Guild Wars 2

Last night I told a friend who hasn’t played GW2 since 2 months after launch to transfer to my server (Anvil Rock) before the new patch today. Due to forgetting what server to transfer to he accidentally transferred to the wrong server (Dragonbrand I think) and now is unable to transfer to my server. Is there any possible way for him to get a transfer in without paying before the new patch? It would be a shame for him to have no interest in coming back if we wont be able to WvW together

PS: His name is Rustybucket.9358

No, there is no way.

Currently, there is a 7 day waiting period before he can transfer servers again. Once the new update goes into effect, he will need gems in order to transfer, but he should be able to guest on your server to level. It won’t help with WvW, he’ll need gems in order to transfer to WvW together.

It can be earned in game, but the cost is prohibitive by design. The 1000-2000 gems necessary for a transfer will cost 19-38 gold, as long as the rate doesn’t continue to trend up. This wasn’t supposed to be a disincentive to people who made a mistake, but rather to people who were jumping around in WvW.

There has to come a point where players must own up to their mistakes — but Tubby and his friend can’t be the only two facing this sort of problem. The number is probably larger if you add in those who don’t read game news, or those that haven’t played for months.

It seems unfair to have a those people begrudgingly pay out as much as $30, or 50+ hours of farming effort, because they clicked the wrong server on a list, or they didn’t time their transfer to hit a 7 day window.

Changing your policies to allow support to handle transfer errors by players (either by manually moving the players or setting a flag to allow a transfer) will probably help your PR image and save a lot of headaches in the future.

I’m sure you can imagine how angry people are going to be when they start screwing up their transfers when they’ve paid gems for them.

But if the current policy is to be hands off on these things, thank you for informing everyone. I can completely understand and respect how handling these requests would add a lot of extra work, and that frankly, people have been given plenty of opportunity to prepare — provided they’ve been playing in the last month.

we’re three people with a similar problem.
after a gw2 break for some weeks we decided to give it another try and now end up on 3 different servers (next time, send ppl an email or put a warning on the login screen)

you know, we were on different servers for several reasons: e.g. the buggy skill events.

so what do you suggest to do if we want to play together again, especially in wvw (and i understand there will be an interesting wvw patch coming …. the main reason why we would consider coming back)?

as things look now we’ll not pay the transfers and we’ll probably never come back to gw2.

good work. you can be proud of yourselves.

wictred.3109:

we’re three people with a similar problem.
after a gw2 break for some weeks we decided to give it another try and now end up on 3 different servers (next time, send ppl an email or put a warning on the login screen)

you know, we were on different servers for several reasons: e.g. the buggy skill events.

so what do you suggest to do if we want to play together again, especially in wvw (and i understand there will be an interesting wvw patch coming …. the main reason why we would consider coming back)?

Exactly how my friend feels right now but with the up and coming WvW score resets wouldn’t it be logical to let people have 1 more free transfer?

For many people, the gold to change servers is the entirety of their net value in-game (if not more). To put this in perspective, changing servers to a very high server is the same cost as upgrading to the digital deluxe edition of the game, or the cost of more than 3 bank slots. Farming 40g for transferring is prohibitively high, and is beyond reason. It isn’t a matter of transferring to a server because of population here, it’s a matter of “I want to transfer to wherever my friends are”.

I think what was the most unreasonable, however, was maintaining the 7 day wait-time for retrying after the announcement was made that free transfers were ending. Removing that 7 day limitation would have allowed people who made mistakes in that last bit of time another chance to get it right, and would have allowed people to fix mis-coordinations. Being on a different server than your friends if you are a WvW player is perhaps the most game-breaking and experience-thrashing thing that can happen to you, and I honestly feel that it could have been better handled. I think ANet should do something about this, but I highly doubt that will happen, and sympathize with the people who will probably quit the game because of it.

I have 2 possible ideas for solving this problem…
1, Introducing free transfer tickets and each account gets one when they first start playing and existing players would get one too. The tickets would allow them to transfer once for free. That way people who couldnt transfer in time can transfer without paying gold/cash and new members get a safety net if they accidently choose the wrong home world.
2. Allowing players to write in to support to give players free transfers on a case by case basis.

why a period for a free transfer?
just 1 transfer, that’s it.

people who come back in maybe 1 month or later might face the same problem.

all their guildies maybe on another server and now they have to pay $$$ just to join them again. that could be a showstopper for some of them.

a simple popup “this is your last chance to change servers for free before logging in. are you sure you want to login on <server name>?” would do it.

Gaile Gray.6028:

I understand what you’re suggesting, but remember that we had months of free transfers. It seems to me that once the decision is made to make a change, there must be a “start date” and, after communicating what is coming, the change should be implemented. That is what happened here.

If we were to say “Everyone gets one more free transfer” for how long do we offer that? (And what do we say to the player who comes back a week after that period and asks for special accommodation?) How do we message a change?

• Emailing? For everyone who suggests that, another say “Stop spamming my email account!”
• Social media? For everyone who says “Yes” another says, “I refuse to read Facebook or Twitter.”
• Log-in screen? We do that, but apparently players don’t read it.
• Website or Blog? Yep, we do that, too, but again, not everyone reads it.

So while I understand why you’re suggesting that everyone get one more free transfer, I hope you, in turn, see the possible drawbacks to that suggestion. Do rest assured that I will pass along your ideas to the dev team, though!

What about an in-game mail?

Personally, I think there should be more explanation in the world transfer dialog box. At least two of the newest (read: most enthusiastic) players in my guild transferred off of our server because they mistakenly assumed that it was a per-character transfer. Another one transferred because he didn’t realize he wouldn’t be able to transfer back before it was no longer free to do so.

Remember all of the posts we’ve seen from developers reminding us that the vocal minority in the forums don’t represent the majority? Or that the game can’t just cater to those who participate in the forums, use Reddit, etc.? These are those people. They didn’t know because they don’t read the forums, they don’t use Twitter, and they don’t expect those things to be necessary to their enjoyment of the game.

And honestly, what did the login screen announcement say?

Guesting is coming!
CITIZENS, I have an important announcement to make.

Previously, we’ve talked about a feature called guesting, which allows you to play with your friends on other worlds. The wait is over! Guesting is coming to a world near you with our update on January 28th! Read More…

I guess I may be dense, but it seems to me that if one hadn’t been reading the forums enough to associate the beginning of guesting with the end of free transfers, that wouldn’t exactly explain anything at all.

Another “free” transfer ticket for everyone is completely unacceptable as it once again opens servers up to massive population swings with guilds being able to transfer all their members for free at any time.

If you join or are a member of a guild, they may be willing to assist in gold cost to get you transferred if you are going to be an active WvW member. I know my guild is offering to pitch in to get any members over to the right server now that the paid transfers started.

Frankly though, server transfers costs have been telegraphed in every way possible by Anet, including the fact that they’ve been slated since well before launch. You shouldn’t be surprised about it. I think any reasonable individual would assume that hopping around to other servers to get world completion more easily would include some inherent risks of becoming split with friends. (What if those servers your friends were on had become full while you were away from them?)

neverborne.4736:

Couple thoughts:
If 3 people are split up, all could transfer to a low pop server (lower gem cost).

This only exists in Europe.

I just started up GW2 yesterday for the first time in months, downloaded a couple hundred MB, logged in, logged off and started it up again today.

1 of us did the same a couple days ago, but wanted to look how it is on a “full” server after returning. Turns out he can’t switch back.

And we just told our mate in teamspeak yesterday that we were considering returning to GW2. Turns out he didn’t know of any update or that server transfers are not for free anymore – and that he’s on another server.
He hadn’t really considered coming back and I wanted to convince him to give it a try. Guess how that went.