They want you to pay for a transfer to another server. Simple as that. Server transfers are HUGE money for them. Why balance out the realms or allow free transfers? When it gets bad enough, people are forced to pay to switch servers to enjoy a game the already pay for.
9 Likes
Not everything is a conspiracy, derp
6 Likes
Heâs not wrong though. The cash shop is the only thing making Classic/SoM profitable. Thereâs a reason theyâve started taking steps to monetize them as much as they have. Expect to see more of it in Wrath.
2 Likes
ButâŚuhhhâŚdidnât we get free transfers to what are now the mega servers?
3 Likes
Free faction change option for one sided servers is about the very very least they could do. Blizzâs move or they can continue to bleed customers.
1 Like
Agreed, many of us have been saying this for a long time. Some of the people who have talked about it and refused to pay out of principle said they were going to quit the game and have. So they donât post anymore.
Some people also have this belief that people quit over things that donât really matter and they say things that show they arenât paying any attention to real reasons like ânobody unsubs over transferring/server issuesâ, when in reality the transfer stuff has caused many to quit. 4 of my guildies alone unsubbed when we transferred, and we have a single raid team. Iâm sure thatâs the same for many others.
Short term gains from microtransations while ignoring long term sub loss only seems to be the goal, it was a great way to make the quarterly books look good for the sale to Microsoft (although YES WoW is a tiny portion but you can bet each game division was being drilled to make the quarterly profits look good).
A conspiracy? No. Doing whatâs best for short-term business? Yes.
5 Likes
Theyâve answered this a few months ago.
Majority of players prefer to play on lopsided servers (in their favor). Most people romanticize open world PvP because they think they are going to be the ones running around winning, but the reality of it is aside from a very small percentage of people who actually enjoys and dedicate time to roam and PvP, most players just get ganked and cry about it. There isnât any fair way to balance it because almost everyone has their own rigid sense of how PvP should be.
tl;dr. Play on a PvE server, cause most people canât stomach actual PvP
5 Likes
Itâs not a conspiracy.
There is a financial motivation to allow this.
Itâs exactly like games that have âXP Potionsâ in the cash shops. The devs are incentivized to increase level grinds to push those items. Even if they, themselves, donât want to.
I mean, they could just make transfers free and put a cool down of 30 days on them. But they donât. They charge for something that is done via automation.
3 Likes
This seems to be a phenomenon exclusive to younger gamers. When classic first released I played on Kromcrush. As soon as P2 hit that server was LIT for WPvP and while Horde had a slight #s advantage (45/55 H) it was close enough to only matter in extended engagements over world bosses and the like.
Guild I joined up with was basically a dad guild full of experienced raiders. None of us shied away from PvP and most of us got quite bored when Alliance started transferring off en masse (to Heartseeker and Benediction) and by the start of Naxx, Krom was almost 100% Horde.
But the younger guys that were with us seemed to prefer it being a de facto PvE server. I never really understood why though. Didnât make sense to me to want to play on a PvP server with zero chance of world PvP.
3 Likes
Wrong. They didnât âallowâ servers to get lopsided. They donât have that much capacity to manage servers to begin with. Iâll tell you exactly how blizzard views server balance.
âRiskâ.
Itâs all about risk for blizzard. They are incredibly conservative with doing almost anything that could cause them to lose subscribers. This means, if player trends have players of one faction all jumping to the same realm and then blizzard tries to fix that problem, they could lose a considerable amount of players who actively chose not to play on a balanced realm to begin with.
2 Likes
Hmm⌠How about sub fees?
1 Like
You also claimed that 50k - 100k people quit in TBCC because of no duel spec. While people are passionate about duel spec (and I donât normally comment on it) very few have quit because it isnât in the game, to the point where I donât know of a single person who has quit over this.
While I agree with some of the stuff you say this alone shows that you have no clue why people quit. Blizzard probably does though, but Iâd still say itâs short-term upsell profit over long-term subscription numbers.
Transfer money is pitiful compared to Activision (and even just Blizzard division) net revenue. Seems kind of ridiculous to me to believe they thought âoh yes, lets potentially tank our sub numbers to get a .1% increase in net revenue this quarter for this sale to Microsoftâ.
If $1-2 million is enough to have any effect on a $60+ billion acquisition then you also have to assume that Microsoft would spend the effort to track the trend of sub numbers and accurately plot out predicted income.
Either Blizzard is just complacent and didnât bother to care about the transfer âissuesâ or they did their due diligence and realized that people just arenât going to quit over being encouraged to transfer.
1 Like
If 20% of each guild quits over each transfer like what happened in my guild, so if you are losing 20% of your subscriber base, or even 10%, then how is that no one quitting?
Large companies have departments where each department takes care of things, it doesnât matter how massive the whole company is. Each department has revenue goals etc.
The server issues were either over neglect/not paying attention (which is what they basically have said "we probably should have done something earlier but we didnât) or over wanting extra short-term revenue and if you look at the shareholder meetings you can tell that it matters, no matter what you want to believe about how large companies operate.
This is, quite frankly, one of the dumbest ideas anyone has. I see people say this all the time and they clearly lack any basic understanding of math or business.
If every single person that plays TBC transferred servers tomorrow, it would be meaningless.
Letâs say thatâs 100,000 people. That would be $2mm in revenue. There would be some cost associated with this from a data perspective so thatâs not $2mm in profit.
Activision Blizzard had $8.8bn in revenue.
SoâŚyouâre saying that the reason they are allowing this is to achieve 0.2% more revenue (thatâs if 100,000 people xfer tomorrow) ⌠in reality its probably 0.0001% and itâs a rounding error to them.
1 Like
The server balance issues are player created, not endorsed by blizzard. Theyâve said before that theyâve considered stepping in, but it would then create other problems (such as player/server identities). If this blizzard conspiracy were true, Blizzard wouldnât open up free transfers as often as they do, or not at all.
I think Blizzard is just incompetent and transfer fees were just a pleasant surprise to them.
Server transfers arenât that big of a revenue generator.
They let the players do what players want. The realms are balanced exactly as players wanted. They do not want to herd you like sheep and regulate realm populations, even though it would have been better.
Itâs just another reason to play PVE. Thereâs far less risk of your faction being abandoned because everyone wanted to follow the crowd to a bigger realm.
Players do not want a fair fight on PVP servers/ They want to destroy the opposing faction. Congrats on lopsided servers, you won WOW