Many World of Warcraft fans are familiar with The Instance, a popular WoW podcast hosted by Scott Johnson and "RandyDeluxe" Jordan. Last week, during show #168 on Nov. 8, the hosts were able to score an interview with Blizzard head-honcho (and former WoW lead developer) Tom Chilton. Since the main topic of the interview was Blizzard's newly-launched Pet Store, some listeners might have missed a brief digression―about 23 minutes in―when Chilton mentions the most "obvious" paid-service coming next; the ability to transfer entire guilds across servers:

"It's a real pain right now to move your guild from one server to another," he told The Instance. "We'd like to develop a way to do a guild transfer [...], so you can move your guild bank and all that stuff at the same time. I think that's going to become more important in Cataclysm, because we're introducing the concept of guild leveling and all that kind of stuff."

Chilton said that Blizzard doesn't have any developers currently working on the guild transfer service yet, but he believes it's "a likely candidate for the future." We've known since BlizzCon 2009 that WoW's entire guilds system is slated for drastic upgrades, set to coincide on or shortly before Cataclysm's release. It sounds like a much-needed feature; one that probably would have held numerous guilds together in the past, if they would have been able to switch servers as a group and retain all items, member data and stats. But how much will it cost? The usual price, per "individual character" transfer? Or maybe an alternative and cheaper "flat-rate," that a handful of guild officers can afford?