04/10/2021

Character Transfers & Season of Mastery

In Classic era news, there are now free character transfers available for a number of realms in both the US and EU regions, including away from Hydraxian Waterlords and to Pyrewood Village. A keen member of one of the Discord servers I'm on noticed the option before it had even been officially announced.

My impression is that quite a few of the old max-level players on era are taking the option to transfer, and the guy who invited me to Azuregos a couple of times has been talking to me like he assumes that I'll come along as well, but I'm still not sure about it. If I was serious about continuing to play on era it would definitely be the sensible option, but I'm not sure that I am, so why bother?

If the destination server was empty for me, I could still do it easily just because, but even though the PvE server cluster consists of several realms, for some reason the transfers are only available to Pyrewood Village - which is the server on which I originally started playing Classic as Horde, meaning that half my character slots are already taken and I'd have to make choices about who to move and who to leave behind or whether to delete any characters. That just feels like too much decision-making energy for something I'm not too sure about, but I guess we'll see. Just putting my thoughts about this into writing kind of makes me want to do it more to be honest.

In other era news, Blizzard provided more details about the fresh servers they hinted at a bit over a month ago. The whole project will be called "Season of Mastery" and will include #slightlymorechanges as they put it, including a condensed 12-month release schedule, more health for raid bosses, no world buffs inside raids, and the addition of selected quality-of-life improvements from Burning Crusade, such as no debuff limit, faster levelling and meeting stones becoming summoning stones.

That sure does sound somewhat intriguing, but I was already dubious beforehand how relevant this was going to be to me personally, and hearing that they'll be trying to cram all of Classic's content into a single year only confirmed to me that this one's going to be a hard pass for me. I suppose it might be interesting to watch from the sidelines though. If nothing else this initiative's popularity will show how representative the people always clamouring for fresh servers really are of the wider player base.

1 comment:

  1. As someone who gets attached to my characters, I would like to know what will happen to them when the season is over. Are we going to end up with a set of Classic Era characters, a set of Season 1 characters, Season 2 characters, etc. all separate? Repeat this with the BC Classic (with possible Season servers) and likely Wrath-era servers and you would have a large mess near empty servers.

    I'd be more willing to put in the time and effort if I knew, say, appearances and other collectibles would end up on my retail account. What I don't want is to put in a year's worth of effort and have that character get effectively abandoned.

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