Drak’thul is now a PvE realm! Starting today, this realm will be recommended for New Players, which means a lot of people will be creating new characters on this realm. These will be a mix of completely new players as well as experienced veterans who are looking for a new start. We hope you will make these people welcome here on Drak’thul.

If you still want to move from Drak’thul to a PvP realm, Free Character Moves to Akama, Dalvengyr, and Torthelfrin will be available until June 15.

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As part of our continued efforts to balance the World of Warcraft player population across all realms, we will be converting one of our lower-population PvP realms – Drak’thul -- to a Normal PvE realm. For players on Drak’thul, we will be offering Free Character Moves to alternate PvP realms both before and for several weeks after the conversion takes place. This will allow us to continue to support healthy communities on the realms and help new players transition easily into the community.

In the event that any of these destination realms meet our transfer goals before the scheduled end date, the transfers to that may be disabled. We highly recommend that if you are planning to transfer that you do so at your earliest convenience. No characters will be eligible for these free moves once the transfers have been closed.

The conversion will take place on Tuesday, May 18th, with the Character Moves opening on May 11th and lasting until June 15th. Upon being converted to Normal PvE, Drak’thul will be given the “New Players” flag to ensure an influx of players over the coming weeks.

The following are the destination realms for Free Character Moves off of Drak’thul:

• Akama (Both Factions) of the Vengeance battlegroup is a Central time zone realm - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?sid=1&forumId=11131
  
• Dalvengyr (Horde Only) of the Stormstrike battlegroup is an Eastern time zone realm - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?sid=1&forumId=11177
  
• Tortheldrin (Alliance Only) of the Emberstorm battlegroup is an Eastern time zone realm - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?sid=1&forumId=68887

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Q u o t e:


Bornakk (or other Blue) -- is there a way that we can get a semi-accurate count of the server populations for both alliance/horde for the above listed servers to give us a better idea of what we are transerring into? This is a topic of conversation and debate, and critical to the decision among my friends and guild mates in making said decision.

Thanks.

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Akama is pretty even, Dalvengyr is slightly Alliance favored, and Tortheldrin is decently Horde favored - hence the restrictions on the latter two. For people who just want to "merge", Akama is a bit higher on population, same time zone, and pretty even on faction ratios so your experience will be somewhat similar there. None of these realms are really high population realms so you won't be seeing a huge change in your game experience once the moves are complete.

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Q u o t e:
Why do we get so few choices compared to the last realm you rerolled pve? Seems like we should have at least two more choices.

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There were four choices for that because we made a mistake initially and had to add one more. This different set of destinations are also better setup based on how players transferred last time so hopefully things go smoother.

If you want to stay on a PvP realm, Akama will provide a very similar experience though with a healthier population. The other options are there if you want to change things up as much as possible. Why do you need more choices?

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Q u o t e:
how many chars can we switch and can the horde switch to alli?

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You can transfer as many characters as you like, but it is only a free character move service, we are not offering additional free services like faction change.

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Q u o t e:
Me and most of my friends joined this server specifically because it was a PvP server. Alliance side most of the people that I know outside of my guild that like it here on Drak'thul do so because its a PvP server.

I just wanted to voice my opinion that i dont like this change. I suppose there are no other Central time PvP servers that we could be merged with? That would seem like a much beter solution to me.

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See my post above. If you are looking for a merge, Akama provides the same timezone and battlegroup. I understand the pains of moving but not everybody wants the same thing out of a situation like this.

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Q u o t e:
so how do i do the free transfer thing?

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You do it by going to your Account Management page at www.battle.net. After you login you select the box/account that you want to transfer characters off of. Then you will see a "Character Move" option under the "Free Services" column. These will open later today and will be open for several weeks as mentioned in the original post.

And I have seen some people bring up the Paid Character Transfer FAQ as a reference, be sure to look at the Free Character Move FAQ if you have additional questions: http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20530&pageNumber=1&searchQuery=free+character+move

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Q u o t e:
Transfers are up. Under character move, then free transfers. Keep getting error every time I try, but its letingt my alts go, so it will work eventually. See you on the other side Hylia.

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What is the exact error you are seeing and at what point in the process are you hitting this error?

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Q u o t e:
Let me see if Iunderstand this- If we want to be in a PvP realm;
1. We will lose our guild and guild bank?
2. We will lose all the time, trouble and gold that we spent to set up our guild and guild bank?
3. There is no way to transfer the guild and bank so we just take it on the chin?

I transfered into Drak when my realm was over full and Blizzard made the choice for me just like they are doing now. I was not happy but stuck it out hoping for the population to grow. Now instead of growing the realm, you want me to start over in another realm that may or may not stay PvP?

You have some great computer people there. Now you need to bring in somebody familiar with business and customer satisfaction.

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I understand it isn't a great situation for you, but we are keeping track of the realms we use as destinations and there are a number of other options for future conversions that these destinations shouldn't need to go down that route.

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Q u o t e:


Why do we need more choices? Cause you are forcing a change to our server and regardless of the people that are happy...there are those who do not appreciate the change. Some people made decisions a long time ago, to come to this server specifically because it was designated a PvP realm. When this decision was made, all the servers were available for us to choose...now each faction only gets two realm choices? You're ruining a long-term decision, and then limiting our choices.

Also, to some people character names matter, even if this is a trivial issue, maybe we want more choices to see where we can get character names that we want?

I'm personally annoyed with the change, one reason being, leaving this server means that friends I made that are currently on hiatus will no longer be with us if we moved. And if they eventually come back to the game, they will have to pay to switch servers.

To balance server load? Why not just offer free transfers from all the highest pop realms to specifically selected low pop realms? Or free realm transfers across all realms, to specific low pop servers? Then cross-server friends can transfer to lower pop servers and be on the same realm. And instead of forcing people to leave who enjoy a specific part of the game, people who actually want to transfer servers can. Thanks for ruining a decision I made with a group of friends long ago.

These are rhetorical questions, I just started this post because I felt that the question 'Why do you need more choices?' was ignorant, all things considered. Some person just wanted to know why they couldn't have more choices and instead of just giving them a simple explanation you had to belittle them as well by following up with that question.

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You are reading into my previous comment a bit much. I was looking for some feedback on why you felt you needed more options, that's all. Based on how players tend to pick their transfers, especially based on the previous conversion, more options are not necessarily beneficial in the overall picture. The more focused the options the more we can keep track of it and help the destination realms.

And some of the ideas you brought up have been tried but players tend to not be interested in going from high population realms to low population "dead" realms, especially PvPers. It kind of misses the point of being a PvP realm when you never run into anybody (my personal experience supports this as well). And this is probably at least part of the reason why the same realms have been the "high population hardcore PvP realms" for such a long time.

PvP realms aren't seeing a heck of a lot of traffic these days and these low population realms, of which there are several, are not bouncing back much. PvE realms on the other hand are doing well pretty consistently. Players often ask us to "do something" about the situation and we are doing what we feel is the best solution to an icky problem. Not everybody will like it but we'll get through it and move on from there. If you have friends you want to transfer, you have several weeks to get in touch with them and try to figure something out before the FCMs close.

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Q u o t e:
Can you do chromaggus now?

Thanks.

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It was considered but Drak'thul had a definite lead. We'll see how this goes for now.

Drak’thul is now a PvE realm! Starting today, this realm will be recommended for New Players, which means a lot of people will be creating new characters on this realm. These will be a mix of completely new players as well as experienced veterans who are looking for a new start. We hope you will make these people welcome here on Drak’thul.

If you still want to move from Drak’thul to a PvP realm, Free Character Moves to Akama, Dalvengyr, and Torthelfrin will be available until June 15.