About a week ago, my guild who I’ve been playing with since classic started made the decision to utilise the free transfer off Remulos (which has 160 people on it lol) and move to Arugal. I agreed and we all made the decision to transfer a few days ago.
I was having a bug with the mail not letting me transfer any character and thought ‘oh I’ll wait it out’ and went across state for work. Now suddenly only a couple days later there’s no available free realm transfers for Remulos despite it being dead.
Basically, due to their own system not working, Blizzard now expect me to pay for a service to transfer my characters? Anyone know of any other way I have out of this situation or hope even hope for it? Because honestly, I’ll just cancel my 15 year running sub if that’s the case.
It’s just poor form and I can’t even think why they’d want to keep that server running.
Maybe there’s a different post about there being free moves off Remulos to Arugal, but it’s not in the original announcement of free transfers HERE.
There are free transfers TO your server in that list.
Was there a different announcement that stated there were free transfers off your server that I’m missing?
Otherwise, either it wasn’t offered to begin with, Blizz opened them by accident, or Blizzard shut them down intentionally for whatever reason. It’s possible a blue here might be able to shed some light, but at the end of the day, it looks like they were originally trying to move people TO that server and not off of it.
Yeah I remember there being much confusion when the free character transfers off remulos a few months back as it wasn’t actually on the release list.
It is, however very well documented within the forums (both here and other sources) that it has been available for multiple months, to the point where the player base is non existent. When the server died completely my guild and friends decided to move.
Now just as randomly the free transfers have disappeared. I know about the Yojamba transfers but honestly, it’s not done anything. 80 alliance and 50 horse players on Remulos, of course no one was going to transfer to that when Arugal is an option with a few thousand a side.
Further explanation would be much appreciated because the random enabling/disabling of free transfers seems weird at best. I don’t think it can be said it was a mistake when it was happening for multiple months.
I was already going to be paying for faction changes. Certainly won’t be paying for multiple server changes in addition due to shadow changes of free transfers.
Free transfers are never guaranteed to have a set time.
They are always at our developers discretion, are actually fairly rare - and usually used to try to rectify some type of imbalance to realms.
In the case of population - the move is typically from an overcrowded realm to an underpopulated realm.
They can be pulled at any time without notice. It is important if you wish to utilize one not to wait too long because they can and do end abruptly once goals are met.
That’s fair enough, still don’t understand what the purpose of allowing almost the entire population of a server to transfer off for free before closing the free transfers, particularly in the lead up to a new expansion where I’d imagine you anticipate players returning.
Perhaps it is to ensure the remaining people who are returning to the game for Cataclysm or other reasons have to pay for a transfer to be able to play with more than 50 people. That’s just speculation based on patterns over the last few years of course.
To be fair, I did try transferring as soon as I knew however a bug prevented me from doing so, resulting in me missing the cut off by a day or two. Unlucky I guess.
Nevertheless, thanks again for responding and confirming my suspicions that I’d need to unsubscribe until something is done about the state of under populated servers as opposed to hoping we’ll spend more money. Fingers crossed for cata!
It absolutely is NOT. There are no ulterior motives in this sort of thing. They’re always limited-time offerings that are only available until the receiving server(s) hit a population threshold. Please do not try to spin some hyperbolic tin foil hat theories when there are none.
If they didn’t care, or they were just offering them as you’re suggesting? Then why would they offer free transfers at all? They could have either let the server die off and force everyone off to whatever willy nilly server they chose, or they could have forced EVERYONE who wanted to continue to play their character to pay for the transfer off before shutting it down. I’m sorry you didn’t get to partake in the free migration.
Definitely keep your eye on them though, it may be that they reopen. One can never really tell what the Devs are thinking and planning to do. When they were working to shut down realms back before Wrath, it was a daily game as to which servers were open or locked. Good luck to you.
Unsure how you can definitively say what they are not doing, calling anything else a tin foil hat theory then end your post with this. Kind of ironic, don’t you think? You also left out the part which gave it context, I acknowledge it’s merely speculation based on other aspects of the company model but apparently that didn’t fit your narrative so it was not included in the quote.
You also neglected to read where there are roughly 50 players on either factions when you mentioned ‘its not like they waited for the server to die’. I certainly wouldn’t say ~100 people over two factions is exactly a living server.
While I absolutely appreciate the comment, I’d also appreciate if my words weren’t selectively chosen to fit your own narrative. You are right though, perhaps there’ll be some form of server merge on Cata or something which I’ll have to wait and see, which I think it’s fair to not pay for something that I cannot play in the meantime. I was merely pointing out that given the circumstances of no announcements regarding the free server transfers opening/closing and well reported bugs with them, it seemed weird.
Remulos was low pop going into 2023 and getting worse. Entire Horde guilds paid to faction change to be able to continue raiding. Still the population was dropping away as people transferred to Arugal to be on a healthy realm.
Then free transfers were opened without warning or communication.
This was obviously not to fix an overpopulated server - it was presumably to allow people to flee a sinking ship. This was questioned but met with radio silence.
The free transfers remained open for 10 months, without a single shred of communication. Every community survey I got, I begged for attention to be given to the issue of the future of OCE PVE. I ended up finally cancelling my subs in frustration but putting in a ticket to plead for someone, ANYONE to get eyeballs on the OCE PVE problem, so that my friends left behind might get some answers… and maybe there might be a light at the end of the tunnel that would make it worth resubbing. We just wanted some communication either way so that we could make a decision - stay or go.
Players who remained on Remulos waited to hear what might be happening with servers in Cataclysm before making a decision. If there were no strategies in the works to save the server, then some of us might decide to bite the bullet and take the free transfers to Arugal. Others might quit. But either way, we assumed the free transfers would close before/during prepatch, so we would have time to wait for announcements before deciding. We thought (naively) that we would be given warning. There was no warning, it was simply removed. This is despite the fact that transfers off US low pops that have FAR higher population than Remulos are now open…???
Our server was allowed to bleed out over a period of 10 months, with zero communication, and now the people who were waiting for announcements before deciding what to do in Cata, having already paid to faction change last year, have been stranded unless they pay money again to leave.
Maybe there is no solution for Remulos. Maybe it’s just too bad that the only OCE PVE server is functionally dead, and there’s just nothing to be done. But for the past year at least, there have been opportunities for communication with us one way or another, instead of just letting the server languish and die.
How is the lack of communication at all defensible?