Sent this email to Blizzard re the need to enable a once off way to transfer chars trapped on the wrong server region, ie the need to move a us account to uk server I will publish there response below :
Stopped playing for a couple of years now, in this period I would have thought you would have decided to make a paid way to transfer chars between US & EU realms ? as a one off. My character is trapped the wrong side of the atlantic, server wise. Due to the character being started one christmas on a free us trial. Well over 100 days of playtime later I have no desire to start a char on an EU server. I know other people also stuck in this situation, I’ve never felt youve taken you customers very seriously as concerns this situation or bothered to to accomodate people with a facility to rectify this situation, you can’t consider it acceptable for anyone to have to raid from 12-4am in the morning from a UK perspective and still work the next day.
Will there ever be this facility ?
If the only response you can give is some generic corporate blurb then please dont reply until you can generate a considered response from the people who have the power to change this situation.
THE REPLY :
——————————
Hi D,
I’m sorry to hear about your dilemma-and as a player myself, I understand not wanting to start again after investing 100+ days into your character; currently there is *literally* no way we can transfer a character across regions.
Quality and customer service are the highest priorities for Blizzard Entertainment. Because we cannot guarantee a positive gaming experience for users connecting to servers outside the supported region, we do not support use outside of the designated region. I recommend that, if possible, you acquire a localized version of the game for a more positive gaming experience.
At this time it is not possible to transfer an account or an authentication key between regions. In addition, there is no way to deactivate an account or authentication key in one region to re-create the account in another. Characters and items are non-transferable, as well.
We highly recommend that you purchase a localized copy of World of Warcraft.
You may be interested in the following Localization FAQ:
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21464.
—— IN CONCLUSION —-
the words worth observing in this reply are :
“Quality and customer service are the highest priorities for Blizzard Entertainment”
” currently there is *literally* no way we can transfer a character across regions.”
these statement are at direct odds with themselves :
“currently”
( TRUE ) > implying possible to change in the future
“literally no way”
( LIE ) > implying the extreme difficulty of my feature request, basically not true, there is a way of physically moving whatever digital data represents my character on a US server and moving it onto an EU server, and seeing if it runs and is acceptable))
“Quality and customer service are the highest priorities for Blizzard Entertainment”
( LIE ) > MARKETING IS LYING, to state something is of a higher value than is demonstrate-able
in reality the one marvellous thing about all digital data is its portability, my belief in this is that, the unwritten reason they don’t allow region transfers is really to do with crappy pvp international league table abuse or something, in reality I doubt the file format of US Character files, stored on US servers is in any way radically different, to that an EU character file is stored in on an EU server. In reality Blizzard are lazy, when it comes to addressing this issue, and shareholder profits and length of swimming pools for some few executives is a higher priority than individual player concerns.
If warcraft was an open source project there would have been no reason to prevent region transfer, as that would be an artificial discriminationary function created in the software, ie it would take more time to write in the inability to transfer between regions. This no transfer business, is similar to dvd regioning bullshit, it is in the favour of the commercial entitys so as to price differentiate global markets and control shit more tightly for their own commercial intent, and makes no sense considering the truly portable nature of digital information.
I have two Oceanic accounts and an EU account and I have often wanted to merge them together. Whilst my experience of Blizzard customer experience over the past 5+ years have always been good, I am disappointed that this feature is not available.
Some of it though is related to data protection acts in the various regions. You would think that with customer consent that it can be dealt with but unfortunately the laws around data protection is a little more complicated than that. So it is not 100% a technical issue.
On the same note I have the issue with the upcoming Cataclysm key. My Oceanic accounts are cancelled and I only play on the EU server (with RL friends) even though I live in Australia. The version of Cata that I can buy over here is only the NA version and thus the registration key won’t work. The client is no issue as you can use the same client to connect to both regions. The problem I have is that I have to buy the NA version here, have someone buy me a copy in the EU and mail me the registration key, thus paying twice for the same product!!!
no wholesale use of portions of the site, quoting is fine as long as the site is referenced in bibiliography or directly, but no representation of writings on this site as being say your own work. etc