Whilst it doesn't directly affect me, the description of how to transfer a guild does sound... awkward. I can see that yielding a lot of pain & CS tickets as it stands. Surely the entity can be transferred (and players left find themselves guild-less) rather than vanishing & reformation? Perhaps merely I took issue with the phrasing e.g. 'money grab' Absolutely Bioware need to understand players' situations. As mine has no doubt been lost somewhere around page 4, I would be quite keen to consolidate the characters I have across two servers.

Don't get me wrong; I appreciate the situation you find yourself in; as you may note, I am equally screwed by the current likely initial wave. I am just.. I guess surprised that you are jumping to the conclusion that a) PvP<->PvE is impossible (note they said you won't be forced to change, not that you can't change), b) that it won't ever be free at some point to move your chars back to PvP or around again, and c) that that specifically they'd charge for. They are certainly going to charge for some aspect of transfers in the future. I guess all I'm suggesting is holding off on the complaining (not the constructive feedback though, they need to see what situations people are in) until it's actually stated there's a charge. Consider: you may find that your lonesome PvP char is able to transfer for free to a PvP server that has a high population. That doesn't help your other PvE chars, I agree, but it would certainly be a start, no? Who is to say that Bioware won't read this thread and go 'holy smokes there's a lot of players who want to consolidate their characters, maybe our second free wave should be for those players'?

Arguably, it's only an issue if the players left on a ghost town server don't want to be on a ghost town server. Some, as this thread illustrates, don't mind. Now, it's very different if we end up in a scenario where the opportunities have passed for free transfers and people who wish to be elsewhere are still stuck on a ghost town server. I also remain intrigued as to how the inevitable reduction on some servers will be handled. One would think that at some point the hardware to keep a server going is just not viable for, say, a mere 100 players.

Thank you.

You seem bent on complaining at any sort of fee being charged for anything. As I said, plenty of other MMOs not only do this, but it's not the cause of a small nuclear outcry when they do (and note that TOR hasn't yet stated as to what will be charged for, so not only is it an outcry but an unfounded one). I am intrigued at the odd standards being applied. They have indicated they're providing transfers to sort out population (note: population, not 'I rolled on the wrong server') for free. Even WoW charges $25 for a transfer. Why should TOR do differently? What is in their interests to do so? They're doing these ones for free as it is. Why should every transfer be free? What sort of carnage might that inflict?

As opposed to all the other MMOs where arbitrary server transfers are entirely free... Of course they're going to charge for some circumstances. Speculating in advance as to what and assuming that it will be your circumstance that gets charged for is just that - speculation & unfounded. By all means criticise when that is what is said, but it hasn't been said yet!

Forcing players to change servers and rename their characters just because you want them to doesn't sound like the greatest business move in history, does it?

The blog indicates that in the first wave they are intending to deal with immediate population problems they designate. It doesn't rule out arbitrary transfers in the future at all. I'm in the same boat; I doubt I will be able to move any of my problem chars at the first wave. The technology is clearly available; now we have to see when and how it's made available more generally. I'm not surprised they're not doing that first. This initial wave will be fun enough for CS to sort through.

Excellent news. To be honest, as a person seeking to consolidate characters onto a single server, this may not actually solve my individual problems in the first wave, but it's a good start for the larger whole of population. However, the blog seemed conspicuously silent on what the intent is with servers that are origin that end up practically dead. Do you actually intend to consolidate servers (i.e. close some)? The great unwashed may label this a sign of death, but frankly, TOR opened with too many in the first place. A round of consolidation would seem sensible at this point rather than desperate.

You are placing a bias on the numbers that cannot be confirmed factually. Like it or not, the growth or not of a given game is made up of hundreds of thousands of such 'anecdotes'. Additionally, I was debunking the statement that simply because 2.4M sold and 1.3 subscribe that somehow all 1.1M of those players hate the game. You cannot make that statement any more reliably than I can the opposite (which is why I didn't). Nor can you infer a given customer profile to be a common one. MMOs are by their very nature fluctuating beasts especially in times of financial hardship. In short, you're making it up. I am merely pointing out that you are doing so, not attempting to make up my own interpretation. 500k people left TOR since launch. That's the facts. Anything else as to why is hundreds of thousands of anecdotes coupled with inherent player bias. Certainly some left because they don't like the game. How many is unknown. You seem to be uncomfortable with 'don't know' and prefer to fill in the blanks with your own viewpoint. I find that a pity. You mention statistically insignificant. Please back up such statements with actual evidence. Alternatively you could continue to resort to insults. Edit: Re-read this and it sounds a bit harsh. I don't mean you personally I am merely irritated by the huge Grand-Canyon-spanning assumptions being thrown around.

Interesting reading through the thread. It seems if you're remotely positive about the game, you're an EA employee. If you're against the game, you're not, as might be expected, a Blizzard employee, just an aggrieved player, who (from the opposing point of view as far as I can tell) can't face facts. Fascinating bits of psychology. I must go make some popcorn. You are, I trust, aware of the concept of MMO population variance? Where people can quite often have the game purchased but decide for various reasons to just not subscribe currently - even 'I'll be back in a year'. WoW has this quite a lot which is why their box/digital sales & subscription numbers rarely tally at all. For example, I have a Cataclysm box on a shelf & no sub. It does not automatically translate to me never playing WoW ever again. The only major difference here is whether TOR can sustain things despite people vanishing (for whatever reason). WoW has a larger overall population with which to absorb such hits. If this thread is still debating facts, which I doubt...

What amuses me is the continued assumption that those 1.3 million players are all on the edge of unsubscribing, just because a few people on the forums are (and that's ignoring those with just plain schadenfreude). Projection is such a terrible thing... As for it being terrible for EA - I doubt it - there are lots of reasons why EA's share price might change but TOR isn't one of them. They sold 10M units respectively of Battlefield 3 & FIFA 2012. They already have the ability to print money regurgitating the same games year after year & fans that will lap said up. $70M in a few weeks vs a drop of $5M a month. I'm sure they want TOR to succeed, but it's not exactly a major dent. No, if TOR's sub numbers are a problem for anyone, it's us - the players still playing.

Transfers would have to move not only the character itself but deal with names, guild associations, legacy interactions with other characters on source & destination, and also UI to handle all of the same. After all that, it needs to be 100% reliable, because it's dealing with the very data that represents your six months of time in the MMO. Not exactly something to rush out - oh oops I did a transfer and your character's appearance has corrupted etc. However, since we saw manual transfers when the new sets of servers went live, I would imagine it's fairly close. Can't wait.

Yavin IV is an iconic planet to which logically both Republic & Empire would find a reason to go. Manaan/Kamino/Mon Calamari for a water world. Mustafar would be lovely for a lava world, or Sullust - then again Hoth was supposedly deadly cold and we didn't have to deal with that really. Slightly more in the way of environmental conditions would be nice on both types of planets... A void planet like Nathema or Katarr (it's not directly established that Katarr is devoid of the force, but Nihilus seemed to do exactly that). There is so much potential there. I would really prefer not to go to Naboo. More specifically, Gungans...

And I have none of that, and a mid-to-high range PC. The issue isn't that there are problems. Of course there are. The issue is this blind bashing that just says 'it's crap for me, it must be a poor codebase'. That is why I tend to get a bit upset when even developers (who should know better) make these statements. To the OP's credit, he is at least pointing the finger of blame at managerial decisions rather than simply alleging that the developers at Bioware are not very good. I remember one example where a big client reported to us they were having all sorts of problems. We couldn't repro any of them. Eventually, after talking with them for a while, we discovered their problem machines had a combination of a given graphics card and OS. We tried that specific combination out - and lo & behold we wanted to murder ATI for not optimising a given function call that worked beautifully on every other card & driver. PCs are complex systems, and code is not a magical panacea that somehow you can design perfectly and it'll run like a dream everywhere. Only developers fresh out of university think that. The moment your code hits reality is when you discover all the cases you hadn't considered, and find that in some cases, the platform on which you rely is just plain rubbish in some circumstances, and you have to work around that. Absolutely, Bioware have stuff to fix. Wildcard statements don't really help that. What does help is lots of error & bug reports.

Interesting... however... There's a lot of statements in the OP, but very little in the way of constructive developer-oriented content. I'm not flaming - simply stating that to me, I parse down the content of the post and read a few simple valid sentences, and the rest is hyberbole. Consider it critical writing feedback Essentially, there are two problems. First, on some machines TOR runs poorly yet kicks the crap out of the graphics card. Secondly, on at least quite a few machines/connections, TOR has a tendency to be hiccupy, laggy, and other vague over-used terms. Sure. None of that is really in doubt. The people having problems over in Customer Support are hardly making it up. It didn't need an entire page of text to say it. None of that is enormously surprising. I've yet to be in a major MMO that didn't have a line of people saying 'it runs terrible on my PC'; it's pretty much par for the course when you release a PC-based 3D application. How you handle that after launch is the test. After that, the OP gets entirely speculative, and thus of limited value (it even says 'I haven't researched your tech at all.'). Sure, blocking calls are a thing to avoid when handling networked clients, but any developer worth their salt knows that there is always a tradeoff between non-blocking/responsiveness and actual client results. Asynchronous calls are completely useless if your main thread can't do anything productive until those calls complete. At best, you're faking a responsive UI that has to play catch-up later. You might paper over the problem so people don't see it that way, but that doesn't address the underlying problem. Rule 1 in developer circles is that you understand the problem before trying to optimise it. We, as end client observers, have no real clue as to what blocking call the client ends up waiting over in some cases. You can allege it's all sorts of things, but it's unfounded speculation without in-depth research and possibly source access. Good remote clients are complex beasts, tough to test in what approaches reality, and tossing out multi-threading 101 statements doesn't impress this parallel developer. The rest of the OP about management culture is pretty much standard big business, so I am forced to ask the following: If you truly believe all this (and it does sound very familiar I grant you), rather than merely being jaded & bitter as your second sentence heavily implies, then how come other equivalently run companies aren't all having the same problem? I've yet to be in any big company where this doesn't happen. In my experience, the 'one root problem' is a simple early decision made that is usually almost impossible to undo at a later stage. I absolutely disagree that any of the issues you highlight are 'simple to undo'. Most developers are not fools, and if there were a quick easy fix, we'd have seen it. In short, to me, as an experienced developer in an equivalent large scale company, the entire post could have read 'the sky is blue, and thus Bioware are doomed' - and that to me does not compute. Much as half the thread loves to just jump on the bashing bandwagon, applying a little thought suggests that this ought to be a problem everywhere (as exemplified by your own implied experiences)... Clearly it is not. Also, developers are almost never the right people to lead anything, unless they are that rare breed of developer that actually have leadership skills. It is not a coincidence that team lead & architect positions are tough to fill. As an aside, the theme of the post is that Bioware needs management help, yet the title claims the technology is the problem. This makes the post look contradictory. Nothing personal, but this sort of statement really pisses me off. 'Knowing what you're talking about' does not translate to 'saying what I believe and agree with already with no background knowledge'. Biased much? Good developers know when they're speculating vs when they are backed up by facts.

I'm still waiting for the ability to move characters over ever since the legacy system was announced (as to how it would actually work as opposed to at launch where it was just 'we'll have this cool legacy system later on dudes!'). If you're going to create a system, months after launch, whereby characters need to be on the same server to gain mutual benefits, then not having character transfers available would seem to be exceedingly dim. Setting aside that it's a prerequisite of most MMOs and a feature I'm amazed the game didn't launch with (because of the inevitable structuring required to do it, you'd design it into the character system, wouldn't you?!?)... I'd even pay a small fee - how about that EA? You like money, right? Free first time would be nice of course. As I've said before, Bioware created the population problems in the first place; transfers enable the players to fix the problem without Bioware needing to look bad by merging servers.

It is perhaps important to remember that motivations for choosing given technologies are many, and lots of different factors weigh in on that decision. 20-20 hindsight of 'this area of your engine sucks' is the worst way to approach the discussion, because you're glossing over all the ways in which the technology works well (and this applies to any such discussion, not just this one) - usually because the poster has insufficient background to actually see those. Writing your own engine from scratch (because that is the most oft-quoted alternative) is not exactly simple; it's not like you can just go 'hey Blizzard, you did that great engine, can we have a look?'. Every time a company builds an MMO for the first time, you have a new set of developers who must pretty much make the same mistakes and learning experiences as all their competitors. That is just the way this stuff works. That sets aside that every MMO genuinely is different; it doesn't take much to diverge (in software terms) away from what works in a given engine context. I continue to be astonished at how so many people latch onto phrases like single-threaded and blow it all out of proportion, forgetting that some of the most complex advanced games of today are still running on exactly one thread. Threads are an ideal way to spread parallel work across cores. Just what in a game engine is genuinely parallel? That's a much tougher question than most realise. Sure, some engines offer multithreading for some tasks, but ultimately your input & render loop isn't going anywhere except your main thread, not even with DX11. It's also way, way, way too easy for people to look at an 'engine' and believe that does everything e.g. Gamebryo has been mentioned. It is a graphics/physics/audio engine people - that's it. Hero does substantially more than just a pretty simulation. In many ways, I wish people would stop using the term engine; it's been so grossly abused as to have no meaning left.

Character transfers (ideally free initially for a period first time) would solve a lot of this and allow Bioware to better manage this picture. They have only themselves to blame in some ways; they chose a sharded server design, they opened loads of servers to cope with holiday demand, and then the subs dropped off as they always do, and servers are quieter than at Christmas (what a surprise). A little 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' which is why I always felt explicitly allocated separate servers, especially without transfers, was a bad idea (and said so at the time as well as in beta). Merges just won't happen for some time. They are irrevocably associated with game death. Not going to happen. Transfers would let people ease the pain, and if a few shards are genuinely empty after a while, then Bioware can quietly close them and nobody frankly will notice.

I can't help but feel like Bioware just pulled a huge trolling success in many ways. Reminds me of the good old days of EVE & TomB, for some reason. Still - promotional videos usually aren't required if the game is actually doing superbly well. Nothing sells like success etc. Afraid I've not read the pages of whines; I'm still busy laughing at the poor deluded posters on page 1 who believe that marketing budget could have been used to fix the game instead. Ah, it never gets old really. Right up there with 'you improved the graphics a bit, why didn't you fix the lag!' Edit: Also I did have to laugh at the bit about looking at the shards and seeing them all say full. Ahem.

Right. They're lying. To their shareholders. Of course. That always works out so well.

Much applause for both listening, reacting, and coming up with a solution that is option based & allows players to customise the result to their tastes. Great steps in the right direction. Love the numerical timers visible on the actual cooldown skills. As others have pointed out, do think about colour-blind players when using particular colours for notifications. Red may not be the best choice for the numbers. However, that's very easy to change. Also kudos for making a blog page about this so quickly and getting the message out. Communication in an MMO is important. Nicely done. Mildly unfortunate that at least 30% of the posters here are unable to actually read it before making stupid statements, but that's today's education systems for you. <insert kids today, get off my lawn quips here>.

Brilliant video. So apropos.

Purely as feedback about this - surely an in-game poll or email to all players would give you better feedback? The forums are usually lucky if they manage 10000 unique votes, that's less than 1% of the playerbase (as advertised). That's one heck of an extrapolation of representation. I applaud the desire for feedback, I really do, I just don't see that a forum poll will reach people. Given the way these forums are, a lot just don't go near. As for the PTS - since there is no way to copy characters over, it is a considerable pain even trying it out, let alone getting heavily involved in testing, and that assumes testers care, look, and provide feedback, can do so without immediately having the thread locked, and do so often enough that they catch a patch before it goes live. Most PTS usage 'out there' is for big changes and builds are up for a month or more. I think dev blogs of upcoming changes (one video of this UI change would have told everyone whether they would like it or not) might be the way to go in this sort of case. My two pence.

The flashing effect every few seconds across the entire bar as you use skills needs to go. Flashing is used to draw attention - I have no objection to an important skill just off cooldown flashing (e.g. Whirlwind), or a skill that only enables under certain conditions and thus requires attention drawn (e.g. Riposte), but not the entire hotbar. The cooldown itself is ok, although on long CD skills it becomes hard to spot if they have become available, because the availability indication of skills is still very hit & miss at best. A proper visible timer or countdown, or instead of a horizontal dropping bar, make it a circle that turns around, would be better. Above all, make these things configurable! Stop assuming you know how everyone wants to have their UI work. I don't mean total UI modding, I just mean that if you decide to implement some new UI feature that could be made optional, make it optional.