I know, for a fact, you're making this up, as I was online the time you state (on Space Slug, the server I tried to reroll on, but ran out of fun. I was in vent on Saturday with my Razor guild, talking about server pops. The Razor hasn't hit heavy (that anyone who's been checking has noticed) this year. [url=http://www.torstatus.net/the-razor/history/7d][/url] http://www.torstatus.net/the-razor/history/7d Sort that list by population, and start around the middle of page 5, and see how many times those servers ever hit heavy. You'll find there are about 40 to 45 servers that in the past week have not hit heavy once, and more than a few that have not hit standard once. *If you didn't mention PST, I'd think you were talking about EU servers, but you're clearly not, because at 9pm PST it's like 5am in Europe.

This is me, too. Lack of modern MMO features, which at this point in my gaming experience at the top is server transfers (to get off a dead server), is the reason I've unsubbed. I just suspect by the time these features are all implemented, I'll be enjoying one of the many 2012 releases I'm planning on buying, and the window of opportunity for me to be a long-term subscriber to this game will have passed. But I do know if none of these modern MMO features are added, I'll never be back.

Meh, I just want to be on a non-dead server, be it merge or transfer, I don't care - but I'm not against either. With the answer in the Q&A giving no timeline other than "soon" for transfers, I take that to mean it wouldn't be by the end of the 2nd paid month (mid-March). For myself, a person who's played MMOs for years, but not "in love" with TOR, that likely means the window of opportunity to have me as a long-term customer has passed. There are a lot of issues with this game, but the one that sent me to the unsubscribe button (6 or so days remaining) was being on a dead server, and my reroll attempt that proved to me that this game isn't very repeatable when you feel "forced" to (by wanting to get my characters off a low pop server and being unable to). So I'm not subscribed for paid month #2. By the time paid month #3 rolls around, I'm sure I'll be playing Mass Effect 3 (or it will be very close to release). By the time I'm done with ME 3, I'm sure I'll be trying 13-2 (I know it's out now, but I haven't purchased it yet). At some point Diablo 3 and GW 2 are coming out this year. I can't see myself choosing to try TOR again over playing any of those games (and as I'm a recent PS3 purchaser, and played Demon's Souls only this past fall, I still have Dark Souls waiting). For people like me, the window of opportunity was about 2 months. In those 2 months I've yet to see the launch version of the game improved with any meaningful feature, but I've seen my "very heavy" on launch day server drop to low standard. I know very heavy on Dec 20 and very heavy today mean different things, but I didn't know that on Dec 20th. A merge or a free transfer before my sub ends would have kept me. It's clear it's not happening. Adios!

Shotgun-clavy: When are character transfers going to become available? And are server transfers a real possibility? Daniel Erickson: Character transfers between servers are definitely going to be available in the future and we’ll announce details as soon as we have firm dates. Not the answer I want to hear, but at least someone from Bioware finally answered this question (that has been asked since before the official launch). Since there's no date (or even a vague date) on this or the dual spec question, I feel I've made the correct decision to unsubscribe. But I thank you guys for answering this question, finally.

Read my whole post. I can 95% tell you if I'm on a winning or losing team (assuming everyone in the zone is trying) based on who's on each team. But I'm also on a low pop server. Again, read my whole post. I'm not saying I agree with what "he" does (as if you read my whole post you'll see my point of view on this on MY server only, which is my only experience in TOR), but right now the game does NOT punish him for leaving. Maybe it should (and I would agree that it should) or maybe how it is now is fine, but right now "how the game is intended to be played" is that there's no punishment for leaving a warzone, so why not leave?

The fact that there is no penalty for leaving means that there's no reason not to, and Joe probably isn't wrong that his team will lose if they're 2-0 down after 5 minutes. On many servers (the low pop ones), you can tell who's going to win just by looking at the rosters. If you don't know it, you can do a /who The Pit and see every character your faction in the Huttball zone. On low pop servers, this number is never higher than 16 level 50's. You can look at all the players in the zone, and look at who's on your own side, and then deduce the other side. Like any server, low pop servers have their hardcore fully geared 4 man premades, and their people who PvP "casually" - meaning they do it to have fun and probably to complete the daily. If you know who the geared 24/7 pvpers are on your server, and you see they're all on the other team, you know you're going to lose. I'm sure that's what Joe is doing (anyways, I've only ever left 1 warzone. I waited 5 minutes and requeued and got the same team in the same huttball, and somehow we actually won, so I felt really bad about leaving and haven't done it since. that being said, I learned later that we won because the other team "let us". the single 4 man premade 50's in vent on my server found that if they won every single match, people stopped queuing and they didn't get ANY matches, so every third match they don't really try. I have also seen them offering to PAY level 50's to queue in /general on the Fleet when they feel they won't get their daily 3 wins because there's not enough queuers to get a warzone going. but that's life on a low pop server.)

My deal breakers (and I've unsubbed, so my deal has been broken): 1 - Low population servers - and no way to get off of them except to reroll. 2 - Complete lack of features that MMOs released in 2011 should have (dual spec/useful LFG tool/modern UI, etc) 1 on top of 2 was enough for me to unsub - free transfers to high pop realms or a way to group with people on other servers would have me still being a subscriber. As for gameplay issues: 3 - PvP design is pretty bad - bordering on atrocious. 4 - Auction house needs a complete revamp. 5 - Crew skills (apart from Biochem) were useless at 50 at launch, and now Biochem has been nerfed down to where the rest are. There should be a reason for any skill to be useful at 50, not only during the level up process. 6 - Companions completely disappear (in a story sense) once you reach max affection with them, and simply become hunter pets that can craft/run missions. Companions (along with voiceovers) were the BIG INNOVATION that Bioware is offering with TOR, and both become completely non-existant at 50. This game IS WoW circa 2006/2007 with companions and voiceovers added. But at 50 it's just WoW circa 2006/2007. That's...not good. 7 - Orbital stations. There's more, but pretty much for me only 1 & 2 are deal-breakers (and mostly only when they both exist together, which they currently do). And they're deal-breakers enough that I have unsubscribed.

I solved the problem myself by unsubbing. I have about 5 days left on my account, but have not logged in since last Sunday morning (I'm only posting from work because I have no work to do at 4:15 on a Friday afternoon, but I'm still getting paid). There are other reasons why I unsubbed, but the complete lack of fun rerolling (I have a 50 jugger tank and 30 healing sorc on a low pop server, and now a 15 jugger tank and 15 healing sorc on a high pop server) was the last straw that pushed it over the edge. I have no desire to play a non-lightsaber character, and I have no desire to play Republic, so these are the only 2 characters I actually want to play - so please don't tell me to play BH or IA or anything Republic. The reason re-rolling isn't fun is quite simple - there is only 1 quest path (not including your class quest). I've done every single player quest in the game (not including the planet quests on Corelia and some of the bonus series). None of them were memorable. So it was either stay on a low pop server or reroll, and I tried rerolling, and enjoyed Korriban again. But that was it. So I unsubbed. If there were free (or paid) transfers, or cross-server PvE queues, I doubt I would have cancelled. But I also never saw more than a 5v3 in the Ilum PvP area, and my low pop server likely will never have interesting battles on Ilum. I kind of wanted to see what mass PvP was like before I stopped, but I honestly can't see rerolling being at all fun (having re-leveled both classes to 15). Maybe the 10 questions that Bioware deigns to answer in their Q&A today will give hope, but the mere fact that they're only answering 10 tells me they really aren't interested in actually answering the community's questions, but are interested in a PR move that "demonstrates they listen to the community". Actually that's the primary reason I'm reading the forums today at work - secondary being I don't actually have any work to do - to see what questions they actually answer, and hoping they're questions that matter to me.

Well, Bioware may feel the game is expanding, and perhaps it is. But there are more than a couple servers that are doing the opposite of expanding. And as there is no cross-server anything in this game, that's simply NOT GOOD for people on those not expanding servers. As a selfish gamer, I care most about whether what I'm doing is "fun". Playing on a low pop server (and standard has a HUGE range - just because a server is listed as "standard" does not at all mean there's even enough people to do a single level 50 warzone) is not fun. Rerolling and redoing everything again is not fun. Unsubscribing is "less not fun" than either of the other 2 options.

Yeah, people who say "there's no problem" because their own server isn't low pop don't understand that many people (myself included) choose option 3 from those above. I tried option 2, but after 3 days I realized I didn't want to do the same things again, and just took #3. I seriously doubt I'm the ONLY person to choose 3.

Well I took being on a low pop server, and no info from Bioware on transfers/merges as a sign that I didn't want to play a dead MMO. What I mean by that is that no matter how populated the game may be, if the server you are on is low pop, the game is, to you, low pop. I tried rerolling on a heavy pop server. So much better. But I only got to 15 before I realized I wasn't having any fun rerolling (and wasn't having any fun at 50 on a low pop server), so simply unsubscribed. I have like 5 days left on my subscription. If, a week ago, I had been able to transfer my 50 and 30 to a heavy pop server, I wouldn't have unsubscribed. I would have even paid money to transfer them. But the only 2 options I had (continue on a low pop server or reroll and redo everything on a heavy pop server) weren't appealing enough to me to keep my subscription. Obviously the low pop server wasn't the ONLY issue I have with the game, but it was the tipping point. Bioware simply should have been prepared for this, and they aren't, and is on the long list of things they seemingly haven't learned from other MMOs.

I didn't unsub because of the awful PvP system here (though it IS awful), but I have unsubbed (being stuck on a low pop server with no hope of that changing, and finding that the content isn't really good enough to do all over again on a heavy pop server made my decision for me. But the reasons I think the "PvP sucks" here in TOR is because it is not at all innovative. It relies on PvP gear (which in every MMO that has PvP gear, a big chunk of active PvPers have always hated because they think, like I do, that PvP should be skill v skill, not gear v gear - which is just a translation of how much time you've put in) to keep you playing. That gear grind, alone, stops many people from participating due to the "new level cap fodder" syndrome. That syndrome is actually worse in TOR because they don't offer any sort of crafted gear at all. Add in that the initial system made it much too slow to get tier 1 pvp gear, to the point that it was faster to gear tier 2 first, even though they are awful RNG bag drops, means that someone at Bioware didn't do any number crunching to figure that out (took them 6 weeks to alter that?). I would like to talk about Ilum, but I never saw more than 5v3 on my dead server. And even that lagged the hell out of me. I did see 7v0 crate farming a LOT, though. Joyness. But the complete lack of planning for unbalanced factions meant Ilum, even if it performed well, was always going to be bad. The fact that it doesn't perform well and promoted objective trading from day 1 meant that the designers did a very poor job of designing the only open world pvp area in the game (for those not on PvP servers). I didn't unsub because of the awful PvP systems, but the system here is worse than WoW's, Rift's or Warhammer's, and apart from Huttball being possibly same-faction, there's not a single innovation in the system. That's pretty hard to accomplish, but they did it!

WoW is WoW, yes. SWTOR is WoW circa 2006 or 2007 (probably when the design docs for SWTOR were being written - that's why there are pretty much no features that other MMOs have developed since that time in SWTOR). The only real difference is lighstabers and blaster pistols.

This is one thing I don't quite understand about servers and the "modern era". I never played Eve, but I know they have 1 server, and regularly have 30k + concurrent online players. Guild Wars is a 100% instanced game, even so much as instancing main cities. TOR seems to have had an opportunity (if they would have been innovative) to have very few, or even 1 per playstyle (PvE, PvP, RP PvE, RP PvP) servers. We are on the FLEET. Why is there only 1 ship we can land on..on the fleet? Everywhere else we go, we get instanced, or if a particular planet hits a certain point, there's another version of it created (so you can have Balmorra 1 and Balmorra 2 in the current game, for example). Why not just make 1 (or 4, in the case of the different playstyles) server, and have multiple ships in the Fleet? Say there are, currently, 200 servers - just a guess. I know that you can have 200 on one Fleet right now (and probably more), but most servers don't have that many (and many have under 50 in their prime time). Just combine all "servers" into one server, but have multiple named Capitol Ships that you pick one to "call home". Have however many capitol ships you need so one single one never crashes, and don't have the chat cross each, but allow people the opportunity to change their home base. So, for example, a guild may form, and choose "The Defiant" as the fleet ship they meet on, and mark that as "home". But they actually would be able to travel from one ship in the fleet to another to recruit, or whatever, but would have to travel there in-game to use that chat (you could only use the chat on the ship you were on). Each ship in the fleet would be LIKE a server, but they'd not be 100% separate. I'm sure there's many more details that need worked out, and I'm also sure the Hero Engine would struggle with something so radical, but you'd, basically, eliminate low pop servers.

You know, I tried this. I was on The Razor - level 50 jugg tank and 30 sorc heals. Dying server. Rerolled on Space Slug (has about 6 to 8 times the level 50 population as The Razor). Got to level 15 and realized - this game isn't fun enough to do the same thing all over again, so I unsubscribed. I'll be following the game for a while, but with so many other games coming out I want to play, I just suspect TOR missed it's window of opportunity on me to make me a long-time consumer. If this game, CURRENTLY, had dual specs, LFD tool (cross server, because my orginal server has had, in prime time, ONE level 50 healer online at least 1 time in the past 2 weeks, with around 47 total 50's - but ONE healer!) and/or free server transfers, I most likely wouldn't have unsubscribed. But I have seen nothing from Bioware on any of these 3 things, so figured why waste my time on a low pop server, and...the game just isn't good enough to redo (at this point).