There's a healthy middle ground between ghost towns and full servers. I've never heard of a player deciding to play a game because the servers are full, I have heard of players quitting a game because they're paying to sit in a queue. BW could have handled the transfers in a way that avoided queues. They chose not to. People have just as much a right to voice their unhappiness about the queues as they do about the empty servers.

Here's hoping they can up the pop cap to the point where we don't see queues. I still think they should have left themselves more room for new players and returnees, but if they can increase the cap it should be ok.

They made the wrong choice then and they appear to have made the wrong one again now. Instead of opening so many servers they should have run the numbers and really approximated how many they needed, both when they had too many players and too few. Now it looks like they're going to end up with situations like 2 full and 1 low pop server. It just seems as though they've never sat down and figured out exactly how many players on a server is ideal. Filling up the few servers they picked as destinations wasn't the right choice, especially if they're optimistic at all about players returning and new players joining.

Why? Their stated goal was to make several servers with healthy populations? Is a full server a healthy one? I don't think so since that makes for a queue and doesn't allow any head room for new players or returnees. They could have left themselves enough room to either fit the remainder in or make more healthy servers.

I assume you mean they want to study the activity to avoid a certain outcome. Here are the possible outcomes over the weekend: 1) Destination servers are too full after weekenders initiate their transfers, people re-sub, or whatever. 2) Destination servers are still too empty, they'll dip below BW's threshold for a "healthy" population. 3) Destination servers are somewhere in between. I don't think 2) is currently a probable outcome since the destinations are already bumping up against queues. 3) is the good outcome so that leaves 1) as the one they're trying to avoid. By running the numbers and planning they would have known before they started the process how many destinations they needed and wouldn't need a weekend to monitor. They could and should have been conservative and opened slightly more servers than they thought they needed so they could fit all servers in before or during the weekend. And you're right, there are other things to complain about. Don't even get me started on them apparently overlooking the EU RP-PVP servers.

Yes, the data is uncertain. That should be part of the model that drives the plan. If the uncertainty of the data is causing them to hesitate with this few servers left, then they didn't model the problem well enough. I would have a different opinion if their track record was better, but between opening tons of new servers after launch and now I'm skeptical that they're doing the right thing.

Really? If you were doing the math you'd need a weekend of monitoring to approximate what your server population would be? Doesn't it seem like they didn't really understand the parameters of the problem before they decided they might be able to fit all the West coast PVE servers into two servers? My main point here is the apparent lack of planning. If they planned better they wouldn't need a weekend to monitor. They know how many subscribers they have. They know how many characters each account has and where those characters are. They know how many active players are playing on each server. They have enough data that they should be able to estimate how their actions will affect the system and then take those actions. Not take action and see what happens. If they planned better they wouldn't have to decide between working Father's Day weekend and pissing off their customers, either.

The current destination servers already have healthy populations, so the only risk is overfilling them. If they're worried that the servers will get overfilled, then they already should know it's time to open up new destinations. If they're already to the point where the remaining origins aren't going to be enough to fill one single destination then they're already screwed and they might as well open up a new destination, put them all together and don their flame proof suits. They should have all the data they need to make an educated decision. The entire process looks from the outside like no math was involved. Their excuses should be more along the lines of, "we aren't filling the servers more because we need to leave head room for people to come back or new players to join," not, "we're afraid the destination servers might get too full so we can't transfer any more until next week."

The only evaluation they could be making right now is, "do the remaining servers fit in the current destinations?" If the destinations are already so full that this is a question, then the answer is no, they don't fit, they need to go to a different destination. So why not take that action before the weekend?

I agree. It appears that the individual or team in charge of server population balancing has made the wrong decisions pretty consistently. There shouldn't be any monitoring involved at all. The calculations should have been made from their own data. There is a middle ground between empty and queues where players can find groups and PVP opponents in a reasonable amount of time. That should have been their target, with some head room for new players. Once that goal was set they should have tested their transfer infrastructure and gone as fast as they could to get the transfers done. That includes working a weekend crunch for some comp time in a week or two.

This smacks of the heavy hand they've had with server populations the whole time. They could data mine all the numbers they'd need to do all the transfers. They've just set an unrealistically high population for the servers after the transfers. It seems like they don't see any middle ground between completely empty servers and ones that are so full that they have queues. After launch: the servers are full, open all the servers. Now: the servers are empty, close all the servers except two. We pay them to manage the game, they should know how populated a server needs to be for it to be fun. They should also know how much headroom they need to leave on the destinations for new players and players coming back. That should be their target, not Very Heavy or Full or whatever on the server status page.

I'm also concerned that they're gambling between fitting the remaining servers into too few servers and having to put them all in one much smaller server. I expect more rounds of transfers to even the servers out after this.

This doesn't make sense to me. Wouldn't the server push the appropriate patch to the client, even if it's a downgrade? That seems like a pretty small inconvenience to a small percentage of the player base (players who have characters spread across regions).

They could do it cleverly and suppress it in most cases. You would see people running round with only the name before the @ showing, could right-click on them to interface, but only if you did something like, "/friend boo," would it require, "/friend boo@blah."

It's ok. They'll just open free transfers off the destination servers. That's a solution, right? Or they'll just experiment with upping the population caps, which they should have done before they rolled out their transfer plan.