They are terrible and cause players to not care about the community on a server, knowing they can just leave it if goes to crap because of behavior. So its a player issue, enabled by blizzard.
They seek a balanced place to play, and the only reason the target server is balanced and thriving is because the native community created that. Then the transfers come in, and if they don’t assimilate to the social norms of the host server, the host server goes to crap as well and the cycle starts over.
The transfer I took is the reason I’m still playing.
Players don’t care about server communities because they don’t care. That’s not blizzards fault. There’s servers out there that aren’t filled with pirate server players looking for the most packed servers and expecting no queues for some reason.
Literally said that.
Its a player issue.
Here’s my opinions:
This was designed as a 1-server game. It was never designed as a “server-hop – play all the servers” game.
Blizzard allowed realm transfers to handle rare situations, not to support a new “multi-server” game model.
It seems like we got a flood of PVP player transfers to a few PVP realms, once Blizard unlocked paid transfers in Classic. Why? Did streamers cause that? It clearly was not all “rare situations”.
Blizzard themself said it does not harm the playerbase and its barely adding up to anything:
This is why I dont understand why they lock servers for transfers but fresh people can create new characters.
They locked them for both for a while. Personally, I don’t like the idea of locking new character creation on the server I choose to play on.
I also don’t like transfers.
I know they did, but they unlocked the servers so fresh people can create a new character while transfer restrictions are still in place
But sometimes it is necessary, especially after… cough cough… difficulties in the weeks of the launch. And it was a part of vanilla, too.
For most people the poor decision was trusting Blizzard, paying more for that privilege is just throwing good money after bad. Some of us rolled on low pop servers to avoid these problems and then Blizzard directed tons of people to them and ruined those servers. So it seems like the only good decision would be to not play at all because what’s to stop your new server from going the same way?
Yeah! I’m happy they did, personally. On my server, we seem to have a lot of people either just starting classic, or rerolling, and that keeps a healthy population at various levels. Locking new character creation may lead to a lot of dead areas while leveling.
It’s something that was chosen to be added, and you’re right yeah during Vanilla. That doesn’t mean that I personally like transfers though. I feel they detract from the game overall, and that WoW would be better without transfers.
I suppose Retail has already solved a lot of the problems with regards to population and transfers, which are almost meaningless with cross-realm everything (except maybe what? Mythic raiding?)
There seem to have been a couple of incidents of this, and it’s very unfortunate.
True, because a friend of mine was affected by the lockout, too. You know, the usual story, Corona and boredom and WoW 
Tho I can not imagine blizzard did it in order to revive low lvl areas, did they really care for that once?
Id rather keep my 25 €, too but apart from what @Graff said, the launch weeks brought up many desperate fortunes.
Anyways, since Transfers are still locked, let’s talk about why and why Blizzard isnt updating us on that topic…
They don’t care, it was all about the money and how little they could do to get it. Even if they didn’t directly plan to ruin servers to get people to pay for transfers I’m sure that the result is very pleasant to them.
players dog-piling on a small select group of servers was more harmful then transfers were.
It has to be a lie. Maybe not in the overall picture, but transfers sure destroyed Incendius. It was the hot spot for transfers, then it bloated to a 6 hour queue and got stalagg’d. It was happening to my server, the population was rapidly inflating after incendius became unbearably full, we were the next victim. They cut them off just in time, and I hope they stay cut off.
If you want to roll here, do it from scratch, don’t bring you and your 200 goons over here. The best way to keep the servers healthy for the long term is to leave them alone and only allow new character creations. If you want to play on a high pop server? You have to work for it, from level 1.
I play on a low population server and transfers have actually kept our server alive. A large portion of the people who I played with at server launch have long since quit, but the population is healthy, not too large and similarly sized now as it was then. Paid transfers are largely responsible for that. If we didn’t have them, we’d probably be a dead server.
Now, if they opened up free transfers, I’d be furious. The $25 barrier to entry keeps the flow of people just right.
You know, this is in fact the only hope I have. Since I am/we are waiting for paid server transfer to open, Blizzard will probably unlock it as soon as they can because well…paid transfer.
Well at least I am sure as heck you dont know any better. That is what Blizzard said and while I acknowledge the state Incendius is in, wasnt it due to uncontrolled free server transfer from many other servers? Also acknowledge the amount of Bots swarming full servers.
Anyways, I dont want to roll on your Server and I dont know why you assume so. Thanks for your honest opinion on what keeps the server balanced but I dont really care. Paid server transfer was a matter back then and it is now. Dislike it as much as you want.
they’ve been extremely harmful to a handful of servers, i think we all know which ones i’m referring to.
for majority of servers, it hasnt been an issue.
I have no idea why you think players would be capable of self-regulating, we’re not all coordinating with each other. We’re all in it for ourselves, that’s why when overpopulated servers get free xfers the vast majority don’t want to leave to a low pop realm that people just kind of sort of hope gets a decent population because they hope other people will fix the problem for them and if they see a high populated realm they’re willing to xfer there and abandon their dead realm which makes it even more dead.
Not only that but $25 to fix your playing issues is not the end of the world for most people, especially those already forking over $15 a month.
Exactly what you are saying. +1
Actually I do know, I was watching it happen, right in front of me. I’m talking about paid transfers. They should not be allowed to high/full servers.
I also wasn’t telling you not to roll on my server, I was saying if you or anyone else wants to play on a high pop balanced server, they should be forced to roll from level 1. These are not retail realms, they have a concurrent player cap, player population has meaning.