That said, I made my PS3 vs 360 decision based on the exclusives that were available, and I can now testify that Journey is a worthy factor in that decision. The others were the ICO/Shadow of the Colossus re-release, Uncharted 1-3, Bayonetta, The Last of Us, Heavy Rain, Demon Souls, etc.

Going server-less or some megaserver is definitely something I can get behind. In fact, I’ve been calling for this sort of solution since 2011.

I have two friends that still play WoW, and they ended up “taking advantage” of the reduced-price transfers to move to a medium-high pop server on the last day of the sale. Technically, the whole guild ended up moving. They based this decision almost entirely on the fact that this was the first time in history that such a sale has occurred, and on the fact that Blizzard has never done server merges/free transfers off of the dead realms.

Would they still have paid for the transfers even with the “virtual realm” news? Maybe. We still don’t know what kind of realms are being merged, and like you said, it could be a while until things are actually finalized. But at least they could have made an informed decision. They might not have paid to move all their characters, or just 1-2 to get them by. The sequence of events casts Blizzard in an incredibly shady light, even if was unintentional, just like with what happened with PlanetSide 2 (hence the anecdote).

Beneath all of this remains the latent ire I have for Blizzard for allowing the underlying situation to fester for so long in the first place. Server merges should have been happening years ago. Server transfer prices should have been reduced by 50% (or honestly 75%) years ago. You would assume that losing 1.3 million subs in a quarter would do something to affect the incredible hubris that seems to infect Blizzard’s business decisions, but here we still are with $25 automated server transfers as if the price is justified in some bizarro alternate reality.

Second(ish) question. Let’s say that this feature does not go live come 5.4. What happens if virtual reams do not affect high population servers, what if virtual realms cap at the high end of ‘medium’ population realms? What if it does go live, does not work properly for whatever reason and has to go back into the lab for further testing? Would it still be underhanded by Blizzard then? If server transfers were the only service being offered at half price, I would agree with you more, but they offered all the ancillary serves on sale. Do I wish they would have done both at the same time and said, “Get where you want your home server to be now.” Yea sure, but I would not call this EA levels of low. I expect that kind of exaggeration from Gevlon not the usually sound minded Azuriel.

Anyway it’s sad that they are milking customers for a “feature” which will disappear, the server boundaries were growing thing already, but this “50% off” thing is a bit of a slap in the face when it occurs just before a server-merge-without-calling-it-so.

BTW I keep that they should kill servers off once and for all. It would also solve the “server merge = bad PR” problem…..