WoW paid character transfer…a service or swindle?
£14.99…in this day & age what can you expect for this sort of money?
Maybe 2 CDs or a DVD?
A month of broadband service?
A budget PS2 game?
A few good things that you can see where your money has gone, sure. There is a value to that £14.99. I value that amount of money just as I value £1499 but I am not so sure that Blizzard hold that same value as it’s customers.
Let me explain…
A few days ago I paid £14.99 for the transfer of my level 61 Warlock from the Runetotem server to the Teneras server. When I first heard how much this service was going to cost I bulked & delay doing it. Since then I have paid the monies & truth be told the service was very good.
The experience got me thinking. As it is, the paid player transfer in WoW seems more a tax on the player than the player paying for a service. If we look at what it costs to buy WoW & then run 1 account monthly you are looking at this:
To buy WoW at present is £9.99
To buy BC Expansion at present is £9.99
Monthly payment on 1 account - paid each month £8.99 (4/£8.99 = @£2.25 per week)
Now if we consider that Blizzard are charging more for a paid character transfer than the cost of the basic game itself it doesn’t add up for me.
What we are looking at is that Blizzard get £14.99 to basically copy your files on one server & paste them to another. OK yes I have made that sound very simply but surely £14.99 is too high a price to pay for just 1 character?
I emailed Blizzards customer service & asked them if the price of paid character transfers was to be re-evaluated. I also asked if they could tell me how the £14.99 is broken down as a fee & where that money goes. Fat chance I’ll get a reply to all I have asked but it will be interesting to see what kind of a reply I get.
I will be posting the response from Blizzard in a future post but I’d like to throw out these questions to you the reader/players of WoW:
- Do you think Blizzard can justify charging £14.99 per paid character transfer?
- Do you consider the charge a tax on the player or a service to the player?
- Have you paid to transfer a character & if so would you do so again?
EDIT: Since posting I have found that Blizzard now charge the following for paid character transfer, from their website:
* DISCLAIMER : The price of this service was changed from 19.99€ / £14.99 to 20€ / £15 on 25/02/2008.
§Related Posts ¦ World of Warcraft
Tags: Blizzard, WoW paid character transfer
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February 26, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Actually, you are only doing the “enraged-customer-thing” without looking if this actually does good:
Just because the character transfer is this expensive, few people actually take it. This means, that the server populations are stabilized, which in my eyes is a good thing.
Also, this is a method of compartmentizing the market: You don’t want to pay that much money? Well, this feature actually should not be missed by 99.9% of all players! However, those poeple who do want this feature and are willing to pay for it, decrease the monthly cost for the other players.
So, yeah this is a tax for players… But is a tax inherently bad?
February 26, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I don’t agree dionadar.
There are built in limits to how often you can transfer each character which would stabilize server populations, if a player really needs or wants to transfer £14.99 wont be too big a hurdle. What I am saying is Blizzard are charging over the odds for something they class as a service when it real smacks of a sneaky tax.
I would be happy to be charged £8 & then told I couldn’t transfer again for a year on that character. Surely that is more reasonable?
February 26, 2008 at 4:56 pm
I think the cost is very much needed. As it stands Blizzard offers free transfers from servers that have ridiculously high population to servers that are struggling with their player base. At no point in time does Blizzard prevent you from making a new character on the server you are deciding to transfer to. If Blizzard did not charge for this service many people would do this on a whim without really thinking the decision through. Considering the overhead it requires to move a character from one server to another, these type of restrictions is necessary. These type of processes aren’t just a simple copy->paste.
As Dionadar stated, Blizzard has to take into account realm populations. By having a cost associated with moving a character at will, it prevents people from doing it at a whim which could ruin economies on servers that might already be running into issues. By having a cost associated with the service, which is indeed what it is - a service, only those people who have a real reason to transfer will find the cost worth it.
February 26, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Look at it this way: how long have you been playing the game, paying the monthly fee, buying the original game and expansion pack, etc.? How much money have you already spent on World of Warcraft? I’d be willing to bet 14.99 is a drop in the bucket compared to that!
That said, this is like economics 101: a service is worth what people are willing to pay for it. In this case you were still willing to pay 14.99 even though the price seemed high. Obviously they got the maximum money, which is just smart business.
February 26, 2008 at 5:04 pm
I am not arguing for a NO FEE Drotara. I simply feel that the now £15 charge is over the odds.
As I stated I don’t think its a simply copy paste procedure but a relative price comparable to the cost of the game that included lets say a restriction of a year before said character could again transfer would be a fair return.
February 26, 2008 at 7:52 pm
I understand the argument suggesting that it needs to cost that much to dissuade people from frivolous changes. I understand that it may involve additional expense on Blizzard because it is a little out of the ordinary (although I can’t believe that they haven’t fully automated the process). I also understand that it falls into the well known business model of keeping your basic price competitive and charging as much as possible for extras once you have the customer sucked in (checkout the price of popcorn in your local cinema!).
However I much prefer the way Guild Wars does things. Every time you are in a town you can access a drop down menu to switch to another server. As simple as that, no fuss, no fees. And guess what: It doesn’t lead to server congestion, It doesn’t lead to chaos. The whole system regulates itself very nicely. English Server 2 feels a bit overcrowded tonight? Just switch to English server 7. Can’t get a group on German server 4? Try German Server 1. Want to go adventuring with your amis tonight? Lets all agree to meet up on French server 8.
February 27, 2008 at 6:08 am
I don’t think it would be even possible for Blizzard to determine exactly how much it costs them to do a transfer. The price is purely to dissuade people from using the service too much.
February 27, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Tobold, I knew that Blizzard would probably not answer my questions but they were still worth asking.
With regards to pricing…if Blizzard are so concerned with overuse of the system then it seems a contradiction to allow your character to transfer once a month.
If it was all about earning money but dissuading people from using the service then surely a higher price for the transfer with a condition of a once every 6 months or a year per character would be better than once a month. I feel that Blizzard could easily manage the transfers, as they do with the free transfers, with little effect to server stability.
Players normally change server because they either want to move to a friends server or they wish to try a new/low populated server. This surely would be a very small percentage of players per month.
To me it just smacks of greed from Blizzard.
February 28, 2008 at 2:10 am
Actually there are two other reasons I have come across quite often recently:
a) Switching for a place in a high performance raid
b) Running away, because you totally blew everything on your old server…
February 28, 2008 at 6:31 pm
dinoadar are you saying the players that fall into your a&b have transferred from another server via paid transfer or the free transfer?
February 28, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Those of whom I was speaking (well, it is not as if there were hundreds of them, but there are a few I personally know) did so w/ paid transfer.
February 29, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I’m with Tobold on this. I don’t really think it’s a revenue raiser, especially since Bliz make over a billion a year on subscriptions. The money made from paid transfers is pocket change. (The motive may be different on SOE service since they have less subscribers, other income sources would be welcomed).
It would be nice if you could get an answer from Blizzard to confirm, but I expect it’s simply a measure to reduce the number of transfers.
March 3, 2008 at 6:42 pm
See how we’re squabbling over the fee? Some think its too high, others think its nominal. Frankly I agree with both sides for all the above reasons, as most of you have compelling arguments.
Here’s the catch: nothing will change debating off it. Just e-mail blizzard today, right now if you have the chance, Support@blizzard.com and many others you can easily find, and let them know exactly what you think. They get 100,000 emails in a short amount of time about something, they might be inclined to do something.
I’m wrote one shortly after reading this blog.
March 4, 2008 at 11:08 am
[...] paid character transfer…a service or swindle?pt.2 After the post I made regarding Paid Character Transfers, it seems Blizzard have made a this statement which does tend to feed my argument that they are [...]
September 18, 2008 at 4:31 pm
It’s fine, leave it
Imagine the chaos Blizzard would have to deal with if everyone was transferring consistantly for one reason or another, i’ve personally used the service 3-4 times for one reason or another, mainly to raid with new/better guilds or to relocate to servers with friends on or such and never really felt a need to grumble about it and i’m not exactly complaining 
Now stop being so Jewish, if you want to transfer it’ll cost you, what in life is free? I don’t think it’s an unreasonable amount of money personally.
Regards,
Weakness
September 18, 2008 at 4:42 pm
oh, may have forgotten to point something out… for 8.99 a month you’re already getting a hell of a lot of entertainment in comparision to anything irl, i mean whats that? 2.5 pints? wewt :< + i mean it’s not exactly cheap to develop expansions at a time of economic turmoil for the western world, personally i’m glad Blizzard have a bit of extra side income right now.
September 26, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Theres ultimatly two points to make:
One: Blizzard have a monopoly on wow character transfers and can charge whatever the market can bear. Excuse my capitalism.
Two: Would you like to play a WoW in which people paid less than the price of a bag of crisps to move server and did so everytime they lost the drop they wanted in raids or suffered a humiliating night in the arena/bg?
September 29, 2008 at 3:22 pm
I recently moved a single character to a new server, as I moved across country and wanted less latency (for pvp). My main complaint is that I had another character on the old server that I would love to have on my new one, but I would rather not pay $25 for him as well.
Blizzard should offer the ability to transfer as many characters as you want to another server, assuming the popualtion isn’t too high, for a flat fee - i.e. $35. This might not be as big of a problem in other countries, but in the US living on the East coast with a West coast server just doesn’t work too well.