Gems for world changing?
It used to be free. Then WvW people used the free transfer to go to other servers to grief the opposing sides. In response ANet started charging and putting in a 7 day period between transfers,
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.
ANet may give it to you.
Firstly all of your characters are on the same server, even if you pay gems to transfer it moves all your characters together.
Secondly your server only matters for WvW. For everything else maps are shared between servers and if you want to increase your chances of playing on a particular one you can guest to it. If you want to play with a particular person (outside of WvW) you can form a party and choose ‘join in [map name]’ to meet up with them.
Thirdly the transfer cost was planned since launch but the introduction was delayed by a few months, at first to allow servers to settle down and establish a WvW ranking, then until guesting was working. It’s necessary to stop people constantly jumping ship based on each weeks WvW rankings, so there can be some stability within worlds that allows the ranks to mean something.
Finally that flicking gif is horrible. If I hadn’t been able to scroll down so it wasn’t on screen I wouldn’t have replied at all because it was giving me a headache just in the time it took to read your post.
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
Sorry that you don’t like gifs, I’ll try to burn them all for you.
It used to be free. Then WvW people used the free transfer to go to other servers to grief the opposing sides. In response ANet started charging and putting in a 7 day period between transfers,
It was free only because guesting and “join your friend” were broken — the only way to play with other members of your party (in open world PvE) was to transfer, i.e. it was a workaround, not the original plan.
For the OP, there are several reasons why they charge:
- It’s not free to ANet. Each individual move is low-cost, to be sure; building the capacity to make it easy to move is not.
- They want worlds to be cohesive teams. With the numbers of people playing, that’s nearly impossible to achieve if folks are allowed to move at will.
- As others have mentioned, free transfers enable griefing, as World A’s loyalists can transfer to B to use counter-tactics, without much risk or cost to themselves.
In short, ANet wants to discourage people from bouncing around.
That said, I think they do need to do something to promote folks migrating from a full server to a less full one — I know some people that don’t really care which world they do WvW on (a lot of roamers) — they’d happily move to give their slot to someone else, if only they didn’t have to pay to do so.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
There’s an issue with paid transfers though; There’s no way to join the most popular servers.
I’m on JQ and I recently got a friend of mine into GW2, he wasn’t able to join me because it’s “full” and I’m not able to join him (something I’d be happy to do) because I’d have to pay in order to be able to play with my friends aparently.
WvW is something we would have enjoyed doing together and we’re now basically resigned to WvW being something neither of us will ever do because we can’t do it together.
It’s also a shame that I’m eating up a spot on arguably the best WvW server that I’ll never use because none of my friends or guildies are on JQ.
Giving players 1 free transfer every 12 months would solve the problem and wouldn’t introduce the “griefing” that was an issue in the past.
(edited by Daxidol.8956)
There’s an issue with paid transfers though; There’s no way to join the most popular servers.
That’s a temporary issue that will eventually vanish. It came about because ANet changed the definition of ‘full’ to be more stable and predictable. Only, they forgot that they would end up with tons of “full” servers and no easy way to reduce that to allow new players to join or for veterans to move.
Already, Tarnished Coast (one of the NA servers that was full when this happened) is no longer full. (That’s partly because people moved off TC to build up another server for WvW.) It will happen for JQ, just very slowly.
I do wish ANet had shown more sympathy and foresight when they changed the definition, so that people could play with their new friends without leaving their old ones. However, this will resolve itself…eventually.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
Sorry that you don’t like gifs, I’ll try to burn them all for you.
The flicking ones. Just remove them and that’ll be good enough. The others you can leave alone.
There’s an issue with paid transfers though; There’s no way to join the most popular servers.
That’s a temporary issue that will eventually vanish. It came about because ANet changed the definition of ‘full’ to be more stable and predictable. Only, they forgot that they would end up with tons of “full” servers and no easy way to reduce that to allow new players to join or for veterans to move.
Already, Tarnished Coast (one of the NA servers that was full when this happened) is no longer full. (That’s partly because people moved off TC to build up another server for WvW.) It will happen for JQ, just very slowly.
I do wish ANet had shown more sympathy and foresight when they changed the definition, so that people could play with their new friends without leaving their old ones. However, this will resolve itself…eventually.
And when it is fixed one of us has to pay money to be able to play together. That’s ridiculous.