"By no means do you need any of these premium services to enjoy World of Warcraft gameplay to the fullest extent."

Blizzard has recently devoted a great deal of effort to making guilds a requirement of "enjoying gameplay to the fullest," especially for raiding. As this is a social game, and many people desire to play in a guild with friends they know in the real world, many of us have had to transfer our characters multiple times. For those of us who are unable to devote enough time to have an end game raid level character on multiple servers, this poses a serious problem. A problem that I feel Blizzard has exploited.

A real world example:
I started playing in a guild with my roommate on server X as Alliance. Long after he stopped playing, I was stuck on a server with no one I knew. Years later, an opportunity arose to play in a guild with some coworkers, but there was a problem... not only did I have to pay to transfer my character to their server, I had to pay AGAIN to transfer to Horde. About a year went by and people left the company, left the guild etc... Then came the opportunity to join a friend's guild, which was unfortunately on another server... and Alliance.

I fully understand their desire to prevent people from frequently server or faction hopping, but a more reasonable solution (or price) needs to be found. Right now this just feels like a way to exploit players for more money, when all the players really want to do is keep playing the game they love, when circumstances have driven them to change server/faction.

That said, I do feel that blizzard has done right by keeping subscription fees at the same level over the years.

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