Quote Originally Posted by Zarabeth View Post
They tried the buy your way in thing, that's how Balmung got so congested.
Yup. New character creation was locked on Balmung for a long time, but people (like me, totally guilty here) just shrugged and shoveled $18 toward SE to transfer there.

Then they locked Balmung out of transfers on the website officially, but had a poor implementation that was only a minor UI change and popping open the hood would let you pick Balmung anyway.... so people kept transferring. I can't remember if anyone got banned over that, but once the exploit was discovered, SE shut it down fast.

So now here we are - no amount of money will let you transfer to a locked server.