Generally speaking they are both handled the same way. There is a fee for changing your servers for each of your characters you want to change. However recently something potentially revolutionary has occured in the realm of Eorzia.
The developers are prepping a new data center for their usa and european servers in preparation for their new expansion. During this transition period to the newest expansion they are giving their players free realm transfers for as many characters as they want for two weeks.
This is both because the data center changes will cause interrupts to some of the platforms systems but also because they want people to pick the servers where all their friends are to help make the game more fun and less expensive for the average consumer.
In their press release they stated
“We will be taking various steps to minimize the impact of these changes, including offering free World transfers for all characters on the North American and European Data Centers for a period of approximately two weeks after implementation. We ask for your understanding as we work to create a better experience for all players in the days to come.”
The full release can be seen here https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/11cadb280ca20f53f22e0b0885d1ebf675536bb9
This is a facinating topic considering the current conversations we are having as a community on how to deal with server migrations, the cost to change from alliance to horde or horde to alliance etc.
WOW clearly has a bit of faction and server imbalance right now but Blizzard has not opted to bring the server fees down or even offer this type of deal at the end of the expansion.
It would be interesting if this is the start of a new trend for mmos to assist players mid or end of the expansion with server migration with the idea that it will lead to people playin more with their friends at less of a cost, at least for a small two week period.
Does that mean wow is in the greatest state it has ever been since we do not see that ever? /s
Honestly not sure how Blizzard can ever do right if this is the mentality on such a pro consumer move. And even if they do this it would still only be for a limited time. Even if there are “ulterior motives” its hard for me personally to egg a company for wanting to make players more confortable with the server they are on for FREE
They used to do free transfers from high pop to low pop servers but people don’t use it.
Why would they willing transfer to a worse experience even if it’s free?
It’s the same thing with faction. They could make horde to alliance changes free and people still wouldn’t do it. Why make a change to a worse situation even if it’s free?
Hey, all I am doing is pointing out when Blizzard has a player services sale, free weekend, etc…people somehow say something is wrong with it.
Blizzard could offer free unlimited transfers, and we’d have multiple threads talking about how Blizzard is only doing this because the game is going bankrupt or something.
And I don’t think there is enough interest in free server transfers here to actually address the issues with things like faction imbalance. At most it would just help people with lots of alts put them all on their current server.
I think the major problem with that is he amount of people, were talking potential 5+ million accounts jammed onto a single server, and if they did just merge every server together, their would probably be millions of naming conflicts, name changes, and other tomfoolery as a result of jamming so many people together. Plus not to mention server stability.
ESO can handle it because its a much smaller game compared to WoW.
Blizzard has also done something unique in that they now allow us to have all our characters on One server. They also offered a realm transfer discount I actually moved two of my characters and I’m looking to move a third this weekend.
In the past the discount has been 25% this time it’s 30.
I’m sure if blizzard did something like Final Fantasy XIV is and having data centers change that they would offer free transfers as well it is a unique situation.
I’ve been stuck on many a dead realm due to this.
What they should do is either enable more shards or temporary transfers during xpac launches.
Illidan, Mal’ganis, all of the high pop realms on the US were dead for the entire launch day.
They finally “fixed” the issue at midnight when the entire East coast went to bed. Cause you know “most successful launch ever” and “fixed” problems.
Main differences with 14 and WoW with server stuff is that you can do cross-world groups for dungeons/raids whenever you want, even for current content. CRZ doesn’t exist, but they are implementing a feature where you can move to another person’s server for world-content like CRZ is, but only by invite.
Yea only issue I can see with having free transfers consistently at X part of the expansion each time is that people would wait for that moment to transfer and they would lose alot of money. However I think it makes sense to have this at the beginning of an expansion as a part of buying it. It would certainly go far to help some people.
When Blizzard made the dedicated Australian servers, they offered customers who were on the US realms to go over to the Australian servers for free.
The whole unbalanced faction is mostly due to player choice on which faction they want to be on at the current time. Blizzard can try to make players go to another faction by doing minor stuff in the game, but again it does fall under players choice.
So what you are saying is regardless of what Blizzard does to try and make money or even try to be kind with the community, it is the result of them losing money and trying to get subs again. I mean is that a bad thing? Why do I read your post here like it’s a negative comment?
They doing it because some people will not be on the same datacenter as they were before which would mean if you raided with people cross server and had a cross server raid group you could no longer raid with them unless you moved after the transition. It would be dumb to make someone pay for a server transfer if the company themselves is moving servers around.
