DWho
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Posts posted by DWho
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Harbinger also has the highest variety of players that play group, pvp, solo story, solo or Rp. You really shouldn't use Harbinger as an example of people who don't understand because lots of us do because we have friends from all parts of the game. Just because you are on Harbinger doesn't mean you don't understand.
Even Harbinger is having fleet population issues. Where we used to have 4 instances 12 months ago at certain times of the day, now we have one or one and half. Harbinger fleet population is now 1/3 of where is was and grouped activity is suffering more than usual if you are outside the 4-5 hour bracket that still seems to have a reasonable population. If you play in that bracket you may not see any issues. But not everyone is able to play the game in that 4-5 hour bracket. That bracket is also shrinking fast. Only 6 months ago that bracket was 7 hours and 12 months ago it was 12 hours. If you go back two and half years ago it was 16-18 hours.
Considering the game is online 24 hours a day and is a global game, the expectation is to at least have 16 hours a day to play in (obviously not all in one chunk). When the busiest servers "healthy" time bracket is now down to 4-6 hours and shrinking, I can only imagine how bad the other servers are fairing, it doesnt bode well for the game.
I know a lot of the arguments that people are making here is by adding populations that don't group finder or doing much group content won't add anything to those populations that do. But the populations are getting so small now that just having 10 extra people put into the group mix at certain times can have an positive affect on group content. It doesn't matter what server you are on because there will always be a few that will do group content if given the chance and by consolidating them all in one place it can have an impact even if it is only a small one.
The lower the populations drop, the more urgent it is to bring everyone together. As an example, it's better to have 16 people all queued for pvp on the one server than 16 people queued over 3-4 servers.
OK, let do a little math. We'll use PVP as the example since it is entirely dependent on random groups (save the premades that are showing up) Now we'll us JC as the example since it is the server I am most familiar with. During prime time WZs pop every 5 minutes or so. That means 3 or 4 active warzones at a time. We'll round it up to 5 WZs so that is 80 players queuing for PVP . We'll round that up to 100 players just for a nice easy number to work with. During prime time the population on JC is at least 1600 (7 of 8 Rep advanced classes show as 100 or more so assuming 800 Rep and an equal number of Imp seems reasonable). So that means 1500 of the people on JC are not queuing for WZ. So in order to get the 100 players queueing for WZs better pops (a portion of which are casuals and don't care anyway) we are going to move 1500 other people. It would seem the most efficient process would be to move the 100 that are dependent on random pops. At most I would estimate there would be another 100 people Pugging OPs, FPs, and Uprisings. So you are still talking about something on the order of 1400 people that do not need to be on a higher population server. If there were 100 people on Harbinger that wanted to move to a less populated server, would you move 1400 other people who want to be on Harbinger to that new server?
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I agree. Don't waste the $...just close the dead ones down and let people move or not. If "most" people were happy with the game as it is, why the hell are populations continuing to decline?
If its too late for "most" why are there still people playing the game? MMO (or more correctly in this case online games since this is not a true MMO) populations decline over time. This is a 5 year old game. Even WOW and Everquest, two of the biggest MMOs ever, have a fraction of the population they once had.
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Agreed. It's well past the time to do something. But even when they do, it's too late for most.
If it is too late for most (which is a major exaggeration anyway), why do anything. Mergers cost money and they will not increase Bioware's profits in any way. Since you used the exaggeration "most" I will as well. "Most" people don't come to the forums so one could argue that "most" people are happy with the game the way it is.
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Dead servers shouldn't exist. This is an MMO, not a singleplayer game.
Oh btw, with the server transfers back in 2012 they ended up closing the servers while transfers were going on and then finally merged them. Your argument doesn't hold water.
I know how the server mergers were done previously, I don't need you to tell me how it was done. The point was to do it differently. By doing it this way you do not force people to play where they do not want to play. Your opposition to that is saying, in effect, the only way to play this game is the way that you want to play it and anyone who wants to play it differently is wrong. This is very selfish on your part. Allowing people to move back off the large server to a smaller server in no way affects your game play. You get your higher population server. Is it that you are afraid that the servers would redistribute themselves back to the way they are now because that is the way that the majority of games population wants to play. The Merge server crowd is unwilling to redistribute themselves to improve their game experience but when someone on the other side suggests an option to let the people who don't want to move make that choice (maybe they will maybe they won't) the merge server crowd say no we must force everyone to play the way we play.
On the MMO point. This game never was an true MMO it was always an online RPG with MMO elements. From the beginning 80% of the game was set up for solo player content. That was one of the things that made it better than an MMO.
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Harbinger also has the highest variety of players that play group, pvp, solo story, solo or Rp. You really shouldn't use Harbinger as an example of people who don't understand because lots of us do because we have friends from all parts of the game. Just because you are on Harbinger doesn't mean you don't understand.
Even Harbinger is having fleet population issues. Where we used to have 4 instances 12 months ago at certain times of the day, now we have one or one and half. Harbinger fleet population is now 1/3 of where is was and grouped activity is suffering more than usual if you are outside the 4-5 hour bracket that still seems to have a reasonable population. If you play in that bracket you may not see any issues. But not everyone is able to play the game in that 4-5 hour bracket. That bracket is also shrinking fast. Only 6 months ago that bracket was 7 hours and 12 months ago it was 12 hours. If you go back two and half years ago it was 16-18 hours.
Considering the game is online 24 hours a day and is a global game, the expectation is to at least have 16 hours a day to play in (obviously not all in one chunk). When the busiest servers "healthy" time bracket is now down to 4-6 hours and shrinking, I can only imagine how bad the other servers are fairing, it doesnt bode well for the game.
I know a lot of the argument people are making here is by adding populations that don't group finder or doing much group content won't add anything to those populations that do. But the populations are getting so small now that just having 10 extra people put into the group mix at certain times can have an positive affect on group content. It doesn't matter what server you are on because there will always be a few that will do group content if given the chance and by consolidating them all in one place it can have an impact even if it is only a small one.
The lower the populations drop, the more urgent it is to bring everyone together. As an example, it's better to have 16 people all queued for pvp on the one server than 16 people queued over 3-4 servers.
Alright, then lets approach it this way. Once Bioware has the guild transfer issue fixed move everyone to one or more of the more populous servers but don't close down those servers. Then allow everyone a free legacy and guild transfer off of that server and back to where they came from (alternatively you could ask people if they want to move but you would get a lot less movement because that is what it is like now and nobody is moving). Then you have consolidated the population but allowed those who don't want to be on those high population servers to go back to an environment they prefer. That way the people who want to move and those that don't care are consolidated and you get your tiny improvement in random group pops while those that do care get to be where they want to be.
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Exactly.
Ebon Hawk is simply not as random group friendly as the traditionally non-RP servers. They are, by choice, more dependent on community connections (guilds, circle of friends, etc) rather then random unknowns looking for instant grouping via GF. I really do not understand why the Harbinger folks cannot grasp this and understand that forcing RPers to a non-RP server is NOT going to measurably increase GF pops.
The thing Harbinger people don't understand (and not all of them don't understand) is that not everyone plays the game the way that they do. Harbinger has a much higher percentage of people dependent on random grouping than any other server. You continuously see people stating how barren fleet is as a measure of how busy the server is but that is a poor measure of actual activity. It only shows the people that are looking for random groups in chat or waiting by the terminals and not the actual group activity going on behind the scenes. When I run OPs I am on the fleet for maybe 30 seconds, just long enough to teleport in and enter the OP. A large number of people group up before going to the fleet (even the GF people do). Fleet is where people hang out that don't have anything better to do which is probably why fleet chat gets so toxic.
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You incentivize to actually grow the population by funneling people to the same server. PvP pops are slow and confined to peak hours. Servers larger than the status quo will address at least one of those problems. "Fine as is" isn't fine for everybody.
I thought the incentive was the better group pops. Now we need even more incentive. I can see why you would want to make it "cheaper" to move to a specific server but it should not be "more expensive" to move off a server that does not suit your playstyle (right now the server merge people talk about those trapped on dead servers but are perfectly willing to trap people on high population servers they don't want to be on). Perhaps people haven't migrated en masse to the larger servers because they don't want to. That seems to be the most overlooked point in this thread. People don't seem to want to move to get these "better random group pops".
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They still have to do a "preferred server" transfer. There's no reason to say the "status quo is sufficient" which would be equal pricing on each server. It empirically didn't work. The pricing should set up a classic "stay/go to intended server" choice. If you are going to do voluntary server transfers as a population management strategy, whatever server (Megaserver, or other target) needs to be free/the cheapest target (to a degree that would affect behavior). What the current approach has created is 2-3 servers of comparable size.
Why would you need to incentivize. After all the reason to move is to be on a more populated server so you can get your random group pops. I see no need to make it cheaper/easier. And maybe 2-3 servers of similar size is what the overall population wants and that is why they have developed that way.
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Correlation does not equal causation.
I does when the reason for a large part of the loss was the damage done to guilds by the merges. This is what would happen if they merged servers now and damaged guilds in the same way. There is a lot less holding the player base here than there was the last time they merged.
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That's not the way it works. You realize Bioware has merged servers twice before right? Those who didn't want to transfer didn't get to keep their dead server to themselves. Merging servers is something you just don't have any say in.
Yes they have merged them twice before and each time lost a significant percentage of the game population in the process. A voluntary system is much more sustainable and allows players to play on servers they like rather than being forced to play in an environment they are uncomfortable with. Bioware has already stated they want to let payers play on the servers they want to play on and that was the reason they are trying to make transfers easier. If they were just going to merge servers anyway, why would they put in the effort to fix things, they would just go ahead and merge like they did previously.
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:I am fine with the pops at certain times as people do have a life, but in your case the timezone is an issue I would say. Still, being on Harbinger I am surprised by the lack of pops, might have something to do with the recent class changes and people not playing as much probably (also vacation season)
Another thing that plays into queue times (and probably is becoming a major factor) is that the PVE casual players that have been queuing for warzones to get their main in full 248s are getting there and no longer have a reason to queue for PVP. Once you have one toon fully outfitted, the drops you get from that toon can equip most if not all of your alts with gear sufficient to do any of the other content in the game up to and including Master Mode OPs. That affects all servers resulting in extended queue times.
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I'm not one to cry out about something, but there's a lot a stake for folks all over SWTOR that have concerns on Strongholds, Guilds, Outfit Designer, and so forth... Yes its a given that the masses want Server Merges, I'm ok with it but I have these concerns as well. My Grandkids when they come each weekend play on my Account.. One server has the max of 50 characters. All the other servers have no less than 16-20. (They've been busy and got a lot of them from the Dark vs Light Event) So I toss my hat in the ring of concerns because, from the start till now have been a subscriber that has no less than 3 strongholds on Most servers, Guilds that have been abandoned and set to me as GM I try to maintain with SH's if there are any... Have invested quite a bit of $$$ to buy Cartel Coins for packs etc., over the last 5 1/2+ years like many players and just don't want to loose stuff because if it, and because Grandma spoils (my Fault not yours...LOL)...
I truly hope solutions can be found to work all this stuff out that will leave folks happy and content...
I would say the masses are OK with server mergers under certain conditions not that they are for it. There are some players that are for server mergers whatever the cost, but this is a small group of people (the no merger ever group is also small). Bioware has said they are committed to making voluntary movement of characters easier so that is likely the direction it will go is with people moving to more populated (or even a new server) of their own volition. Until the issues with guilds are worked out, there is little chance of a server merge as transferring guilds the way they did last time (disbanding and reforming) would likely kill the game.
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Edit #2: Also, it's unlikely (not impossible) that people will actually want to use those old enhancements. Colour crystals are more cosmetic even if they do have minor stats and people are much more likely to want to obtain them.
This is true now but wasn't at the time it occurred (at that time, those mods were still better than the first level of new mods). Besides that, it took a lot of effort to get enough pieces to be successful at re-engineering those mods. At that time the RE chance was 20% (might have even been 10% on the OPs pieces. I don't recall) not the 60% it is now. As I said, I don't think they should remove the crystal schematics from the game but there is a precedent for removing RE OPs schematics.
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I have no idea whether or not reverse engineering crystals obtained from operations was intended but if they did take it away you'd hear a lot of complaints - a lot more complaints than the ones who started the game later and didn't have them. Some people put a lot of time and credits into getting those schematics. It would likely be more of an issue than BioWare is willing to deal with.
Also, honestly, asking for those schematics to be removed is kinda selfish. You don't have them so no one else should have them?
Older players are almost always going to have an advantage over newer ones simply because they've been around longer and have had more time to accumulate things in game.
They did take away reverse engineered OPs grade schematics when they realingned Cybertech and Artifice. When Artifice lost Enhancements to Cybertech any reverse engineered OPs mods were lost. They did not go to your archived folder. Not a justification for taking away crystal schematics but it has happened before.
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So, is this something that's ACTUALLY going to happen or just people SPECULATING that's going to happen?
After all the time and effort it took to put the decorations on all of those personal and guild strongholds, if merging servers meant we'd have to go back through, unlock all those rooms, and redecorate all that stuff again, plus have to rename a bunch of our toons. I can see a lot of players leaving for something like that. That's like spitting right in the faces of all those players and their efforts put forth in this game. I know that would definitely be a "screw it, I'm done with this game" moment for myself, that's for sure. If you have all the strongholds unlocked and fully decorated, it'd literally take weeks to go back and put all that stuff back the way you had it. If you think the game is dead now, go ahead and merge servers without making it so everyone's items remain the same as it currently is and see how that works for you.
Mostly speculating or wishfull thinking. Your points are exactly the ones that need to be assessed. What would the overall population impact be in a server merge even assuming everything went smoothly. Most of what is being done would be useful whether they merge servers or not. When you have people who complain about their low server populations and yet refuse to move you need to take away their excuses.
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How does this dovetail with your statement that you do not want to forcibly move players that are happy where they currently are and have no desire to move?
Are you talking about merging servers and forcibly moving people who have no desire to move or are you talking about enabling voluntary individual or guild transfers, possibly to one or more new larger capacity servers, without losing any guild or personal assets in the process?
I wouldn't worry too much about this at this point. Making guild transfers easier takes away one of the last complaints that the merge server people have when they say they are trapped on a dead server. A lot are saying the "have to stay" on the dead server because they have guilds there and would lose them. With an option to move guilds they are down to losing names and it costs too much. It costs too much could be solved with free transfers. That would leave them with names as the only reason to not voluntarily move (assuming fixing guild transfers fixes a few of the other transfer related problems as well like legacy storage) to a server that has a population conducive to their gameplay style. Fixing guild transfers does not automatically mean forced mergers.
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Here is a prime example of why it's important not to have empty servers and how detrimental it is to the game.
This person is hanging around, but you can see the impression new people get of the game when they log into a dead server. Can youimagine how many people trying the game for the first time see this and just leave?
Assuming he is on one of the old PVP servers, which seems likely since he seems interested in PVP, it is something that could have been easily solved by not allowing brand new players (those that have no characters created in the game) to create characters on those servers. Heck if you even wanted to prevent new players from creating characters on any server but Harbinger, I'd be fine with that (though I suspect a large number of them would move off at some point). Why does every problem that comes up mean there has to be a Server Merger, there are a lot of things that are easier technically than merging servers that can be done.
The thing that has irritated me most about the posts in this thread is the number of people sitting on dead servers complaining that they can't get any group content to pop but refuse to do anything about it. Even if Bioware offered free server transfers and the ability to take all their assets along, I doubt they would move as they seem fixated on their names and don't want to lose them (some have even gone so far as to actually say it). They would rather say anyone who is playing on a less populated server is playing the game wrong and should just leave if they don't like being packed together with lots of other people ("after all that's what MMOs are about" or so they keep saying).
At some point you have to take some responsibility for your own happiness.
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Wow...good links. That is extremely depressing tbh.
Its actually very interesting data, the overall population drop aside. It shows that the difference in population between the "standard" servers and the "light" server is a lot less than people claim. Light servers are running at 90% of "light" and the standard servers are running at 5% of "standard". It is consistent with the surveys I did a couple of months back that showed on average across several time periods, JC had 75-80% of the online population of Harb. Good to see some confirmation. Thanks for the data.
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As for people implying that I posted my original comment because I only "want to hear what I want to hear" or some crap: I don't look on these forums regularly and only recently re-subbed. I haven't been keeping tabs on everything Bioware has said, and I figured them having a megathread implied that this debate was still actively ongoing otherwise what is the point of such a thread? And no, I haven't read every page. I jumped to the last most recent and took a summary from there mixed with my own experiences.
Looking at the last few pages of this thread you missed out on all the discussion of the issues that needed to resolved and the fairly useful discussion that occurred early on. Instead what you saw was the complianing by people who didn't get what they wanted by from Bioware (ie. and immediate server merge) and the counter complaints about "forcing people to move". The constructive discussion portion of this thread ended a long time ago and it has now devolved into an "I'm right and You're wrong" thread coming from both sides of the issue.
For a bit of perspective, I also play on JC and do not have issues with WZ pops (rarely if ever have I had to wait more than 5 minutes) but I play during server prime time. What this means is that my feeling about the health of the server is significantly different from yours. Are there dead times on JC, absolutely just like there are dead times on all the servers. I have even been on Harbinger when I thought the populations would be good and found only 20 people on the fleet (and only a single instance). Obviously that is not indicative of the number of people playing on that server but neither is a single snapshot anywhere. My experience in prime time is that the population on JC seems to be trending up slightly based on the population of planets like Tatooine (outside the Rakghoul event which swells its population well above normal), Alderaan, and Balmorra. A few months ago, these planets were in the low to mid 20s during primetime. Lately they have moved into the low and mid 30s when I have been on.
JC is not a big server nor is it a dead server. My opinion of server merges, if they ever came to pass, would be to have 3 servers in each region (east coast/west coast) with one being a low pop server, one being a mid pop server like JC, and one being a high pop server like Ebon Hawk. It is entirely possible that the populations would shift around to change those but it initially gives people the level of population they want. A mid sized server also gives those people who want to roleplay an oasis that is not crowded but not empty either (it is my feeling that perhaps the increase in server population on EH is having a negative effect on the roleplay community there). In this day and age maintaining 2 or 6 servers really has little incremental cost (it certainly doesn't cost 3 times as much to maintain 6 servers as it does 3) , particularly since all of the servers in a region are probably on the same server stack to begin with.
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40?
At one point it have close on a 100 server JUST for the US.
There were around another 100 in Europe.
All The Best
A lot of that was performance issues. When the game first launched any server that got to "standard" population would start to choke and die. As the server tech improved, they were able to bring other servers online that could handle more players. It is a standard practice in the MMO industry to start with more servers than you think you will need just in case you have underestimated the interest in your game. There was a lot of reason at the time to believe a Star Wars MMO-RPG would be immensely popular.
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Living in denial won't change the facts and you don't even disagree but think fraction of a population is healthy because mob spawns really Devs can change that and no one cares about that. JC and the rest of the servers have been declining in pop. Enjoy your delusional world and single player since you won't see the facts themselves. And EH for real group content is equally memetic. Wastelands are also peaceful too but yeah lol. The people gave up cause lack of content and lack of means to do said content. When that happens serves collapse leaving a few solo players to scour the wasteland. BW will eventually be forced due to the cost of maintaining that many serves so it's only a matter of time.
Who is really the one living in denial, someone looking back at what the servers used to be several years ago and never will again even if they merged every server in North America into one server or someone who accepts that the population is much lower now and plays the game accordingly.
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I imagine we've got at least until the end of next year before this product might enter any sort of "maintenance mode" and who knows maybe the level of content we have now is sustainable with the player base they've got (i.e. revenue generation) to keep the team size the way it currently is.
It might not be much but it's certainly enough to keep it ticking along until a replacement game were too be on the horizon (which I would be surprised if EA aren't seriously looking into).
I think something that could really help would be to go back to selling WZ and OPs passes on the Cartel Market. It would give a boost to revenues and would add additional players to the OPs and WZ queues
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I wonder if this attitude will change when we get no more new content developed (maintenance mode) due to a lack of people playing and paying for the game.
Even right now we're getting a bare minimum of content and if this years is as small as it seems to be so far ... how bad will next year be.
Sounds good to me. Lets not merge servers then and see where we are 6 months from now. I'll probably be fine with it since I still have a lot to do story wise. So many combinations yet to play.
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Sadly all the servers are shrinking and have been since 3.0 . People who say servers like JC are healthy obviously didn't play during the heyday of 2.x and even going into 3.x when Fleet and planets had double or even triple the pop. Before you could get a daytime pugs of anything but now gl unless your camping primetime. I remember when we had multiple NiM tier raiding guilds and dozens so of hm now it's handful of either of various quality. PvP guilds are non existent anymore outside of some tryhards trying to reclaim a fraction of those guilds skill. Those people in denial will call a terminally I'll person healthy but whatevs what they believe is irrevalant to reality and only the game suffers as it doesn't affect me as I can play other games when raid time is over. Even WZs at this hour can even take about 15 minutes per pop as of late. But really there hasn't been a real reason to log on outside of raid time. More content and either server consolidation or ulimited free character transfer and movement of guild and other assets that currently don't copy over. Until then it's a moot point and people will just log in farm the latest Op boss do some rehashed content and log.
Sorry to disappoint you but I have been here since launch and while the population of JC is much less than it was in 2.x and 3.x it is far from unhealthy. Starter planets with triple the populations also had 10 times the problems with ninjas and toxic chat and that in itself drove players away. In a way I am glad the populations on the server declined to the current level. It is a much more friendly atmosphere and more relaxing to be able to play through the story without having to constantly look over your shoulder to see if someone is going to sweep in and take the objective while you are fighting the guards. I feel bad for the people who don't have enough friends online to do their group activities but for a lot of people, servers like JC are just fine. Those people who live for group content have options. They can transfer to Harbinger or Ebon Hawk but for some reason they never do so. Could it be they value their stuff more than their gameplay and prefer to complain about it instead of doing something about it. There should never be another forced merger. All character movement should be 100% voluntary.
Server Merge Discussion Thread
in General Discussion
Posted
Yes but very different MMOs. Sandboxed MMOs are very dependent on high server populations, instanced ones are not. SWTOR would be classified as an Instanced MMO using your terms.