@Devs: Please allow us to travel at will between servers.

[Alhanelem]

That depends on you, not on the fact that you were in different linkshells. I never had the slightest problem playing with anyone on my same server, whatever linkshells they were on.

Then you were a very lucky guy or online 24/7. The rest of us who have life schedules face problems like this rather often. "That depends on you" is a meaningless statement. It depends on either of us to make the exact same kind of decision that you have to make in transferring servers. Of course it depends on me (or him). If he didn't leave his LS, I would have had to leave mine- A compromise had to be made somewhere if we wanted to play together.

People that play on different servers do have a physical barrier preventing them to play together unless they create a whole different character or abandon all their friends on their home server to join the other one.

People in different linkshells/guilds do have a physical barrier preventing them to play together unless they break that barrier (leave the guild) or find some way to schedule time to play around both guild's events. It's the same concept- an issue of some sort gets in the way of friends being able to enjoy the game together.

Apples to Apples. It's the exact same kind of situation, and no amount of saying "apples to oranges" will change that.

If it was that expensive, The Secret World wouldn't have it. Funcom is a much smaller company than Square Enix, with a much smaller development team, and a lot less resources and smaller budgets.

With a much smaller customer base as well.
If their game (which i've never heard of) was as big as WoW, yes it absolutely would be expensive and difficult to implement.

[Abriael]

Apples to Apples. It's the exact same kind of situation, and no amount of saying "apples to oranges" will change that.

A situation in which you only need to make time in order to play with someone is undeniably completely different from a situation in which you have to level an entire character from scratch or to abandon everyone else between your current friends.

So yeah, Apple to Oranges, but feel free to continue denying it. It's not like it's not evident that you're grasping at straws anyway.

With a much smaller customer base as well.
If their game (which i've never heard of) was as big as WoW, yes it absolutely would be expensive and difficult to implement.

You already demonstrated that you know nothing about the topic (according to you this solution didn't even exist), so I'm sorry if I won't exactly take a cost assessment from you

Server systems are modular. The bigger cost is in creating the core system, not in adding more modules to fit a higher population.