Yes we all expect weekly maintenance but it would be nic eif it could be staggered...like WoW. I.E it is through the night for all zones.

ohh and by the way, you really need to chill mate

The suggestion is not as good as you are stating. If they are going to open the game free to play every Tuesday are they then going to pro rata all of the subs accordingly as why should I pay monthly for those 8 hours per week when other casual players can play for free? WoW (as in the OP example) schedules its routine maintenance through the night when most players will be hitting zedds or are too stoned to play, as such the vast majority of them will not be logging onto SW:TOR just because they can't log onto WoW.

I don't have a problem with the choice of day for the routine maintenance, as already stated we need to have a day so Tuesday is as good as any.... My issue is with the maintenance being done on all servers at the same time. USA servers are fine as the work is done in the dead of night while Eur and Asia servers are down during reasonable game time. I have a little experience in server maintenance and software installs/updates etc. so know that quite a lot of this will be automated so surely they can stagger the maintenance so all 3 zones are done during the night.

This sums up my feelings quite well. One of the other guys mentioned going back to WoW...well even that flashed across my mind last night (with a shudder down my spine) when there were <50 people on Imp Fleet at 21:00 I do enjoy this game but I do think that BW could use patch 1.2 to implement all of the 'nice' features in the world and it would not stop people leaving in their droves unless the issue of falling population is adressed.

What?????

So he wasn't one of the first to join the SW:TOR online community, it doesn't make his point any less relevant. My server is shown as Standard population, which you could take to mean a healthy community, and it is like a ghost town whenever you want to do any group events.

What a crap analogy, but I’ll try and run with it......The decision is not so simple in this scenario - So you’re an experienced miner with years of experience and you are a shift supervisor or even mine manager (one or more well geared level 50 character(s)), the mine dries up so you follow the crowd to the next town(server) but you have to start out from the bottom again as a trainee or shift dogsbody (level 1 character(s) with no gear). OR do your realising you have to start all over again in a new town (server) just think sod it I will leave this career (SW:TOR) and change career instead (change to a new game or go back to a MMO you used to play) Not such a simple choice then I think.

I don't know if the game is dying but if nothing is done to arrest the problem it definitely could be. If populations continue to diminish like they are on most servers the existing players will get sick of not being able to group or just feel like they are in a community and follow the trend and leave. You guys dismissing the OP must all be playing on high population servers because if you are playing on the lower population servers (the majority of European servers) you would realise how you could easily think the game was dying. 10 people to a planet in peak times, 80 to 100 people on the fleet. How are you supposed to do FPs and WZs let alone heroic missions with those sorts of numbers? And before you all start with your ‘reroll on a higher population server’ chants, why should I write off weeks of time invested in my characters on those servers? As well as the fact that one of the things I like most about this game is that I feel these are more like characters rather than something to hang gear onto like in most other MMOs, I don’t want to move onto another server.

All of the very good reasons why BW must implement server merges or free character transfers have already been stated in the hundreds of posts before this one, so I am just adding my voice to the cry..... Please do it very soon as the low population severs are exacerbating the issue and will make even more people leave the game and the snowball keeps rolling and keep getting bigger. I love MMOs and I am one of the biggest Star Wars geeks in the galaxy but even I am becoming disillusioned

I completely agree, they need to merge servers. The longer this continues the more disgruntled the existing players will get and more will leave exacerbating the issue. BW do it now before it is too late!

I don't think reducing the number of crew skills will stop in-game inflation, your suggestion is that reducing the number of crew skills will push prices up of crafting mats on the GTN but that does not remove credits out of circulation. The only way to do that is use vendors and that balance seems good, as well as the usual sinks (mounts and vanity items) there are vendors that sell good usable gear for credits unlike the other MMO I have played where the only gear you would buy from vendors required JP, VP, CP, or HP. IMHO