It's kind of hard to have a "real MMORPG" when the basis of the game is instanced hallways that turns into the standard raiding end game at 50 with the caveat of no real effective LFG tool.

With Real ID and Battletags on Battle.net 2.0 and WoW my "community" suddenly went from just my medium pop realm to every single realm in the NA cluster. I've made plenty of new friends and enjoy raiding with them.\ Here are a bunch of X-realm community groups that WoW features: http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/02/20/cross-realm-raiding-resource-guide/ Why can't Bioware do something like this with SWTOR? Why separate us through artificial server boundries when obviously it's a failed design if you have to merge less than a year after release?

Re-rolling would solve his/her personal issue but where does that leave the server? With one less person on a server with an already dwindling population. How is Bioware going to handle population issues? Allow people from low pop to all xfer to high pop servers then the low pops will be even more dead? Or will they take people from the Fatman and allow them to go to low servers (who would want to lol?). As you can see there really is no way to solve population issues that doesn't involve merging servers or at least moving the people on extremely low pop servers to high pop servers then shutting the low pop ones down. A Cross server LFG tool alleviates the issue of character progression in regards to individual server population because your pool of potential players for groups suddenly becomes an entire server cluster.

Yep so the servers with peak fleet populations of 25-30 will continue having difficulty forming groups. Please make this a reality Bioware!!!

All it takes is spamming "LFM ANY HM FP" in your fleet and hoping you were smart enough to roll on The Fatman or any of the other top 5 servers. Players will always take the path of least resistance, I understand that. That's probably why PvP is as popular as it is because you press a button and you're queued, (not exactly sure how Bioware was surprised by that?). Right now spamming "LFM" in fleet chat is the path of least resistance. If you feel that this is a necessary addition to running a FP, along with your singular view of being forced to "build bonds with people", instead of a more adequate LFG tool then I'd argue that your mentality is far more venomous to the SWTOR community than a cross server tool would ever be.

The challenge of an FP or OPS should be the actual content of the FP or OPS, not the logistics behind forming a group together, not building a vast network of social contacts over time that you can draw upon to fill your needs, not the current LFG tool that is inadequate and underused, and certainly not fighting with your servers lack of population.

I am quoting this post because I think it's 100% true and I hope Bioware reads it and reverses their stance on X-server LFG.

Like I said before if you look at the graph you'll see that each year is segmented. The subscription rates were dropping in 2009 (WoW's issues in China likely being one source) then began to climb back up all throughout the year 2010. Cataclysm was released at the end of 2010. Obviously the population didn't suddenly just drop or decline after LFD, it actually increased again.

Uh what? Cataclysm was released in Q4 2010. Notice how Q1-3 2010 all show an increase in subscribers from the downward slog it had taken in 2009?

That's basically Blizzard has declared raids to be the ultimate end game focus for PvE. Good news though! There will be challenge modes for you in MOP so you can be no.1 on your own special leaderboard

Realize maybe that Blizzard wants to design content that everyone can see and they already offer hard mode raids for the cutting edge players. I'm sure Bioware will realize sooner or later looking at their telemetry that their design going into FPs and OPs is more or less wasted because this game lacks decent LFG tools. Oh look they already changed their design philosophy so normal modes are now "story" modes.

You're not recalling correctly. WoW subscription rates were already dropping in 2009 and after the LFD was implemented in patch 3.3 the numbers went back up where it eventually peaked at around 12 million with the release of cataclysm before dropping again. http://www.tentonhammer.com/wow/subscriber-numbers-2012 http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

Right now on The Courageous there is 27 total level 50's serverwide and 25 people on fleet all together. My choices are: - Adjust my life schedule and play on peak server times to run HMs - Wait and hope this server fills out over time while either continuing to pay or quitting the game - Reroll and abandon my Legacy on this server Does that make sense to you terminova? The alternative is having a cross server tool that can pull up 1000's of level 50's for HM flashpoints. What is the point of continuing to design operations and end game flashpoints if people are going to have trouble forming groups to run them?

When you're playing republic on a low pop server and do a /who and see only 14 level 50 players on then it doesn't matter if you have a LFG tool that's server only. It won't fix the problem lol.

I would like to see some of these people talking about "community" actually define what it is to begin with. I'm sure it'd different for every player anyway.

I'm level 50 and I like it, currently running HM Karagga's and Eternity Vault. Haven't really got into too many alts yet besides a Jedi Knight on a woefully low populated server. It has its faults but it's a good game none the less and I feel Bioware has already made several improvements and will continue to make more

He/She meant that since they're no longer subscribing to WoW that the game is now *dead*.

Compassion for what? What do you honestly feel you'll lose if they implement this? Look WoW implemented a tool for both raids and dungeons? Did their community die? No in fact look people build up communities now without having servers act as barriers! http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/02/06/how-players-are-using-cross-realm-raiding-to-foster-communities/ I personally believe in letting people play with who they want to play with, implementing an Xserver tool won't stop you from forming groups however you want.

Why do you feel that one is dichotomous to the other?

It's never been "proven" because it can't be measured in any sort of scientific sense outside of anecdotes you read from people on the forums. I mean look at it LOGICALLY if what you're saying is true then the LFR/LFD finder on WoW should be dead and have no people opting to use it since everyone has bad experiences with it? Or another theory that might support your "argument" is that the 10.2 million subscribers are all members of this so called "cesspool" and they don't mind playing with eachother. I mean seriously? :confused:

Community is what you make out of it regardless of whatever automated or unautomated tools there are for forming groups. http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/02/06/how-players-are-using-cross-realm-raiding-to-foster-communities/ Look players are fostering communities without server barriers and all while using a cross server tool!

You also have battletags now so you can add people to your friends list (without giving them your email/real name) cross-server if you like them and want to continue running with them. If anything Blizzard is destroying the barrier that servers represent to "communities" and allowing communities to be whoever the player chooses to associate with.

You can still advertise in general for a random pug on your server to join a group. Whether or not people will choose to use the LFG tool instead is another matter.

4.3 allowed more players to run dungeon and raid content. There are still hardmodes there for people who want the challenge. I doubt the amount of people who defeated Deathwing 10/25 on hardmode is anywhere near the amount of people who did it via the raid finder. We don't know the exact reason why WoW and Rift lost subs besides conjecture on our parts.

The problem with a "LFG server wide" tool is that some low population servers will still be low population and they're stuck with hideously long wait times or not running flashpoints at all. The rewards WoW offered were just that, incentives to get you to run it. Never did they actually stop you from typing /invite playerx 4 times and running to the entrance of the dungeon.