Harmonics

We can probably stop quoting that guy and pointing out that he's a moron now.

More to the point: Alright, I think PvE -> PvP has been hammered out as being probably reasonable. And PvP -> PvE - PvP not being allowed is pretty much totally unfair. The only real problems that exist are apparently some really over populated realms that are afraid of getting more transfer's than they can handle... But at the same time, high level raiding guilds require transfers to recruit.

A possible solution would be maybe allowing some bizzare cross server guild transfer authorization? And maybe these these transfer tickets are limited to a number every two months or something. Now you wouldn't want to limit what kind of guilds could give invites, you'd have "family guilds" raging all over the place... but it would cut down on "Ima join me some nihiliumz" transfers.

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songster

OK, let's see if there's a sane way to allow PvP -> PvE - PvP.

Obviously a blanket flag wouldn't work. Just roll on PvP, transfer to PvE before you move from the starting area, transfer back at level 70. What's needed is a way to transfer from PvP -> PvE, and then return to PvP but without having benefitted from the intervening time on a PvE server.

Simplest way I can see is to flag a character based on whether you levelled on a PvP server. When you roll on a PvP server, you get a flag attached to your character that says "this toon is allowed to be on a PvP server". Every time you ding, it checks to see if you're on a PvE server, and unflags you if you are.

So, if you've levelled 1-70 on a PvP server, you can transfer freely back and forth. If any of your levelling was done on a PvE server, you have to stay on PvE. This would need to be coupled with a general amnesty for all existing toons - you get flagged when WoTLK comes out, so you can transfer to PvP when the reset happens. If you don't transfer, and instead stick to your PvE realm, you have to stay in PvE.


What would the consequences be? Well, the most hardcore raiders would all level up exclusively on PvP realms. Hardly a difference from nowadays. Casual raiders would likely not give a toss - same as nowadays. However, the hardcore raiding population would then be free to swap between different types of server at will while at the level cap.

Would there be a exodus to PvP realms at each reset? Possibly. But I doubt the vast majority of players would notice or care one way or the other.

 

Styphen

Are people really this reckless with $25 dollars Im thinking no way. Plus your totally overlooking the main key factor people speak of which is PvP isnt some super hard level grind more then PvE. Heck imo from the whole time on TBC your not going to see world PvP minus.

-Occasional city gank
-If your in a prime farming spot
-If somehow you decide to do the Haalaas stuff

The moral of those 3 areas for me is they all revolve around TBC minus the occasional city gank. And thats happened to me at the bg quer in TB on PvE more then on my last PvP server.

On that server transfer post thing someone had my first ever server was Malganis I was in SoS(very unpopular leader lol) one thing Ill never forget is the horde pop there > alliance pop and I can say since paid transfers almost 90% of people I know getting one have talked about going to Malganis that place is pretty much the horde capital in my eyes.

 

◊ Kalman

Seperate issue, and I wish people would stop bringing it up like it was relevant.

If Blackrock is too full, it needs to be closed to transfers. From PvE? Sure. But from PvP too. If you're full, you're full, no matter where a player might be coming from.

"My server is full" is not a valid reason to be against PvE->PvP transfers.

 

• squiffy

Er, in the post you quote and also earlier in the thread, I've said I'm in favour of PvE to PvP transfers.

 

Jayde

Perhaps another way of looking at it...

$25 is nearly two months worth of monthly payments.

Does it take two extra months to level on a PvP server? (Quick answer? No.) Is two months of payment a sufficient enough gesture/penalty to dissaude abuse of the system? (Probably.)

I just fail to see the issue here. It's not as if transfers are free. Dropping 25 bucks to save maybe a combined total of less than half a day of /played time when many people have 50-100+ days /played seems dramatic enough as it is.

Just looking at the time and money factors alone is enough to make it seem resonable to me. The actual time difference between PvE and PvP leveling is at the very most 1 day /played (corpse-running doesn't take that long, really) and any serious raider that wants to transfer servers is probably sitting on an account with 100-200 days of /played time.

After people have played for 2-3 years, it seems like a pretty unresonable standpoint to say that it's those few hours of corpse-running as a noob that keeps you from being able to get into the guild you want.

 

Lazare

This is a very good point. When the game launched, I immediately rolled on a PVE server because my experience in previous games was that world PVP tended to be unfair, frustrating, and generally something that I'd want to avoid. As it turns out, this was an incorrect assumption, and I wouldn't mind being on a PVP server. But leveling from scratch...isn't going to happen; not only would it take a big chunk of time and effort, but it'd mean writing off the huge amounts of time and effort I've invested in my PVE characters. Ugh.

Further, of course, my server was one of the ones chosen for transfers to Black Dragonflight; several guildmates or acquaintances of mine transferred from PVE -> PVP back in the day so I know quite well it isn't a harbinger of the end times.

(Speaking of which, the once-off PVE -> PVP tranfers were pretty frustrating too. A couple of guilds on my server transferred wholesale, and then after transfers closed a lot of frustration cropped up. Guildmates or friends who had been left behind wanting to transfer but being unable to, or people who had transferred regretting it, but realizing this was their only chance to ever escape the "PVE ghetto".)

 

◊ Anias

As an ex-guild leader, you do not want realm transfers closed for any reason, ever. Guilds have a hard enough time maintaining themselves against natural attrition in wow, as the game does not in any meaningful way build community. At least by having individual transfers open, the larger community building tools of the internet can be brought to bear to build the guild, and then server transfers used to match the characters to their guild. Even if the server is already full, you would rather (for your guild's sake) leave it open to inbound transfers, and hope for technology upgrades to fix any disadvantages that coincide with a large player population.

Something that probably deserves it's own thread, but I'll mention it in passing here. If we decide to derail accordingly I'll start up a thread for it.

I'm of the opinion that every single time blizzard has the chance to merge realms due to technological advances allowing more concurrency, they should if it will not impact performance. If the reason for merging realms is seen as "we just bought xxx new servers and our clustering technology has advanced to the point where we can host 8 old realms on the same number of machines that used to host 4" I doubt it would hurt the game any, and frankly - it's more fun to play on a high pop realm than a low-pop one.

Math is very easy, explaining math is quite difficult.

 

Lazare

To expand on my previous point...

I rolled this character a couple weeks after launch, it's my only 70, and the vast majority of my play time has been spent on it. I've done weird quests, collected minipets, spent ages pre-TBC trying to duo every lvl 60 instance, struggled to down Lucifron back when he was hard, struggled with ZG back when some drama left us unable to clear MC, ground out reps, collected strange items and souvenirs. In my bank, I have 5 [Bobbing Apple]s from the first ever Hallows End event (the flavor text amused me). What's the value to knowing you have a set of the first ever Bobbling Apples? Priceless, IMHO.

Now imagine my /played time. Now imagine the percentage of that which came from leveling. The argument against PVE -> PVP transfers is that it makes leveling harder? If it took me twice as long to level I wouldn't notice it. What I would notice is losing my character; at this point he's essentially my alter-ego. Rerolling would be huge; I'd lose over a hundred days of playtime...and all because I leveled up as PVE and missed out on maybe a dozen days of ganking and world PVP? (And as others have noted, there are plenty of carebear PVP servers where I could have avoided even that.)

 

Harmonics

There is no possible way that enough people would blow 50 bucks and 2 server transfer cooldowns to make this enough of a problem. What in the world would be the benefit? There is some minor tediousness that comes with leveling on a pvp server. Anytime one of my friends brings up how my first character was on a pve server I just mention that I did the AQ gates opening clusterfuck.

Basically: There is no reason to not freely allow PvE to PvP transfers

.

 

Anaram

My mage, leveled on high popolation PvP server when the zones were not yet empty got (successfully) ganked perhaps 5 times, and 'corpse camped' perhaps twice.

The current system really isn't solving anyone. Many people might want to move to PvE, but the risk of getting stuck there is just too high.

 

Pyros

They should just make pve>pvp 15$ more or something, you could transfer if you really wanted to, and they'd make even more money, win-win situation for Blizzard.
The best solution seems the flagging thing, if you already have a 70 on pvp you can transfer to pvp, but well from someone who exclusively played on pvp servers, high pop and bad alliance/horde past, pvp or not doesn't make a difference, at worst I spent 6hours /played wasting time in pvp while leveling, if that. The whole restriction should just go.

 

Anaram

That would be a bit too transparent. If you don't condone gold selling, you certainly shouldn't charge premium just because someone "had it easier leveling".

 

tedv

The problem isn't technology. It's namespace. Every server has an Undead or Night Elf Rogue named "Assassin", some Warlock named "Death", and so on. If you merge servers, all but one person will need to give up that name, and all the others will be pissed. This doesn't just happen for names you needed to claim on launch day either. If your name is less than 8 letters long and easily pronounceable, odds are that there are many other people with the same name. Check the armory.

 

JamesVZ

You'd be surprised how much of a non-factor that is, though. There is some general unrest about it for a little while, but mostly everyone gets over it. EverQuest players got over the fact they had an X on the end of their name rather quickly when their deadbeat server quadrupled its level cap population in the course of a night. I doubt you'd find many WoW players that feel their name is so important as to continue the state of their dead servers because a merger might mean they have to change it.


Still wondering what the hold up on PvE->PvP transfers are. Despite a broken thread in WoW general and a high awareness and general agreement among fansites, still no word back from them. Which means, to me, either they're waiting for the right time to announce it or they don't have any good reasons to respond with. I'm hoping it's the former, and not the retarded latter.

 

Calantus

For around a year Frostmourne was closed for transfers. For months we were one of only 2 servers with transfers closed. Other Oceanic servers had queues and higher populations and yet still we were closed. Threads went up all the time and Blizzard never responded. A couple weeks ago transfers openned. No announcement, no nothing. I just did my ~weekly check and hey I can transfer my cross-server alts, awesome.

Blizzard just isn't big on the whole informing idea. They could have this ready to go tomorrow and just never say a thing.

 

Styphen

Knowing blizzard and the way they do things it will be something put up for either the next big patch or for the next expansion because bottom line carrot on a stick has to be their company motto.

 

zurmagus

/signed

I'm in this situation right now. Leveled 1-60 on Mannoroth, guild moved to Lothar for TBC but isn't doing so well. Have a bunch of friends on Tichondrius so I'm rolling a new character there. I don't mind leveling up again but man it is such a huge rip off to lose all the gold and mats I had on my character.

 

Daldain

Most seem to think that allowing PvE -> PvP would improve ones chances of getting into a high end raiding guild. However, doesn't this also mean that the same PvE server they came from would have diminishing chances of high end guilds forming?

For each quality person leaving PvE -> PvP means that the problem of lower quality guilds forming on PvE is going to be exacerbated. I could see the raiding landscape on PvE servers becoming very barren, which would be very ironic on a PvE server.

 

JamesVZ

I disagree. People see PvP servers as the premium, they're attracted to them. Many are afraid to leave because they can't go back, and they don't want to be trapped seperate from that premium. Allowing PvE->PvP transfers would get rid of that fear, it would at least attempt to equalize the rulesets, and probably, I'd bet money on this actually, increase the amount of players and end game guilds on PvE servers.

 

Thomase

As a person who just leveled a warlock (loldekcoil yea yea :P) from 1-70 recently on Kiljaedan, it was not nearly as annoying as i had imagined. If you could spend some time leveling in off peak hours even the worst zones such as STV, hillsbrad werent too bad.

Its not often that you run into a person bored enough to camp you, and if you did, they lost interest usually by the time you got back from grabbing a drink/doing dishes/alt tabbing to forums etc.

I dont even think i got ganked in outlands very often if at all by 70s once i got an epic mount (one of the reasons i have absolutely no qualms with intial flying mount being 60% speed). Even the times i did get ganked those who were doing so were terrible i was able to escape eventually or ended up killing them. (Best investment ever is a goblin rocket helm).

What is my take on transfers? Im really undecided. I would love to grab my decked out mage and bring him over, but selfishly I know that it would only be for mid-air pom-pyro bombs, which is what i fear the most. People getting themselves decked out in amazing gear and just transferring to gank non-stop. Then again the only gear worth fearing could be from some guy living in shat queueing arena. Could be done easily from either server type.

So what is my actual stance? Meh. Some asshole levels on a pvp server to gank constantly, someone transfers to gank constantly, it doesnt matter where they come from... flying mounts have killed pvp anyways :P

edit: also just to add, i think i leveled in record time (7 or 8 to 70) i never died to mobs.

 

Natrozim

Personally being on a PvP server, at some point I wanted to transfer to a Pve Server that was very high worldwide, but I decided not to when I realized they were on a PvE server and theirs no going back. If I want to sell my account, play withs some RL friend on a pvp server or come back to my current server, all that becomes impossible or severely harder (selling account)

 

Sando

I thought i'd post my recent experiences, i started levelling my alt (from 60) just before this thread started, and i'm apparently on one of the most active US realms (Spinebreaker US), so maybe it gives some insight into a reasonably active PVP realm. Here's my ganks (me being killed, not killing them) from 60-66 (what i reached tonight). For the record, i do not engage hordies while i'm levelling, i leave them alone and help if they need it. I don't gank, so none of these are 'revenge' kills on me. My alt is also not in a particularly well known guild, with most having transfered off, so no 'I hate that guild' kills. I'm also aussie, so some of my level is without many others around, so i would expect more playing in US times.

60 - 5 (3 of these were to one 70 warrior, 1 to a 65 rogue, 1 to a low 60's lock)
61 - 3 (didn't notice the breakdown on these, 1 was a 63 hunter)
62 - 3 (all of these were in a half hour period in Zangermarsh from one group of horde from the same guild)
63 - 1 (same level hunter picked me up while i was on low life fighting a mob)
64 - 5 (i'm in terokkar now, get ganked alot by random 70's)
65 - 6 (this is a combo of terokkar and nagrand, lots of higher levels)

And i just hit 66 tonight, so no deaths yet there. So all up, 23 deaths in 6 levels, about 4 a level. Hopefully this gives a bit of insight into the levelling experience on a reasonably active PVP realm. This isn't my 'gut' feeling on how hard it is, you can decide for yourself how much those deaths cost a character. None of them are particularly long corpse runs, alot where close to town. Alot of this discussion has devolved into arguements about how little or how much you get ganked, and while it's really hard to make figures, since you have to level a character to 70 completely, at least it's some figures.

Edit: Got some numbers wrong

 

◊ Bekah

Those numbers seem about in line with my experience on Asharte. I hit 67 last night. My guild is fairly low key (we might be known as EJ benefactors by a small subset of the alliance population but I doubt that's reason enough for KoS) and I play during prime time.

Basically I only get killed if I'm in the way of a 70 or if there's ganking going on anyways. Don't hang out around the towers in Terokkar while they're being capped, if you see a higher level killing things in your area just move around to where you're out of their way.

1-67 I have never been killed more than twice by the same person in a row.

It is more annoying then leveling on a PvE server. the folks arguing to open transfers aren't denying that ganking occurs. The question always seems to be:

How much more difficult is it- and what does that level of difficulty entitle you to?

 

Stereo

The numbers Sando posted appear to be about the same as my experience on Tichondrius and my time schedule is skewed from the prime play times because I live on the east coast and Tich is a west coast server (3 hour difference).

I'm glad someone posted some hard numbers to combat the people posting "I leveled 1-70 and was only ganked once and never camped" posts. If this is truly the case and you enjoy PvP, transfer because your server genuinely blows. To quantify the amount of time lost I would say that the average run back/recover after a death is about 4 minutes (run, eat/drink, rebuff). This adds up to about 92 minutes of wasted time within a span of 6 levels (according to the numbers in Sango's post) while not playing recklessly. This can add up quickly over the span of 1-70 and is FAR from an insignificant amount of time lost. For the people that try to down play this they can take their argument elsewhere.

Also, I'd like to add that the blanket statement of "World PvP is dead" isn't exactly true across all servers and hearing people repeat it over and over is tiresome. Maybe the days of the old, endless and unexciting SS/TM zergfests are over but some servers do have steady world PvP and large city raids occurring.