Limited PvP -> PvE Free Character Transfers

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WoW Developer
#1 - April 23, 2024, 1:04 a.m.
Blizzard Post

Good evening everyone,

When we launched Season of Discovery, we made some bold decisions, one of those was the creation of Enforced Faction Balanced PvP Realms. When we did this, we did our best to communicate some caveats that this may not end up being the experience you want from World of Warcraft, as PvP realms can be an intensely challenging experience at times. While we are very happy with how the faction balance system has worked out, we know from player feedback internally and externally that the reality of a balanced presence of both factions on a single realm, and that individual layers will not always have equal factions, means that some folks have now decided they would instead prefer a PvE ruleset, but have characters locked to these PvP realms.

To that end, we genuinely want everyone to have the best time they can in Season of Discovery, so over the next few weeks, we will be periodically opening Free Character Transfers from PvP realms to PvE realms. These transfer windows will open and close fairly rapidly, and we offer no guarantee that you will be able to transfer. The reasoning for this is simple; we need to ensure that one faction doesn’t disproportionally leave a realm, undoing months of hard work with realm faction balance.

These transfer options will be periodically available starting Tuesday and will open and close throughout the rest of this week.

As always, thank for you joining us in Season of Discovery. We’ve experimented a lot and learned much that will ultimately lead to bigger and better things.

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WoW Developer
#248 - April 24, 2024, 4:03 p.m.
Blizzard Post

These transfers have been re-enabled and will likely remain open for the next 1-2hrs, but as always they may close at any moment if the there is any sign of risk to balance or health of the Source realm.

Thank you for bearing with us while we try to ensure people who want to move can do so, without jeopardizing the original realms.

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WoW Developer
#321 - April 25, 2024, 3:03 a.m.
Blizzard Post

Transfers are open once again, and again likely for the next 1-2hrs.

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WoW Developer
#380 - April 26, 2024, 12:15 a.m.
Blizzard Post

Transfer are open once again, no faction restrictions at this time, movement from both factions has been roughly equal.

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WoW Developer
#393 - April 26, 2024, 12:35 a.m.
Blizzard Post

Should be a couple of hours. I know these windows are frustrating, but a lot of players can move very quickly sometimes and we’d really prefer to not completely mess up any existing realms with these moves. Its more nuanced than “how many characters have moved” it takes some time to see how many people are just moving an alt or two, how many are actively then logging into the new realm. So everything needs to bake for a while to analyze the actual effect on both the Source and Destination realms.

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WoW Developer
#446 - April 27, 2024, 12:42 a.m.
Blizzard Post

Hey everyone, there will not be any additional transfers opening up this weekend. We’re giving these moves time to bake and seeing how populations settle before making more decisions on Monday.