As yet, Blizzard hasn’t been able to stop them, and one of the checks and balances they have is corralling them into servers. There’s a 50k gold limit on transferring between servers, and this prevents large gold transfers from high cash servers to low cash ones. If your guild bank is cross server, especially the gold deposit, then it opens up the floodgates of filling low cash servers with significant reserves from servers where the value of 1G is lower.

Now, if we were talking the tail end of a dead expansion with no new content for, oh, 12 months, that would be a different story. But not right now. Instead, you;’d have people who were only available because their main team was taking a week off.

You do have a great point about raiders for hire, though. I could see that.

Not sure if I’d put that solidly in the bad thing category, though. I don’t have any objections on moral grounds to someone offering their services as a raiding expert to help raid teams work their way through a difficult encounter. Would be a better situation to me than the top raiding guilds that hire out ‘carry runs’ to other people on their servers, as far as I’m concerned. One is helping touch a group how to do it themselves, while the other is just carrying one person.

I also think it could potentially create a “raider for hire” atmosphere where extremely skilled/geared players hire themselves out mercenary-style to semi-carry struggling guilds through fights they’re stuck on. We already see this dynamic at work with progressed guilds selling Madness of Deathwing kills, or Firelord titles, etc. And while it wouldn’t be quite like carrying one wealthy player to their desired objective, even a single top-level player can make a significant difference for a struggling guild. And if it’s 2 or 3 players, even more so. In other words, how much would guilds pay for the #1 DPS player from Blood Legion to carry them through fights for a night? Or to get 3 of Paragon’s healing comp to breeze them to a Sha of Fear kill? Etc.

More choices for people, more ways to abuse things.

Of course, cynical “me” thinks “well, they won’t take the motivation away to spend $25 per migrating toon…”

For example, your /trade guy would have been excluded from your group, while your cross realm (talented and likely well connected) friend was able to find a raid (or form one) on his own server if he wanted one. How many players would lose the chance to play current content because it is now easy to fill raid spots with better players? I see better and more successful raid groups, but fewer of them.

It may seem like just a convenience to you, but Blizzard apparently sees it as a potential game changer, and I agree. The vitriol over CRZ isn’t just about tech problems, it’s a we/they thing as well. Players value that small town feel. Would cross realm raids affect that? If players feel like they are competing with every other player in the game for an occasional raid spot, surely some would stop trying.

So the question is, would the game itself be better off?

It’d also be one more nail in the coffin of the server community, but I always saw that as a concession to technological limitations anyway. Wasn’t the idea behind an MMO to be as many players in one world as possible? I suppose there’s some value in a tight-knit community where it’s not outrageously hard to become well known, but that ship mostly sailed with LFD.