Arguably the greatest issue plaguing World of Warcraft: Classic at the moment is the issue of overpopulation. In the quest to keep the game as similar to Vanilla WoW as possible, that’s meant that the same issues that were prevalent in the mid-2000’s are back, too, and overpopulation is leading the charge.
There are fixes, but much of the player base is against them. The Layering mechanic, for example, has been utilized to effectively lower queue times, but this has negative impacts on gameplay. By layering, players and instances of the entire server are separated onto different layers, making it sometimes difficult to find quest mobs or other players on your specific layer.
Additionally, layering is incredibly easy to abuse, with players above to clear out an area with AoE farming and then switch to another layer by having a friend invite them to a party, shoving them out of their own layer and into theirs. This causes all the monsters to be present against and is generally considered an exploit, though it’s far from a nefarious one.
One of the other fixes that Blizzard found to counter overpopulation has been offering Free Realm Transfers. If your realm is overpopulated and you’re tired of waiting to play, why not just switch to another server, right? Such is the logic of plenty of players who headed for greener pastures instead of waiting for room on their own.
This service wasn’t offered to all realms and servers, though. Blizzard offered the ability to transfer for free – the service usually being a paid one – from high population servers to other servers that weren’t also suffering the same issue. For example, one could use a free realm transfer to leave Faerlina, but couldn’t use one to join Faerlina.
But this service has now been canceled as of 3:00 p.m. PDT today. “In this region, this means that all of the different Free CHaracter Moves available from Incendius, Faerlina, and Whitemane will no longer be offered,” the developers wrote. “We will continue to monitor realm populations, and make further adjustments as necessary.”
While it may sound on the surface to be a bad thing – who doesn’t like free services? – it’s actually a wonderful sign. If Blizzard has decided to stop allowing players a free way out, that likely means that the population is coming back under control, as the developers aren’t shoving as many onto a bus out as they were.
Additionally, the service has been available for free for quite a bit. It’s highly likely that anyone who intended to transfer out has already done so. Removing the free service isn’t of much consequence to a player base who likely has no need or desire for it at this point.
