A few weeks back, MOP’s Eliot covered a World of Warcraft sale that caught my attention: Concurrent with the launch of Eternity’s End, Blizzard had issued a discount for folks who purchased server transfers in bulk. I ranted about this for several minutes before just deciding to vent right here in a Daily Grind to see if anyone else is as annoyed by this as I am.
It’s not that I really mind that much paying for transfers or that I’ve never done it. In fact, I’ve actually paid kind of a lot of money to transfer characters in MMORPGs. Just between Ultima Online and pre-sunset Star Wars Galaxies, I’ve spent several hundred dollars transferring characters around – all to get off thoroughly dead servers and onto live servers with actual humans and a real economy. In fact, I’m relatively certain I’ve spent far more trying to rescue toons from dead servers in MMOs than I’ve spent on cosmetics.
But that situation was garbage and I knew it at the time, and in retrospect I wish I had just quit rather than feed into that cycle of swindling. I can understand wanting to make sure people aren’t just swapping factions to stay on the winning side, or moving from server to server to perpetuate scams, but there’s no reason “exorbitant sums of money” needs to be involved instead of timers or timeouts. If servers are dead, the studio should be fixing them or offering people a free ride off of them – not trying to charge us in bulk to move a dozen toons.
Am I alone here? Are you also irritated by paid server transfers in MMORPGs?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
