There is a growing concern that the reason Blizzard has disabled the paid transfer service in Era is that they are getting ready to put Era on a two megaserver-type platform as they have done in Anniversary.
I for one do not desire such a change, and I also would respectfully request that the paid transfer service be re-enabled in Era.
How different would that be from the various realms within each rule type being clustered? I ask this sincerely because I’m not overly familiar with what all benefits having servers clustered provides aside from maybe better queue times for PvP since it draws participants from every server within that cluster?
I know having smaller communities as opposed to one giant community is something often talked about but if you’re able to communicate with players from other clusters via global channels, would it really be much different than doing so if they were all on the same mega-server?
there is no such rumor 
nor does it make any sense, as the current system of connected realms works just fine
Hiya Eyr.
There’s a growing concern amongst some of us. There’s no rumor.
well all i care about is that there is no layering. if they start adding layering to classic era, i’m out
“dont fix it if it aint broken” - blizzard probably
I think he means the fact that there’s still a few realms that aren’t clustered. Both Sev and I play on one of those realms.
Speaking only for me, personally, being on a “dead” realm has really made the game playable and much more enjoyable for me. I can farm my own stuff for raids, there’s no contention, and anything I need I can coordinate with my guild mates to get.
I don’t really think WoW was ever intended to be this monetized but it is… and I get that some folks dig it, but it’s not for me. If they ever closed our server off completely, that would probably be the end of WoW for me. I hope they don’t do it, but it’s been a good run I guess.
I can definitely relate to that! I’m leveling various characters on Dreamscythe, the Anniversary PvE server, but every now and again I log onto this character that is eternally parked in Northrend on a dead/locked server. The silence is beyond golden. Only way it could possibly be better is if I had 24 other people that wanted to just keep running through vanilla-WotLK content and forget that Cataclysm even exists.
Definitely something to be said for extremely low population servers.
I would definitely transfer a character over to grob if it was possible shame
We’re still hopeful that paid transfers will be restored.
This would be the only way I would want to experience WotLK and Cata, if I’m being honest. If I wasn’t committed to Grob I would maybe join you. I’m impressed with the work Legacy has done to create a Naxx-viable raid team on a dead server because it’s a lot of work, but it does show that it can be done!
Yea, I don’t really understand why Blizzard shutdown transfers in. I don’t know that I share Severus’ outlook, but I can certainly understand how he, and many others, have come to that conclusion as a result of this action.
With that said, you can always roll a character. There’s a few folks leveling and the guild is always happy to help people out with dungeon and elite quest carries when we have the time. Just make sure you get an invite to Legacy if you’re Alliance, or one of the Horde guilds if you’re playing that faction. We’ve got a problem with bots and professional farmers exploiting the free transfers to Whitemane and so anybody without a guild tag will likely get killed and camped. We usually reach out to folks who don’t look like they’re actually bots, but some folks have been dealing with this for many years now and can sometimes fall into auto-pilot haha.
Honestly man, I think that ship has sailed. Blizzard can get pretty dug-in on stuff like that, even when their public facing reason for it is pure nonsense. Personally, I think the theory that they just straight up broke something and can’t be bothered to fix it is the most likely. I can’t think of any other reason for them to deny customers the ability to give them money, lol.
I haven’t heard any of those concerns.
Paid transfers were disabled because they were disabled on the Anniversary realms and Blizz is too incompetent to separate those from Era.
My guess is that once Anniversary progresses to TBC and get their own, separate client they’ll be opened up again on Era.
I’m raising the concern here, thus, you have indeed heard it.
Heh, ok.
Well, I empathize. Megaservers are trash and have destroyed Anniversary. And would destroy Era, where community still does matter.
This concern has been discussed privately amongst different Era players over the past couple months, I’m just bringing it to the public forum. 
I would be very saddened if it happened, as I think Era is the only form of Classic even worth playing. It would be an obvious slap in the face to all the players who choose to play on those Era servers.
And it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Blizz did it, since they don’t care.
I’ll start by saying… this is my own totally made up theory. I don’t have any evidence here.
Blizzard has continuously been working on reducing realm management. Since 2019 Classic they’ve consistently moved towards less realms, and more passive management of those realms (auto faction balancing, locking). They want to reduce the human employee toil that comes with managing these realms.
They’ve also made efforts to reduce the devops/sysadmin toil of managing the infrastructure. We’ve seen them consolidate clients for all versions of wow, we’ve seen them add layering tech to scale instead of horizontal scaling with additional realms.
This leads us to Anniversary, which is the latest iteration in their progress to reduce administrative toil. One PvP and one PvE realm*. No RP variants. Deployment of massive layering tech. Near elimination of administrative toil to realms. The realms manage themselves now!
*I am excluding OCE here. I know it exists. It seems it’s about to bite them in the butt, and further reinforce their golden path to less realms = less management. They’re eventually going to have to intervene and manually manage the OCE realm, likely with Free Character Moves + locking the realm to bail them out.
So how does this relate to Era I’m sure you’re wondering? We’re on the legacy setup still (no pun intended to the guild I’m in lol). Era has a dozen realms. Multiple clusters of realms. Multiple realms uncluttered. It’s objectively a mess compared to their modern approach to realm management. I don’t like it… I want more, smaller, uncluttered realms. But admittedly it’s confusing unless you’re One Of Us playing era regularly.
It’s not obvious which realms are active. It’s not obvious which realms are clustered. It’s not obvious what a cluster even means. It’s not obvious that there’s uncluttered realms with smaller communities. It’s not obvious that Whitemane and Mankirk are the defacto realms. I know… to you, it may be VERY obvious. But we’re over on era living and breathing it. We know. But newcomers do not. All you have to do is look in this forum or Reddit and you’ll see dozens of posts asking “what era server should I play on” or something like that.
If they clean up the realm management strategy, it’s a much easier journey for new players. PvP or PvE? Again, I don’t agree. I want many smaller realms. I want RP variants. But the writing is on the wall imo. It’s more work for blizzard and they’ve trended more and more to less realms and passive management.
So when is this going to happen, if it does? I believe once Anniversary realms end. My theory is that they will merge the Era realms into PvP and PvE only. Perhaps will be Whitemane and Mankirk, and everything else is merged (not clustered). Perhaps they clone Anniversary outright into Era and we have Nightslayer and Dreamsycthe, with the era realms merged into those. Perhaps we have new realms we all clone to. I don’t know exactly, but I believe we’ll see a reduction to two Era realms once anniversary ends.
I also want to note, I don’t buy that these realms are expensive in terms of compute/storage/networking. I know some people will say “oh how expensive could it be to run all these realms”. I don’t think that’s the issue. I think it’s actually very cheap for them to keep many realms up. It’s the human expense having their ops team manage multiple realms, running the active management of populations, dealing with requests from us on Grobbulus when we complain about bots and exploitations of FCMs or restoring the transfer service. Players opening tickets about clones. Players being confused where to play. That’s the cost to me that they’re looking to reduce. Not just the pure infra cost. Though I’d guess two realms with auto scaling infinite layers is likely cheaper too, in addition to being cheaper to manage.
Jarl always says things better than I do.
I just say a lot of words 
lol this is probably true sigh
the further corruption of era realms is virtually guaranteed