What is the point of opening Free Transfers to dead servers?

Do you guys expect us to transfer from Netherwind to Bigglesworth for example? Or Fairbanks to Herod?

Like what is the point of opening transfers from a completely dead server to another server with 0 players? Please allow us to transfer our remaining alts to the bigger servers like Benediction, Faerlina or Whitemane without making us pay 500$ for all of it.

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just merge all servers and make it a mega server its all ruined

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The only thing I can figure is that they’re hoping the community will band together and decide which server to consolidate on, thereby relieving them if any responsibility so they don’t have to figure out a solution in their own.

And if that was going to happen it would already have happened.

Those realms are already grossly overpopulated. If you’re intent on adding to that overpopulation, I have no sympathy for the “$500” you’ll need to pay to transfer to it (though that number is ridiculous).

I totally agree, Blizzard’s “solutions” to population distribution and faction balance are utterly flaccid and indicate nothing but indifference to the problems.

Theres nothing wrong with overpopulated servers. You’re clearly mad because ur a grobbulus player. Let it go…

Except for the fact that their populations constantly exist on multiple layers, which in Blizzard’s own words is antithetical to the “Classic experience”.

I have no idea what you’re implying here. What is there for me to be mad about, aside from what I’ve explicitly stated?

It did on grobb

Overpopulation isnt antithetical to the Classic experience, maybe in Vanilla but TBC/Wrath has arenas (wpvp is a meme at this point) and harder raids where having a bigger player pool benefit guilds to recruit easier and fight the roster boss. Not to mention more PvPers to play with.

Blizzard doesnt know what the playerbase actually wants.

I’ve noticed grobbulus players getting triggered when people mention transfering to benediction over them.

Overpopulation itself isn’t antithetical to the Classic experience, but I wasn’t talking about overpopulation specifically – I was talking about layering, which is currently the primary symptom of overpopulation because the WoW team hasn’t stopped using it as a crutch like they said they would.

Both the players and the WoW team have talked at length about the importance of the ‘sense of community’ that was lost as WoW gradually turned into Retail, but layering creates a situation where there that’s almost completely lost. They may as well just bring back Sharding, since that at least wouldn’t divide the already small number of people in relatively low-populated zones.

I haven’t heard any dissenting opinions towards Blizzard’s stance on Layering back when they first talked about it.

I couldn’t care less about that. Grobbulus is overpopulated too, albeit to an insanely lesser degree than Benediction, Firemaw and Faerlina. The top 8 largest realms could use significant downsizing, and only Firemaw and Grobbulus among them aren’t in desperate need of faction balance intervention.

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1 of each type per time zone ez clap

The idea of free transfers works if 3 things that ought to be true are made true.

  1. Faction lock Q’s so that factions are indeed balanced.

  2. Total cap on population of a server being at most 5000.

  3. Layers are permanently removed.

plus transfer $$$$$

If layering didn’t exist I’d agree with you, but since it does it just gives players incentive to stockpile onto them, which in turn is what killed off all those smaller servers. Admittedly this is what I did when Kirtonos died off, I didn’t go to other smaller servers that looked like they were bleeding, I picked one of the best servers out there (at the time at least) for being able to stay alive. Looks like Faerlina and Benediction have absolutely ballooned now compared to other servers, and the size of these servers are absolutely massive compared to what they were originally designed for.

If they had done some sort of capping and removed (or never introduced) layering players likely could/would have moved around a bit more in an attempt to balance themselves out. Once you throw the inconvenience of large servers in the bin no one has any motivation not to go to them.

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The point was to try to save the smaller, dying servers by limiting transfers. It was unsuccessful, and came too late.

remember when bene was grobb and then blizz decided to kill all the servers with transfers to bene and faerlina?

That all assumes blizzard is correct. What if blizzard is making a mistake pursuing the ‘classic experience’? What if it’s costing them subscribers?

In case you’re unable to answer the question for yourself. Pursuing the classic experience has been a mistake from the get go. It’s not what majority of the audience cares about. As is quite evident by how people play the game.

I mean, forget Blizzard’s reasoning, it IS correct. That seems self-evident to me. When you have 4-8 times the normal amount of players crammed into one server and you can’t even communicate with people across layers in general chat, what’s really the difference between a “mega server” and just playing with connected realms? If every single layer on the biggest realm could, itself, populate an entire new server, what’s the point?

If the realm’s population always exists on multiple layers, you lose the sense of community because there are just too many people playing there. People really don’t seem to understand just how absurd it is to have 10,000+ active players in a single faction, and it’s probably because layering is keeping them in the dark about it.

And it actually does make the experience worse if you’re questing. New layers spin up to meet the demand on individual zones, not the entire server. So if there are too many people sitting in Stormwind or Orgrimmar, the server will create enough layers for those zones not to overcrowd, but those layers apply to every zone in the world except for special cases like the Isle. The General and LocalDefense channels are layer-specific, so the only way you can communicate with people on other layers is through global channels like Trade, LookingForGroup or custom channels. This is horrible for the leveling experience if your realm is highly populated but there aren’t a ton of people leveling. It takes whatever little amount of people there are leveling and divides them, just so the most crowded zones are artificially still playable.

I don’t see why you’d make that claim. The WoW team has done a pretty good job with Classic, generally speaking. There have been some really big mistakes, but overall, the game is popular and it offers a good experience.

What do you mean by that, specifically? Are we talking about dungeon carries, GDKPs, combat logging? It’s absolutely shameful how little Blizzard has done to guide the playerbase where population distribution and faction balance are concerned. It’s awful that they’ve completely ignored dungeon carries for the entirety of Classic so far outside of SoM. It’s utterly inexusable that they haven’t dealt with the botting issue when private realms have eradicated it.

I don’t think we have a problem with the way people want to play the game so much as we have a problem with Blizzard being totally absent like an irresponsible parent who doesn’t supervise their children. The ‘children’ in this scenario are in the kitchen playing with knives and Blizzard isn’t intervening.

I’m very thankful to see that it seems like they’re just now starting to put some effort into these issues – I think that will make waves in the experience. That being said, there has been a lot of damage that can’t be rolled back in time for Wrath. The majority of realms currently in existence won’t be able to enjoy an actual Battle for Wintergrasp, which really sucks.

Keep in mind too, I’m extremely disappointed in these areas where they’ve completely failed to perform their role as “shepherds of sheep”, but I still think the game itself is great. The WoW team has done a fairly good job overall and it’s just these issues where they’re suspiciously absent and indifferent. I’m more disappointed about these problems because they account for most of the distance between the current state of Classic and perfection, in my opinion. So please don’t mistake my harsh words as me saying that Blizzard has totally failed us. I don’t think they have.

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