EU Confirmed as 3rd Rate Customer

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

No, you - along with a few other posters flocking to this thread - are just deliberately ignoring the complications that exist. It's not a cut and dry matter and more could have been done to resolve the problem in advance. The irony is that looking at the post history of those pointing fingers shows that when a problem affects them, directly, they're amongst the first to kick up a fuss about it. It's interesting how that works, isn't it?

What complications? There was no housing at the time, and the game had freshly launched, so unless you were legacy, there were no bonds pre-existing to put you on a non-EU designated server.

Yet the NA players who chose to be on Ragnarok back then for timezone or friendship reasons were bailed out by the free transfer. What about all of the people who joined after 2.0 hit, but before the mythical EU datacentre ever came to be? They were actively being advised to join NA servers 'because there's no real difference' on these official forums for a very long time, and no mods ever jumped in and said that was bad advice because until the EU datacentre was formally announced very few people believed that it was really coming. S-E has acknowledged that the lag will increase for players outside NA, therefore the decision to play on a NA server has a different meaning now than it did back then.

And yet, the dev's posted a recommendation at the start for EU players to be on the EU datacenter. it was the PLAYERS who told people to go wherever.

[Serilda]

And yet, the dev's posted a recommendation at the start for EU players to be on the EU datacenter. it was the PLAYERS who told people to go wherever.

Not going to argue that the players were the ones giving out what ended up being bad advice, but the reasoning for the official recommendation was, IIRC, based on time zones, not latency. The players who made that decision were happy to sacrifice some convenience, but they didn't realise they were also giving up their ability to play with an acceptable ping several years into the future. The NA players who opted to use the EU servers had exactly the same official recommendation hanging over their heads. Really, the only difference I see is the completely arbitrary restriction people are giving that it's still within the borders of 'NA' after the move this time, however both EU and NA are big places with very variable routing depending on the region.

Given how few people are affected and want to relocate, it seems unnecessarily mean not to help rehome a small number of them to keep the move as smooth as possible. Especially when the devs went out of their way to acknowledge that EU pings would increase.

[Fyce]

There was no free transfer from NA to EU servers because EU players who were currently playing on a NA server would see absolutly no change. Chaos servers moving to Germany absolutly didn't affect them whatsoever. Sure, if they actually moved to Chaos, their ping would likely be reduced, but that's not a reason for SE to offer them a free transfer. The goal of the server relocation was to improve the experience of EU players playing on "EU" servers already. EU players who choose to play on NA servers weren't the target of that relocation. Besides, it was their choice not to follow official recommendation, and their choice to ignore the future possibility of server moving (it's not the fault of SE if people had poor forseeing abilities and didn't know that server merging, relocating and whatnot are pretty common in MMOs).
Anyway, EU players playing on NA servers didn't see anything changing for them, so no free transfer for that way.
However, NA players on EU servers would see a significant ping increase because of EU servers relocation. So a free transfer was put in place.

Now, NA servers are being relocated somewhere in NA. The ping increase that some people may see is balanced with the ping reduction others will get. Besides, -except if a large portion of NA players get an awful route which leads to big ping increase,- the change shouldn't be as significant as relocating a datacenter to the other side of the planet. So, a free transfer is completly useless in this case.