#14 - March 6, 2013, 2:06 p.m.
these services are completely 100% optional and are in no way needed to play the game.
It’s partially because of this.
Another reason would be to keep things somewhat stable, if these services were free or extremely cheap, communities could lose social and economic stability.
Social stability - Because realms are supposed to be somewhat insular, and that’s a good thing, one of the best qualities MMORPG’s have going for them is the social bond created between players, and those require time and a stability to create.
Players would also become less accountable for their actions (realm reputation would be very hard to assess), and we all know that unfortunately LFR and CRZ already hinted on how that can be a problem; we still we think the benefits far outweigh the risks in these two specific cases though, as they’re limited to the use of those features.
Economic stability - because not all realms are exactly the same and this would effectively allow the most enthusiastic traders and speculators to explore the global economy to their own best interests, which could have negative effects on a global scale or at least on the more economically vulnerable servers.
We could talk for hours about this, but that would be beyond the point of this topic, I’m sure you understand the logic behind this argument, some won’t agree with it and that’s ok, this can be quite an interesting and complex topic, just think about reality and global economy, opinions on that are far from being unanimous.
Now I understand that nowadays it’s much more common for players to have a lot of alt characters and when someone chooses to migrate, most of the times that player would like to take all his characters with him and that would come at a high cost.
Sometimes players will choose not to migrate at all due to not being able to afford it or simply not wanting to pay for all those migrations; now, although there’s not much I can tell you about this, I can say that we’re aware of all of your suggestions and requests regarding services, as you can probably realize, this is not the sort of thing that can be decided on-the-fly, but if we believe that there is a real need for some sort of change or improvement on our character services and that it could potentially improve gameplay, then I don’t see why we wouldn’t consider it, evolution and change has always part of Blizzard’s culture, especially when we talk about WoW, we’re nothing if not adaptable and iterative, so all I can say is that I’m not currently aware of any plans to change these services, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have them in the future, keep providing us with constructive feedback about it, I can assure you it can/will speed things up.
