Quote Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra View Post
They did that with the Aether/Crystal reshuffle. They are going to have to do it with this new data center. Yes some people will be unhappy and want to move back. The transfers will be free but as you point out housing is the real problem for anyone moving back to a populated server.

Honestly they don't really have a choice. The new data center has to have a minimum number of people for it to be functional from a game play perspective. They can't simply offer incentives and wait/hope people move to it quickly enough to make it viable.
I wouldn't entirely be surprised if they did a shuffle to ensure population then opened new servers in the data centers that lost some. That way you'd sort the population out while opening up housing across the world rather than in a single region, if that encourages OCE players to shift then it would also potentially open up even more housing as some percentage of those players would own houses too.

The hardware would presumably still be there so it doesn't seem implausible, they could also potentially shuffle things around and repurpose that hardware to add more housing wards.