SOE - you will make more money - if you allow free character transfers.

don't want any type of transfer's unless its about fixing pops on servers

3 years from now you will be able to pay for a transfer. If you don't want to spend the first week on throw-away characters then either find your friends or stop playing for the first week. This is what happens when you start playing a new MMO. Characters are server locked for a reason. Ghoest, I'd love to hear why you think otherwise.

This is a double fail.

1 Why would a developer want a system that discouraged players from spending money whenever they have the urge.

2 You are suggesting that we should expect gamers to play with long range planning because you personally do.
Why? It makes more sense to design a system around the way players actually act rather than your ideal.

I'm not, empire pop caps was for sure a feature that the devs had planned in beta. I'm not sure though if it ever made it to the game.

This depends

In the beta of PS2 I made a post about being able to transfer characters because in the beta you couldn't transfer at all. I'm glad you can at all but it would be nice to transfer for free because of the reasons you stated.

If you can find a quote from a dev I'd be very appreciative.

The point I was making was that very few, if any, of the vague 'most' MMO's you refer to feature that specific combination of elements. Perhaps you can offer specific examples instead? League of Legends and World of Tanks (the two most successful F2P MMO's I can think of) feature account-wide purchases. Age of Empires Online features account-wide purchases and unlimited free server transfers.

Designing a system around people being idiots? Yeah, sounds great.

Those MMOs also don't have characters... Also, I believe the post was in Beta, aren't all those threads gone?

I love this thread, please allow servertransfer, would be great if I want to play with an outfit on another server. And names are unique anyway.

Age does, actually. Also, I asked you for an example. Care to provide one instead of just criticizing mine?

There are a bunch of games already available that do megaservers or instancing where that doesn't happen to you. Most of the upcoming generation of MMOs which will appear 2-3 years from now are also building on megaserver technology.

They know that when there is competition that doesn't artificially restrict people to squeeze them for money they will lose players over sharding.

The thing is SOE intionally put in the ability to easily move people between servers and they even to the proactive step of making all names unique in the whole game.

I agree. I am currently sitting on 4500 SC, and I am reluctant to spend any of it because I worry that I will not want to stay on this specific server once I settle in. If our purchases do not follow us (which I do not want them to, it is better for the game this way), then we should at least be able to move our characters where they need to be.

This makes sense. They should allow 1 free server transfer then $5 each additional (to prevent server hopping)
Either that or allow station bought items to be available account wide.

But I am in the same boat. I am not paying one smed until this is addressed. Outfits are going to have a hard time recruiting without something.