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Does a Character transfer have to be £15?
A Race change £15? A Faction change £20? Now i know that you should make a choice and stick with it so dont go flaming me :P But i have changed realm a few times, wanted my Heirlooms and had to pay. It is a lot of money considering it takes 10mins now to do and we pay £8.99 a month. £5-10 is much more reasonable. Oh and 50k gold at max level when transferring? :( come now Blizz, we work hard for our money and we cant take it with us? maybe 85-89 50k g limit but not max level :( Just a problem i see but you could probably get more people to pay if they were slightly lower prices. I do not have a lot to spare each month and neither do most who play. So pull in more numbers using your services by reducing the cost slightly. A long term player and no i wont be quitting so don't even start that either :P Thank you |
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I think someone said that at some point they mentioned the prices were this high to discourage people from constant server hopping. Either way I'm afraid this isn't something support deal with so this topic will likely be moved.
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Well the prices are high for several reasons. Firstly, because I believe they don't want them used too often but also because, well, they can? After all these services are completely 100% optional and are in no way needed to play the game. Yes more would use it if it was cheaper, but I don't think they don't want that.
As for the gold limit, it is there to fight gold sellers. Unfortunately they spoil things for the rest of us :( |
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Even with a 20 euro price tag many servers are now completely ruined and at a point of no return thanks to realm transfers. Making it 5 euros would make the problem even worse.
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I agree that they're too high but aslong as people keep paying the current prices I doubt they will dropped.
And why can't they just put a limit on how often someone can do a transfer? |
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There used to be a huge limitation on how often you could transfer. I guess people complained because they wanted to be able to transfer more often, or the accountants people (let's be frank, there HAS to be someone not related to the devs doing profit stuff in a company this big) decided it would be better with less restrictions. I don't know, but to further explain on what I said I haven't seen any source to that, it's just what people say someone said when the question was raised.
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Server transfers is understandably high, but I think we can all agree the cost just to race change on your current realm is unjustifiably high.
People like change. Shouldn't cost 6 quid just to change your characters name for crying out loud. |
Less money for the greedy b*rds. The prices are waay too high. When it costs more than double a months subscription to click a button and an automated script run on the server to initiate a race change. |
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If people didn't pay for the transfers, they would be free. As it stands, Blizzard are probably making a lot of profit from character services... I'd imagine they earn at least one million euros pure profit each year.
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There are several factors you have to consider. And a lot of them are unknown to "us" Firstly, we don't know how difficult these transfers are for Blizzard to execute. Is it on click or a button or is there a myriad of paperwork and file transferring? Secondly, Blizzard employs a lot of people and people to do these transfers for us. They have to be paid with something other than free water from the cooler in the corner. Thirdly, like others have said before me, constant realm hopping is probably not something Blizzard wants to encourage. You want to build on the community you've joined and not just hop off if you don't fancy it. (Make a level 1 character for 'recon'). However, putting a limit on it is indeed a much better idea. At least from our point of view.
I don't know if your speculating or if you have any facts to back this up. If you do, please share. I'm interested to know actually what happens behind the scenes of a character transfer. With that knowledge then as a group we can work out if these prices are justified or not. The best way for the customer to 'win' these things is to; a) not pay for them - a majority boycott b) then choose a competitor. Since there is no competitor service we must boycott if we want the prices changed. We need to know that by not using these services Blizzard will be losing money. We need the situation to be 'some money is better than none' for Blizzard. I doubt this will be the case. If nobody ever bought a realm/faction/race/name change ever again I think Blizzard would still be ok financially. So we need to ask Blizzard, how much do you care about customer satisfaction? A lot of people are calling for lowering these prices. If it's financially viable (which I suspect it is) a great solution would be to at least half the prices of the services and then impose a limit on how many times you can use them in a given time period. To me that would be a very feasible compromise. Or, better yet, why not offer discounts to those customers who have been paying a long time? After 6 months subscription you get half price on all services (to use once)? After a year you can use one for free? etc.. |
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Edited by Infuria on 06/03/13 11:42 (GMT)
When they are earning £20 every time someone uses the service, they want to encourage it as much as possible. You'd be foolish to think otherwise.
I doubt that.
Let's see. You have 3 options... 1) Take £10 million and a handful of whine topics on the forum. 2) Take £5 million and a few less whine topics on the forum. 3) Take no money and have the forum free of whine topics. Which seems most financially viable to you? |
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There has been a lot of threads like this. I made a post about what I think awhile ago in another thread.
@Ravinna |
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It’s partially because of this. Another reason would be to keep things somewhat stable, if these services were free or extremely cheap, communities could lose social and economic stability. Social stability - Because realms are supposed to be somewhat insular, and that’s a good thing, one of the best qualities MMORPG’s have going for them is the social bond created between players, and those require time and a stability to create. Players would also become less accountable for their actions (realm reputation would be very hard to assess), and we all know that unfortunately LFR and CRZ already hinted on how that can be a problem; we still we think the benefits far outweigh the risks in these two specific cases though, as they’re limited to the use of those features. Economic stability - because not all realms are exactly the same and this would effectively allow the most enthusiastic traders and speculators to explore the global economy to their own best interests, which could have negative effects on a global scale or at least on the more economically vulnerable servers. We could talk for hours about this, but that would be beyond the point of this topic, I’m sure you understand the logic behind this argument, some won’t agree with it and that’s ok, this can be quite an interesting and complex topic, just think about reality and global economy, opinions on that are far from being unanimous. Now I understand that nowadays it’s much more common for players to have a lot of alt characters and when someone chooses to migrate, most of the times that player would like to take all his characters with him and that would come at a high cost. Sometimes players will choose not to migrate at all due to not being able to afford it or simply not wanting to pay for all those migrations; now, although there’s not much I can tell you about this, I can say that we’re aware of all of your suggestions and requests regarding services, as you can probably realize, this is not the sort of thing that can be decided on-the-fly, but if we believe that there is a real need for some sort of change or improvement on our character services and that it could potentially improve gameplay, then I don’t see why we wouldn’t consider it, evolution and change has always part of Blizzard’s culture, especially when we talk about WoW, we’re nothing if not adaptable and iterative, so all I can say is that I’m not currently aware of any plans to change these services, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have them in the future, keep providing us with constructive feedback about it, I can assure you it can/will speed things up. |
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06/03/2013
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While others would gain these things. I disagree.
I don't know how they can become any less accountable than they already are, unless you're talking about trolling /2. Hardly a big deal, is it? I think it's more likely to encourage a steady flow of goods around all realms with a reasonably stable economy and well stocked AH on every realm. |
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I belive this is key to solveing low pop server problem and judgeing from Blizz history on this issue its hard to see they will change something soon.Just check 200+ page long thread on issue of low pop servers and nothing being done by Blizzard for years.And from evidence they like to create money pits=low pop servers so they can open migration from high pop servers and when those ppl realise what low pop servers is all about they charge them nice big fee for char transferback to old server.Nice tactic from Blizz side ,but ask yourself how are customers feelings about it? |
I'm sorry, I can't agree to this. We don't use in game currency for transfers so it has no impact on economic sustainability. Besides, most people who want transferrs are usually those who are on economically screwed servers in the first place. And usually because it's socially dead. Put a Cooldown to these services and there would be no difference to how they run now.. Except then they would play into the "Blizz actually likes the customer" and not the "Let's Bleed em dry" feel these current services feel like. If you make free server transfers and put a cap to how many can actually move to Horde and Alliance sides on each server you may even see players move to a certain set of servers and then have an opportunity to close the dead ones. |
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I had to log in to express what everybody obviously knew all along. All the reason ever expressed by blizzard to justify their character transfer are just DIRECTLY groundless and it is not even up for debate.
Here are some points that you can generally ask a blue to completely shut them down on this issue and prove they are just clearly lying and the reason those things cost so much or anything at all is pure $$$. nothing else but $$$. 1. so price is what determines who gets to migrate and who doesn`t. Way to incorporate capitalism to a video game. Rich get to do what they want and poor people are stuck on dead servers that you do nothing about. Please tell me that free character migration has ever solved a dead server. bravo. 2. Why does every individual character transfer even to the same realm you already migrated one cost 20$ extra? because $$$ ofc. 3. games like rift have free character migration but mighty blizzard is unable to offer such service ? 4. Worried about ah exploitation? how about a month cooldown on migration. or 1 cheaper migration per month? Tell me with a straight face that this can`t be solved in a way that normal players could transfer but hard core economist AH players could not. do it. 5. where does the cost of 20€ come from. I refuse to believe that the process of migrating one character takes so much time from a GM or whoever is in charge that it takes 20€ worth of workhours. My bet is it is automated and nobody does anything but smile and collect $$$ The one thing that really constantly pisses me off about Blizzard is that they treat their playerbase like children and even when they are clearly called out on something they continue like nobody has no clue what is going on. I would be more pleased with if they just blatantly told "WE NEED MONEY." than trying to make CMs have a storytime on official forums about something that is so clearly untrue. |
It’s partially because of this. About what communities are you talking about? Those that are ruined by LFG/LFR? Or those ruined by the marvelous idea of 25 lvl guilds? |
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I don't have an issue with name/class/race change prices, those changes are almost entirely cosmetic anyway (racials don't matter until you start getting to top 100 types of guilds, and it takes ~7 days /played time for an average player to cap a new toon 1-90)
I think the server transfer charges need looking at. I think that it would help the community at large a lot, especially with people looking to move to a good guild for them, especially if Blizz want to nudge players towards raiding 25man rather than 10man. Blizz needs to make it easier to look for guilds and guild recruits, cross server, though that's a seperate issue. If a player pays the fee and moves their toon to a new server, doesn't like it and wants to move back then that's several months of subscription. That's too high imo. I think Blizzard should allow all players 1 free server transfer per account once every 3 months or so. For most players and most raiding guilds the people you want to recruit or the guild you want to join, or that would e most suited to you is on another server, and aside from the problem that you don't know they exists and they don't know you exist, the costs of transferring over for a trial amount to a lot relative to the monthly subscription. A (maybe forum based, and no the existing one is abysmal) system that marries players up with the right guilds for them, and allowing people the small luxury of 1 free server transfer per BN account every 3 months or so would go a long way imo to improving the communities and game experience of lots of players, and I think would be one of the best improvements to WoW you could make. |
