A new round of free character transfers announced
by Alex Ziebart 
Sep 3rd 2008 at 1:00PM
As of noon today, a new set of free character transfers are available from select realms due to their exceedingly high population. Bornakk says that these transfers will last until Wednesday, September 10th unless their transfer goal is met early. In that case, the character transfers will end early as well. Get in while you can, if you're on one of these realms!The realms Illidan, Mal'Ganis and Warsong have the option to transfer to the Zuluhed server. Aerie Peak, Area 52, Moon Guard, and Zul'Jin have the option of transferring to Muradin. On the Oceanic side of things, the servers Barthilas and Frostmourne may transfer to Dreadmaul if they so choose. Forum links embedded for your new-home-researching convenience.
Remember, these transfers are only open until September 10th or until their transfer quota is met. If you're interested in moving, do it as soon as you can so you don't miss out.
Filed under: Realm News, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
eroch Sep 3rd 2008 1:24PM
How come there's never free transfers to the Azshara realm? It's the lowest populated server in the game according to warcraftrealms.com anyway.
eroch Sep 3rd 2008 1:26PM
Or at least give free transfers out of there and delete it which I would prefer.
Xerous Sep 3rd 2008 1:30PM
because its such a low pop realm every few people have the wow census addon and routinely run it there. Thus the number for most all the lower pop realms are far from accurate. One can assume blizzard has a better idea of what the population is.
Kuhtarl Sep 3rd 2008 1:50PM
They want the server to remain as sparsely populated as the zone it is named after?
Seriously... Azshara is such a great looking zone... there's just not that much to do there. It's always empty on my server.
Great lore stuff too.
Trennon Sep 3rd 2008 2:11PM
As Muradin born-and-bred, I for one welcome our new high-pop overlords. Just make sure to bring lots of Hearts of Darkness. And money.
Sonmerlong Sep 4th 2008 9:47AM
Yep, muradin is a good spot.
Try and ignore the forums though, i honestly believe the entire population of WoW forum trolls are born there.
We will greatly welcome the influx of new blood.
There are several T6 and T5 guilds looking for raiders to fill slots left open by kids heading back to school.
Not to metion replacing people that wont log out of the beta to eat, let alone bother with BT.
Masaru Sep 3rd 2008 5:35PM
Dentarg US needs transfers badly... guilds are stagnating and transferring off left and right, especially on Alliance side. It seems that they are trying to correct overpopulation more than underpopulation.
crsh Sep 3rd 2008 2:09PM
Having played on Zul'jin for a good while, I can't help but notice this is like the 3rd (or 4th?) time we're offered free transfers off since January; something's not working because the realm's stability is not improving, the population also doesn't seem to drop much.
zappo Sep 3rd 2008 2:50PM
Yeah, I'm not sure what Blizzard is hoping to accomplish by this method. Lets see, I'll just leave my guild, and friends to a server where it will be harder to find groups and probably has a borked economy? They're approaching it from the wrong direction.
What they should do (and probably will have to do once the WoW population starts shrinking considerably) is consolidate low population servers. Either that or give the people on low pop servers the option to transfer to any of say, 20 medium population servers.
Anyway this seems like Blizzard throwing a bone here and there but not really having a good solution to the problem yet.
Nagi Sep 3rd 2008 2:34PM
Unless there's a healthy roleplaying population on Muradin, good luck getting Moon Guard players to transfer out. Just about every Moon Guard newcomer I've talked to in the last few months has told me they came TO Moon Guard specifically because it's pretty much the last server with more than just a tiny handful of roleplayers on it.
Ametrine Sep 3rd 2008 3:02PM
That's my reason, yeah.
Kia Sep 3rd 2008 2:39PM
This really ticks me off. I've been looking to get off Moon Guard to another rp realm so I could play with my boyfriend. Why the hell would either of us want to play on Muradin? -_-;
Dessel Sep 3rd 2008 3:50PM
Muradin is dead the top raiding guild is leaving.
DO NOT GO TO MURADIN
Sonmerlong Sep 4th 2008 9:40AM
Muradin is far from dead.
We will greatly welcome the influx of new blood.
There are several T6 and T5 guilds looking for raiders to fill slots left open by kids heading back to school.
Not to metion replacing people that wont log out of the beta to eat, let alone bother with BT.
Eliseth Sep 3rd 2008 2:58PM
What we of Mal'ganis are still trying to figure out is... why don't they keep the $%&#ing server closed after transfer goals are met? This has happened so many times now--server gets overfull (long queues to get on, instability and crashing all the time), free transfers off are offered, server clears up, then gets re-filled with a whole new batch of transfers on. Maybe if they kept the server closed for a while the crowding would actually die down, but instead Blizzard is apparently content to let the same problem keep recurring.
Alveredus Sep 3rd 2008 3:13PM
Blizzard should avoid consolidating servers if nothing else because in a multimillion dollar company with investors, that makes people nervous... and it really is unnecessary.
However this poster does identify the problem well.
IMHO, a good approach would be to concoct incentives for individuals or guilds to leave a crowded server.
I think the following would do the job nicely:
An "Exile of " title. Cute. Fun. Somewhat impressive. A way to identify where you came from. Essentially something to let people know where you come from.
A mount. For people who are not impressed by text alone.
Two weeks of RAF triple XP leveling benefits applied guild-wide in the event of a guild transfer. This gives recently transferred guilds an edge in recruitment and creating alts to replace anyone who stayed behind. However, being GUILD based and not ACCOUNT based, it's limited to the new lower pop server. Limiting it to 14 days (and having no level granting mechanism like RAF) keeps it from conflicting with the RAF program.
Nevets Sep 3rd 2008 3:33PM
SAVE KALECGOS
Matt J Sep 3rd 2008 3:48PM
I think those proposing alternatives to shoring up the numbers of the various low-population servers are missing the point.
IMO the primary reason for having the server transfers are to decrease the population of higher population servers. If there weren't servers with opprerssively high populations we probably wouldn't be seeing these transfers at all, regardless as to the status of low-pop servers.
As a resident of Area 52 before the start of the summer we rarely had any loading queues, but over the past several months we've gone to having upwards of 15-20 minute wait times before getting onto the server, and it is annoying. Now I won't and I doubt many of my guild will participate in the program, but hopefully this will help to thin out the ranks, and bring those queue times down.
Queue times are a problem that affect almost all players on a realm in that it prevents them from playing at all, whereas the issues regarding low-pop servers don't actually prevent people from playing the game. It's easy to see which types of problem would concern Blizz more.
Swiss Sep 3rd 2008 4:54PM
I started playing on Area 52 in September of 2007. It didn't used to be as crowded as it is now. In April of this year, I rerolled on a PvP server and every now and then I log onto an alt on A52 to stop by and say "hey" to old guildies and friends.
I had a lot of fun on that realm- but from what I've been hearing, I've been missing out on server queues, severe lag, server crashes, etc. Makes me glad I rerolled.
In my opinion, if they wanted to attract more people to transfer off, they'd offer multiple destination realms (PvP included). Having the option of transferring off a PvE realm to PvP would probably be very enticing for a lot of people.
SuperBell Sep 3rd 2008 5:27PM
We could use more players on Muradin. It's a very stable server; Just because Grandeur is leaving doesn't mean the server is dead- they just could not field out the players required to take down M'uru in the 3 months they've been attempting it.
I'd love to see some good players come to the server, imo. I can't transfer off atm because I have no way of doing so, so it's not fair to those of us who try to make the server a better place.