Possible server transfers to any server

[fractaled]

Diablo2 realm servers were very little more than a place to see what games are going on + storage for characters + the occasional scan for hacks.  The games themselves largely ran on client hardware.  WoW is totally different in that the "game" runs entirely on the server hardware.

Are you sure? My understanding was that D2-open had battle.net as the matchmaker with characters stored on the clients. And D2-realms had battle.net as the matchmaker AND ran the games themselves. If not, I don't see how D2-realms is any more secure than D2-open. And thinking about this, if what you say is true, how is that a solo player could leave a game and rejoin with a different character? Obviously some of the state must be persisted by battle.net.

Comparing 8 player concurrency per game to 3000+ seems like quite a stretch to me.
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And you're totally missing the point. It isn't 8 vs 3000+, they've obviously *already* got servers that handle 3000 chars (or two that handle 1500). It's allowing you to log on to any game-server in your realm. The biggest obstacles that I see to this are the mail and auction systems (and cross-server chat/guild stuff). Other than that, the worlds are largely static, so once you've loaded your character from the database, it doesn't really matter what server you're on.