They actually did allow complimentary transfers at the beginning of 2.0 for a brief period. I know this because i transferred off of balmung for free during that time.
I came from Hyperion and the reason I left there is because it a dead server. A lot of people move to Balmung because it more active and there a mix of everything there. From endgame to causal and role playing. I may never get a house on Balmung but I'm more then glad to finally be on an active server and actually see people do things beyond content. PF full of people doing something also vs Hyperion where it very few. And I'm not sure what you mean by the prices, but Balmung a lot cheaper then Hyperion by miles in 95% of the MB.
There have been cases when major patches weren't available for download until the maintenance period was nearly over, so there was no advance downloading. Whoever had the fastest download speed was the first to be able to log in. SE usually tries to make the download server available at least a few hours ahead of the game servers, but I wish they'd be more consistent about that.
It'd also help if they'd include it in the schedule (servers going down at this time, patch downloads to be available this time, game servers to come back up at this time) so we could plan on it rather than staying up all night trying again and again until it works. (I'm sure we'll see threads here tonight going on and on about "can't connect yet, can you?" We get that with each major patch.)
At least this time, though, I'm in no hurry. I'll just start off the download before heading into work tomorrow, as I won't be ready to try it out until evening anyway.
Some of us legit have friends here that we wish to play with, which means we bring our characters over, or in my case, actually make them on Balmung. Sorry for wanting to play with friends and playing on a server before it became perma locked. I'll be sure to remember next time I play a game to just make my friends abandon their level 50 character.
10 am gmt
3 am PST
6 am EDT
no RMT, all towns are full of life, people everywhere, lots of pf up in comparison, marketboard is senselessly low on prices in comparison, mats generally sell for more than the finished product, interesting pf entries like looking for voidsent etc and there are lots of non-rp peeps too, just a mixture of everything
I wouldnt expect servers to be up till at 2am pacific at the minimum. Since its reset tuesday, I doubt they would allow for a quick one hour farm of new tomes before reset.