It should come as no surprise to anyone that Blizzard has bungled this issue of locking and closing certain servers as WOTLKC prepares to launch. However, despite our knowledge that Blizz was likely to screw us over somehow, several friends and I still find ourselves in a position to be bent over and taken advantage of. Here is the situation:
My guild decided to transfer from Sulfuras to Whitemane. Sulfuras was dead, around 1k players and very hard to fill groups for anything. The decision was made to transfer when prepatch launched. Most of the guild did so on pre-patch day, though most were only able to take their one main toon over. However, a handful of us, including myself, were not at home to make the transfer on pre-patch day. I attempted the following day, LESS THAN 24 HOURS LATER, to transfer and Whitemane had been locked.
No warning from Blizzard, no communication, just locked. So sorry all your friends are on a different server, we don’t care. The purported “reasoning” behind locking Whitemane, along with a handful of other high population servers, was to deal with long queue times. Only problem is…WHITEMANE DOES NOT AND NEVER DID HAVE QUEUE TIMES! Other large servers did but this is irrelevant. Whitemane should not have been lumped in with those other servers before it was actually an issue.
BUT IT GETS BETTER: Blizzard then offered FREE TRANSFERS TO SULFURAS for everyone and their mother. Since pre-patch, Sulfuras has had OVER 40K character transfers. We went from a server with very low population to an extremely crowded server. We went from a server with virtually no alliance population to one that is now 65% alliance. In fact, Blizzard allowed so many transfers to Sulfuras that it…wait for it…NOW HAS A QUEUE!!!
Let’s recap:
- Blizzard locks transfers to servers with no notice or communication.
- Blizzard has no mechanism for allowing friends/guilds to stay together.
- Blizzard locks servers without queue times…then allows other servers to be inundated with transfers until they develop queue times.
- Blizzard has a completely uneven application of their own standards and rules.
What is the end result of all this whining on my part? I hope someone from Blizzard will see this, take pity on me and the few people trapped with me and allow us to rejoin our friends and guildmates. I hope Blizzard will realize they rushed a solution to a problem they allowed to happen in the first place…and then didn’t even prevent the problem from happening again elsewhere.
I have put almost 3 years of time and effort into this game. I have real life friends and friends made along the way in WoW in the guild I am trying to rejoin. I have ZERO interest in starting over for Wrath with a new group of people I do not know. If Blizzard does not find a way to fix this problem, I will be cancelling my subscription and simply walk away from the game. The same goes for the few people trapped on Sulfuras with me.
I really don’t want this to be the outcome of all this, but I will lose all interest and passion for a game I love if I am unable to play with friends. Which is kind of funny, considering that long post about the changes Blizz was making a month or two ago, where they listed relationships and community as some of their top reasons for making the decisions they did. How about some consistency here, Blizz? If community and cooperation really matter that much to you, help us rejoin our guild on Whitemane.