Many players have been murmuring quietly (and in some cases, loudly) for months about character transfers. Whether you started playing on a friend's account, and now want your own, or you started a character on a random server and want to move it, the case for transfers is pretty easy to see. One of WoW's downsides, at least from a new player's perspective, is the huge number of servers offered.

While the game helps you pick the most suitable realm, it's unlikely to be the same realm as your friends--it might not even be the same region (American servers are entirely separate from those offered to European players). While it's fairly easy to contact your friends and find out which server they're on, there are quite a lot of situations in which you end up with a reasonably well-advanced character on one server, but wish it were on another.

Several players I know have a related problem: they started playing on their friend's, husband's, girlfriend's account, got up to high levels, and then finally got their own copy of the game. Now they have to start all over again, and forget about the character and their memories.

The current solution is simple, but frustrating: re-roll, and try again. It's just not the same, especially if you have weeks of play time invested in a level 60 but pressing reasons to change sever.

Hence the case for character transfer. But what are the downsides?

Account-to-account transfer is probably the most dubious (and also requested by fewer people). Unchecked, it would easily allow characters to be sold between accounts, and powerlevelling companies would jump at the chance to quickly equip eager consumers' accounts with a level 60 or two.

The sanity checks that can be put in place to counteract this range from high prices and time limits (for example, only transferring one character every six months) to restrictions such as ensuring both accounts are at the same billing address. If this scheme ever does come into play, it's likely to be surrounded by a thicket of these restrictions, but hopefully will allow people who genuinely want to transfer a character for "above board" reasons to do so.

Realm transfer has its obvious appeal, and already exists in a limited form, but the popularity is one reason it may be more trouble than it's worth. Certain servers may attract a flood of players because celebrities use them, or they have well known guilds, or they are further along in the war effort, etc; thus Blizzard's load-balancing system gets shot to pieces and the server queues shoot up, causing the players who were there first to get disgruntled.

Within the game there's also the question of economy. Whether it's a sudden abundance of epics or a shortage of trade goods, moving players and their belongings will cause certain economic disruption to both the old and the new server, if it happens on a large enough scale.

The worst-case scenario sees servers turning into a mix of ghost towns and overcrowded, unstable realms, with shattered economies, guild upheaval, item problems and unhappy players. Of course, if Blizzard manage to find enough caveats to make transfers work, it will satisfy many players, so there's definitely a trade-off.

My "character transfer wishlist", if you will, includes not only realm-to-realm transfer but also the ability to play on international servers. Despite lag, I would love the option to play with American friends as well as Europeans without having to buy a second copy of the game. When the European copy of the game was released, Blizzard promised "a means to make this possible after the European launch", but nothing has surfaced nearly a year later.