EAI agree the problem is EA. It is a large corporation, with little interest in providing meaningful value for their consumers, only in keeping shareholders happy. The article mentioned Dragon Age 4 being "live", whatever that means, which points to yet another franchise sure to be ruined by EA's greed (though I'd wouldn't necessarily state ME's demise was all on EA. Plenty of fault goes to Bioware). For SWtoR, that means less content, less updates, less resources, until they stop altogether. Not a shutdown, just a living death. Studios like CDPR (who by the way have their own issues) and single-player RPG's are becoming an extinct breed. And for all its problems and criticisms, Blizzard at least hasn't even thought about giving up on WoW.

Going through Hoth as Imperial. Found out you can harvest (bioanalysis) Ortolan. This needs to be changed. Its the only alien race I've found so far that you can harvest, which shouldn't be if you can't do the same for all alien races and humans. Talking about strong and above difficulty of course.

On my main server, lost 4 on starter level alts. Almost definitely in better hands now anyway, though. Lost only a single name on characters above 10, a mid level in the 40s doing the vanilla story. Ironically, it was on a variant of a name I thought I was going to lose for sure. As it turned out I lost on the variant name, and miraculously kept my original name due to a starter alt on a different server I played up to level 13 with. Had to rename the alt, but didn't delete. Didn't feel right after it managed to keep that name. Other players must have been un-subbed or inactive because I don't think I could've won out otherwise.

I've read in other forum threads, folks suggesting reset/release of long inactive accounts of 2+ or 3+ years. I selfishly am all for that idea. I believe the last and only previous name purge was in 2013, maybe early 2014. They set the level cap then to be 30 or under for 120 days of inactivity. They can set a new cap to be 50 or 55 for 3+ years of inactivity. Subs would still be immune. That would release a ton of names for sure, ease the pain of forced name changes. Additionally, BW should get rid of "invalid" names or at least review and revise that list. So many don't make sense.

Agree though think it should be capped at lvl 55 and below (so after RotHC released Apr 2013, but before SoR released Dec 2014) meaning most will be from 2013, and the cutoff should be 3+ years of inactive status. The only other time they did the name purge in 2013/early 2014 (only 2! years after release). Its been about 4 years since then, and tons have stopped playing and will probably never play again, so the name glut has gotten worse. Finally, and almost as important, they should revise their invalid name policy and programming. Some "invalid" name restrictions make absolutely no sense, and were only implemented after release and to my mind arbitrarily at that.

I'm pretty much the same. Vast majority of my /played was in the first few years, before and during RotHC. I was playing regularly but infrequently through SoR, then irregularly after KotFE. I have yet to finish KotET on any character.

Bioware is probably going to continue, if in name only. After all they still have pretty strong IPs in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect (despite Adnromeda's lackluster reception). Two points though: 1. Bioware probably would've changed anyway. The founders and key personal have mostly left. Maybe hastened, if true, by what many say is EA's predilection to micro-manage studios. So today with or without EA, we'd still be looking at a much different company than the old interplay, Baldur's Gate days. 2. SWtoR is probably going to die in the next few years. Shrinking player base and server merges aside (which is a good moves to improve the shrinking population), the data center consolidation in NA points to a clear effort to reduce cost irregardless of negative player impact, specifically referring to APAC players. The conclusion I draw from that is that there is heavy pressure to keep the game in the black. But as some have already alluded to, this just perpetuates a death spiral. By cutting back on resources, you necessarily have to cut back on service and new content. This will in turn continue eroding the player base, which will in turn decrease CM sales and subs, and so on. I mean, unless my assumption that data center consolidation savings will go to the corporate bottom line and not towards hiring new staffers is wrong, I don't see how this death spiral can be avoided. And then there is EA which has shown a willingness to kill studios (BW Montreal, Visceral just this year alone) and put on "hiatus" games (Mass Effect franchise). I honestly think they don't want to keep SWtoR going, and are just looking to ride the horse until it drops from exhaustion. So re-investing into this game is a non-starter for them. And without investment, you will never be able to grow the game and increase revenues. So you will get to a situation (which imo we are already at) where BW doesn't have the personnel and resources (aka money) to create new game content (and let's for argument's sake assume good game content) because everyone is busy making CM reskins. If my arguments holds true, then, SWtoR is a dead man walking.

130+ on main. Mostly due to so many hours of PVP and game exploration. From there drop off is steep. My swtor vanilla toons drop to 20+ days at most. Its odd that they seem to fall into 2 tiers, with a few at the 20 day mark, and the others all less than 10 days. As the years have gone by, I've become a lot more efficient with my time, and leveling has gotten easier with boosts and rewards, so past 2-3 years (basically since RotHC) if I've started a new character we're looking at 6-8 days (if just doing the class/planetary stories). Generally speaking if I've done a lot of socializing, GTN shopping, or SH decorating, on a toon that playtime will naturally be higher regardless of level.

While server mergers point to a shrinking player base, data center consolidation points to a shrinking budget. This is a defensive move of a studio looking to cut costs, not a studio looking for opportunity to grow. So if swtor was as healthy as EA claims it was satisfied with, this would not have happenned. And in the wake of shutting down Bioware Montreal earlier this year and Visceral Games just this month, the trend is clear; EA is planning on shuttering the game completely, and is only looking to wring out as much money as it can before it does. And as to posters dismissing or diminishing the impact APAC players have for EA business, the opposite is actually true. In my opinion, APAC players are among the most enthusiastic and social players in ALL games. Losing them, which the data center consolidation will surely contribute to, means losing a lot of the best the swtor community has to offer, which in turn will hasten more players to leave APAC, NA, or other, until the inevitable. How is that good for business? Badly done Bioware. Very badly done.

Well hopefully I am reading too much into this. But I point to this post in the following thread Incorrect, they haven't revealed the exact way it will be happening but you have to have played actively (done missions, heroics, FP's or any other content, I believe) to be marked as an active player. In a recent interview Eric Musco stated that running in circles does not count as being active in the game. Again, they didn't reveal the exact parametres they use but simply running circles will not work to be marked as an active player. Here is the interview for reference and the moment Eric starts talking about the criteria to be marked as active: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/183790403?t=45m49s from http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=933614&page=7 The takeaway being, what is stated by the devs initially and what they mean by it, doesn't necessarily coincide with what the player may think.

I think there is definitely wiggle room in that language. Particularly if you read the sentence just before where they talk "accounts" not characters. But like many have said and Mubrak reiterated, simple thing to do is hit lvl 11 on your toons. Problem solved. Probably can do that on your prologue planet alone (Tython, Ord Mantell, Hutta or Korriban), so 1-2 hours of gameplay.

That ambiguous language worries me. I initially read this as being 2 conditions that need to be met. So if a character had been inactive for 90 days AND had not progressed beyond level 10. Some people have taken it to mean OR, which would mean that if either condition is met, then the name will be purged, which in turn means you need to level your character to 11 to be safe even if you log into him today. But this interpretation doesn't make sense, since I doubt they would purge names from character level 11+ (probably way over 50% of all player accounts) that haven't played in the last few months. More troublesome is the language just before this where they specifically distinguish , and use the word "accounts" not "characters". So the possible inference here is that there is a 3rd criterion, which is the name purge will only affect unsubbed accounts and their characters, not subbed accounts WITH inactive characters. If they actually meant "characters" as opposed to accounts, then a lot of subscribed players may get bamboozled into thinking their characters are safe. As was mentioned above, to be absolutely safe its best to log into characters whose name matters to you and progress to level 11. Any dev reading this want to clarify the language here?

Replying to OP. I think by now, common names and their alternatives are all taken. Unless you luckily created and kept a name on an alt on one of the 2 or 4 other servers targeted for mergers from the last round of mergers, you are likely not going to be able to game the system in the way he describes. The name purge will not help, as the reality is many names, popular or not, will NOT have all 3 or 5 toons meeting the 10 or under criteria. At least 1 of these toons will be 30+, probably 50, though it is likely they haven't been played in years. So the number of players that can do what the OP suggest will necessarily be very few.

Regarding /played and level, it can be tricky, crafting and GTN alts aside. The level cap was at 50 for about 18 mos before RotHC, and then at 55 another 20 mos until SoR. KotFE is almost 2 years, and KotET is less than one. I know I played hours upon hours of PvP on my max level characters in vanilla. And as the game released expansions you had all these ways to level up faster: tokens, double xp rewards, xp buffs. So its quite reasonable that a max level 70 toon has less /played than a lvl 50/55. For these older players, who allowed their sub to expire, the possibility of losing their name or maybe just curiosity as to the new server pops could make them resub. So is /played still a fair way to decide who should keep their name in this scenario? In my opinion, no, but in past server mergers name resolution seemed arbitrary. So I'll take this least worse solution.

Biased opinion, admittedly, but I also favor purging names of up to lvl 55 (not just 50) characters on long inactive accounts. Like many, if not the majority, I lost names in earlier mergers to accounts whose toon's are still stuck below 50 across ALL existing servers. In my case, in several instances, I even lost out to lower level toons, which still angers me to this day. So for example, there 5 joesmiths across all existing East servers, all are under or at 50, and then there is my joesmyth at 60+. I favor being able to get back joesmith. However, for sure, 90 days of inactivity is too short a criteria in these hypothetical cases. In my opinion, characters above lvl 30, would need a criteria of like 2-3 years before being purge eligible.