It was predictable, unfortunately. Best case is that they will institute transfers within the next few months -- it won't be very soon, however, I would be willing to bet.

The problem is that people listened when the note came up advising people to roll on servers without queues during the launch period. Servers have queues for a reason: MMO players know that these are the servers with the best populations a couple of months down the road, because populations at peak always decrease over time (people play less than at launch, some people quit), so you're starting from a higher point and then leveling off at a still healthy level of population. Of course, this means suffering through queues for the first week or three of the game while everyone is slamming the servers with marathon gaming sessions (made worse in this game by launching right before holidays when almost everyone has massive freetime compared with a normal month). If you try to sidestep the queue pain, you will get the pain later on, as the non-queue servers level off to a low level of population. Eventually there will be server transfers, but not very soon. There is no goldilocks when it comes to servers. It's either pain up front for a short time, or pain later for a long time.

In fairness, however, WoW has both paid server transfers and cross-server multiplayer play (PvE and PvP), all of which takes the edge off of being on a low pop server. I'd expect TOR to eventually have both, frankly.

I'll bet they are willing to lose a few subs (really should be only a few if the population on those servers is so small anyway) than take the huge PR and reputational hit of being the first game to merge servers this soon since Failhammer.

The idea that the fighters are hitting it is a nice excuse, but really this is quite obviously a very hamfisted difficulty balancer -- the shuttle disappears from view, then drops health before it appears from view. It's just a attempt to find a clever way to make the mission more difficult, since it is essentially very similar to an earlier mission, by having the shuttle drop health for no reason from fighters you never see hitting it with anything. If you don't like this one, wait until the 40+ missions. I stopped playing space entirely around level 40, as I am not a fan of space shooters and have no intention to learn how to play one at a more advanced level for this game.

Yes, and these will happen long before server mergers do, unless the game population completely tanks like it did in WAR.

Exactly. It basically says to the market: "Our population is capped. Time to reel in the nets and move on with a smaller gamebase". It's a failure tell if there ever was one.

Yeah, I've never been a fan of space shooters, so once I got to the 40+ missions I stopped doing them. Yes, I could l2p, but this isn't a genre I like (and certainly not why I play MMOs), so not really interested in investing any time at all to learn how to play it, really.

It's extremely unlikely that you'll ever see a big budget sandbox game. It's way too risky an enterprise given the amount of budget we're really talking about for a AAA MMO. We will see indie developers do them, but the games will suffer from the indie drawbacks, likely. You're not going to see investors take a 100 million dollar punt on an untested model. If you have 100 million lying around, go right ahead.

This was lifted from Mass Effect, pretty much, where there is a similar galaxy map with zooming. However, if I am remembering correctly, in Mass Effect the constellations and systems had names and didn't require mouseovers.

There must be some lefty keybinders (quite a few I would think!), but I'm not sure how they usually set up, as I am not a lefty. Hopefully another left-handed player can clarify.

Or you can map the keys on the left side of the keyboard -- i.e., q w e r t, a s d f g, z x c v b and so on (for right-handed people), if you don't want to fuss with using control and shift with the number keys. It's the difference between training yourself to hit two keys at once and training yourself to memorize what each of those 20 keys (1-5 plus the five sets of lettered keys beneath them) are in your setup. You can even omit WASD if you like to use those to move, although if you are using them to move most of the time, you won't be able to use keybinds as effectively, because you'll be using those fingers to move - it's often handy to move and cast at the same time, as we all know, and doing that if you are using WASD to move means playing twister with your fingers. Most keybinders use the mouse to move unless backing up (and a lot bind that to a mouse button, too, so they can free up all of the WASD keys). Normally it persists for a character, but needs to be set up again for a new one. Generally, anything that can be slotted to a space on the hotbar can be keybound/hotkeyed.

It was patched out a few weeks ago.

I voted Belsavis. Terrible arrangement, loads and loads and loads of travel and trash mobs. Just un-fun in the extreme for me.

I agree. The supreme irony of that is that WoW's current leveling speed was set that way because the game is mature -- that is, as expacs were added, the leveling speed was increased to let players reach the newer content (and the mass of the playerbase) sooner and faster. WoW certainly wasn't that speedy when it was released, and for the entirety of vanilla until well into BC, but now that the speed has been increased a few times due to having a mature game, it has set the expectation level for leveling speed for *any* game, including a brand new one. This is completely unreasonable, of course, but it is what it is. It's one of the many downsides WoW has had on the entire industry, really, in terms of setting expectations for new games.

I don't agree with forcing people into certain playstyles (grouping, world PvP) which you might prefer but which others do not. A good game design doesn't force this, while making it possible for people who do enjoy these styles. So, there should be better grouping tools for people who want to group to use. And for PvP servers there should be more areas of confict -- forcing that on PvE servers would be a huge, huge mistake in terms of forcing people into a playstyle they do not want. This is not Warhammer -- it isn't an MMO which is self-selecting for PvPers from the get-go.

That's true. I think, though, that while you can always twink your low-level alts, if you can't park them at a certain level the adverse impact they have on others is limited because they will fairly quickly level out.

But that's in there so that the weekend warriors don't get completely behind the curve. Also, if you are not logging on your ship/fleet/cantina, how much rest XP are you getting?

Heh, indeed. My other favorite perpetual misspell is "Tatoonie". Lol.

It's likely a factor in the imbalance. I'd say the imbalance is due to (1) level cap (and also lower) armor differences making Empire look much cooler, (2) big butts on jedis, (3) Coruscant sucks, (4) lightning from fingertips vs pebble spam and (5) Dark Side mayhem on Sith characters (plays into GTA mentality). It would take so many things to fix the faction imbalance at this point that it seems very unlikely to happen, really.

I think this would be fine provided that it makes the character ineligible for PvP and has a long cooldown timer for PvP eligibility once XP is turned back on. Otherwise, all sub-50 WZs would be completely destroyed by level perma-49 twinks.

Troll post, because the game encourages nothing -- that is like saying the game encourages mass murder due to the way the Dark Side Sith work. Pretty stupid conclusion. Also, the game is too mature for 12 year olds. It is quite a bit more mature than WoW is, and not due to scenes like that, but also due to the fairly extreme evil stuff a Dark Side player can do in the game. Too mature for most 12 year olds.

I hated Belsavis with a burning, fiery passion. Very, very, very irritating layout, terrible transition time, just very frustrating. Voss, which follows, is great, but Belsavis is a terrible planet, imo.

Yes, I am satisfied with its current condition at this point in the life of the game. As with all MMORPGs, I expect that it will also continue to improve moving forward.

He probably was missing planet quests, bonuses and bonus quests.