Free transfers are ruining shards :(

[Alatarv]

Too many messages saying the same thing to quote...

When I log in and look at the shard selection screen in prime time, EVERY SINGLE SHARD is showing as High or Medium population, with MOST OF THEM on High.

How is it possible that some shards are getting "dangerously low in population?"

Trion's free shard transfers have been a smashing success. One of the best things about Rift! The OP is entitled to his opinion, I'm entitled to mine. Since we both pay the same monthly subscription rate, I'd say my vote cancels his. We're back to dead-center on the opinion meter. As I browsed through this thread, I'd say more people are in favor of free transfers than against them.

Here's a thought. If you don't want people to leave your shard, LOCKING THE DAMN DOOR ISN'T THE ANSWER! Work together to develop a community that people want to stay in and be a part of. Your first divorce might not be your fault, your second one is suspicious, but by the fifth or sixth time you get served with papers I think you need to realize it's not the people LEAVING that are causing the problem.

[Cikala]

Here's a thought. If you don't want people to leave your shard, LOCKING THE DAMN DOOR ISN'T THE ANSWER! Work together to develop a community that people want to stay in and be a part of. Your first divorce might not be your fault, your second one is suspicious, but by the fifth or sixth time you get served with papers I think you need to realize it's not the people LEAVING that are causing the problem.

Pretty hard to develop a community when most of it has left. My current guild leader has delayed transferring for a long time, feeling a loyalty to the shard, but when you lose raiders every week to more populated shards, eventually you give up and join them. It's not the people left behind who are causing the problem. In this case it IS the people leaving who are causing the problem.

[Talila]

Too many messages saying the same thing to quote...

When I log in and look at the shard selection screen in prime time, EVERY SINGLE SHARD is showing as High or Medium population, with MOST OF THEM on High.

How is it possible that some shards are getting "dangerously low in population?"

Trion's free shard transfers have been a smashing success. One of the best things about Rift! The OP is entitled to his opinion, I'm entitled to mine. Since we both pay the same monthly subscription rate, I'd say my vote cancels his. We're back to dead-center on the opinion meter. As I browsed through this thread, I'd say more people are in favor of free transfers than against them.

Here's a thought. If you don't want people to leave your shard, LOCKING THE DAMN DOOR ISN'T THE ANSWER! Work together to develop a community that people want to stay in and be a part of. Your first divorce might not be your fault, your second one is suspicious, but by the fifth or sixth time you get served with papers I think you need to realize it's not the people LEAVING that are causing the problem.

Hello.
It's currently primetime in the EU right now and we have four shards on low population. We've also had a large number of shards closed because there were no people on them.
As much as the US people does outnumber the EU people, I thought I'd just point out that we see some issues that the US side doesn't see right now, but they should be worth to notice even so.

[SanguineDeath]

Actually, I'm all for keeping the free transfers. Do you guys want Trion to do what WoW does and charge you an exorborant amount of money just to transfer? What if YOU need to transfer shards for any given reason? Do you want to pay $50 for it? I personally appreciate the freedom of mobility that Trion has given us. I've only ever moved shards because my guild wanted to. That was it. I hate moving lol! Even if it's low pop, I look at it this way - oh goodie, more shinies for me to collect, more objects: wood, flowers, mining, etc..., for me to collect. I'm the emperor of my own little universe Really people... come on, if you're not happy somewhere, move to another spot - everything gets balanced out anyway in the end - that's the nature of the beast...

[Ming]

Free transfers are awesome!! Every 7 days? Love it!!

Those ASKING FOR fees and restrictions (???) are quite simply wrong.

1. Incentive to behave? Really?? What are these folks doing to you? Wouldn't you want them to leave?
2. Hard to build a community? Please. There is no community. The UO/ EQ era of mmo's is past. People don't even talk in chat through entire PUG dungeons. If you want that back, make game mechanics that require actual skill but the answer isn't adding fees and restrictions on transfers.

[Gray]

Cost is a deterrent. Do you think that guilds would constantly hop servers if the members had to pay to transfer? Free transfers are creating high and low server population extremes and leaving nothing in the middle.

New players either log in to servers that are overcrowded and lagged out or that are completely desolate and boring. Neither situation is helpful in retaining new players, nor in enticing Rift Lite players to sub.

Absent of Trion managing transfers and server locks like they should, free transfers have and will continue to cause more problems than they solve.

and on the other hand you have servers like wow that are literally dead, and all you hear is "lol, just use FD/lfr, we don't care - unless you pay us" if you want to get off. people who WANT to transfer will do so. and do you really want to be stuck with people that honestly want to transfer but don't because of the cost? sure it's fun. not to mention, these players stop having fun as well - which makes them quit the game as a whole rather sooner than later (=loss for trion).

paid transfers change nothing if they are as unsupervised as they are now. but you can't just close a server, somewhere someone's friend wants to transfer one minute later and is now pissed. with the current system players congregate instead of being spread out too thin, what trion should do is provide incentives to go to a lower pop shard, not restrictions.

the real issue are again the players. there is no perfect way that will work for every player. you get the "the game is too empty for me, THE GAME IS DEAD!!!!" crowd against the "ZOMG TRION, MY SERVER IS TOO FULL, FIX IT OR I'LL QUIT!!!!!".
basically TOR release in a nutshell.

and trion does not help it with world event quests that have a fixed threshold instead of a number relative to the real faction population.

My current guild leader has delayed transferring for a long time, feeling a loyalty to the shard, but when you lose raiders every week to more populated shards, eventually you give up and join them.

the important question is: why are your raiders leaving in the first place?

[One Chance]

I loved my low pop server (Atrophineus). Sometimes There wouldn't be anyone in Sanctum, if I had a quest I KNEW noone would be killing my mobs.
I rarely saw anyone and was fine until it went "tester" or whatever..

I scoured the forums for a server that had the oldest post on top of it's forum section (figuring it would be indicative of the lowest pop) and moved to Greenscale.

Geez, now it's always busy and people keep transferring their toons there and crowding up the place... bah.
I'm with you. People need to stop transferring so much and crowding up the peaceful shards.

[Gray]

Geez, now it's always busy and people keep transferring their toons there and crowding up the place... bah.
I'm with you. People need to stop transferring so much and crowding up the peaceful shards.

you know, for every player transferring to your shard, there are others whose planar inhabitants miss getting beaten up.

[Shadowboxerz]

I'm still waiting for the OP to tell what competition they speak of on a PVE server that is leaving.

[Nossgrr]

For the rest of us that loves shard transfer, my vote is to keep them the way they are.
I've followed guilds, friends, returning friends..etc.. I would be at $200+ in transfers if this would be wow..
Love it the way it is!

[Whytwulf]

^ WoW baby.

That was even more inane than your tl;dr pile of verbal diarrhea. Try again, scooter.

[PhantasmXI]

I loved the idea of free transfers to other shards when you guys merged all the shards but i think now is the time to get rid of it... i know in my shard (shatterbone) we have had at least 4 or 5 higher-end guilds leave to another shard. Entire guilds just up and leaving make competition scarce and population even worse. I for one do not care too much about the competition but it saddens me to see so many people just leaving making a medium/low population shard even lower :/ Thoughts?

i find shard transfers absolutely fine, had a guild on our shard that would insta kick our members if we we're in their groups for IA , onslaughts and pug dungeons...just because we had a few people that changed from our guild to theirs and had something to complain about us.

so we transfered so the drama wouldn't effect our guild....seriously whats with people+ drama in games? ive never experienced a need to cause drama in my guilds or whole gaming life lol

[Medawky]

Transfer to a higher pop shard. That is all.

So that EVERYONE has horrible, terrible, system killing lag. Faeblight is almost unplayable most night now.

[Scormus]

The free transfers experiment has failed. It sounds nice on paper, but instead of being a last-ditch solution to a problem, it has caused problems by making players far too mobile. It had perpetuated a "Grass is Greener" mentality for guilds, destroyed non-guild communities, damaged economies, magnified faction imbalances and irritated players who suddenly find their server overcrowded and laggy or completely desolate.

Restrict transfers to once or twice per year or start charging for them. Trion has failed to manage transfers appropriately and has not responded to population booms and busts in a timely fashion by locking servers.

My guild transferred to Shatterbone a month or so ago because it had a decent sized community and they were trying to escape the lag on Deepwood. They thought they had found a decent, active but not overpopulated server, but within days of transferring over to Shatterbone, several of the top guilds left the server. A few weeks pass and people start getting pissed about the lack of Guardian players, desolate zones and failed zone events, so we went out scouting again and settled on... f*ck, I can't remember the name of the server I'm on now... but anyways, within a few days, numerous other guilds also transferred there, causing Sanctum to be overrun, bankers and porticulum masters to be blocked, NPCs to take 2 minutes to load and zone invasion boss fights to be slideshows.

Trion fail.

I heartily disagree. When Trion shut down all of the NA RP servers except for Faeblight, my wife and I did like most RPers did and transferred to Faeblight... which quickly became overcrowded. If it weren't for the free transfers, my wife would probably simply have quit Rift, rather than pay to move to another server. Same for if there had been a longer wait period for transfers (such as a month, rather than 7 days), because Faeblight was pretty much unplayable on weekends when we play.

We are now on Millrush, a nice Medium population server, and quite happy here, with no intention of moving again. In fact, the guild we're in here is a pretty stable bunch, happy with our virtually-lag-free server.

[Zerosum]

I'm against limiting it. So many are flooding into Faeblight. The only saving grace is that once they experience the lag, they leave. If a limit was put on it they would flood to Faeblight, increase the lag for all of us, and be stuck for 30 days. Several have come and gone within the same week. Thank goodness.

Why would you think that? If transfers were limited, there will be alot less transfers EVERYWHERE. So you would not see a flood to faeblight. It will even improve the situation for many of the 'stubborn' servers. Where people just transfer to whatever FOT(W) server is. Server populations will remain much more stable across the board.