Oh snap... my server so bad that... fight incoming.

Dunno, Corellia seemed arbitrarily badly laid out, too much stuff too far away from either a quicktravel point or speeder, quests set as far away from each other as possible and way too many mobs in between. Almost like it was designed to slow you down just as you see the end.

In essence (although I wouldn't have put it in those particular terms), yes. If you are open to a suggestion, you could always hang out on the test server this weekend, I know that thing has a pretty healthy population. But yea, it is a rather sorrow inducing situation.

This is baseless conjecture and not constructive. Do you have anything to support the supposition that this is out of malice and not exactly what they say it is?

If only that were the case. In reality if you look back people have a huge tendancy to ignore everything including and after the word WARNING and then promptly complain loudly if changes. Not saying they shouldn't have done it anyway and dealt with the potential backlash, just pointing out its not as easy as , this way good, this way bad.

With no additional data and not knowing what has been discussed internally, I would tend to agree with you. However those are big caveats and I am still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. However being on a transfer destination, I admit I have that luxury and my perspective is no doubt tainted by that knowledge.

Assuming for the moment your conjecture over overloading is correct, another possibility is that they are using the weekend to brainstorm and try and figure out possible solutions (do they want to open the can of worms by setting up a third and allowing transfers from Fatman and Po5 to it, which would cause some backlash from the community on other servers, etc).

You are making a few suppositions about populations and likely lack of upswing in populations that a truly risk adverse party wouldn't. As for statistically significant data, it is the sad truth that in most IT industries, it is impossible due to the frequency of environmental change to get truly statistically significant data. SO basically people learn to make do with what they can get. So they can't do a comprehensive analysis, they can do a simple analysis and make best guess projections from that. That last bit (along with a few other things that would be waaay off topic) is what makes IT different than say computer science and why some recent graduates have some growing issues going into the corporate world. It would be nice if we could get statistically significant data and do a comprehensive anlaysis, its just not likely we can. NOTE: (edit) let me be clear and say I don't necessarily agree with their conclusions or what they are doing, but not having the data they do or been in the meetings they have, I can't rightfully say I disagree with them on their face.

Thoughts like this make me really wish I knew their architecture. In a single server/role environment what you are proposing wouldn't make a lot of sense... but if they use clusters/role it could very well be the reason. Oh well my curiosity will have to go unanswered since I wouldn't tell me their architecture if I were them... thats pretty proprietary info.

A fair point, however it can be bandwidth rate and/or latency related. Out of curiosity what was your ping (latency) at the time. It is also possible that it isn't the servers that are getting overloaded but their network in/out.

Fear. A lot of time companies are so risk averse (especially large ones like EA) that they take the overly cautious route to their own detriment. Conversely companies sometimes react to user pressure too easily as well (give them what they want and the will leave us alone) which causes other problems. Its a balancing act that is easy to get wrong and hard to get right.

This really made me LOL

There is a certain amount of risk you can accept in a beta environment. For example if all of that massive population did some set of things at the same time that crashed the server, in beta that would be a learning experience. In production that is called a disaster.

Exactly, while they had some idea from beta how much the server could take, you could accept a certain amount of risk in a beta environment that you can't in a production one. So they were overly aggressive about risk analysis and mitigation. Ultimately the end result is the same but at least they had good intentions, eh.

Not saying you would, nor saying they shouldn't just do it... just guessing to their reasons.

Not to go all english teacher on folks, but the two words are nearly synonymous. Deserve: to merit, be qualified for, or have a claim to (reward, assistance, punishment, etc.) because of actions, qualities, or situation: to deserve exile; to deserve charity; a theory that deserves consideration. (dictionary.com) Entitle: to give (a person or thing) a title, right, or claim to something; furnish with grounds for laying claim: His executive position entitled him to certain courtesies rarely accorded others. (dictionary.com) Now in certain areas and such the two have different connotations, but that varies regionally so its understandable when things are confusing.

While it would be cool, think of the chaos it would cause with guilds, names, etc.

My guess is they are figuring out which servers to send each of those to. (i.e. which of the remaining servers is more full and by how much, etc) But that is just conjecture.

Do you have anything to support your conjecture that they set artificially low server caps in order to force queueing? I would be more likely to believe that they enforced low caps because they had no data on how the servers would take as many people as they got on opening week. They then raised them in january as they determined what a safe level would be. Not disagreeing with your outcome, but I think you attribute to malice something that was not malice.

slightly off topic, but having done a bunch of planet stuff and then gone to fleet... most of the lag is graphics related. They might need to tweak a bit with the number of people per "instance" of an area. There are also settings in the client that can help with that.

While you have some points, they are not helping calm people nor convincing them and in addition your friends aren't paying you to be their friend.

I would suggest "comping" a free month of service to the active userbase as a thank you for their continued patience with the transfer and population issues and as an incentive for those that are frustrated and on the fence to log into the new servers and possibly get re-energized about the game. While a month of service to the existing userbase seems like a lot in dollars, it would be seen as a positive gesture that could turn a lot of people's minds around and result in more subscriptions.

The easiest solution would be for them to implement cut and paste. Right now you can't select text in chat and copy it (frustrating when people post links to chat, etc). Also enabling right click context in more places and adding "copy name" to the right click options would help too.

I would add: Datacrons (really having to do that tatooine balloon ride another time (I have done it ~8 times over 4 toons) makes we want to cry) Social (this would encourage more real social running instead of just eselles/bt social spamming)

A plea for reason.... Ok, everyone who has been responding to the raging and trying to calm things down, please re-evaluate the effect of your responses. I happen to agree with some of you but I think we are past the point of helping and anything we say at this point will only make people more angry. The people left behind do have a right to be pissed, they are stuck in a sucky sictuation, whether or not they should have expected it due to what bioware said does not negate the fact that they were probably looking forward to a weekend of playing that they can't do. Come next week when server transfers are "done" (no, I am not invalidating you guys EU RP-PvP, I know you are in a crappy situation but it is a difficult one and I know they are getting feedback from you in another thread trying to find out a way to make it better that works for everyone) things will settle down and those that unsubbed will either find that they are happy with the bigger servers or not. Nothing you say will convince them one way or another. To everyone stuck in this crappy situation: I feel for you, I really do. I am not giving this suggestion as a way of saying, well you can do this so it makes it all better but you might want to consider (if you want to) going over to the PTS server this weekend and goofing around with folks there. It should be fun, and it no doubt will have more people than your existing servers and hopefully come next week you will be able to transfer to a bigger server. Do I think you should have to do this to enjoy the game you are paying for this weekend, no... but I am just trying to give you some suggestion to help.