Realm Consolidation Update - Season of Discovery

As of 5am PDT, all transfers had processed, that was a lot of characters! I wanted to give an update on Name Reclamation, this system has not functioned on Live as expected, we’ve identified the cause and it is going through testing.

We’re looking into options for name changes once this system has been restored, but currently don’t have an update on what that may look like. We will update you once we have, well, an update!

Transfer are back open, still going slower than I’d like but we’ll be making some tuning changes shortly that should significantly speed things up.

Hey folks, quick update on this as many of you have noticed these transfers are not… transferring. We have temporarily closed the transfers to stop any further attempts, everyone who has queued up a transfer, you have not lost anything and you can login and play your characters as normal on their original realm.

We will have an update for you as soon as possible in the morning on next steps.

These changes are now Live!

One further change will take place with the next realm restarts, Crusader Strikes ruleset will change from RP-PvP to PvP. Crusader Strike has always been a dubious role play realm since its creation and we want to ensure that players uncomfortable with roleplay are not unfairly actioned for RP ruleset violations.

Lastly we have however held off on opening OCE to US transfers at this time as feedback was strongly mixed on this topic, trending more towards negative than positive.

Unfortunately we do not have any other technical solutions that are supported in Classic to allow more dynamic cross-region play between OCE and US so if and when this move comes it will be all or nothing.

On this particular topic we would welcome further discourse, there is no wrong or right answer so it’s very helpful to see a wider range of player thoughts.

Looking through some common questions, FCMs ignore some common Paid transfer restrictions such as level restrictions, gold restrictions. But you will have to no longer be a Guild Master.

Also, yes, these transfers ignore Faction restrictions, you will still be able to get all your characters on one realm. This has always been a ‘dirty secret’ of these free character moves when offered from PvP to PvP. We’re discussing if we want to remove this PvP faction restriction entirely on these realms post-merge. Regardless, intentionally disruptive gameplay such as cross-faction griefing will still be against the Terms of Service.

Oceanic servers are currently planned to be included in this FCM offering, but we are open to feedback on this. The Oceanic PvE realm no longer sustains actual group play, and the PvP realm is looking worse for ware, we feel that a higher ping but actual ability to find groups for content supersedes lower ping times but we are open to feedback and opinions on this.

As always thank you for your feedback!

Hello everyone, thank you for bearing with us there while we solidified our plans around these moves.

For the US region, all PvE realms will have FCMs open to Wild Growth, all PvP realms will have FCMs open to Crusader Strike. At the same time, first character creation will be disabled on all other realms. These Free Character Moves will open at 6pm PDT Tuesday 17th September.

In preparation for this, we have disabled character creation entirely on Crusader Strike and Wild Growth, this block will remain in effect until 10am Thursday 19th September, at which time creation will be re-enabled.

Our reasoning for these decisions are as follows -

• Wild Growth and Crusader Strike have consistantly remained the most populous and active realms in Season of Discovery US.
• We are announcing this now ahead of time to give guilds time to discuss when they wish to move, how to handle moving guild bank and large volumes of gold etc.
• Disabling character creation on the destination realms temporarily is to prevent a land grab of names by people intentionally trying to claim names othwerwise available to incomming transfers.

As part of this process we are also utilizing our Name Reclamation feature, this feature will automatically allow people to take names that are otherwise on an inactive account. We have set the date for inactivity to the begining of Season of Discovery Phase 4, so any account that has not once logged into Vanilla World of Warcraft since July 11th will be eligible to lose any character names it has reserved if those names are requested by an incomming FCM or new character creation. Please note Customer Service will not assist with gametime requests or exceptions to this process.

We hope that this will give as many people as possible a chance to maintain names that they have grown attached to, but appreciate not everyone will be lucky but ultimately we believe this consolidation will lead to the best possible experience for Season of Discovery players.