Free Character Transfers for TBC Realms Coming Today

• Author: Pride
• Date: November 17, 2021
• Updated: November 17, 2021
• Expansion: TBC Classic

Players were massively relieved when Blizzard finally announced that free character transfers were coming, after a long period of declining populations causing dead servers. But there was no official date at the time, only a vague timeframe given with “within the next couple of weeks”.

It would appear that Blizzard has decided it’s time, as Kaivax just announced that free character transfers will be coming today, at 11 AM PST (or 2 PM EST) for US servers and at 20:00 PM for EU servers.

In a move that’s certain to cause even more outrage however, it appears that by “all of the lowest-population BCC realms to any high-population realm of the same ruleset and region”, Blizzard meant only from servers with ~1000 or fewer players, to any server with ~2000 or more players, completely disregarding faction balance on both the source and destination sides.

This excludes all servers with a population ranging from 1500-2500 from being eligible to transfer away, even though some of them are inevitably going to collapse, losing 200-400 players per week. It also includes some servers with 2000 to 3000 players as destinations, even though many of them are also currently in rapid decline, particularly for one of the two factions.

My former server, Razorgore, for example, started off as a fairly even 55:45 Horde:Alliance server, but eventually collapsed into a 70-30 server in the Horde’s favour, with an Alliance population of ~1800 rapidly transferring off to servers with better ratios.

It has now completely collapsed to a 95:5 ratio with only 200 Alliance players left there, yet the server was only flagged as a valid destination server to transfer to, it is not eligible to transfer off from. The 200 players currently stranded there, and any that have already left but couldn’t afford to transfer alts, are very disappointed as a result.

To make things worse, any Alliance players transferring there because it is flagged as “Medium” population during peak hours, will be shocked to discover that they have transferred to an effectively dead server for their side, with no Auction House to speak of. This raises an obvious question — why was faction balance not considered at all here?

Furthermore, all of the “mega-servers” that players have been fleeing to from their dying servers are eligible destinations. This is likely to further accelerate the “refugee” flows to them, to the frustration of players that dislike those servers due to a lack of community, and would prefer there to be multiple healthy servers rather than just 1 healthy mega-server.

There are also some slightly funny mishaps. Felstriker is a US Oceanic server with a population of ~55 Alliance players and 0 Horde as of this week, with only 1 raiding guild. Yet it was not flagged as a valid server to transfer from, but rather a valid server to transfer to — a decision that flabbergasted players on that server.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Are you satisfied with Blizzard offering free transfers off some of the lowest population servers, or do you wish they would do more to help address population issues? Let us know in the comments below!