- Author: Pride
- Date: June 16, 2022
- Updated: June 16, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
There has been a lot of discussion following Blizzard’s announcement of fresh servers for WotLK Classic. A lot of people are excited for the prospect of the fresh start — either because they felt that the hyper-inflated economy hurt TBC, or because they’re new or returning players that prefer not to feel like they’re far behind the rest of the community.
One concern that was commonly repeated by players however was the limitation of transfers to these fresh servers for “at least 90 days”. It was not clear what Blizzard meant by this, and a lot of players felt very strongly that 90 days would generally not be a long enough time period. Assuming there’s a 1 month gap between the WotLK prepatch being released and the actual release of WotLK itself, that means players would have 2 months worth of time with WotLK before transfers open up. For people who don’t level up quickly, that may mean that they just reached or are just about to reach level 80, and now a bunch of people decked out in Sunwell Plateau gear with thousands of gold can transfer in and affect the economy.
Thankfully, it seems that Blizzard noticed these concerns, and Aggrend chimed in with a response on the same thread, in which he clarifies that “90 days is the absolute minimum amount of time [Blizzard] would wait to open transfers”. Blizzard plans to monitor the situation closely and listen to player feedback before opening up transfers to the fresh servers, according to Aggrend, who acknowledges that an equal playing field is very important to fresh servers, which Blizzard appears to understand. They might open up transfers on “day 91, day 191, or even day 991”, and they “don’t intend to commit to an arbitrary timeframe” for them, rather just listening to players — which is commendable on Blizzard’s part.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think it’s a good call by Blizzard to be mindful with when they enable transfers to fresh servers, delaying them as much as necessary? Should they open them up sooner? Or would you perhaps rather that they simply never open them up at all, so fresh servers are always a completely different environment from the current servers? Let us know in the comments below!
Myself and other members of the team have been reading through a lot of the responses about Fresh Start servers since it was announced, and the common feedback we’ve seen is concern over the idea of transfers opening after the servers have been live for 90 days. I felt it was important to chime in and highlight that Kaviax’s post specifically mentions they won’t be available for at least 90 days. As in, at minimum.
The concept of opening fresh start realms in this way for Classic is somewhat new territory for us, so in this situation we believe its very important to carefully monitor the population on these new realms, observe player behavior, and listen to feedback on this topic. There is nothing saying that transfers must flip on exactly on day 91, day 191, or even day 991 and we don’t intend to commit to an arbitrary timeframe for transfers to become enabled super far ahead of time. We plan to be very thoughtful and deliberate when it comes to how and when we lift the restrictions around transfers on these realms.
So to reiterate, 90 days is the absolute minimum amount of time we’d wait to open transfers, and we intend to listen to the feedback we get on this very carefully. If the realms are healthy and we don’t feel the need to open transfers on these realms, we won’t rush to do so. The team really wants to take care with anything we do here because of how excited many players are about the idea of being able to start fresh and have that type of “equal playing field” experience in Wrath of the Lich King Classic. We are excited about it too, and we really want to take our time and ensure that the experience is as awesome as it can be.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this does a little bit to reassure some concerns about this. As always, thank you so much for the comments and feedback!
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this is good stuff and they must never open transfer in any server at all. that’s why always realms and server dies in classic. they just think about money but a good gaming company u must think in the head of the gamer and now u can handle the best game experience for your player IMO. I hope activision does it right