Not sure for the multiplayer part. Though 100% percent certain for the game as service one as it's THE reason the game was put under a major revamp. If the multiplayer part is indeed that big, it could become the killing blow to SWTOR for sure, especially with Anthem already capitalizing in the multiplayer part.

Could work provided they have enough players within an acceptable range of you average ping time. Now about smart players use 3rd party tricks to increase their ping time before the match then immediately go down to way higher latency when in the PvP match? Now say you manage them, how about people with inconsistent latency or spikes, how this management is going to affect them and the others with them?

Keith, To be totally transparent this post did raise an eyebrow. The mention of reducing the footprint and investing in new hardware does not look that good. As to put things into context the Ping latency is the network killer with real time multiplayer games. Hence why initially SWTOR did not allow guilds to be formed worldwide but geographically localized. I was there when it was announced on the forums and you guys had to step down to explain how the latency would be a major issue. Remember at launch we had whole threads about client responsiveness. It obliged you to tweak animations and networks throttling. Today, even with a good ping, the game does not feels as responsive as say WoW in combat. Now guess you have aging servers and most probably core based BD licences which costs an arm and a leg. So the move looks more like an evergreen situation. All in all, apart the cost of the project to evergreen your servers, you could have either kept the same bill with way more capacity, or keep the current capacity and pay less, all that without closing the West cost Data Center. Back to the network latency: in the call for the cost reduction BioWare/EA accepted to deliver a less optimized service to a whole part of their current and future customer base. Anybody a bit knowledgeable in TCP/IP knows there's so much you can do with ping latency and TTL when it comes to distance. Don't think there's anything you can really do against that, especially in two weeks. Top that with the fact that at no point nobody specifically explained how to report connectivity issues. Without detailed reports, with client based network information, I don't see what you're going to do with those reports at all but send back a polite answer. In the end we sit with an acceptable loss that we can guess was weighted against the cost of maintaining a data center in the west coast. Let's step back to when you took over the position as Lead Producer for SWTOR and look at all that was done for the game. Initially the communication increased drastically, for the better, till now where we seldom hear from you. There's still no two way communication as the team keeps digging into directions the players don't want or feel like their feedback isn't taken into account -CXP and classes tweaking being the main point of disconnect-. Content wise we are way way far from any other AAAA MMO, both the quantity and the quality are lacking. Bugs wise it's getting worse, or at least it feels as such. We are getting more major bugs than before and doesn't look the old ones are being taken care of that much. Seriously feels like Anthem cannibalized your team and the job opening page looks very thin In regards of the prioritization it does not look that good either: we got changes nobody asked for (ex: new AoE reticles or inventory UI) and wanted to get rid once live. Yet we are still waiting for improvements for mouse over healing, group/op frames buff/debuff/procs, guild UI. Finally in terms of roadmap and future of the game we can't feel the vision, the drive. Apart a couple of plasters here and there we have nothing. We can feel you are trying though It look like you don't have the budget to properly drive this game. Some of us even wondered whether the mention of reducing the footprint was a hint to tell us that you are stuck with a low budget. So in the end can you specifically tell us if there's anything good at the end of the tunnel? In the contrary guess expectations and hope have to be adjusted. Respectfully, D

Want to make the game great again? To be blunt the game never was great at all (remove the IP and think again.) Apart the fully voiced over quest all other MMO did (and still do) better, from combat to UI. Speaking of story you have way better story telling in the Secret Wolrd and LoRO. In regards or dialog, AoC first 20 level are also much better, only that your character doesn't speak. Now before everything else unless a massive amount of cash ($$$) is invested in the game, it will never thrive. A new specie, more customization options, curved lightsabers, Nihilus-Mask rework are not key factors to make the game shine. They are not even good enough to keep existing players. In regards of the story rest assured they do know they messed up. Again it's a matter of budget and time to market. They had to cut comers and make one fits all story. Would they have the budget they would have continued the class and companions story.

There ya fixed. *Bugs apart.

Slight reskins of existing assets. BTW not impressed by this X-Pack especially as it takes them 2 years to built it. Others MMOs (but SWTOR) do much more.

Guess it was a direct aim against SWTOR and there"s nothing you can say to argue against it, unless your game is turn by turn based.

Tis Friday, let's have some fun: SWTOR : Current - RIP : Report Inconsistent Packets Next - ROP : Return Our Ping

Go back a bit in time and compare it with SWG NGE debacle. They thought they would earn much more players than those they would loose. We all know how it ended. Now consider some of the top execs and designers still around in SWTOR did have a seat at Sony.

Mostly all new companions, especially the CM ones are broken and less efficient than the original ones. . Highest DPS : Shae Vizla (major bonus to her AOE skill) Best heals Z0-0M (hidden AOE bonus) Strongest tank Dr Lokin (Gap closer skill with no cooldown) Source

Mount: all the Prinawe mounts https://torf.mmo-fashion.com/prinawe-collective/

There ya fixed!

Funny the east coast server is located in San Jose : clicky And the other one in Ireland: clicky

As mentioned by others, sounds more like you wanted people to subscribe to keep their characters names. If not please explain to us why not moving the West Coast server would have prevented to log in immediately? Then hopefully you had test servers up way before the merge and did test the latency. So you knew pretty well in what trouble you were throwing the players into, ahead of time. Interesting enough, you don't even provide specifics of how to report the issue, meaning 99% of the reports will be useless. All in all you know you can't do zilch, nada, nothing about the latency because it just follows the laws of physics. It's just bad PR management to its best. BTW I'd love to be proved wrong and hearing how you're going to fix the latency. Many companies I worked for would be more than eager to learn that. We would all do BIG BUCKS together, don't be shy!

Honestly, What The Heck can you do to reduce the latency over two weeks, when I saw top notch network engineers requiring months of efforts and huge budgets to improve it for trade market feeds*? Please enlighten us, cause for now feels like misinformation.

Joke aside, means too many angry threads to me.

Shh don't say you are playing on the devs families and friend beta server, the one you can activate chat bubbles with... .ini tweaks The following can be added to youraccountname_Account.ini in C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\SWTOR\retailclient\ If chat bubbles are not in during Early Access you should be able to force them. Social_UseOverheadChat = true Social_ChatOverSelf = true

Context : EA Shuts Down Visceral Games Good thing is SWTOR is well set in regards of game as service, only issue being it doesn't sell content but re-skinned assets, which kills it slowly but surely. If you step back a bit, not long ago, the business model was to sell subs and then maximize the profit with RMT. The new trend (in SWTOR) is to make money with RMT and eventually make people pay a sub. Why? Because there's not enough new content, nor bug fixes, nor the quality is good enough to justify a subscription anymore.

Choosing the animations client side, now that's interesting. Guess you can tie some CC fees to that. I know I would pay to get the old one.

The network handling of the game has always been quite problematic especially clients syncing. It could indeed help if they fix it, specifically the server part. Not sure they have the budget though. Now as you're saying : You can't really reduce ping time due to distance, the more the distance and the hops the more the delay. What one should read in Keith post is They wanted to diminish the costs by reducing the servers footprint/licenses and the number of datacenters - including FTE reduction for the people maintaining them -. The expected lag, while not optimal is acceptable (for them). The expect loss of players should be compensated by the reduced costs. Now as to manage expectations, if you expect the lag to be THAT reduced, especially in 2 week, you are delusional or misinformed. Finally don't be fooled, such a move takes eons to plan and realize. When they announced the server merge they perfectly knew it was to be consolidated in one location. It was on intent they did not communicate that information.

Prevent hair clipping but hair doesn't show...

To be honest, I don't care anymore. Don't have any faith nor even hope left. I'm just subbed so I can still sell and buy decos for my Strongholds and eventually help my guild healing in OPs.

Couple of things to highlight: BioWare was sold to EA for a premium based on the future success of specifically SWTOR. Soon enough EA realized the game was far from being ready and not only invested a **** load of money into the game but accepted to delay it by roundly one year. One + year later EA realized again the game was not ready to go live but they had to push it out of the door. In the meantime BioWare did a really bad job at managing the game development. They even admitted it was too big for them to manage and messed up. Long story short story it ended with the Death Star meetings in which developers would drop into tears... Soon after launch BioWare realized the players burnt the content in a bit more than a month whereas they thought it would take 6 months to a year for most. There was no end content, the game was truly lacking core content and features (like a group finder). Top that with the fact the devs did not listen to the players and kept thinking they knew better than them what their truly needed. So while we can agree EA pushed the game out of the door, without them BioWare would have sunk as lacking the cash flow to finish the game. Now let's say you are an EA exec and not only see how abysmal are the subs reports but also the bad press the game is getting topped with management that certainly don't make you feel comfortable the game could become better at all: would you invest the 20+ millions required to bring this space turd to a better level? Or would you keep milking players on reskinned assets and invest the money in new titles?

^ Post of the year.

You are not supposed to fart under your vestments...