To me, it’s also quite clear that it’s unacceptable that we are not allowed to transfer our Astral Shards to the new servers. Technically, this shouldn’t be a big problem. You could add a vendor to the game who sells tokens for Astral Shards and also buys them back. That way, we could buy these tokens on our old server, transfer them to the new server, and sell them there. I’m sure that’s not rocket science for a DDO developer and wouldn't take much time to implement.
The real question is whether SSG is willing to let us keep our Astral Shards on the new servers—or if they actually intend to take them away from us.
And please don’t tell me we can just buy things like Hirelings with our remaining Astral Shards to use on the new server. There’s simply nothing worthwhile to buy from DDO vendors. If you use the Shard Exchange, you lose about a third of your shards—and besides, who’s going to sell anything there if everyone is leaving the old servers?
For me, it’s absolutely clear: if we can’t transfer our Astral Shards, it’s yet another big affront to us players.
Also, just to mention it: it’s already an unnecessary restriction that Astral Shards are server-based instead of account-based. If SSG really cared about its customers, this would be a perfect opportunity to change that. Sure, making Astral Shards account-wide is probably more work than implementing the token system I mentioned—but even a simpler solution could work. For example, automatically transfer the shards in our inventory, retire the server-based system, and add an account-wide Astral Shard pool. Then, we could simply click on our shards to move them into this new shared account. Again, not rocket science—if the will is there.