Blizzard's new ideas for WOW

By Ellie Gibson Published 23 June, 2006

Realm transfer and PvP plans.

Blizzard is preparing to unveil a new transfer system that's designed to let World of Warcraft players move characters to less populated realms - for a $25 fee.

Speaking to GameSpot, lead designer Shane Dabiri said: "Our goal with this is not so much about providing incentives for players to transfer realms as it is about offering an additional service for their convenience.

"This is something that many players have asked us about for a long time, so we're glad that we’ll be able to make the service available to them in the near future."

There will be restrictions on realm transfers - you can only take a character to a new realm once every six months, and once you've transferred, there's no going back. Transferring characters must be at least level 10, and their are restrictions on the amount of cash you can take with you - 300 gold for levels 10-30, 1000 gold for levels 31-50, and 5000 gold for levels 51 and above.

You can only transfer between realms of the same type, or from a PvP to PvE realm - but not vice versa. Plus, you can't have two characters of opposing factions within the same realm.

Dabiri went on to discuss the new Cross-Realm Battlegrounds feature which will be introduced with patch 1.12. It'll link Alterac Valley, Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin so you'll be able to fight players from other realms, "which means games will be starting and ending all the time. As a result, the wait to get into a battleground should be considerably less.

"We will of course test cross-realm battlegrounds on our public test realms for everyone to try out," Dabiri said.

Patch 1.12 will also introduce a new type of World PvP content, which will see Horde and Alliance players battling for control of strategic positions and resources. Plus, Rogues will get a talent review.

You can read the full details over on the WOW website. There's no word on when patch 1.12 will be released just yet - but seeing as 1.11 has only just been made available for download, there may be a little while to wait.

Picture of Ellie.

About Ellie Gibson

Since joining Eurogamer in the mid 2000s, Ellie has written about subjects as diverse as the fall of Gizmondo, the rise of Hollyoaks actresses in Red Alert games and the noise a bear makes under NSFW circumstances.

Read more articles from Ellie by visiting the Ellie Gibson archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Bertie Verified Senior Staff Writer, Eurogamer.net #1 6 years ago

    Paid for realm transfers is a nice, yet long awaited, feature. The linked Battlegrounds too is a nice touch. With that in place, it might be that less people are looking to change realms, being that the main reason is Battleground queues. If the linked battlegrounds really work, and queue times drop to something reasonable for every server, then good job Blizzard.

  • Mick #2 6 years ago

    yeah some nice idea's in the pipeline..... if your into pvp.

  • Gurgeh #3 6 years ago

    Just think of all the farmers who will swap servers and it makes sense

  • rinoaMW #4 6 years ago

    "Why should realm transfer be paid for? "

    well, individual transfers are probably harder to do than the ones en-masse. Other games charge you as well - EQ2 charges $50 for the privilage, its quiet a common thing for MMO's....

    being a rogue, i'm more interested in the talant revision..

    oh and no "boo's" at the back please ;)

  • Glitch #5 6 years ago

    Constantly taking peoples money! 50million a month and then as for even more for new features!

    Thats why I play Guild Wars! alot better if you ask me!

  • DjTrash #6 6 years ago

    Guild wars is shit, the world you quest in is empty apart for your party, its all instances
    Edited by DjTrash at 23/06/06 @ 14:02

  • InfiniteFury #7 6 years ago

    I would imagine the fee is charged at the point it is to deter serial realm-whores as that could seriously dick around with realm economies.

    Edit - which I've just realised isn't an issue as you can only transfer one character every six months so everything I say is nonsense...
    Edited by InfiniteFury at 23/06/06 @ 14:37

  • Psi #8 6 years ago

    farmers would want to transfer to high pop servers for the customer base, also they would want to move their max level charas around servers where either they have little funds or have a higher turnover, 1 transfer per 6months and limited gold with move seems well planned out tbh.

    shame its their fault that these limits are in place tho.

  • neuroniky #9 6 years ago

    Bleach. 25 USD. For a character transfer. A TRANSFER. I prefer paying 25 Eur for 500 Golds, thank you. :D And stop thinking this was made because of the gold farmer... it allows one transfer every six months anyway.
    However, this reminds me again why the single server of Eve is so good...
    Edited by neuroniky at 23/06/06 @ 15:33

  • paulf #10 6 years ago

    I really like the idea of cross server battlegrounds, its very frustrating waiting for a game on my server, and hopefully this will sort it out :)

  • Kami #11 6 years ago

    As a WoW player, can I just state...

    Blizzard are talking B*LL*CKS on this one.

    First of all, cross-realm PvP. That's all nice and dandy but does anyone get the sneaky suspicion that a fledgling server (6-10 months) is going to be whalloped by a server with players who have been around since day one? (i.e. those with no life) Makes no sense at all. I'm on an RP server, what good RP reason can Blizzard give for the Horde and/or Alliance on each server battling those in another? Go on Blizzard, we're waiting to hear from you on that one...

    Fooking retarded idea. Just give people new battlegrounds and make ranking up a little bloody simpler, some of us don't have five hours a bloody day every day for three months...

    As for realm transfers, it's again a retarded idea and one they clearly pulled out of their ass. But Blizzard have been doing a lot of that shit lately. 25 smackers to transfer a character is not a bad thing if you've got friends on another server, but... that's not the issue. People will transfer to smaller realms with items and shitloads of money and trash economies which have only just begun to stabilise. They'll bring epics no-one else has on the server and most will never see, and get bored when they realise there's no-one else around as "1337" as them, get bored and annoy everyone on the server. Nutshell; smaller servers do NOT want the retards from the larger servers ktnxbi.

    Along with Blizzard's fantastic idea to globalise the LookingForGroup channel (Now called on Moonglade the "LookingForSpam" channel), a continued class imbalance, some serious faction imbalance (on my server, Horde are outnumbered by Alliance 4-1. Even worse on other servers.) and the fact the game STILL has some blatant bugs that they refuse to fix for some stupid reason... why is the game so damn addictive?

    WoW is great for the meantime since there's little like it out there that's been done in this way. But even I'll accept that WoW has massive problems that are partly down to the players, but mainly down to Blizzard for their continuing habit to turn a blind eye to them. No, WoW isn't ever going to be "perfect", but they can at least make it easier for those who attempt to have a life in-between, instead of ritually abusing us and milking us for every penny...

  • Wobble #12 6 years ago

    yup. I agree with Kami, with both of those changes they're basically fucking the younger servers over to help the older ones.

    guilds with aq40 (naxx at the time this goes live) on farm status will destroy people from the newer servers... we don't even have the gates open yet on ours, it will totaly ruin battlegrounds for everyone on our server.

  • wired009 #13 6 years ago

    WOW is a long way from being a perfect MMO. It's succesful comes from accessibility to a large demographic. The gameplay is simple and the art style is cartoony so that young and old can dive in. I too would like to see a sci-fi based MMO; anything that has a more mature and darker feel. Anarchy Online did a great job of creating atmosphere but had lackluster gameplay. FFXI had great emphasis on group play and exciting combat but was overly tedious. (Ok, all MMO's are overly tedious.) However, despite what the fools at THQ say, I believe that the market is very open to new MMOs. All Blizzard has done is raise the standard for the overall product. It does almost everything at least above average. One of the exceptions is PVP, which I've always disliked in WOW due to it being pointless, hence unsatisfying. This line that has me most excited: "Patch 1.12 will also introduce a new type of World PvP content, which will see Horde and Alliance players battling for control of strategic positions and resources." Yeah, kind of important factors in why wars are fought right? Battlegrounds was really just a test to see if people would be receptive to objective based PVP. Hopefully this will bridge the gameworld and Battleground instances.