WoW Classic free server transfers coming soon – everything we know

Blizzard have announced that they will be opening free server transfers for World of Warcraft Classic characters to help reduce the number of players on the most popular servers.

WoW Classic has launched to immense success, with thousands of players jumping in and the game dominating Twitch since its launch, with over a million viewers tuning into the category on the first day.

That success has also led to one of the game’s biggest issues, however, which has been the incredibly lengthy queue times to log in, with players sometimes waiting for hours at peak times to join the most popular servers.

Blizzard have already taken some measures to alleviate the queue times, opening up extra servers and increasing the number of players each server can hold simultaneously in order to reduce the wait.

• Read more: How to make gold in WoW Classic

One of the issues, however, has been that some servers are more popular than others, especially those where popular streamers have settled, with many of their fans choosing to follow. To help even things out, Blizzard have announced that they’ll be opening up free character transfers “in the coming days”.

Transferring a character to a new server typically costs $25, so players who might wish to move to a server with smaller queues would currently have to choose between a fairly steep cost and starting a brand-new character if they wish to do so.

• Read more: How to level up faster in WoW Classic

Once Blizzard open up the Free Character Move, however, players will see the option to initialize the transfer either on the character select screen or the queue screen of the realm – hopefully encouraging those facing the longest queues to find a new home.

There are some restrictions to the character transfer, as it’s not possible if your character is a guild leader, has an active auction listing or bid, or has mail. If you’re hoping to make the move, it’s worth ensuring these are not a factor beforehand, so that you can transfer immediately without having to wait through the log-in queue to make your character eligible.

The Free Character Move will only be available for certain realms, so it seems likely that if you’re on one of the most popular servers you’ll have the opportunity to move away for free, but transferring from a less-populated server will still cost the transfer fee.