It’s not for me. But the fact is Classic ARE those stasis servers. Have people not been paying attention to what Blizzard has been saying since they first announced Classic?
The topic of TBC servers is only semi-related in that maybe characters from Classic will have a way to move on to TBC. We don’t know that. The survey was asking players’ opinion. Blizz might allow it, they might not. That’s a perfectly fine discussion to have. I made a thread a few months ago saying we should be talking about it then, and that Blizz should be gathering feedback.
What I find laughable is this notion that all servers will progress to TBC and all characters will be forced to go along for the ride. That’s nuts. What is the thought process here? Right, so if players missed out on the 2 years of Classic maybe Blizz will release a WoW Classic: Classic in another 15 years to give them the chance? But as I said that topic isn’t even worth talking about, so I’ll drop it.
OK. I’m going to state what I believe your position to be: feel free to correct me because there seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding here.
You’re arguing that characters that go to BC should be moved, not copied, so that they’re completely removed from the list of characters on the older server. This is going to show up in analytics. Step 2: ???. As a result, your server will be teeming with classic only players, but if the characters are copied over, it will be a wasteland.
Is what I typed correct, and if so, what exactly is step 2? How does removing ghost characters get new accounts with active players in, since they can already do that on a given server anyway and the ghost won’t stop them?
You say you want one server with all the classic players. That’s what the merge is for. You WILL be able to guild together, it’ll just be one “slush” server made of all the wasteland servers(I doubt the biggest ones like whitemane and herod will need this treatment). The server tag just solves duplicate naming issues. It’s either that or the wastelands: you want to cry about no changes because a small part of the display changed, or do you want a server with only 200 people?
Step 1 - When Classic TBC launches, characters will be given the option to simply progress to TBC, or transfer to a Vanilla-Only Server.
Step 2 - Anyone that chooses to go to TBC, logs in like normal, done and done.
Step 3 - Anyone that chooses to stay in Vanilla, then is sent to the Battlenet character transfer options, and can xfer one, some, or all of their characters to otherwise untouched PvE, PvP, RP, or RPPVP servers.
Folks within their current guilds, social structures, realm groups, etc, stay put and keep these. The minority of folks that want to endlessly raid Naxx until every alt is full T3 can do so on servers dedicated to that.
If we did the reverse (people that stay on present servers are Vanilla only, people that copy go to TBC), then you have a bunch of ghosted duplicates left behind that require the server to stay relatively unmerged to support those characters should they ever log in. If people TRANSFERRED instead, there’d be obvious holes in the population and you could safely merge them, but then you just created what the first solution does, but with more steps, and more people having to manually transfer than sitting tight.
The majority should have the most seamless transition to TBC, and right now that means my server, Fairbanks, should become a TBC server come Classic TBC launch. Anyone that doesn’t want to go to TBC would need to transfer off of Fairbanks.
I see. the difference in angles we’re coming at is this: most people here, including myself are assuming the current servers will remain the classic servers, and the newly created ones will be TBC servers that we’ll copy ourselves into. That was there’s no need to dance around with character transfers and guild reformations in classic, you just pick your new server and just say “My BC toon lives here now”. Find new friends and/or bring in your old ones. Because I’m working under the assumption that this is how blizzard will handle it, My posts are more about how to handle that while yours argue for swapping the perspective.
While updating the current servers would keep our guilds intact for BC, I really doubt most people are going to have difficulty reforming, given that you can just drop the new server contact info in the guild info and/or discord.
This is where you lose me. if the classic servers end up as wastelands because too many people leave, all you gotta do is merge them and display server-of-origin whenever there’s a conflict. It’s not some impossible task, and was done dozens of times with server groups starting in Cata(I think).
I do think the transition should be as quick and easy as possible, yes. I also think that:
Transitioning should be opt-in, which means staying put keeps you in classic and 2. There’s no reason you can’t have toons in both games, just like I have a retail Provengreil as well. Thus, copy instead of transfer.
or they can just copy everyones character and paste the data to tbc servers and YOU can delete YOUR characters off the classic servers instead of forcing EVERYONE ELSE to
The kicker is this… If you progress servers to the next version of wow the community of servers stays intact for the most part while allowing those whom dont want to move from that version to transfer to a stasis server(s) of that version ensuring stasis servers with healthly populations of die hard players(of that version of wow) (no need to merge any servers) that wont be logging in every once in a blue moon.
The good part of this method is you can replicate it whether its classic to TBC or TBC to Wrath or whatever else the community has a player demand for.
I said as much. Transfers in great numbers to TBC realms, as I suspect would happen if that was how Blizzard chose to do it, would also necessitate merging because of the mass exodus and now-empty remaining servers. That would mean every character would be merged or transferred.
If Blizzard keeps present servers as TBC, and provides transfers for Vanilla only, you won’t need any mergers and a much much smaller population of people get transferred. I’m sure Blizzard would enjoy that more, for whatever strain such mass movement of characters might put on their systems.