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.

Belsavis, hands down. Why: Each of the stories I have done so far (Agent, Consular, Inquisitor) have tied into the overarching story on Belsavis and each gives a unique point of view into it and (sometimes very galaxy-shattering) revelations that go further to explain it and elaborate on it. I was particularly floored by the Inquisitor one. Great story, great reveal.

If they truly didn't care they would just open the server to transfer be damned with the consequences. The fact that they are doing this slowly, deliberately while monitoring both server numbers and the forums means by definition they /do/ care.

Just to inject some humor... A visual representation of the origin server after a few days on the left, and the destination server on the right (actually its the Mexican/US border, but still apt). http://bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com/2008/01/us-mexican-border.html

Thank you very much. Can you also (in general terms) shed some light on why servers are being chosen for different roles or why certain servers are being done before others? Is it just what you think will fit that particular shape, random, some other metric?

Point but lets be honest with ourselves, the forum sharks are already tearing BW to pieces. This way at least some people would have some peace.

Perhaps would it be possible for you to let us in on some of the things you are considering when making the decision. I think people would be more comfortable knowing the pieces/decisions that you have to juggle to make it all work. They might be still unhappy about being some of the last, but at least they would have some insight as to why it takes so long.

Despite having roughly the same land area (EU is slightly bigger) and less population (we have about 3/5 the population of EU).... yes. We could start a whole thread on the possible reasons for it (everything from US software company tunnel vision to intellectual property rights and cross country legal issues) but the long and short of it is for whatever reason going based solely on number of servers filled during launch and number of active servers and such... yep I think there are more people in the US who play the game. Now I more than acknowledge that not giving the EU some server love certainly isn't going to help the matter.

This is the best reply I have seen in a while. It acknowledges the severe shortcomings in communication but it also addresses the fact that we as a community need to use our heads more and loose them less.

That is a good point and going back and doing the math... I hate timezones. They would have had the primetime data early AM (before work hours) for your prime time, so I have no idea why no EU love.

Isn't that part of what got us in this mess... the community demanding more servers during launch.

I have no idea even where that came from. All I was implying is they have some decisions to make about what servers go where, in order to make that decision they need data. As a side effect of timezones (damn our world being round and all *rabble*) that means the data they need to analyze is happening now... which means its not done collecting.

My thinking is they did a bunch of server transfers yesterday your prime time. They need comprehensive prime time data to figure out a few questions that still remain open after the move. So my guess (entirely a guess) is that at the end of this EU prime time they will start picking apart the data to get their answers and only after that will there be more EU moves (so TLDR, my guess tomorrow first thing).

Off the wall guess, they are using numbers from last night's US prime time to figure out the servers post move for today and I am guessing gathering the EU primetime numbers post move for moves tomorrow. They made a lot of changes that would have to be observed during primetime to draw conclusions and being on the other side of the world from them would have some drawbacks since it takes time to pick apart data. That's not to minimize your concerns, but add onto the fact that they are starting to struggle with what to do with the RP-PVP servers (he posted in another thread looking for feedback on one of them) and my guess is maybe late today, but more likely early tomorrow.

He said no such thing. He said that they are fine tuning and that the servers would come slower but not that they were only doing a few more, just that they aren't going as fast as yesterday.

Ah good point I did assume you meant virtual OS As for the overall point, I would guess that in addition to database clusters (one on east coast, one on west) or some sort of database cache type system that each of the "worlds" also has one or more application servers to do the heavy lifting. Those would likely be pretty memory intensive (you don't want to track all this stuff on disk or solely in database as you will quickly become IO bound) and hence pretty difficult to virtualize. If you did the infrastructure such that multiple worlds could run on a single server you would probably start to run into resource problems pretty quickly. Dunno for sure, but my guess would be they would keep it separate but again I have no clue how they do it and my experience isn't from the game world (mostly enterprise level, healthcare and some higher ed work) so I have no real perspective.... which obviously doesn't keep me from babbling about it EDIT: of course now you have me curious about how they have it set up

You participated in sports, geesh.... Jock. j/k

While a coherent point, I would disagree with the asseveration that the majority of stuff is virtualized. Systems that require a very large amount of memory are inefficient to virtualize, so frequently large database and application servers actually run bare metal. Front end webservers and things like DNS and the like are becoming increasingly virtuallized but no matter how much VMWARE and Microsoft would wish it, the actual implementation rate of virtualizing large resource systems will probably never happen. Basically when you are using multiple clustered servers for performance reasons, trying to add the money and overhead to virtualize them is silly. That being said, I have no idea (and probably no one but people who work for them does) about the specifics of their infrastructure and what you say might be quite possible.

This is about a single fringe case, where there isn't another server they /could/ transfer keeping the restrictions in place. As for "not taking kindly to RP" the only I can say is wow... people need to chill, if someone else having fun near you doing something you aren't doing pisses you off, you are doing it wrong.

The day isn't over

To reframe it slightly what do you have to loose? You move your character, possibly rename and see if you like the new server, if not you are already unsubbed and you can log out and do something else. I do think it would be nice once they finish with this process if they open FFA transfers between their destination servers, but I think this step is necessary before they do something like that or people will end up in a weird loop where folks vacate a server just as people come in thinking the server still has the people there. Reduce servers then FFA makes a bit more sense IMO.

How about -> PvP -> RP-PvE -> Joined RP-PvP (*) (*) by Joined RP-PvP I mean take the three EU (I know there are language issues) and join them into one -or- provide the option to transfer to a US RP-PvP (not ideal due to latency, but some people would consider it worth it, probably east coast to lessen the latency as much as possible).

Actually there is a naming policy and it is enforced. The policy: http://www.swtor.com/legalnotices/rulesofconduct (there is a section on Naming) And if you report an inappropriate name they do indeed enforce it. Now do they go through and manually review the names themselves, no. But if you started reporting them would you see a lot less of them, yes.

Definitely no on this. It would break stories, create issues where certain things that were not available before (datacron and the like) are giving additional bonuses, and so on. And if you start to say "who cares about story" consider that @SWTOR's chosen bio is: "Play STAR WARS™: The Old Republic™ and forge your own Star Wars™ saga in a story-driven massively-multiplayer online game from BioWare and LucasArts."

They answer that right in the article this is the discussion for. Yes.