Petition and Request - permanent price change on Transfers

[LindaMB]

Dear Standing Stone Games,

Please, make transferring between servers much cheaper or free.

Suggested Prices:

•Account Transfer (all characters and shared storage) = $5 (or 575 LOTRO Points)
•Character Transfer = $1 (or 115 LOTRO Points)
•Shared Storage = $1 (or 115 LOTRO Points)

I have 22 accounts that I'd like to transfer from Gladden to Crickhollow. 1 main account which I play for fun and 21 alt accounts that I use for storage (which at times just feels like a whole lot of work).

When I use the Character Transfer Wizard with my main account which consists of 10 characters and Shared storage, it says it'll cost 24,950 LOTRO Points. Currently, I only have 956 LOTRO Points (which isn't even 5% of what I need). At the moment, the "Best Value" LOTRO Point package provides 23,000 LOTRO Points for $199.99 which brings me close but isn't quite enough. If I add the Best Value LP package ($199.99), 2 of the cheapest LP packages ($7.99), plus my existing LP balance (23,000 + (600x2) + 956) then I end up with 25,156 LOTRO Points which is a little more than enough LOTRO Points to complete the transfer of my account at a cost of $215.97... for comparison, if I spent $100 on VIP subscription each year and received the 500 complimentary LOTRO Points each month, it would take approximately 4 years (and $400) to earn enough complimentary LOTRO Points to transfer my account. In the end, paying outright definitely isn't the most expensive way to go, but it's still too expensive for me.

When I use the Character Transfer Wizard for my 1st alt account which consists of 5 characters and Shared storage, it says it'll cost 12,475 LOTRO Points. The "Most Popular" package provides 6,300 LOTRO Points at $59.99 so I'd get two for $119.98 and be able to transfer my account.

When I use the Character Transfer Wizard for my 2nd - 19th alt accounts which consists of 2 characters and Shared storage on each account, it says it'll cost 4,990 LOTRO Points for each account. The "Most Popular" package provides 6,300 LOTRO Points at $59.99 which I would need to purchase 18 times for a total of $1,079.82 to transfer these 18 accounts. (adding together the 3 smallest LP packages would get me closer to the right amount of LOTRO Points, but would also be more expensive so best to go with the "Most Popular" package than just buying enough LOTRO Points).

When I use the Character Transfer Wizard for my 20th (final) alt account which consists of 3 characters and Shared storage, it says it'll cost 7,485 LOTRO Points. The "Most Popular" package provides 6,300 LOTRO Points at $59.99 and the second cheapest package provides 1,600 LOTRO Points at $19.99 for a total of $79.98 to transfer this account.

Honestly, there's one character, my first character in LOTRO (which also happens to be my first character that I ever played in any MMO, because LOTRO was my first MMO) that I love above the rest. Out of all my characters, it's really only hers that I care about the data. I spent the majority of my active game play time on her. I wish I could add screenshots to the post, I'd type /played on all of my characters so you could see the difference in the amount of time I spent on her compared to the rest...even if I combined all the time I played on the other 44 characters it wouldn't add up to the amount of time I spent on her. That being said, I do understand that paying for data transfer is worth it, because I want all my data for my main character to remain intact. However, I don't want to pay this much. My grand total would be $1,495.75 (assuming there's no tax). That's almost 15 years of nonstop VIP subscription...or I could transfer my accounts. This seems overly pricey to me.


For the first 5 years of my time in LOTRO, I averaged about 6 hours of play time per day. After the server closures, I got sick and really don't play as much. However, I'd like to get back into playing regularly (at least on weekends). It'd really help if all my characters were in one place.


Here's a little bit of support history (via email):
My initial support request submitted on January 10th
Is there a discount for transferring accounts / characters in bulk? The LP needed to transfer 30+ characters is incredibly costly $$$. Is there anyone that can provide transfer at $1 per character or $5 per account or something like that? Would it help if I could prove that I've spent a decent amount of money on this game? Not just my account, but I also bought expansions, quest packs, and VIP for other people.

Thank you for your help,
Linda aka Linyara of Gladden (formerly Dwarrowdelf)

Standing Stone Games initial reply submitted on January 20th
Hi Linda,

Please accept my apologies for this delay, we have received an unprecedented amount of help requests over the past months.

Unfortunately Customer Support cannot apply a discount to transfers or offer free character transfers and we will not be able to assist with this request. Thank you for your understanding, if you have any other questions or concerns please let me know.

Kind regards,

Standing Stone Games
Senior Customer Support

My response to their reply
Can you direct me to who could help? If not customer service, then the billing department? Or should I try posting on the forums and if enough people reply, then maybe the cost of transfers will become permanently cheaper?

Standing Stone Games response
Hi Linda,

I'm forwarding your feedback to the relevant team and you are welcome to submit it on the forums as well: https://www.lotro.com/forums/forum.php

Thank you for your understanding, if you have any other questions or concerns please let me know.

Kind regards,


Standing Stone Games
Senior Customer Support

End of Support History (via email)

*Support team seems very nice and helpful, but overwhelmed. So, if you contact support, expect a wait, be patient, and just be glad that they are there and will get back to you as soon as they are able.


Alternatively, if you want to merge all servers into one giant server, that'd be great too...or just merge Gladden and Crickhollow, that'd be awesome.


To all players: Please, sign this petition by replying. I'm looking for thousands of replies. Thank you all.

Have a great day and Happy Adventuring,
Linda aka Linyara of Dwarrowdelf, Linyara-1 of Gladden, and Linyara of Crickhollow

[DavidmeetHal]

I understand where you're coming from, but there may be a MMO standard price for character transfers.

For example, WoW is $25.

https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/pro...acter-transfer

$18 for FF14

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...nsfer_service/


I'm not against your idea in any way, I'm just saying there might be a reason for the cost. it's not only LOTRO.

[Gunhard]

Is this rp comment? If you have so many accounts why not create more toons on different server especially when you use them as storage? You dont go to the shop and tell them to lower the prices coz you want to buy many goods but dont want to spend a lot.

[Vilda]

I am curious, but what are you storing on 21 accounts? I cant imagine.

Are you doing some weird project like - i want 1 million pieces of each task item or something like that?

[Frisco]

Comically absurd situation aside, transfers do seem to be priced too high. This is a fully-automated process that takes like 30 seconds. It's such a simple process that Anor and Ithil had unlimited free transfers between the two servers for a year or so. I saw people running around with -500 after their name from just spending a day transferring a character with the same name.

Then again, they do manage to break transfers every year or so, so they need to pay someone to fix it.

The worst part about such a high price is that they're financially motivated (short-term at least) to not allow free transfers off of servers that house so few players they can barely be considered MMOs. I was one of 10 players on Shadowfax a few weeks ago. On Anor, I sometimes get startled when I see another person in the same non-cap zone as me. Almost wet myself when I ran into someone in my housing neighborhood.

[Sovereign50]

Is there anyone that can provide transfer at $1 per character or $5 per account or something like that? Would it help if I could prove that I've spent a decent amount of money on this game? Not just my account, but I also bought expansions, quest packs, and VIP for other people.

I find these gems so amusing. I mean, you want a discount but you basically state that you pay lots of money. SSG just know you're going to pay them that money eventually. Maybe not now, but they're happy to hold out.

For me, the cost prevents servers from having a mass exodus or being prone to fickle and ephemeral transfers. I can't support a discount for those reasons.

[Joedangod]

OP's prices are definitely a bit too low but the game could probably benefit for a fixed price on bulk transfers, especially if that price is actual cash only and not LP.

$80 for a full account transfer is probably pricey enough that people wouldn't do it routinely but still cheap enough that actually moving servers with a dozen alts is now actually somewhat feasible.

[Laurelinarien]

OP's prices are definitely a bit too low but the game could probably benefit for a fixed price on bulk transfers, especially if that price is actual cash only and not LP.

$80 for a full account transfer is probably pricey enough that people wouldn't do it routinely but still cheap enough that actually moving servers with a dozen alts is now actually somewhat feasible.

Agreed on this. I'd prefer having a fixed price for a bulk transfer across servers (and seriously, no one can expect it to be only $5, I'm sorry OP, that's just an anachronistic value)

Agreed also that individual transfers are expensive. Personally I think all the premium services (renaming a character, renaming a Kinship, race change) are pricey.

Lastly... a merge? I don't think Gladden needs a merge (idk about Crickhollow) but I'd be darn unhappy if we were forced to merge again. I shiver just thinking about all the houses spots I'd lose.

[JH15547]

OP's prices are definitely a bit too low but the game could probably benefit for a fixed price on bulk transfers, especially if that price is actual cash only and not LP.

$80 for a full account transfer is probably pricey enough that people wouldn't do it routinely but still cheap enough that actually moving servers with a dozen alts is now actually somewhat feasible.

Exactly. And more than enough to cover the tech maintenance work (something like the transfer system likely requires a few tweaks as code is updated throughout the year). And remember, they're also likely making money on character slots per server too. A likely bulk transfer scenario is something like the OP posted above, or something like a player moving permanently onto or back to a live server from a legendary server. They're going to have ~5-10 toons in most cases they want to move. SSG could make $$$ not only on the bulk transfer, but also on any additional character slots needed.

[DKenny]

The current transfer prices are insanely high. Given the price I'd rather spend the money on a valar for a newly created character on my new server. All the more bitter a pill given that they gave us two transfer tokens for free during server consolidation, later took them away. I'd rather pay for a character transfer completely off of LOTRO and into another game entirely.

[sapienze]

Transfers should always be free.

I don't care what other games do. I don't care about the social migration. What I do care about is quality. Won't spend LP or cash for a transfer while the game continues to be a lagfest. A three second freeze because I kill a NPC and that death contributes to a daily quest. Ya, never paying for a transfer with that kind of quality.

Btw give me back the three transfer tokens from consolidation. The ones you stole from my storage.


Almost forgot. I still have characters on Vilya. I'm not paying to transfer them too. But, wait... Its been more than 5 years and still can't have access to those characters at all.

Considering, All transfers should be free anytime and all the time.

[Braer]

I felt the pricing came as a result of SSG's failure to see how wallet, shared storage and wardrobe transfers were being abused by many players to varying degrees. If the ethos is to generally ignore broken systems and deny responsibility then players can easily take that step to abuse a system if SSG show no signs of caring. I'd hazard a guess that with generally "denying" the reported performance issues for the last 6 years, pricing account transfers beyond most players pockets has protected favoured servers (whales/CM) from exposure that couldn't be excused. Though invariably, pathetically, still is.

We had changes to Black Steel Keys drops stem from a refusal to examine double dailies when first reported. Many months too late the internal rhetoric; a player abuse, not the failing to act on/relay reports. Had me thinking "Dumb and Dumberer" at the time. I still have all those unused keys.

I have to ask myself if the SSG are so intent on steering the narrative only including the lease unpalatable reasonings then why wouldn't internal communications not reflect that same pathology? Brighter minds created the game else why dismantle it without the realisation?

[spaltung]

I understand where you're coming from, but there may be a MMO standard price for character transfers.

For example, WoW is $25.

https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/pro...acter-transfer

$18 for FF14

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...nsfer_service/


I'm not against your idea in any way, I'm just saying there might be a reason for the cost. it's not only LOTRO.

i agree.

they can't just give everything away for free. because they would lose their business.


but they also need to put cross-server between all regional servers (/whisper, open world, instance, pvmp), because that's a huge issue regarding to population & playing with people that are located in different servers (IRL friends, people from discords, kinships from forums/discord, etc).

WoW gives you the chance to transfer for $25 but they also have cross-servers for everything, so, you would only need a transfer if you want to trade or use the auction house from another server (characters in cross-server open world, instances, pvmp cannot trade with each other if they're from different servers, and they cannot use auction house from other servers).

classic era servers do not have cross-server platform, so once a server has below 300 online players, blizzard just opens transfers for free from all those low-populated servers to one main server.


cross-server realms might fix the need for players to gather on most populated servers and leave behind low populated servers (most players seem to want to be in most populated servers, rather than low populated servers).

[Pewpewmidget]

Transfers should always be free.

I don't care what other games do. I don't care about the social migration. What I do care about is quality. Won't spend LP or cash for a transfer while the game continues to be a lagfest. A three second freeze because I kill a NPC and that death contributes to a daily quest. Ya, never paying for a transfer with that kind of quality.

Btw give me back the three transfer tokens from consolidation. The ones you stole from my storage.

Exactly this! Why charge for transfers? That won't stop a mass exodus. Activity will.
If people are dissatisfied with how dead they perceive their server to be, or other reasons, they will transfer if they can afford it.
Those who can't afford to transfer won't but won't be happy and are more in line to take a break or quit.

But given what I just said, I answered why they charge what they charge. It's so overpriced nonetheless.

[Strider5548]

I think the transfer costs are fine but they really should add a way to scale. The price should get cheaper and cheaper the more characters you xfer, for example $25 for the first, $20 for the second, $15 for third, $10 for each additional (convert to however many LP this equates to).

I remember when i moved 4 characters to a new server I was pretty surprised and disappointed that there was no scaling discount.

[DKenny]

....I have to ask myself if the SSG are so intent on steering the narrative only including the lease unpalatable reasonings then why wouldn't internal communications not reflect that same pathology? Brighter minds created the game else why dismantle it without the realisation?

I have the feeling that the wheels fell off over the HD debacle and it has never been the same since.

[Sovereign50]

I don't care what other games do....What I do care about is quality.

So you don't care about LOTRO either /s

[angelis33]

I do agree with linny (LindaMB)
It was hard when we had to leave Dwarrowdelf. I played with linny for many years and when they shut are server down it hurt. I couldn’t move to the server where my friend went. I was the kin’s leader at the time. So I had to base the move on the votes from kin. It still kills me. Even tho its been a few years. Sometimes I think I should have just went to the other server. But couldn’t leave the kin. Lost lots of good friends with the server closing. I didn’t play much after it went down because I was so hart broken. If they lowered the price maybe some of the player that we all use to play with would come back. Maybe maybe not. I miss you my friends from dwarrowdelf hugs and loves to you all. But all and all im with you linny. And with all the others that it would help if they lowered to price

Love and hugs
Angvoleb ODH

[LindaMB]

Is this rp comment? If you have so many accounts why not create more toons on different server especially when you use them as storage? You dont go to the shop and tell them to lower the prices coz you want to buy many goods but dont want to spend a lot.

These characters have a lot of items on them that I want to transfer (if I could fit all the items onto one account, then I wouldn't need to bother with transferring all of the toons) so just creating more storage toons wouldn't help me keep my current inventory (bags), housing storage, vault storage, shared storage, and Escrow (if it even still exists, not sure if it expired over time).

Correct, I don't go into a shop and tell them to lower their prices. I'm not telling Standing Stone to lower their prices...I am asking them to lower their prices for bulk transfers and if they want to lower their prices overall, then that'd be great too. Side Note: I have contacted eCommerce store owners and asked for a better rate and have found that they are usually happy to give a discount on bulk orders. As far as brick & mortar stores, if you do have a grocery store similar to a Kroger Signature store you can go to the customer service counter and simply ask them to stock items that you'd like to buy regularly (they may direct you to the manager for the department that handles your product to submit your request directly to them). I have a brother-in-law who was shopping for discounted toys and he happened to be in the store at the time that the representative was tagging items for discounts / clearance. Because, he was buying so many items, she let him know that she couldn't give him 50% but she could do something close such as 49% off. In that situation, he didn't even have to ask, he just got lucky and was there at the right time. Lastly, I have customers call to let me know that they'd like to buy in bulk and are looking for wholesale pricing. Honestly, I have no problem giving wholesale pricing to retail customers if they order enough of my candles. This is just to say that it's perfectly normal and even expected (as some stores are designed with a method to handle this exact situation) to simply ask or request or provide feedback. ...If any part of me thought that saying, "I demand you lower your prices or provide free transfers" would get me some kind of positive result, I would do it...I just don't think it would work out in the way I'd like it to.

[LindaMB]

I am curious, but what are you storing on 21 accounts? I cant imagine.

Are you doing some weird project like - i want 1 million pieces of each task item or something like that?

It was unintentional, but began to feel like a necessity over time. LOTRO was my first MMO. I didn't come into it thinking I'd need more than one account...I didn't really come into it thinking anything other than a friend invited me to play so I'll check it out. As time went on, I became very active in Our Darkest Hour kinship. I started heavily crafting and eventually participated in the Kin Crafting Club. I ended up in another Kin and another after that and met people along the way and ended up crafting for them too. I wanted it to be organized so I created accounts for each profession so that I could have a Kin house that stored items for the specific profession. Years ago, when LOTRO still had phone support, the Currency Cap went on sale for $5, so I called and got the currency cap lifted on all my storage accounts which allowed me to be able to hold enough Gold to purchase the Kinship house and Deluxe House. Eventually, I did also have a house for Fortune Cookies?...or something...there's a Deed that has a lot of pieces (50 or 60 maybe) so I had one storage house dedicated to it. I think I did have a house for upper level Task items as well just so people could go to the Task board every day to work on their reputation with specific factions. Oh, and a Kin house decorated with all of the Maps so people could put them in their inventory and then back on the wall to get that deed done too. I had a spreadsheet to keep track of the location of each storage house. ...In short, it became a project without me realizing it.

[LindaMB]

Comically absurd situation aside, transfers do seem to be priced too high. This is a fully-automated process that takes like 30 seconds. It's such a simple process that Anor and Ithil had unlimited free transfers between the two servers for a year or so. I saw people running around with -500 after their name from just spending a day transferring a character with the same name.

Then again, they do manage to break transfers every year or so, so they need to pay someone to fix it.

The worst part about such a high price is that they're financially motivated (short-term at least) to not allow free transfers off of servers that house so few players they can barely be considered MMOs. I was one of 10 players on Shadowfax a few weeks ago. On Anor, I sometimes get startled when I see another person in the same non-cap zone as me. Almost wet myself when I ran into someone in my housing neighborhood.

lol

[LindaMB]

The current transfer prices are insanely high. Given the price I'd rather spend the money on a valar for a newly created character on my new server. All the more bitter a pill given that they gave us two transfer tokens for free during server consolidation, later took them away. I'd rather pay for a character transfer completely off of LOTRO and into another game entirely.

I never did use my free character Transfer Tokens or even my free Rename. Every time I login, my free Rename alert pops up. I would have loved it if they also let the Transfer Tokens remain until ready to be used.

[LindaMB]

i agree.

they can't just give everything away for free. because they would lose their business.


but they also need to put cross-server between all regional servers (/whisper, open world, instance, pvmp), because that's a huge issue regarding to population & playing with people that are located in different servers (IRL friends, people from discords, kinships from forums/discord, etc).

WoW gives you the chance to transfer for $25 but they also have cross-servers for everything, so, you would only need a transfer if you want to trade or use the auction house from another server (characters in cross-server open world, instances, pvmp cannot trade with each other if they're from different servers, and they cannot use auction house from other servers).

classic era servers do not have cross-server platform, so once a server has below 300 online players, blizzard just opens transfers for free from all those low-populated servers to one main server.


cross-server realms might fix the need for players to gather on most populated servers and leave behind low populated servers (most players seem to want to be in most populated servers, rather than low populated servers).

I like your cross-server idea.

[LindaMB]

I think the transfer costs are fine but they really should add a way to scale. The price should get cheaper and cheaper the more characters you xfer, for example $25 for the first, $20 for the second, $15 for third, $10 for each additional (convert to however many LP this equates to).

I remember when i moved 4 characters to a new server I was pretty surprised and disappointed that there was no scaling discount.

Scaling discount sounds great.

[LindaMB]

Transfers should absolutely be free in this game considering how dead some servers are and the mmo experience is just miserable

I'm sorry you're having a miserable MMO experience. If you happen to be on Gladden or Crickhollow, I'd gladly group with you (assuming I have a character within 10 levels of your character).