Mine's downloading at 250Kb/sec and looks to be 25% complete after 90 minutes. I've already restarted it once, and this seems to be as fast as it will go.

Isn't it a little early to be complaining about balance? I mean, half the population hasn't even downloaded the patch yet. Maybe wait a full day before you declare failure??

Not everyone can level to 50 and get geared in 6 weeks. A lot of people in my guild can only play a couple hours a day. That's why they need to give us a ballpark for transfers, so we can evaluate based on our own personal play schedule whether it makes sense to reroll or just wait.

Yeah we really need them to give us a ballpark on this. If they're not going to offer transfers in the next month, then it might make sense to start over for some players.

Excellent post! I can only think of one game I've played that did satisfy hardcore raiders, but even then the hardcore bliss only lasted a year or two before the company decided to maximize its profits by making the game more attractive to non-hardcores. It's hard to imagine any company intentionally gimping their profits by focusing on such a small market, regardless of the development budget. Instead they try to appeal to everyone by offering different levels of difficulty in end game. The trouble is, they often miss the mark in terms of what the community feels is easy and difficult. If I understand correctly, nightmare mode in this game is just more damage and faster boss enrage than normal mode. Instead of just boosting the numbers, they should add more mechanics to keep the hardcores challenged.

I recently rolled an Inquisitor after leveling a Consular to 50, and so far I like the Sith better. The spells and animations are just cooler. One meditates; the other seethes. One throws rocks; the other casts lightning. One dangles enemies in the air by their belt loops; the other causes them to spin in a cyclone. It seems they're sending the message that evil is cool and good is borrrrring. The Sith storyline is a bit disappointing in that the light side choices rarely allow you to do the right thing. Instead you get to do the less sadistic wrong thing. My personal story goal was to subvert the Empire from within, but so far I haven't had the option to do anything like that. Without divulging any spoilers, it seemed to me that dark side choices on the Republic side had more impact on the outcome of the story than light side choices on the Empire side. I'm not sure if this carries through all fifty levels, but at the moment it seems that Sith have better wardrobe. My Consular kept trading one homely robe for another, and her tier gear looks like a wedding dress with oven mitts. My Inquisitor is currently wearing a black and red leather dress, which I don't have to tell you is much sexier than a pastel housecoat. Using superficial criteria, the Sith win hands down. Also it seems there's more wry humor on the Sith side. Other than the Republic Smuggler, I don't recall much humor in Republic quests, but the Sith are hilarious. Maybe it's the accent.

It's harder than you might think to find a server with a healthy population. You have to gather Who statistics from both factions at various times of day over at least a couple days. Saturday evenings generally show the peak, and Wednesday mornings generally show the valley. However, even after you find a server whose population suits your play time, there's no guarantee it will remain static. In fact, there's an excellent chance that it won't. People are re-rolling every day. Nobody knows exactly how many people or which server they will choose. It's conceivable that at some point all the Light servers will be empty, and all the servers that used to be Heavy will become Full. There's also no telling how many people will return to the game after Release 1.2 or to which server they'll return. Will the Light servers return to Standard, or will the Heavy servers become Full? You can't blame the players for this mess. BioWare created the problem when they launched too many servers, and they've perpetuated the problem by providing insufficient information about how they intend to resolve the situation.

That's not true in all cases. Some people want the game to retain subscribers and are frustrated with BioWare's approach thus far having the opposite effect. You can't blame attrition on the forums. My guild lost nearly 50% of its members, and none of them ever visited the forums. Those people left because our server only had 250 people at peak time, and they were tired of playing an MMO with no people. Most of the criticism I've seen on the forums has been constructive or at least reasonable, but the tone is becoming increasingly sharp because our dissatisfaction seems to be falling on deaf ears. Looking back at my own posts, I was very positive until early March. After seeing some of our best players leave the guild and dealing with the same annoying end game bugs week after week, I'm occasionally angry. I still hope BioWare will find a way to get the game back on track, because I've invested a lot of time in the game and a lot of effort in building my guild.

It has a lot to do with server population. People who play on busy servers tend to be much happier than people who quest on deserted planets and can't get into warzones/heroics/flashpoints. That's why it's so silly that they haven't been more proactive about discussing server mergers or character transfers. The game itself is very engaging, but they're losing a lot of customers to the dead servers. I finally got most of my guild to move to a more populated server, but they're not happy about leaving their 50s, credits, alt gear, rare mounts, and legacies behind. I wish they'd handled the situation differently, because it's given the game a black eye.

The way you endlessly expound on this issue, one would think you were a BioWare employee. If you are not, please let them speak for themselves. No one is interested in speculation. We want facts.

Actually I don't need new content that frequently, and I imagine most of the over 25 crowd doesn't either. The under 25 crowd are like locusts; they devour the game and move on to something else. The older folks just want a nice community and a fun/challenging game they can play in their free time. I don't see how you can possibly stay ahead of the folks who speed through content and then unsubscribe. They make rather poor customers, don't ya think? You bend over backwards to satisfy their every whim, but they're going to leave anyway because they're all about the Next Big Thing. The long-haul folks expect predominantly bug-free software and healthy server populations. If you give them that, they'll stay for years and not complain too much. Even in WoW, I didn't feel like 18 months to 2 years was too long between expansions. If you savor the content instead of gulping it, you don't have to be in such a hurry. One of my guild mates was the locust type. He leveled one character to 50, got it geared, then never wanted to play it again. He did the same with a 2nd character. Then, after he'd experienced all the hard modes and operations, he quit the game. I wouldn't go too far out of my way to please people like him because they don't contribute to a sustainable business model. I don't care when they release the patch, but I would like a heads up. I hate it when they spring things on us unannounced, and I hate it when they bury announcements in podcasts and obscure web posts, like I have time to dig through all that junk.

QFT I've never seen an official acknowledgement of the population problem on the NA servers, let alone a proposed fix. They've ignored this issue to their detriment.

Agreed. This is the downside of releasing a game at Christmas. Millions of kids out of school play for a little while, get bored, and leave. Those of us who would've stuck around for years get stranded on wasteland servers. It's hard to believe they didn't see this coming and plan for it.

Standard can be a healthy population, but the parameters for Standard are too broad. Casting that aside, don't you think it's a shame that 26% of the subscribers can't fully enjoy the game right now? I broached the topic of changing servers to my guild yesterday, because our server rarely has more than 250 people. The vast majority of them said they don't want to abandon their characters and/or don't have time to start over on a new server. Many of them said they would rather unsubscribe than re-roll. Given the fact that BioWare is below target on subscriptions anyway, it seems foolish to alienate customers.

Ugh. Honestly, I already took a risk, and I got screwed. One of my guildmates has transferred servers three times. We're all done taking risks here, and we're tired of re-rolling. We want assurances that the server populations will remain stable, and that can only be achieved through a) correctly modeling subscriptions and b) fixing bugs so people will actually want to stay. I don't know who Daniel is, and he's never told me anything. If they want to communicate with people about GAME BREAKING ISSUES (yes, the magnitude of this problem warrants caps) they need to post something where we're actually going to see it. When a dozen servers have queues over Christmas break you don't solve that problem by creating 100 new servers that will not be needed past January 4. Who does that?? I appreciate the fact that you're trying to share information and answer my questions, but you're not a BioWare employee. Why haven't there been any yellow posts regarding this issue? They're killing their own game by ignoring the mounting discontent on this issue. It doesn't make any sense.

You can't compare 6 years of WoW to 4 months of this game, because BioWare hasn't had time to develop commensurate features. However, when I think back to my first year playing WoW, what really sucked me into that world was the zone-specific music, the funny/sad quests, the seemingly limitless zones to explore, and the hundreds of other people to chat/group with. SWTOR in comparison seems like it was developed by an autistic person. There's very little sensory input. The quests are rarely funny or emotionally engaging. The worlds have strict boundaries, and the space combat is on rails. There's almost no one to talk to, because the game is so heavily instanced. The companion quests were really interesting and engaging, but once you get to 10k affection, they don't even talk to you anymore. In four months I've only managed to level one alt past Taris, and she's been stuck on Tatooine for over a month. I only leveled the other two alts to Taris so I could have an extra crewman for crafting missions. Questing is only fun if I can find other people to group with, and that's a challenge these days. When I bought this game four months ago, I thought I'd still be playing it in five years. When I started a guild and rented a vent server and developed a website, I thought we'd be one of the founding guilds on our server. Now my server is dead, most of my guildies are gone, and I can't decide whether to go back to WoW, wait for another MMO, or just find a new hobby. If they'd fix the server populations, I probably wouldn't feel so negative about the game. It's just really depressing when everyone around you is dropping like flies.

I want BioWare to climb down off their high horse and tell us EXACTLY how they're planning to fix this situation. My guild was talking about re-rolling on another server to kill time until release 1.2 and/or the character transfers, but we have no way of knowing when any of these things will happen. Could be a week, could be a month. All they'll commit to is "soon" which is obviously not very helpful. What happens to those new characters we create on the new server? Can they be merged into our existing Legacy? What if the new server we choose becomes Full from all the refugees from other dead servers? Will they stop allowing migrations to those servers and prevent us from importing our 50s? Will we have to wait in queues every time we log out or DC? When they do allow character transfers, will they be free? Most of us have three alts to support all our crafting needs since our server is like a pioneer village where you have to make everything yourself. They seem to be trying to pretend this issue doesn't exist, and I'm getting tired of people blaming the players for being so stupid as to create a character on the *wrong* server, like we had any way of knowing four months ago which servers would die or even that there were 5 times too many servers to begin with. Of the four people I really enjoyed playing with, three have left the game out of boredom and frustration, and the remaining guy doesn't want to re-roll. I already canceled my subscription so I don't forget to do it later, but I'm truly hoping BioWare will wise up and address the population issue. If they did, some of these players might actually come back.

Send BioWare your resume; they need more people like you.

Already did.

I've gotten items with useless stats a lot more often lately. It's pretty frustrating to open a box that should contain a nice blue, and instead it's just vendor trash.

They've promised to fix the re-entry problem in 1.2. I imagine you'll still have to coach your group not to loot until everyone is back inside the instance though. For the bounty hunter boss, you may have clicked the wrong console or clicked it too soon. If you do either of those things, it does seem to bug out the encounter. (Not saying they shouldn't fix it, because they should, but this is how we've managed to farm it for over a month.) On the last boss, you start moving him toward the edge at 15%, and he does 1 more knockback between 15 and 10%. It's important to keep your back parallel to the aisle that whole time. I know that's difficult, especially for melee, but that's what typically works for us. (And if anyone falls over the edge on that boss pre-1.2 you have to wipe it, or that person can't loot.)

His point is: it says HEROIC-2 but it should say HEROIC-3 or HEROIC-4. Overtuned.

Wrong. Only the good people are doing this. The bad people don't even know they're bad.

This game has a split personality. Leveling is an entirely different experience than end game. I really enjoyed leveling. My server still had people on it at that point, so I was able to find groups for most heroic quests and flashpoints. My only complaint in those days was laggggg. Several planets (Alderaan, Balmorra) were so laggy for me that I suffered through the class quests and hurried to the next planet. Other than the lag, I experienced very few bugs and thoroughly enjoyed the content. End game is a totally different story. Thanks to enrage timers, end game is all about min/maxing your gear and picking the optimal spec and rotation for your class. If you don't have a good grasp of raiding concepts, you're a liability, and other people will eventually get mad at you. Plus you have to do day after day after day after day of endless, boring dailies--not just to upgrade your gear but also to finance your hugely expensive repair bills. And there are LOTS of bugs in end game. I'm not talking about silly bugs like the one guy in the Battle of Ilum who hides inside the wall while he's shooting you. I'm talking about the kind of bugs that get you killed and/or make you rip your hair out in frustration. When you couple that with the fact that there's no combat log or damage meter, you spend a lot of time scratching your head and wondering what the hell just happened. It's not fun. I had such high hopes for this game, and it lived up to my expectations for a while. But in the past month, most of the skilled people I enjoyed playing with have quit. Some may have re-rolled on higher population servers. Others are just taking a break. Now I'm trying to enjoy end game with a bunch of people who don't even know what a cleave is, and I can't recruit any skilled people because my server is dead. Several people have told me I'm the only reason they're still here, which is funny because they're the only reason I'm still here. I can foresee a day very soon when none of us will be here if they don't merge the light pop servers and fix these fricking bugs.

End game in SWTOR is not even remotely easy for casual players. Most of these people don't know ANYTHING about raiding. Every concept you can imagine (CC, LoS, AoE, knockbacks, threat) has to be explained again and again. These people come into raids expecting "story mode" (Ooh, I want Karagga's purple hat!) and instead they get their butts handed to them repeatedly by big ugly monsters with enrage timers. Most of these people just want to coo over ortolans. They have no idea how to min/max their gear. I've seen healers and dps sporting gear with defense rating for God's sake. And then there's the bugs. I have never in my life seen so many unusual and inconvenient bugs in a production release. Tonight I wasted three hours in a hard mode because every single time we died and tried to re-enter, it ported us to a new, uncleared version of the flashpoint. And we died A LOT because these were casual players who didn't understand basic raiding concepts. I'm not asking for nerfs, because I personally enjoy a challenge. I'm just saying this game doesn't understand its target market at all.