than established servers, and any significant dropoff in population over time will threaten their viability. To put it another way, they’re now about where servers like Deviate Delight were before free transfers. Given that Deviate Delight and similar small but established transfer targets took two weeks to get to populations in the range of other servers, the new servers likely still need two weeks of free transfers to get to the same fully healthy point.
What Blizzard should do is open free transfers one last time from the overcrowded servers to the new servers created to receive transfers from them. This transfer period should be continuous for two weeks, to provide enough time to coordinate larger group transfers, such as full preraid and raiding guilds.
At that point, transfers can be shut off until phase 2, when removal of layering may require another round of population redistribution over more servers. Shutting them off now is too early.