I'm right with you; my first character was a 'Slinger, and the writing in that first chapter established her as a wisecracking, heart-o-gold type really well. Roleplaying against fusty, serious Jedi was - and is - a hoot! And then there's

You know a troll is really underperforming when you get to page two of the comments and no-one has asked if they can have his/her stuff. Dear me, young people these days.

Because in BW/EAs calculation, the population bump would not be sufficient to bring the game up to their standards, even if every single APAC player took the option to transfer there. You may disagree, but it's why they made the decision they did. Let's assume they have the stats; they have been collecting all sorts of metrics since the servers went live; they know how often WZs pop, how many FPs and OPs are done and by whom, and so on, and they've got all that info to analyse. If they had announced a super server, within a week they'd be dealing with the complaints about living on a dead server, and requests for transfers for mergers anyhow. Which would bring us right to where we are now. It's a bummer, I agree.

They did. Blam away, noble pilot!

As someone who went from mid-48 to mid-49 this very morning, just by running through the space ops, I endorse this statement heartily. Thanks, Double XP+XP bonus weekend. They are a mini-game, OP. Just something to do while your companions are off crafting and gathering, or when you don't feel like wading into a mob-grind. So, no, not essential, but a happy bonus.

You have made everyone reading this thread very happy. Now, surrender to the music, plug in your Kinect and get down like the sinkholes of Utapau. Or something.

Ahh, you say that now. But remember, a certain Panda-monk class started as an April fools joke. And ThinkGeek has been testing its new product launches as April fools jokes for years now. We may laugh (actually, I did ... ) but it's only a matter of time before we all fall under the spell of Dance Dance Auto-Hutt, and get down with our bad selves. Or Good selves. Or, if the rumours are true, carefully neutral selves. But it's nice to see a mount with some attack capability - you could roll your Hutt right over the competition. and squash them flat.

Still, I for one appreciate the heads-up.

Well, 1) if you've been playing with the name since launch, or since the launch of APAC servers, maybe they didn't actually beat you to the name. And if you've been playing under that name for so long, maybe you're attached to it, your guildies all know you by it, and so on. 2) Why can't the galaxy have two people named John? Even if one of them, for silly software reasons, has to be spelled Jöhn? 3) I f you don't like alt-codes, by all means avoid and eschew them. But they are a good solution for people who want to keep a name that they may have put a bit of thought into, and want to preserve, even as we are all sent to the Colonies (well, those of us who roleplay are being sent to a Colony, anyhow ... )

As I interpret Eric's post, we'll be offered a one-time transfer to any of the US WC servers before the merger, and then any toons still on the APAC servers will be merged by type. If I'm reading it right, it means you can transfer toons onto a different type of server before the merger, but any you don't transfer will be put on the same type of server they are currently on.

Well, you see, when a mummy Wookiee and a daddy Wookiee love each other very much, they share a very special hug ... Long story short: if you're not a mummy Wookiee or a daddy Wookiee, you can't create a Wookiee. (Also, you couldn't speak Basic if you were a Wookiee character; imagine how annoying that'd get after about an hour).

1. I could call Eric a cocker spaniel; it wouldn't make him one. I do not think he is lying; I think he believes what he says. I also think he's the messenger, with a pretty unenviable task in this matter, and abusing him won't help. 2. You have collected a bunch of stats with the aim of proving a particular conclusion. I know your heart is in the right place, but that's not a statistically valid method - it's not going to convince anyone who wasn't already on your side. BW, who in all likelihood can't release their raw data because such things are confidential, have months of stats collected with no preordained result in mind. Their analysis differs from yours. That doesn't make them liars, or evil, or anything. It's a disappointment - I wanted a merger myself - but if their analysis of their collected data says that a merger won't solve our problems, your event won't either. Still, have fun. Think of it as a house-cooling party, because that's surely all it'll be.

In Eric's original post, he flat out stated that according to their numbers and analysis, even merging all the servers would not lead to a sustainable population. That's what their months of collected statistics- characters, accounts attached, login numbers, time spent playing, GTN transactions, pop times and who knows what else - show. Yes, you can have a nice big assembly on Dalborra and say "see, we had X people on fleet" but do you really think one event is going to make a dent in the data that they have been collecting since launch, or their interpretation of it? Do you even understand how these decisions are made? Knock yourself out, I suppose; it seems like a waste of double-XP time to me ...

So much this ^^ I want to bottle it. Yes, there probably were financial considerations to closing the APAC servers. But Eric flat out stated that in BW/EAs estimation, the population issues wouldn't be solved even if the servers were merged. Added to which, you'd have had people merged into a play style they didn't want. I know people who are determined to QQ will decry the news about the non-viable population as spin, but I can well believe, given the population drift back to the US servers that has been happening anyway, that the APAC servers were terminal. And yes, the fact that they waited half a year to do anything about it may have exacerbated the problem, but they have to deal with the situation now, not the situation 6 months ago. In all likelihood, if they'd gone for a merger, we'd have had a revival of the "APAC Server Problem" thread a few months down track anyhow. And guess what the solution would have been? I spoke for a merger. I'll miss the ping. But I am not willing to call the entire BW/EA team liars simply because their assessment of the situation led to a different solution. To do so would be rude, and stupid, and it won't make a jot of difference anyhow.

Unless you like getting 2 BH comms per day and 4 on Sundays, for 5 minutes work a day, without waiting on your ghost town of a server for someone to do the heroic dailies. Then they are pretty neat.

And a pony. Also, thin thighs. And World peace. You owe us at least that much.

There was no "best" option. There were two options, both with positives and negatives, and this is the one we got. The latency is going to be a PITA for high-end PvPers, especially melee classes, and I suspect a lot of them won't persist. I've never been so awesome/twitchy a player that 1/5 of a second makes a difference to my playstyle, but for those who are, it'll be a heavy blow, and it takes away an important selling point that this game had over other MMOs. On the other hand, at least there'll be people to play with. The official word is that even merging the servers wouldn't have solved the population problems - I have no idea how much of that is post-descision reasoning, or whether the situation would have been different if they had acted earlier, but there you are. If you play at anything other than peak times on the APAC servers, you have a long wait for FPs and even longer for Ops. The GTN doesn't really work, because no-one is around to buy stuff, and casual RPing is a mythical beast; occasionally talked about, but never seen in the wild. Although, I will miss doing burnouts around the Pylon on Ilum, and farming WZ comms there without having to actually PVP all that much ... I was on BC before the APAC servers went live - you're good folks, and I'm looking forward to renewing the acquaintance.

1. "Americans" as a plural does not take a comma. 2. Don't Bostonians/New Englanders say " 30 of six" for 5:30 and "quarter of six" for 5:45 , or was that just my husband's godfather pulling my leg? (What's wrong with "half past five", anyhow?) 3. There's actually an ISO standard for dates now; YYYY/MM/DD, because the rest of the world was sick of people from the USA mucking it up for the rest of us. A lot of people also use DD Month in words YYYY for the same reason. It's only US cultural Imperialism to cling to your silly, ambiguous MM/DD/YYYY format. None of the cool countries do it.

They vanish from the quest giving console, but they stay in your to-do list.

Oh, thank the gods - I thought it was just me, with a major case of Derp. :o Turns out it's the patch. With a major, major case of Derp. That's a good idea upthread, saving the missions for double Legacy XP ... think I'll do that. Hopefully it'll be fixed by then.

Well, I haven't been DCing, or even lagging all that much. Even in highly populated areas and even in HM FPs and Ops. But gee, if you're "pretty sure" that's terribly convincing. Especially since you haven't actually, you know, tried it.

Here are some ping rates from all over the APAC region. I was actually surprised the ADSL ones were so low. Whether you decide to play or not is totally up to you - some people and some playstyles allow for more latency than others. But I'm sick of people claiming the game will be "unplayable." Especially when all they have to back it up is the Chicken Littles in this thread.

I regularly play on the Harbinger as well as Gav Daragon. The latency is in the order of ~140 MS from Melbourne on a cable modem; not as lovely as the ~25 MS I get on GD, but not exactly a nightmare either, and better than the ~250 I got back in the WoW days. I gather if you are an elite WZ player, especially melee, the lag makes a difference, but it doesn't make much of a a difference to PvE content - it's perfectly playable, in fact, it's usually barely noticeable . Although, if you are an elite WZ melee player, then you have my sympathies. So go reserve your character names. If they are taken, see what you can do with diacritics and accents. You can type them into a Word document and cut-and-paste (Control-C, Control-V) them into your character creator. No one has said that your Legacy will be reset - where do people come up with this nonsense? When they consolidated the US servers, people's Legacy went with them. Do you really think they are going to implement Reputation one week, and then strip us of it the next? (What am I saying - you probably do ... Want a Presidio to go with that bridge?) And BW/EA even made Legacy names non-unique, so people could keep the Legacy they were used to playing with.

(Other hint: do you honestly think there'd be a jot less butt-hurt whining if they'd announced a merger? In that case, allow me to sell you this fine Golden Gate Bridge. )

What do you hope to achieve by this, and what do you expect to happen? Do you think BW/EA will go "Oh darn, we've been outvoted. Guess we'll magically reverse the decision, then." I'm sure BW/EA management realised that whatever they did they would upset some of the APAC fan base. I'm sure that they know that many of us (myself among them) hoped for another solution. And I'm doubly, if not triply, sure that they knew what the impact would be on PvP, and took this decision anyhow. So, what are you trying to actually do?