Not at all. I think your understanding of what I’m saying is wrong or you have an incomplete picture of what happened. I don’t know where you’ve been playing, but I come from Kromcrush. And Thunderfury. And now I’m on Grobbulus. I know this in-and-out
Kromcrush people like myself begged and pleaded to be able to transfer off our server after the population hit abysmally low on the alliance side. My guild and I stayed, and were probably the last of maybe three guilds that played before we had moved to Thunderfury by guild poll.
We spent months after the launch of TBC trying to stop people from leaving by playing the game and not following the hype train. It failed. Our server went from 35% alliance to WAY less than that in a few weeks. Eventually, there’s nothing you can do and the game is unplayable.
What Blizzard did was the famous move: do nothing. They did that until the server actually had almost nobody on it (Horde or Alliance) and then they said that they felt it wrong to force people to be there.
There were months where Kromcrush was literally dead. They did wait to maximize profitability. There’s no arguing that, whatever your inclination to believe other motive is – simply the people left who wouldn’t transfer either would quit the game, or they could have a chance of stopping that and potentially reviving subscriptions from people who would play again knowing that they had a free realm transfer to another realm.
When you see it first-hand, there is NO MISTAKE that saving the day at the very, very end is about greed.
Nope, you’re wrong. In Krom’s case it was.
Yep, after they realize it is more profitable to do so in these instances.
That’s not the issue, that’s a solution. In fact, I actually suggested this with a megapost months back: How to salvage WoW Burning Crusade Classic (You may notice that Mootwo is also a poster on that thread, which is why I was complimenting him for being a sympathetic human being)
The community is partially to blame, sure.
The community is to blame especially in the case when people are not sympathetic to those who have experienced the end of the stick that warrants complaints, because that gives Blizzard justification to continue to ignore the people because they see examples of people who don’t agree. This isn’t about giving everyone a free transfer, this is about not locking people to dead realms.
The community is also to blame for so quickly jumping ship and moving servers. Once a sizeable chunk of the population does it, it’s kind of too late. The damage is done. MMOs need people.
It’s a temporary solution to a problem that has no actually correct permanent solution. There’s a blue post that goes into this in detail, and I agree with it. There’s no perfect solution nor silver bullet: the problem is hard, but my post above does show you that merging was a suggested solution to the problem.
They’re not going to merge for a long time dude, it’s a reality. Blizzard never makes big changes like this until they realize that they have no choice. It’s a decision making strategy that is in place partially because doing anything always has a side effect. It’s also partially driven by the actual monetization of this frustration. If you choose to not accept that profit is at least a partial motivator, it’s fine. But you’re wrong.