As we know and can see, faction imbalance is off the rails.
I am now in a situation where I transferred to Herod to play with a large guild that has several of my friends raiding there on alliance. Over the past week or so the alliance population has dropped massively, so the guild I joined that had all my friends decided it was time to uproot and move to a heavy pop alliance server. Well to my behold I have a remaining 60ish day cooldown and am now stuck on this server with none of my guild mates and a declining alliance population.
So I have to ask. Why is this cooldown in place? Myself and one other that I know of from this guild are now stuck in limbo with no way to remove this cooldown after having a back and forth conversation with customer support. Like guess I’ll just unsubscribe because now not only do I have no raid team until I transfer, I am also stuck here with a continuously declining alliance pop making it more difficult to find groups or get anything done in the world.
The only background on the guild I can give is we had 60+ members on daily during the day and well into the evening. When we had this talk to transfer to another server dominated by alliance I of course said " I’ll follow the guild". But I can’t. guess ill miss out on 3 months of raiding and playing tbc due to cooldown locking my character to a server.
In the forum, yes, In the game? Not really. I’ve been playing the game since 2004. Faction imbalance is nothing new. Complaining about it is just the latest “fad” in the forums.
Simple – Blizzard decided back in 2003 that each server would be a separate game…as opposed to all the servers one big game, with players server-hopping to play different auction houses and other things.
They allowed realm transfers for rare situations, not as a normal activity. To make sure it stayed rare, they added a long cooldown.
You can call it a fad or a trend or whatever you want, but the simple fact is that Herod has gone from a 35/65 Alliance/Horde server through Vanilla Classic where we managed to make it through as the underdog faction, to 20/80 just a month into TBC Classic. Ironforge.pro shows the horde raiding population going from 3300 to 5200, and the alliance raiding population going from 1600 to 1500.
We had friends who wanted to come back and play in TBC, and they came to join us because our guild was able to provide a large community of players that were new/returning to TBC, as well as members that has stuck with us throughout Classic. But just within the past week on Herod, dozens of Alliance guilds have announced their plans to transfer off of the server, which is only going to worsen the current 20/80 split. There’s nothing any individual player from outside of the Classic community would have been able to do to predict this outcome. It’s definitely a bit of a snowballing situation with the mass transfers, but this is the reality that anyone who plans on staying on Herod Alliance will be facing.
Speaking solely for ourselves, I know that our guild had no plans to xfer when we put out our first round of TBC prep surveys at the very start of Naxx, and we still had no plans to xfer at the beginning of TBC. We only made a hurried decision when we saw that several guilds xferred between the start of TBC and now, as well as heard of 10+ other guilds that had committed to xferring in the coming week or so.
At this point, all we are trying to do is help find a way to allow our friends who put themselves on a transfer CD to join us on a new realm where we can actually find people to play with in LFG and stand a chance at duking it out at a summoning stone. We went through several rounds of tickets with various customer service employees, the most recent of whom said they could not assist with a game development decision. Instead, they directed us to the forums in order to make our plights public. So here we are.
I won’t question why Blizzard implemented a 90 day cooldown for server transfers in Classic. I only request that we find some sort of way to let two (2) of our non game-mechanic and non-auction house exploiting friends join us on a server where our faction isn’t dead.
Sure there are guilds still raiding there. But if you are interested in doing anything other than zoning into a raid with a group of total strangers then logging out for a week, then you’re out of luck. I personally spent 2 hours today attempting to level one of the alts I left behind to play with some stragglers, or other alts in guild who didn’t want to xfer before they hit 70. I found one level appropriate dungeon group that actually filled to five and ran the dungeon in a three hour time window, one hour of which was dedicated towards running the dungeon itself. The group was comprised of at least three people who were either unguilded or could not speak enough English to communicate the mechanics. And the rest of the outside world where we could quest is overrun by horde, many of whom are level 70 and wrapping back around to get gold out of the quests they skipped during their original leveling spree.
Most of us aren’t here to “make the most” of our time in a video game, especially not when the alternative is that we actually get a customer service response out of Blizzard because it was their actions (paid level 58 boosts that encouraged Horde population growth on servers that were already Horde-dominant, same-faction queues that discouraged Alliance from believing that Blizz will address the issues that caused the faction imbalance in the first place, etc) that precipitated that massive faction imbalance that currently exists on Herod.
This isn’t the first time that one faction has completely died off or migrated from a Classic server, and it won’t be the last time. Just please let our people go; let us give you our transfer money. No one wants to spend 70 days playing with total strangers when their friends are having fun on a different server.
They didn’t just wake up one day and decided to leave. I’m sure they planed for a few months to pull the trigger and didn’t bother telling the peons about it. My advice leave Herod when you can but don’t follow a guild who didn’t bother to tell you.
After speaking with a GM telling me they can not do anything about this, as it is a dev team decicsion - the GM flat out told me to take to the forums.
Its not a fad. Horde complained enough and they fixed their BG queue times again screwing over the very small alliance pop compared to horde.
So if an alliancr players decided to leave a horde dominate sever they can.
However my case is different, i swapped to this server to play with my friends and after 2 weeks as these other big guilds made the choice to move servers. Our guild was also left with the choice and decided to move
But with the cooldown I am stuck here.
And thats all this post it. Trying to get help for myself and those few individuals that GMs say they can not to anything about. We are hear to get tbe attention of the blizz devs
I assume someone of your kind is able to do this kind of thing. However some people can not myself included, id much rather be able to spend the $25 to be able to play the toon I have already invested my time into on Vanilla and TBC classic.
Nope, I will decide not to believe you. I have played with many of these friends of mine since MoP. This is not something that they took lightly. The sudden shift in other guilds deciding to move prompted a move for our guild.