A transfer is for you when you're no longer satisfied with your present server. Did this really need its own thread?

Well, here is my little story.

I myself just recently server transfered, it was for the simple fact that the old server was dead, lots of others had already left, including guilds, and there was nothing left to recruit from, plus the bigger guilds was trying to poach our better geared raiders.

This lead the guild leadership, and several members to leave it behind, goto a new server and join up with some old friends who also transfered their guild.

The old server really didn't give us any options, the people who did apply to our raiding guild, was clearly not raiding players, wasnt able to attend enough raids, or had the gear or the skill level which we seeked.

Anyway its early days on the new server, we are about to test out the new guild in 25man raiding this week, just a shame I never checked the PvP battle group first, horde are really bad in AV lol.

For advice I would say make sure you check out all servers possible before moving, make sure you can find what you are looking for, even to the point of rolling a lowbie alt and asking questions on the realm itself you are interested in.

Remember, once you move, you are stuck with that char there for 3 months, there is no going back.

Good luck and hope you get what you want.

If you are serious about raiding and your current server can't offer you what you want, then that is the time to transfer. If you are still raiding with friends, and having a lot more fun then frustration, then it is usually wise to stick around.

I just recently moved. I don't like to devote my entire life to this game, but I do enjoy raiding. I like to use my limited time efficiently to get things done. There were not any guilds on my server that matched this (my old server only has 2 Vashj kills and 1 Solarian kill). I have watched friends transfer off left and right over the past few months. If they didn't transfer, they most likely aren't logging in much anymore. The server just continues to have more and more problems as time goes by. In the end I decided to transfer off and give things a fresh start.

Just do what makes the game fun. It is a game.

I have to offer some advice when it comes to server transfer. Research the guild you are joining. I recently left a guild that I had been Raiding with since MC due to recruitment issues and a halt in progression. I did what I thought was a decent amount of research on the guild I was transfering to. Checked Armory profiles, checked their Realm forums, their forums, made a Level 1 alt on the server to check things out, etc. I joined the guild and Raided with them for a week, only to have the GM transfer, then all the Officers transfer over the next couple of days, and then the majority of the guild either quit playing all together, or started looking elsewhere. So now I am stuck on a server where I know absolutely no one, and there isn't another Raiding guild at the same level content wise that I can Raid with. Stuck until November 23rd and not happy about it.

Having transferred not once, but twice, there are definitely a few things you need to check into before you take the plunge.

The first time I did was for the sake of playing with a friend on the same server. He decided to stop playing two weeks after my transfer because of real life issues leading to me rerolling completely.

The most recent transfer I did was the outcome of a number of issues. My old guild (one of three on the server that had acceptable progression) disbanded after GM and MT both lost their jobs (d'oh!) and progression slowed down leading to a lot of people joining one of the other two guilds.

The members who did not want to join either of those guilds were left with the option of transferring or joining the guild formed out of those people who wanted to raid every night. Most people, myself included couldn't meet that kind of schedule and still enjoy real life so I went to the guild recruitment forums on the official site and made a post with my projected availability and what not.

Then it's just a matter of checking who responds to your post, most guilds always need "X" number of whatever class, then it just becomes a matter of research on your part about both the guild and the server that guild is on. WoWJutsu.com is a great tool for checking on progression of the server. I personally ignored any guild that made their recruitment post seem like it would be a job to join up with them.

Just remember to do whatever will make the game fun for YOU. That's the reason we're playing this isn't it?

I think this really shows us something, and that is that you really need to be sure about transfering cause there is always a risk. even with all that research I"m not sure how you would be able to know about some of the internal problems. I had a similar situation except I decided not to transfer(stayed with some friends) and the guild I had been in contact with ended up disbanding.. you just don't know sometimes.

Don't sign your posts.


- Gwill.

The WoW population will eventually begin to decline at some point, and the situation on lower population realms with only a handful or raiding guilds will only become worse. This begs the question: if your goal is to continue raiding and progressing into WotLK and beyond, wouldn't it be the most prudent decision to transfer to a higher population, more progressed server sooner rather than later?

Perhaps some ex-EQ players who were around near the end of its peak could share some unique insight.

In European servers most likely all release realms are empty now.

Reason is the bad latency due to old technology that was present at the migration times.And now we have a plenty of high populated, highly progressed realms and realms that are suffering from lack of players, my guess is this will continue like this since no guilds want to migrate from these "highly populated realms" to realms where no one has killed Kael.

They also draw a lot of players from PCT, which is also really bad for the small servers.

Network technology hasn't changed that much in two years.

Secondly, I'm being the witness of another trend; whole guilds transfer from a server to another. I'm not in the position to know whether they still end up in high-population servers in EU or otherwise, but it's reasonable to assume some of them do. Even 6-7 months back I was reading in the Guild Recruitment forums about the promising new guild that was going to be started on the newest PvP realm opening (just an example, but you get my point).
New realms opening are the result of demand. You can't seriously believe a company like Blizzard is purchasing, setting up and offering new servers for no clients, right? They have obviously done their market research beforehand.
I think these two kinda level the field between "small" and high-population servers.

I think I saw a post about Blizzard using better equipment in newer servers,I'm not 100% sure though.Add up queues, constant disconnects and guilds failing to raid and you have an urban legend!

I dont know where you got that Info, but its definitly not the whole truth. I am playing on a release server and there are active guilds in all parts of content from Karazhan to Black Temple.
We do have good latency and definitly the server population isnt dying

Setting aside exceptions like Mal'Ganis and those other 4 day release servers this was true. New servers had new hardware while release servers waited months to be upgraded.

Hey! He's talking about my server!

That said, the raiding picture isn't quite as dire as painted. Horde side, there's 2x Hyjal/BT guilds and around 4 guilds in SSC/TK scene besides your own.

You obviously don't understand how wowjutsu works. It tracks the loot from the armory, yes, but it tracks only the first appearance of that item. If player A gets loot X while in Guild 1, then Guild 1 will retain that progression. Even if player A moves to Guild 2, Guild 2 will not receive the progression bonus (unless player A immediately gquits and gets himself a new guild before the wowjutsu scanner picks him up). The predominant reason its inaccurate at the low end is because of Karazhan (and Gruul in some more advanced servers) PuG's.

On the population side, we're on the lower end of the spectrum. I know we've resorted to using cross server transfers for about > 90% of our recruiting. But one thing I've noted in the months doing so is that cross server transfers usually end up unsuccessful. Maybe half of the new xfers usually quit (even when they're doing good as a trial), which I'm going to assume amounts to virtual homesickness.

I used to be on Drenden, which is a really backwater server as far as raiding. I was in the only legitimate alliance raiding guild on the server, and the leadership in the guild ninja-transfered off at 5am one day, so the guild fell apart.

I play only to raid, and as I said there wasn't any other options on Drenden so I used the bosskillers.com recruitment directory to find another good guild that needed rogues. I didn't really have any risk though, cause i was 50/50 for quitting anyways, and if the guild didn't work out I wouldn't have cared. But it worked out great, so all is well.

Way back when we were doing Naxx, I remember reading a post on EJ about the newly opened cross-server transfers. Many of the people who transfered were already burned out with WoW. They attributed their burnout to their current guild or their current server, but once they transfered, they realized they were just sick of raiding.

It was a running joke in our guild that all our healer apps would quit the game within 3 weeks of joining the guild. We've seriously had about 5 or 6 cross server healer apps from Naxx up to the present who went through weeks of trial raids with almost perfect attendance and then decided to quit the game 3 weeks or so after getting a guild invite. Some actually lasted a couple of months. And then there was our amazingly skilled Resto Druid app during Naxx who lasted less than a week before he decided he didn't want to play anymore.

Make sure when you transfer that you really still do want to raid. If you're already burned out from WoW raiding, a change of scenery isn't going to pull you back in.