Character Transfer Controversy Continues
by Mike D'Anna 
Jun 29th 2006 at 10:00AM
The announcement that Blizzard will now be offering paid character transfers for $25 has been met with more than a little controversy within the community. Many people, including many who have commented on it here, feel that Blizzard is milking customers out of more money for a service that they could easily provide for free. Others defend Blizzard's descision, claiming that the character transfer fee is nothing more than a way to discourage players from moving servers willy nilly in a never-ending game of musical realms, which I happen to agree with.If players were allowed to freely transfer between servers as often as they wished, then it could potentially open up a huge can of worms; one scenario I can imagine is players possibly griefing or otherwise causing problems on one server, only to move to another when they wind up on too many peoples 'ignore' lists.
What about you readers? How many of you are planning to take advantage of the transfer service? Why have you chosen to move realms? population? Friends on other realms? Want to start anew with a fresh reputation? Let us know...
Filed under: Realm News, Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Sylythn Jun 29th 2006 10:31AM
You'll also end up with a massive problem of economic disruption. Farmers would then be able to take that Epic item that only sells for 200g on their server, and their stacks of Wool that only sell for 50s...and head over to another server to sell the Epic for 600g, and their Wool for 80s. You now have goods from one market, being sold in another.
eNola Jun 29th 2006 10:34AM
Personally, I understand where they're coming from. The $25 fee keeps everyone from moving at once, helping prevent any potential load problems. The 6 months wait time keeps people from abusing the system, though I think it may be just a tad long. My only concern is for friends of mine who are stuck on a realm with serious issues who can't afford the $25. Not only will they have to stick around and deal with the problems if they want to keep their mains, but they'll also be left behind when those of us who can afford it decide to leave.
It's not a perfect world, though. As with any decision that will affect many, there are pros and cons.
Hildar Jun 29th 2006 10:40AM
It's a catch-22 for me because on the one hand, I believe Blizzard must implement a fee for character transfer or the issue you described could become a reality. But on the other hand, I will probably never use the service because it would cost me $25. I can think of many things I'd rather spend that money on.
Byll Jun 29th 2006 10:53AM
$25 is not a lot of money for the time it takes to do something like this. You might think it's a simple database change, but if you really think about it, imagine all the stuff that is tied to you character. Money, bank items, bag items, honor, etc all needs to be move over and accounted for.
If you are in a situation where you really need a transfer, $25 is not such a steep price to pay. Go mow a lawn or two.
be glad you aren't paying $50+ like in EQ.
Grendalsh Jun 29th 2006 10:55AM
Blizzard has a wonderful, built-in means of 'deterring' people from moving their characters, 'willy-nilly', without charging a penny. Timers blow, cause they're passive, and farmers would just stagger them across accounts. You'd need something that must be ACTIVELY done, to EARN the right to move yer character.. hmm. What mechanic does WoW have where you have to do something with yer character to earn a reward.. QUESTS!
Imagine a fairly extensive quest chain, something that takes a couple days of effort to complete. Nothing as extravagant as faction grinding, but a significant step up from The Missing Diplomat. Something that requires an actual investment of time from the player. Now, if I want to move my character once, a quest to earn it isn't so bad, even if it does take a couple days.. but hey, I'm PLAYING to do it, not paying to change up an account I'm already PAYING for. If I want to move several characters.. well, that's no different than having to complete the same quests with those characters to level them. On the other hand, I'm not going to be incentivized to go do that chain, all over again, to hop back and forth between servers without reason. If it's to take advantage of market fluctuations, and it takes me a week of questing to flip between markets.. not really going to be able to take advantage of that. And if I take a week to flip goods from a low-cost to high-cost market, how is that different from spending a week grinding that item to sell? If I'm a goldfarmer, that means several days away from gold grinding in order to transfer a character, which equates to profit loss more significant than $25.
The one constant in the game is play time. Gold is flexible, and real life time can be passively waited out. but PLAYING time is Blizzards real product, the one thing we all have in equal amounts (we all pay %15/month for a months worth of it, regardless of whether we get to use it), and the one thing that Blizzard could charge that requires an active effort on our part without hitting our wallets.
Blizzard talks a big story about how they want in-game mechanics to not be influenced by real life finances. An in game quest would fit with that ideal far better than a real life charge.
Brad Jun 29th 2006 11:11AM
This is funny. There is no "controversy." It's kids who have no money that are complaining. When I was young $25 was over a month's allowance. Now I can spend that going out to dinner. The fee is there for the all the reasons listed here, and it's completely fair. I'm sorry if little Timmy can't move servers and join his friends because he doesn't have $25, maybe they should move to EverQuest... oh wait, they charge double.
captain roach Jun 29th 2006 11:20AM
There is already a safeguard against moving "willy nilly" to multiple servers with a 6-month restriction on re-transfering a character. I could see this as a valid system if it only applied to the account-to-account transfers to deter the powerlevelers and account sellers.
My biggest complaint is the ruleset restrictions. I can't move my abandoned level 40 PVE character to my current PVP server (where 2 60s reside). Why? Because "PVP is easymode. L2P". /sigh
Oh yeah, but I can move both my level 60s back to the deserted PVE realm (for $50).
Gill Jun 29th 2006 11:22AM
I must admit that I quickly jumped on this once they made the feature available to Turalyon. I quickly transferred to Kul Tiras where my friends and co-workers are playing. Yeah the $25 is a bit steep for some people but I understand where Blizzard is coming from. I mean, if this was all for free, the farmers out there would have a field day. And yes, I agree that there is no "controversy". I swear, if you can afford to pay $15 a month to pay a game and yet complain about $25 you need to stop living off your parents' credit card(s) and get a job.
jpc Jun 29th 2006 11:29AM
@3, good idea.
PsyClerk Jun 29th 2006 11:35AM
I agree with Brad. $25 is nothing unless you are a serious skinflint. The fee is not something you HAVE to pay. You can stay on whatever server you rolled on.
If you can come up with $15 a month to play, PLUS monthly cost of internet service, AND are able to afford a computer to play the game, but you can't come up with $25...then you have bigger issues other than where your favorite WoW character resides.
dojobo Jun 29th 2006 12:06PM
I've been waiting for transfers for quite a while, and the $25 fee is in line with what I expected. I started at launch on a PVE server, played around with several characters and then bailed to join some friends on a PVP server. There I played up to 60, and then I took nearly a year off playing.
Coming back to the game recently I realized that on balance PVP servers don't make sense for me - the slight thrill of world pvp doesn't make up for the differences in (**gross generalization coming**) the average maturity level of the server population. (**at least you were warned, flame away**)
So for me the $25 isn't an issue. The no PVE->PVP transfer rule isn't an issue. Now if Gilneas(PVE)would just get taken off the "Ineligible Destination Realms" list I'd be set. /sigh
Mat Jun 29th 2006 12:11PM
I agree with Brad too.
Snapdragon Jun 29th 2006 12:50PM
I've had DBAs working for me for years (in California...where Blizz is located) who make in the neighborhood of $80-90K/year = $40/hour. So, Blizz is saying it takes roughly 30 man/minutes to make this change. That's not unreasonable with the table changes, test to production moves, and request communication involved. Those complaining clearly don't understand how companies work.
James Jun 29th 2006 12:52PM
"$25 is not a lot of money for the time it takes to do something like this. You might think it's a simple database change, but if you really think about it, imagine all the stuff that is tied to you character. Money, bank items, bag items, honor, etc all needs to be move over and accounted for."
As a computer programmer myself, all they have to do is write a small application or set of queries that do this. It's not difficult at all. At my job, we have recently had to do this a lot. But somewhere around the lines of about 100,000 entries. It took about a day to run, and about a week to write (from 1 person working on it). And now it can be ran anytime we need it. It's not difficult at all. All aspects of a character are simply database entries.
As for the topic. I think $25 is a little steep. I have around 5-6 alts on 1 server, and there is no way in heck I would ever pay $150 + $25 for main just to bring them all over. Now if they were offering something like $25 or $50 for all X amount of characters from 1 server to another, I'd think about it more. Living on the east coast and playing a central server really hits hard in PvP. Didn't really notice it until I already had my friends playing, etc. and until I got into a guild that used server time to raid. BLAH I say. What I would like to see is Blizz implement where the server is located so people can ultimately get on a server closest to them! That would be awesome! Past week I've randomly got on other servers while mine has been down and looked at the time just to see what ones were on the east coast and what my ping was compared to my normal server. A 200ms ping difference is a big difference in PvP.
Dave N. Jun 29th 2006 1:33PM
Brad is right except for one situation (ah, isn't it the exceptions that chalenge the validity of the claim?) - When I started playing, my wife created a couple of toons on my account before she got her own. Then, I created one on her account, so that I could play when she was using my account. I know, violates the TOS, whatever. Customer service didn't flinch at this admission last year, only said that cross-account transfers weren't available yet, sorry.
The point is, she bought her account so we could play together and because she had a chance to play characters created on my account. She would like to transfer those toons to her account (which would correct the TOS violation, BTW). But there is no freakin' way we are going to pay $25 per character, especially considering the lag and lack of accessibility to the game when they decide to patch during primetime, or there are problems in a realm.
I work in IT, and have dealt with database programming since the 80's. Once a routine has been written to transfer data from one server to another, it takes a matter of minutes and a trained monkey to do it.
It should be obvious by now that Blizzard is just soaking it's playerbase for every dime it can while the soaking is good. I am saddened that today's Blizzard is not the same company I grew to love through WC, SC, and Diablo.
Rhys Jun 29th 2006 3:06PM
How about they keep the $25 fee, but donate $15/$20 of it to charity? Wouldn't that keep both sides happy (apart from Blizzard, of course).
Quagmar Jun 29th 2006 3:53PM
I'm kinda of getting sick of hearing people complain about the $25 fee...if you dont want to pay it then your character stays on that server, end of story. Everyone can gripe and complain all they want about it but Blizzard is not going to change the fee. For me 25 dollars is not a lot of money and i'm a poor college kid. It means that i will have to stay in one night from going out to the bars. I understand not everyone has a job but everyone makes money some how i.e. allowance, birthdays, holidays, cutting grass, whatever. Hell, spend a day going through trash and collecting cans, i really dont care, everyone can make 25 dollars if they really want to transfer their character over and if not you can always rebuild a new character on a different server (yah i know it takes a lot of time.) Blizzard could have never offered this option. We should feel fortunate that they are providing this service.
You will always have the hardcore fans that are willing to spend the money to transfer, i mean you have people paying real money for fake gold on a game!
In short some people will pay and some will not...in the end it will all balance out just stop complaining about $25.
And by the way nothing is ever free in the business world, they designed this game for one thing, to make MONEY. And might I add, they are doing a great job at it.
Zequel Jun 29th 2006 4:49PM
30 mins of time.... NOT. They're not covering costs. The fee's to dissuade jumpers.As for Snapdragon, you don't know what you're talking about. Any fool of a DBA would not be stupid enough to manually change records. You write a script enclosed in a transaction. You test it to death, then you package it up in a procedure. The software developer hooks the procedure into a GUI. The employee transferring the character would simply identify the account and click a button - end of story. Anything else is unfathomly stupid and lends itself to too many mistakes.
Megan Jun 29th 2006 6:36PM
I agree that the fee is a good idea to keep people from going crazy and just transfer characters constantly. That's why I think the 6 month rule is a good thing, too. However, this is my story: My boyfriend and I started playing about 3 weeks apart from each other and instead of creating my main on his server; I just created it on the realm the game suggested. Since then, we've each created characters on the others' server, but our mains are still apart. We'd like to consolidate our characters on Runetotem (my server) by moving them all there from Draka (his server), but it would cost 125 dollars total to do. We believe that $25 is a fine base rate for a character transfer but, if you're doing what we want to do, it should be maybe 5 or 10 additional dollars per character, instead just 25 dollars for every character, no matter what. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I really don't think that's such an outrageous thing to ask for.
Grendalsh Jun 30th 2006 2:54AM
1. Blizzard has repeatedly said the fee is to dissuade folks from transferring chars.
2. Blizzard has never said fee is to cover costs.
3. Costs are insignificant vs. monthly subscription.
4. There are better ways to dissuade abuse of transfers
5. The people most able to afford transfer fee repeatedly are rich gold-sellers.
ergo
Blizzard is charging a fee that is unnecessary and fails at its stated purpose, but won't go away because they have the right to do so, and it makes money.
How about discussing original alternatives to the fee?