Evidently it’s hitting the servers (or the billing servers that handle it, or something) harder than expected, but the (pay) service to (a) transfer a toon to another server, or (b) rename your toon is now officially up. Woot.
Once upon a time, I would have seriously done a lot of capering about regarding this, but it’s been several months at least since I’ve been highly server-centric, or had a group of friends that I Really Truly had to hook up with regularly on a given server. Instead, I have various duos scattered about that Margie and I play, as well as a ton of alts across all the servers as the mood seizes me.
That said, I could see possibly gathering some folks together in one place to do a particular activity — the $9.95 isn’t meaningless, but it would cost more than that to meet some friends for dinner. Or I could see wanting to pull some alts together to create yet more Margie/Dave duos. We’ll see.
As for renaming — I can think of only one toon I might consider (changing Psi-clone back to the original Psiclone I had in mind) — but only if the name was free. Other than that, no sawbuck-worthy regrets over character names, at least for now.
What amazes me is the folks who sound utterly frantic to transfer their toon Right Now. Come on, guys — wait until tomorrow, or Friday, when the lines die down. Really.
Now, what is kind of interesting is the speculation about whether certain servers will see a major drop or rise in population, based on reputations as PvP or RP or whatever servers — or, alternately, if those reputations will become self-fulfilling prophecies. It will be interesting to see if any stats come out of this.
We’re only planning to use it to “archive” a few toons that we don’t play but that have some neat things we don’t want to lose forever. (Granted, some day when the game winds down or we delete our accounts it’ll be a pointless gesture. Ah well.) That’ll open up a couple of slots for the only server we actually play on, which is all we really want at this point…
Actually, it’s kinda not up … yet.
And, GreyDuck, I don’t deny it’s a spiffy tool. Indeed, I’d probably be out $100 or more if, back in the day, I’d had the ability to shuffle some toons off of my “main” server (Champs) to cold storage elsewhere.