Possible server transfers to any server

[nobbie]

Character-Transfer Service

Another feature of the Web site we'll be implementing is fee-based character transfers. This is a feature that's been very frequently requested and one which we want to provide for players as soon as we can. We'll offer character transfers from one realm to another, as well as allow players to move characters from one account to another. While we want to offer this service as a convenience, we also want to prevent its use for exploitive reasons, so there will be a time restriction to limit the frequency that a character can be moved.

I consider that latter direct support of power-leveling and item services for cash on eBay and such.

[Tal]

According to at least one poster Blizzard is starting to feel out customers on how much their wallets would support a one character transfer fee of $40.

[SwissMercenary]

According to at least one poster Blizzard is starting to feel out customers on how much their wallets would support a one character transfer fee of $40.
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Am I the only one who finds that its 'only' 40$ rather amusing?

In the states, you could, what, pick up a brand new game for that, or somesuch, right?

[Tal]

Am I the only one who finds that its 'only' 40$ rather amusing?

In the states, you could, what, pick up a brand new game for that, or somesuch, right?
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I'd gladly pay it to bring Mav's warrior into the fold on Stormrage. :)

[SwissMercenary]

I'd gladly pay it to bring Mav's warrior into the fold on Stormrage. :)
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Oh, I'm not at all trying to pass judgement on people who are willing to pay it, or at all doubt the existance of the market. I just find the price tag... :rolleyes:

[Roland]

Oh, I'm not at all trying to pass judgement on people who are willing to pay it, or at all doubt the existance of the market. I just find the price tag... :rolleyes:
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If it costs more than a month's worth of playtime, it's not worth it. Period. Blizzard should realize this. The amount they are fishing for is absurd, and I hope the market is not so completely assinine as to think it's worth it.

[Bun-Bun]

If it costs more than a month's worth of playtime, it's not worth it. Period. Blizzard should realize this. The amount they are fishing for is absurd, and I hope the market is not so completely assinine as to think it's worth it.
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I must disagree. I find the price fairly reasonable, given the constraints Blizzard is under to raise the bar high enough to discourage bulk character movement.

If your choices are spend 6 months levelling a character on a new server or importing one from your current server, you can either spend $40 and no time via a transfer, or $90 and six months on a new character. In that context, it clearly pays to exercise the transfer.

This assumes your gear comes along for the ride. A naked transfer has other penalties involved and will change the cost-effectiveness equation.

[Kevin]

If it costs more than a month's worth of playtime, it's not worth it. Period. Blizzard should realize this. The amount they are fishing for is absurd, and I hope the market is not so completely assinine as to think it's worth it.
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I have to disagree as well. Getting to 60 for my first 4 L60's was about 10 days played on average. Now keep in mind that I was leveling 4 different classes and leveling them somewhat concurrently so I didn't aways have the advantages of knowing where to go what to do or twinking the character out.

I believe if I put my mind to it I could get from 1 to 60 in 5 days /played. That is 120 hours of time. If I could play 2 hours a day every day that would be 2 months. $40 is slightly more than that amount of time.

I think the market will bear it.

I still don't think I would personally ever pay it. I enjoy the leveling process too much and could handle not being up there with that group of people right away for the end game stuff.

[Walkiry]

This assumes your gear comes along for the ride. A naked transfer has other penalties involved and will change the cost-effectiveness equation.
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If the gear and gold come along for the ride, $40 will be profitable for people who will load on stuff on saturated markets (old servers), transfer to a newish realm, and sell there for $$$. If they don't, well, leveling to 60 clean is probably a more attractive option (since your new transfer won't have gear anyway).

[vor_lord]

If it costs more than a month's worth of playtime, it's not worth it. Period. Blizzard should realize this. The amount they are fishing for is absurd, and I hope the market is not so completely assinine as to think it's worth it.
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At my rate of play, getting to 60 is almost 6 months of playing. I don't think the amount is absurd. It's high, but not absurdly high.

I'm in the position where I have a level 60 paladin who I never play. I also will have two months this spring where I'll have no wife or kids at home. It'd be nice to be able to transfer over to Stormrage and get a chance at seeing some of the content that we're still a long way away from on Terenas.

I'd pay if it was $25 or less. $40 is probably too much for me, but not absurdly so.



Plus my guess is that the survey actually sends out different prices to each respondent. That way you could get a percentage at various price points. $40 just might be one data point.

edit: Grammar

[Xanthix]

Also remember that the price tag should be high enough to discourage misuse. I would prefer to know that the majority of the people on my server were either "born and raised" there, or were transferred there by someone who cared enough about them and the game to pay $40 for the transfer.

I would not want to be on a server where a significant portion of the population came here to get our gold by dumping rare items on our AH, or vice versa, or came to harvest gold/items for another server, or came to join some new fad guild of the week, or came to harass people.

Also, I would not want a big percent of the people on the server just leaving, because of some bad lag, or because a new server opens up, or because of some hardware failure that would be corrected in 2 days. A price less than $15 could end up making some older servers into ghost towns.

[Thenryb]

I would spend it in a heartbeat assuming I can bring my rogue in fully equipped state.

[fractaled]

If it costs more than a month's worth of playtime, it's not worth it. Period. Blizzard should realize this. The amount they are fishing for is absurd, and I hope the market is not so completely assinine as to think it's worth it.
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I can't believe there are 4 people who've already responded that they would gladly pay $40 to do this. This is a complete rip-off.

1) Blizzard already does this to balance out realm transfers at their own whim
2) No way does this actually cost anywhere near $40.
3) They can easily put in non-monetary mechanisms to prevent abuse of this, such as: 1 character per month restraints; constrained destination servers (i.e. only high to medium or low or something); or in-game gold costs.

And this is all because you, the happy customer paid 100$+ to get a level 60 character on one server and have friends on another and they couldn't come up with a one-realm system to begin with.

[Quark]

... and they couldn't come up with a one-realm system to begin with.
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Show me a multiplayer game that's one-realm and I'll show you a multiplayer game that's seriously flawed at its core.

[fractaled]

Show me a multiplayer game that's one-realm and I'll show you a multiplayer game that's seriously flawed at its core.
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Diablo 2.

To clarify, note that I'm not talking about one one-realm totally. I'm talking about one realm per game-type + latency-zone + language. So there would be 12 or so in North America. (PvP, RP, normal) * (east, central, mountain, west) * (english).

[Concillian]

Diablo 2.

To clarify, note that I'm not talking about one one-realm totally. I'm talking about one realm per game-type + latency-zone + language. So there would be 12 or so in North America. (PvP, RP, normal) * (east, central, mountain, west) * (english).
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Depending on how you define the term "realm" Diablo2 could be considered to have only 8 players per realm.

[Quark]

Diablo 2.

Funny, I could have sworn each defined realm in itself had thousands of games up.

[fractaled]

Funny, I could have sworn each defined realm in itself had thousands of games up.
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In D2 you could join any "game" you wanted that was in your "realm". I see no need for the WoW gameplay to have the realms (equivalent to D2 games) in the same timezone isolated from each other. I'm sure their are architectural problems, but maybe your $40 to transfer will help them re-figure them out (since they solved the same problem with D2).

Perhaps this was just semantics, but you haven't shown me why a "one-realm" policy is a bad one.

[Concillian]

but maybe your $40 to transfer will help them re-figure them out (since they solved the same problem with D2).
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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.

Comparing 8 player concurrency per game to 3000+ seems like quite a stretch to me.

[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.