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Name Change, Transfer Cooldown Reduced

By Keith Cross on Feb 25, 2008

Blizzard has announced that they have reduced Paid Character Transfer and Paid Name Change cooldown time.

We have made changes to the Paid Character Transfer and Paid Name Change cooldown times, and have lowered them from three months to one month. The cooldown refers to the length of time between when a character first uses one of these services and the next time it can be used. These two services do not share a cooldown.

When the paid transfers originally opened back in June of 2006, they included a six month cooldown. This was rather high as we had no statistics or data that would show us what effect the transfers would have on the game as a whole. It was rather conservative for a new feature. After analyzing any possible security risks, impact on the economy, and effect on in-game communities, the cooldown was reduced to three months in October of 2006.

Since that time we have released eight major content patches and the Burning Crusade expansion, and as the game has evolved we have continued monitoring the impact these services have, who's using them, and purpose for their use. We're now confident that a cooldown reduction to one month will not increase an already minor impact these services have.