No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Oh, Alright.

One feature players had asked for ever since EverQuest launched was the ability to transfer your character to another server. Maybe you discovered too late that your friends were on a different one, or you didn’t get along on your current one, or it was too overcrowded, or something. However, all such requests were instantly denied; Verant didn’t want people hopping fom server to server because the designers behind EQ had a specific ‘Vision’ in mind, a set of principles and ideals about the nature of the EQ world. To them it was more than just a game, they were building virtual communities of people, and to allow such transfers would dilute the community. It would be harder to make groups of friends and keep them together if people were coming and going from the server at will, and it would allow unscrupulous people to dodge their bad reputation too easily. Similar reasoning was behind the decision not to allow your character’s name to be changed — if that character had a reputation, he was supposed to be stuck with it.

Fine, fair enough, it’s their game so they make the rules. The often-mocked slogan of EQ is “You’re in our world now,” after all.

Money talks though, and a few years later they caved in and introduced a character transfer service and a name change service. The catch? Well, there was a price to pay, starting at $50 per request to be exact. A rather excessive amount for what is essentially just fiddling with a few database entries, but a lot of players were apparently desperate for services like this. A fair price is whatever someone’s willing to pay, after all… The other catch is that when your character is transferred from one server to another, he loses *all* of his equipment. You arrive on the other server without even a basic weapon of any kind. This was part of their attempt to hold on to the last shreds of The Vision — sure you could transfer, but you’d have to suffer for it.

Well, the EQ team must have failed their save vs. temptation, because lo and behold, now you can buy a character transfer with items service. For a mere $75 you can move to another server and keep all your stuff, as if you’d played there all along. The Vision is dead and buried, finally. (Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable; people’s opinions on the Vision varied wildly.)

Those people who bought the previous transfer service and lost all of their equipment in the move must be mightily pissed-off now…