I'll never understand the archaic pvp diehard mentality of "No, I don't want more people to kill."

I mean, really. It's a win-win-win situation for all involved. PvE'ers are no longer stuck on dead realms, PvP'ers get more targets, Blizzard gets a veritable shitton of cash.

I must be some kind of visionary or something.

And according to the diehard PvP mentality, they'll be easy targets! After all, they leveled easy mode, they can't possibly be good PvPers.

Right?

As part of a Horde guild on a PvE server, this is a very big issue for us. Any time someone leaves or quits or any other reason, we've struggled to replace them. Around 80% of our recent successful recruits have been from server transfers. Nearly all of them have required attunement.

For us, there is an extremely limited pool of recruitment. No PvP player wants to transfer to a server with only 1 BT/Hyjal clearing horde guild since they'll be stuck there. The amount of players available to us on our server is even less.

If PvE -> PvP transfers became a reality, I can only imagine it would increase our options in recruitment many times over and certainly make us a lot more comfortable. I would be lying if I said it hadn't come up that we might as well reroll on a PvP server to maybe get a shot at a decent recruitment pool for once.

Well I'm a guild master of a decently progressing guild on a EU PvE server and I've leveled various alts on PvP servers over the years as well (unfortunately I like my guildies too much so I keep going back to them rather than rerolling properly!). We've had moderate success in the past, up to Thaddius in Naxx and on to phase 4/5 Kael now with a view to getting him down soon and as such we've experienced a lot of the problems associated with being on a PvE server.

What I've tended to find is my experience varied quite dramatically from server to server in terms of PvP, I leveled chars as horde on Lightnings Blade and Boulderfist when they were first released and these were the most PvP active during leveling simply because everyone was starting out at the same time, it'd be the same for most new servers, STV was a blast, Tanaris etc too. More recently I've been leveling on Al'Akir as Alliance and Magtheridon as Horde, two older more established servers and these two servers couldn't be further apart, Al'Akir is a fairly balanced population with a nice mix of Horde/Alliance and fairly active amount of people leveling, Magtheridon is 92% Horde...worse than any PvE server I've seen and even worse than the population of my main PvE server ever was (5:1 at one point). On Al'Akir its more active in terms of world PvP while leveling but still nothing as close as a new server, it mostly consists of the odd bored 70 or random burst of PvP in Nessingwarys and thats about it, farming on Al'Akir I can imagine to be more difficult however as its a fairly aggressive server. On Magtheridon its even worse in terms of leveling/pvp and I've seen less carebearing on a PvE server, the pvp action you generally have to start yourself other than the odd burst at the SM meeting stone, I was ganked a total of twice during 60-70 and the only pvp action was at the Coilfang meeting stone! -.-

PvE servers are suffering badly because of the PCT to be blunt and it's a lot worse nowadays that it was during the introduction of the PCT. TBC brought forth the situation where some servers had 1-2 good guilds which then led to a lot of others establishing themselves on those servers attracting more likeminded players to the same servers. Good for those servers but bad for anyone not on them, look at the difference between somewhere like Magtheridon(EU) and Aggamagan(EU) and those are PvP servers, PvE ones tend to be even worse in terms of progress overall. With PvE servers this was even more aggravated by the fact that you couldn't attract PvP recruits because they were afraid of the PvE deathtrap and overall there is a much lower standard of recruits on PvE servers than PvP to begin with for whatever reason. If you were not one of the first few progressive guilds then you suffered because they attracted the few good recruits there was and you had problems even attracting people to your server in the first place despite not being that far behind, no-one thinks of Aggramar when thinking about transferring to a PvE server, it's instantly Silvermoon or even Terenas they think of. The vast majority of the problems we've had since TBC can be contributed to the poor recruitment status of our server and thats not going to change, I made the mistake of staying on Aggramar this expansion, I won't be repeating that next expansion.

There is one main reason why Blizzard don't want PvE to PvP transfers and thats simply because of the population balance, atm there's a fairly even balance of PvE and PvP servers and if a large chunk of PvE players suddenly want to go PvP where are they going to put them? Even if they used the opportunity to fill a lot of the low pop PvP servers they would still create a lot of issues with some PvE servers becoming wastelands. There are only two things that are easier on PvE Servers - Leveling and Farming. In terms of leveling nowadays the difference is minimal at best unless you're on a brand new server which, given the stable to decreasing population, wont be happening again for a while. Farming, again varied so wildly from server to server, on Magtheridon it was akin to a PvE server without the bots and if anything was easier to farm as a result, Al'Akir the players were more agressive so I'd give that one to the PvP crowd. The leveling aspect however is further being denied by Blizzard themselves, they're speeding up the leveling process and there even introducing a new class which negates a large chunk of the process entirely! (The latest word on Deathknights is once you unlock them its account wide unlocked and not just limited to that server.)

The whole concept of the PvE->PvP server transfer blockade is completely outdated and should be ditched. There's plenty of ways to sedate the whiners:
Charge them more for it, have some sort of account restriction whereby you need to have leveled a char to X level on a PvP server or limit it to low pop PvP servers or hell even specially created new servers specifically for that purpose.

I'm not sure that its such an outdated idea. With the new 2.3 changes to leveling I think a LOT of people will start leveling alts again and the zones will be much more populated once more. This will again make PvP server leveling much more difficult.


That said as a 70 on a PvP server I couldn't care less if somebody levels on a pve server and then transfers to a pvp server. They wanna pay £15 or whatever it is to save maybe a day of /played to make 70 then whatever.


What I would like is stronger restrictions on migrating to full realms grr. Frostmane EU has been a full realm for a long time now and has had 3 free migrations away from it. Not only are very few people leaving the server in these migrations, huge raiding guilds keep migrating to our server! I understand not wanting to be stuck on a dying server but surely a medium or high population realm would be a better choice? As a result of this we've started to see increasing lag and constant instance server crashes at raid time.

At a minimum I'm surprised they haven't offered more PvE - New PvP realm xfers to perhaps distribute players a bit more evenly, and then of course those people would be eligible for PvP transfers 3 months later (assuming this used their xfer cooldown).

In any case, I haven't seen a single reason yet that isn't archaic as to why these transfers shouldn't be allowed. It is for the health of the game, particularly raiding, which in the end will make them a ton of cash and increase general player enjoyment aside from a few diehard forum trolls.

A lot of people re-roll new characters on fresh realms for the levelling race/rush. I think allowing a crop of bored 70's onto a brand new PvP realm would be a recipe for disaster.

I think it would probably have the inverse effect, and the few remaining horde on your server would probably be tempted to move out to greener pasture.

I play on an average pop server that happens to have one of the worst balance, we're like 90% alliance. The horde is suffering a lot, and over the time most guilds there have moved to other more balance realms, mostly Nordrassil which for some reason seem to be the server to be, for horde pve.
Meanwhile most PvP servers are better balanced, quite a few PvE servers are suffering from this unbalance, and i guess the main real reason for blizzard to block these transfert is to prevent the complete desertification of Horde on quite many PvE servers.

Now the official board kiddies reasons are almost all idiotics, as quite many people here, i've leveled characters on both PvE and PvP servers, and honestly it's not nearly as horrible as people think. I actually think it's funnier to level up on PvP servers, since sometimes you have some fights that break up the monotony of grinding up. And if you get killed, big deal, you lose a few minutes to run back...

Do they ultimately matter? The racers are generally also the first ones to reroll elsewhere when they realise that geting to 60/70 first is not really an indication of long term skill anyway. These serial rerollers contribute nothing to a servers long term well being and indeed anything other than a new thread every other day on the WoW forums whining about how there's no new servers.

They aren't the issue, the issue really is providing solutions for the longer term players to keep them motivated and playing, ultimately keeping them paying for blizzard as well. I've known a lot of people quitting the game or indeed just rerolling PvP due to the various issues which arise from things such as the poor recruitment status on PvE servers and the slower overall progression.

I'm already planning on rerolling PvP properly next expansion with the gear reset, I'll have characters leveled and geared up for this in advance but in the meantime I'm trapped somewhat on a relatively dead end server with precious little recruitment pool and seeing our progression grind to a halt every now and then because we cant replace people who leave. The best part of this is my server is far from the worst PvE one, it's about 5th in the EU in terms of progression or so with The Dominion recently having claimed Illidan's scalp.

Most of the people that read these forums are hardcore raiders. They spend thier time in raid instances. When not there they are off doing something in support of that. Flying around looking for herbs is not fun. I want to get it over as quickly as possible. I dont want 3x people deciding to grief me adding time to that activity. When I log on to raid, I want to get to the raid and begin without having to suicide run through an opposing bunch. I dont care if they live or die, I am there to raid not to kill random players. If I choose to pvp there is always BG.

As a raider I spec to raid and choose my gear to raid. This is not optimal for pvp. A raider will always be at a disadvantage to a pure pvp specced player. It all comes down to this "killer" mentality. Having killed tens of thousands of opposing players I simply dont care anymore. I am quite happy to have an opposing player ride right by me simply because I dont care, I simply cant be bothered with killing them.

Choosing to transfer pve->pvp should be available. You know when you do the transfer that you are going to a pvp realm where all your activities will be less efficient but thats your choice. This argument about leveling is a non issue. I leveled almost 3 years ago straight after beta, took a few weeks, with BC the same to 70. The time spent leveling in this game is insignificant compared to the time you spend on improving your char through raiding once you reach max level.

If someone leveled on pvpv then joined a pve guild what exactly is the argument that they shouldnt go back to pvp realm guild.

I've so often read the argument that levelling on a PvP server is so much more difficult and that you "must have gone through it". If thats the point - I have serveral alts on PvP servers, and I think many people that have their mains on PvE servers have too. I've gone through levelling on PvP servers.
When I chose my main after WoW release, I just went to the server my friend already played on, a EU-PvE Server, Horde side, and I didn't realize what impact that would have some month later for raiding. To be honest, i think many players that now make the point that "leveling on a PvP server is so much harder that on PvE servers" didn't go through the early server crashes due to XR or TM - open pvp, or days of absolutely no chance playing in the barrens due to massive server lags caused by hundreds of players that ganked each other near XR - on a PvE-server, I have to point out.
But if it's considered a must to have leveled on a PvP-server for being awarded the "prize" being allowed to play there, I wouldn't care to play another alt to 70 on any given PvP server.

If goldselling or even being able to farm more gold in shorter time on PvE servers is considered a Problem - there could be a limit for gold that can be transfered. Maybe that would be a good solution anyway, no matter where somebody transfers.

As I said, levelling an alt on any PvP server isn't the Problem for many players that are stuck on a PvE server. But choosing a new main after more than two years of WoW is not really a valid option. What about the reputation, the keys, the gear etc. Even the item "reset" with TBC and WotLK - it's not a real reset, many high-end items from before the extension still make good raiding items afterwards. Gearing up a char thats lvl 70 but green, is something abolutely different than playing your main thats hingh-end geared from 70 to 80 for raiding.

Many high-end guilds don't care about the story that "you've played your hingh-end-char through every raid instance in the game but rerolled, because..." and for good reasons. They want geared, keyed players with the afforded reputation and they want the evidence that you've gone through the raid instances.

I think most arguments against PvE-PvP servertransfers could be met with some rules that prevent abuse, and making that transfers possible would offer more options for raiding guilds on PvE AND PvP servers.

As someone who's leveled 1-70 on what is arguably the most die hard pvp server in Europe, and have an alt repeatedly ganked at level 65 as we speak, what I don't get is how opening up transfer from a pve server to a pvp server would in any way change my gaming experience? The difference from leveling up on a low populated pvp server is minuscule, and we already have lots of transfers from those.

As a rule, no choice made possibly close to 3 years ago should affect your gaming experience to such a degree. And it seems the majority here agrees on that.

Shortly before BC was released, I rerolled to a PVP server, having played on a pve realm since release. Leveling was pretty relaxed, I was ganked a few times but on the other hand, quite a few ganks were pretty much provoked by me :P
Ok, I played a rogue then which is probably the hardest class to camp, especially if the rogue is not a novice to pvp. Nevertheless I leveled a second character to 70, my new main. Even though our realm is pretty populated, I get very very rarely ganked (except for port stone at the instances, but even that occurs not that often). Open PVP is pretty much dead, especially with the advent of flying mounts. There is no reason to build up a wall between those realmtypes.

On the other hand some realms are pretty much deadends for many players. On my old realm the Horde was hopelessly outnumbered. They still get almost no transfers and I guess at least 20 % of the raiding horde population are actually alts from hardcore alliance players. I know quite a few people who lived through a guild breakup and are now on their own because their realm doesn't offer a lot. Transfering isn't a real option because the situation is pretty much the same on all EU-PVE-DE (German) realms. Most pvp realms have a healthier balance and also most often a larger raiding scene.

To play devil's advocate for a bit:

Is it really harder to farm on a pvp server? Yes, you get ganked, granted. However, the number of farmable mobs on the server is still finite. There are only so many elementals available for killing in the top hunting areas and on every server I've visited they're all well and truly camped, farmed and controlled. On a pvp server you will spend more time dead and corpserunning on an average farming session, but the same is true for all players in that area so for a given number of total farmers the income will be higher for a living farmer on a pvp server than on a pve server. The net effect is that ability to effectively pvp is correlated to your income on pvp than on pve as this lets you keep the competition away, but the average income doesn't differ. Conversely, on pve your ability to effectively tag and kill mobs quickly is more strongly correlated to your income than on pvp due to their being more living players competing for mobs at any time if all other things are kept equal.

A much stronger variable than pvp or pve on player wealth is server age. People on old servers have, on average, more cash on hand simply due to having played for longer. This trickles down to lower levels: a newly rolled lowbie on a server where the average player sits on a few thousand gold and copper goes for 1g/stack isn't going to have trouble raising his mount money, whereas a newly rolled lowbie on a completely new server will not have nearly the same sort of market to sell to. However, beyond recently created servers we don't have any restrictions on rerolling from old servers to newer ones, in spite of it being easier to grow rich on the older ones. Why should the much smaller effect of pve vs pvp be treated differently? Perhaps more specifically: if the issue is rich characters moving from a server with high average wealth where money is easily made to one with a low average wealth, why not restrict that directly rather than restrict based on criteria that may or may not even influence wealth?

I see these threads time and time again with people attempting to play down the amount of time lost while leveling on a pvp server. Maybe Tichondrius is different than most PvP servers but a day does not go by without me losing a lot of time while leveling one of my characters because a couple of bored 70's want to camp a flight master or a quest hub.

Perfect example: I go to Thorium Point to turn in quests yesterday and two alliance characters are camping the entire hub killing all the lowbies that were coming in there. You couldn't so much as turn in a quest or hop the wind riders, let alone escape. This is a DAILY thing.

It always appears to be the worst classes to get groups (Rogues, Hunters) and they have the worst imaginable gear which leads me to believe that these people just had characters purchased or power-leveled so that they can gank lowbies on the server.

I fear that if they do open up PvE --> PvP transfers all the terribad players that can't get a raid invite will focus all their time into these activities and leveling on a PvP server will become near-impossible. Then, the big trend will eventually become "level on PvE, transfer to PvP" where PvP servers will just become "max level" servers.

As a note, I have two 70's on a PvE server.

edit:

Yes, sometimes it's fun and sometimes it can shut down that character for at least an hour if not the night. Example: While leveling one of my characters I end up getting a Deadmines group together. A couple of us haul our horde asses out to Westfall ( a pain in itself ) and summon the others to the instance. As we are making our way through the outer instance area, we are ganked and then repeatedly camped by a 70 rogue and 70 druid ( the whole premise of these two max-level idiots hanging out in the pre-zone of Deadmines to gank still blows my mind ). After being one-shot after rezzing a few times and having a 2 minute rez timer, I decide it's time to scrap the whole group and log on to another character.

For all you people who want to talk about how you have to earn your pvp cred, or whatever other bullshit it's cool to spew these days to prove you're h4rdc0r3 about pvp. If you didn't level up on Archimonde at release you don't get to talk. Ever. Although I'll begrudge a little respect to the other release day PvP servers.

If you don't believe me watch this video.

A real slap in the face to Casuals from www.ym.com | GAMERIOT

There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to transfer PvE to PvP. Getting ganked during daily's? I don't think I've ever been ganked doing my daily quests, sometimes I gank other people usually just to be an ass, but it's exactly like I'm going to waste my time sitting their and camping them. Also for the number of times that a level 70 ganked you and stole your cookies, did you forget to subtract the time that you killed an opposing player for killing quest mobs you wanted, or killing them to force an escort to respawn, or untag a quest boss.
I'm more frustrated by an inability to gank same faction asshats who will run in front of me and take crates than any pvp related issues.

We're the only horde guild passed TK on our server. We recruit very little from our own server because there are very little people to recruit in the first place. There is no way for our recruitment pool to go down because it's almost entirely offserver and I'm fairly sure with our most recent recruits it'll probably be completely off server from now on unless something miraculous happens.

So opening to move would open up our options by a lot. We could move off server to a better realm or applications would rise because we suddenly aren't a transfer deathtrap.

Just to point out, a person can only transfer to a server with a max of 5000 gold.


But for the topic on hand, I do at some points wish I had rolled on a PvP server but have been playing on this server since launch not fully knowing the difference between the server types when choosing. At this point I wouldn't transfer only because of the situation that I am in. There really doesn't seem like there's much of a reason to prohibit this now that leveling seems to have become much easier on PvP servers as well as the incoming changes to the leveling curve.

When I played on a PVP realm Warsong, it was before BGs. I think back to that time and wished I had more targets, so whats the problem with PVP Realm Players not wanting transfers? You're there to kill each other, why not offer more targets? I think it's a combination of old fashioned e-peen waving and the fact wow.com forum whiners are very loud.

I apologize for missing this gem on my first pass through the thread but this is exactly what it is like on most of Tich. Some of these zones have more level 70's or near-70's in them than the normal level of player in them. This is exactly what all the bad players do when everyone else is raiding, doing arenas or doing heroics.

The real issue isn't "having pvp cred" from leveling on a pvp server. The issue I worry about is having 1,000 4 year-olds that leveled their all-green equipped hunters over to PvP and sit in the lower zones all day (to "pwn" them, of course) effectively shutting down leveling on PvP servers. These are the types of people that would normally never level to max on a PvP server due to their intolerance to the regular frustrations of getting ganked themselves. Seeing a person that will sit for hours on end in a zone 30-40 levels below their own leveling just camping people makes my mind reel.

This is an important topic, but the discussion always tends to go to the beaten horse of how harder leveling on a pvp server is or isn't. While it's fair to assume there are some differences in the leveling experience, the general agreement is that whatever it may be, it is not enough reason to prevent server transfers from pve to pvp. I'd say mainly because these transfers are wanted not for pvp purposes (like someone mentioned, the effect would be minimum on that area) , but high end-raiding.

What we should discuss instead is why blizzards doesn't want to allow these transfer now, even with so many glaring positive results that should arise from allowing them. I'd suspect it's for the same reason the payed transfer system was also quite delayed: they are afraid it will impact server's stability and health.

The example you give of allowing the transfer for newly created pvp server actually touches this point. They could do it, but wouldn't that taint the server's freshness, which is one of the bigger goals of these new servers?

What would be the impact on pve servers, namely the least progressed ones? And wouldn't the most progress servers become overloaded and some sort of huge raiding "metropolis"?

I suggest the answer to these kind of questions holds the key why these transfers are not yet allowed. When the payed transfer started, they did other things, like free migrations, and opening new servers, to make sure the impact was healthy. I assume when they have some solutions for the the current situations, they put this barrier down.

This would be all well and good, but Blizzards official response has been "No, because it's harder to level on a pvp server". They have expressed no concern over server balances or health worries. They have come out with a blanket statement saying that it's a rule because PvP people have it harder.