Free Character Transfer Each Week in Rift? A Bless or a Curse?

Hey guys, let me go straight to the point on this one ok... Trion Worlds the developers of Rift have been releasing a lot of information recently about a new feature they are going to implement in the game for the upcoming patch 1.3.

Rift Update 1.3 Coming June 22 with Waves of Madness Trailer Released

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This new feature will allow players to transfer their characters and guilds to another server each week without asking for any amount of money. Apparently the philosophy behind Trion World is that MMOs are about playing them with your friends no matter what, in this case, no matter in what server they are on.

I have to admit that I was a bit impress when I saw in the Rift Executive Producer (Scott Hartsman) saying: "RIFT is both a game and a service, and adding free server transfers is just one more way we can make this the best possible MMO experience available."

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Watching such commitment without asking for a single penny these days is like watching a miracle in the makings. Who knows why this developers are doing this. My best guess is that the way the character transfer works is fully automatic and it doesn't require a lot of human attention.

A lot of people who play Rift and others who don't are actually following this series of events because having free characters transfers each week is something new. I never heard of such thing before, all I know is that in some games you pay an additional fee on top of your monthly fee to get a single character transferred to another server.Anyway here are a few characteristics of this new character transfer service.

• Is free, I am not joking, it's truly free for now
• You can transfer once per week.
• Guilds are going to be able to move too.
• You can move from a PvP shard to a PvE shard and vice versa.
• You can move with your items and currencies.

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All of that sounds cool because some people are looking forward for this update, some people want to change to PvP servers, others want to get rid of logging queues and so on.

But...!

Is this a good thing, or just a curse that will break the game?

I don't know exactly if this is going to be good or bad, but I made a list of the virtues that the new character transfer have and another list of possible flaws.