I would just like you to know that the way character clones and Classic Era has played out is leaving me feeling somewhat cheated. I supported the idea of keeping a copy of my character on Classic Era but being able to also migrate to TBC, but the population of Classic Era is too sparse currently to the point where I now feel I’ve wasted my money.
It is reasonable to expect that the population of Classic Era would be much, much smaller after the launch of TBC; however, the remaining player base is simply too spread out at the moment. It is quite unreasonable to expect the community to solve this problem themselves by self-organizing and paying an additional transfer fee on top of the character clone we already paid.
I realize there’s quite a bit going on at Blizzard and have no expectation that this will be solved immediately but some form of acknowledgement that Blizzard is aware of how this has progressed and is considering options would be quite sufficient, at least for me.
Sounds like you were aware of the risk involved but chose to purchase anyway. Sorry you paíd for something you’ve convinced yourself you cannot enjoy knowing the limitations going into the deal.
It’s not a question of buyer’s remorse, it’s a question of misrepresentation creating false expectation. We were told our characters would be copied and preserved on Classic era realms and we were told that mergers were happening (prior to the copy), a demonstration of intent with regards to maintaining reasonable populations for Classic Era players. A sufficient player base is present, they are just currently unable to connect with each other.
Do you feel the current Classic Era populations in their existing, fragmented form is an acceptable delivery of service?
I’m not asking for a refund, I’m asking for delivery of service based upon reasonable expectations. I’m not even expecting an immediate answer and am content with an acknowledgement that the current state of affairs is outside the bounds of what can reasonably be expected for a paid service.
Think of it as a long term investment. Blizzard has always taken their time with development ever since the very early days. I am confident they will merge servers and/or provide some kind of nebulous solution like resetting the phases, it will just take a while.
Blizzard never promised a certain population.
Their fee is for the service of server access.
Copying characters is bonus and not required to be able to play the game.
Realms are up and functioning so they delivered.*
*accounting for announced scheduled maintainance
They did this.
You bought a copy and your character is preserved. Mergers in the form of connected realms happened as well.
Still seems like buyer’s remorse to me. Not that I don’t empathize. Sorry for your regrets.
I mentioned in my OP, but I’m not expecting an immediate solution. Blizzard has their hands full at the moment and I can accept that. However, it’s been two months and the game’s population continues to dwindle. A simple statement along the lines of “Hey, sorry, this isn’t panning out like we’d hoped. We plan to address this but we need time. Your patience is appreciated!” would go a long ways towards good will and greatly mitigate feelings of dissatisfaction shared by myself and, evidenced by a brief perusal of this forum, several others.
While you may have confidence that this will be resolved “eventually”, the longer this issue persists the more the population dwindles and the greater the appearance of underhandedness becomes. The optics of this are one of forcing players into paying more money for transfers to further exploit their player base. This isn’t a good look at the best of times, perhaps less so right now.
I’m not stating that this is their intent, but it’s very easy to come to this conclusion.
Implied within is the expectation of reasonable delivery of said service to the best of their abilities. Servers with fragmented, unsustainable population while keeping their player base in the dark for two months does not qualify as reasonable.
The current situation is that adequate population exists but is unable to connect with each other due to restrictions currently imposed by Blizzard based upon a projection of interest that turned out to be incorrect. By solving the problem of players being unable to connect with each other (as an example, via server merges), Blizzard is providing the best opportunity they can for their players to enjoy the service they paid for.
Should such measures be taken and the population is still not enough to sustain play, no further fault can be laid at Blizzard as they took reasonable action to provide their service. In this case, it would just be a service an insufficient amount of people want to engage in.
Further payment to Blizzard (ie, server transfers) to solve a problem that they have created (via enforced population segregation), is inappropriate.
I’m not quite as worried about this as you are but I agree this is about the time Blizzard needs to start looking at this. The tourists are drifting away, the populations are stabilizing, now is the time to look at server mergers.
This would be an acceptable outcome, though it should be noted that it’s not my intent to dictate how Blizzard should solve this problem… I support them having the freedom to pursue a solution that they feel best addresses the needs of their player base, but customers who have paid for services that are currently falling short of reasonable expectations do deserve some communication on, and ultimately, a resolution to, this issue.
Access and hardware stability.
That is what the reasonable expectation involves.
If you personally don’t care for the population balance, the company makes another optional service available to you in the form of a server transfer. Which implies that population levels or balance is not a part of the basic service. Your perception seems to be that the company is cheating or gouging you on optional services.
Not a very good take as the expectation was that Blizzard would connect realms to provide a sustainable population. While they did connect some realms, they didn’t do enough connections, leaving some realms virtually dead.
You’re wrong. OP has the correct expectations based on what Blizzard said:
Currently, many realms do not have healthy populations (no idea why they wouldn’t connect DD or Grob to any other server). Hopefully, they are actually monitoring and will rectify this in the near future.
I left a couple of characters behind and my realms are dead. Fortunately, I didn’t waste money cloning given that Blizzard has not delivered on the expectations as they explicitly stated.
I will consider cloning/playing Classic Era if they actually fix this by making more connections.
While I understand that some are dissatisfied with the current populations on realms in Classic Era, implying that the company has somehow tricked one into making an optional purchase is disingenuous.
