I too have moved from dead realms, it’s how I ended up on Draenor and I’m never going back to dead realms myself.
I do understand your view, I just don’t think bulk bundle is bad in itself, it’s just that they are ignoring the issues with dead realms AGAIN.
I think we will have to agree to disagree, to me the fact that they are ignoring the dead realms again is what makes the bundle so insulting.
If they’ve got any sense, they’ll charge per move, not per character, so if you have 10 alts you want to get off somewhere, to the same place - one standard transfer fee, as long as you do them all together.
As for what it will mean; death of small servers. This is Blizzard admitting they don’t know how to solve the server population issue, and rather than kicking out the idea that individual economies and realm firsts matter, they’re choosing to let players sort it out themselves. The reduced cost is an admission that they’re seeing people unsub with the comment “can’t afford to get off my dead realm”.
Although I do think that 6 months later, we’ll end up with free transfers OFF the full servers, because people absolutely will bulk move to the ‘good’ ones if the price is right.
(Personally I wish they’d just x-realm literally everything. Then people can choose a physical server at login time, which removes queuing issues forever. Spin up temporary servers during times of high load, close them down a week later when it settles off.)
If they opened everything up, by changes like: ONE auction house for every single realm(unified AH), trade with players on any realm, join any guild on any realm then they could knock the issue out the ball park, so to speak.
@Punyelf, my main issue with transfers is character names. I’ve had most of my chars for around 14 years now. I love their names (and spend days deciding on them) and they all have a special meaning to me. I’m not prepared to move servers and discover that I have to change the name of every one of my chars.
I can’t even do LFR as Alliance to get my Dom slot Gears and gems on Archimonde.
I support this thread.
I just want PvP servers again with sharding gone.
It is awful losing names, I agree.
My issue is my guild. I’ve run that guild since early 2007. We have many members who have been with us for many years. I do not have the option to move, without causing major upset and expense for a whole load of members. If I moved the guild, it just would not be the same. We have so many people who stop playing for a while - sometimes years - and then come back and rejoin us. If we just upped and left, they’d never find us.
We are on a low population realm. At one point it was the recommended realm for new players. At one point (in the last round of connections), we will have been on the list of realms due for additional Connections. And then they stopped. They promised they would continue until all low pop realms were connected. Prior to the connections starting, we were a low pop realm (albeit at the high end of low pop). They did a bunch of connections and now we’re even lower down the list of population.
Sure … it’s great that they’re going to be offering paid bundles for transfers. However, if they’re going to throw their hands up in the air and confess they have no plans to connect low population realms, I’d much prefer they say it up front, NOW, AND offer FREE transfers from our low population realms.
Because some don’t want to pay to transfer to one of the few high population realms that will mean queue times, but equally, they don’t want to run the risk of paying for a transfer, only to find in short order that that realm also becomes abandoned.
Although, of course, that is not a problem for me, because unless they can offer our entire guild a free transfer to a realm that has a good chance of surviving, then I can’t do anything about it. I’m not leaving it, and I’m not moving it away from our members.
Not that that will make any impact whatsoever on Blizzard, who have made it pretty clear over the last few years that they’re trying to move away from supporting guilds.
As an officer in a guild in a similar position in Aggramar I share your feelings completely Poisonenvy, we once held a vote if people were open to moving, and it was a resounding no. We’re making the best of the situation by building connections and friendships with the other guilds on our server and we take pride in being on the server since Vanilla.
I agree that Blizzard need to be open about the merges though, they’ve been silent for too long.
@Poisonenvy, exactly the same situation for us! We’re such an old guild and people do come back after years away, not to mention we have characters of people who have passed away over the years still in our guild roster. Those people were special to us and keeping their characters is a little way of keeping their memory alive.
If they did they better change how timers on rare spawns work because already many rares are a pain in the butt. Imagine having only one server with soundless at an 8 hour spawn timer. No thanks!
We need server merges badly. Some server factions only have like 20 level 60s online at prime time. It makes guild recruitment for content impossible.
Now this makes me sad, I’ve not been playing much for the last couple of years, but I originally started out on Dragonblight back when the game launched. 
Just put all together let’s not act like this game is played
That has nothing to do with this topic and is a terrible suggestion
Still longing to join forces with the Defias cluster…
From next week they will be selling bulk character transfer bundle instead of merging dead servers…
Ugh. That doesn’t bode well. 
…Okay, the (very small) part of me that clings to optimism despite all odds quietly hopes that this new service will make OOC players move away instead of RPers. (Which I imagine would be beneficial to everyone involved–if you’re not here for RP then you’re pretty much shooting yourself in the foot by clinging to a tiny server with severely limited PvE/PvP opportunities.)
