Why is it a problem: Essentially, frequent server transfers remove any sense of community on a server (e.g., no possibility of building of rivalries or making friends/allies), but they also bring loads of balancing issues.
- Building up alliances/making friends takes time, but as soon as things get rough for a faction, companies leave the server. On a personal note, I’ve played since launch and never been in a company for more than a month or two because this happens and I’m not interested in transferring all the time, because…
- Likewise, rivalries require time to build up, but potential rivals either leave because they’re getting demolished or leave because they’re doing the demolishing.
- Those who can take the most advantage of server transfers are those who have the real life financial means to do so.
- Hardcore companies transfer to buy cheap resources on one server and bring them to a new server for profit.
- Hardcore companies transfer to take over all the territories of one server and transfer the wealth back to another server.
- Hardcore companies get around any potential transfer cooldowns by buying new accounts.
Potential solution: Remove transfers altogether and instead allow players to buy more character slots that can be used on any server even if they already have a character in that region or even on that server.
Impact:
- This completely removes all the balance issues related to server transfers while still allowing just as much freedom to move to new servers by way of creating new characters.
- While this adds some burden to changing servers, that burden also adds incentive to build up your faction and try to overcome enemies even when things get rough while still allowing players to change servers if they’re really not up for the challenge.
- This would also mean more people would be leveling characters because alts would actually be a thing, which means it’s that much more likely that new players will have others in their level range to play with.
Proof of concept: It’s been successfully done this way on basically every MMO that has existed up until very recently.
