This^

Wow, sounds almost as if you work for Bioware! This is the attitude we face from support. This is the attitude that is driving companies into the ground.

Dont buy a Mac then. I own both a PC and a Mac. I use them for different things. The real question was, "Did you get good service while you were in the store?". In this instance, we are all a customer of the same company getting different levels of service. That is the issue.

Also FYI to all you Hyperspace Cannoneers: We are one of the 8 US PVE West Coast servers left un-transferred. The 2 US WEST PVE servers that were destination servers have been lower population over the weekend then Thursday of last week (The day of most transfers). So the wonderful weekend stats that were so necessary will probably say this: Send 3 of them to Drooga's, send 5 of them to Harbinger and were done.

The word was on Friday morning when they said they would be "Monitoring" the server populations over the weekend and start transfers up again next week after analysis of those numbers. Reading between the lines, they are saying we worked hard this week, were gonna kick off the population metric gathering scripts and kick out early on Friday. We'll come back in on Monday and check out the demographics the script pulled and make some decisions. Might take us a while on Monday to do that, and there is a patch Tuesday night to get ready for so, maybe we'll start looking at transferring those other servers on Tuesday. Of course Tuesday is Hawaiian shirt day and were having a BBQ so might not have enough time that day. Wednesday we have an all day meeting on customer service so that takes out that day. So Thursday, yah that looks good, Thursday we'll move another 8 to 12 servers, than on Friday we can send out another notice that we need to analyze data (LOL does anyone buy that even?), check out early for the weekend and come back on Monday the 25th and start the process again. At this pace we should have everyone moved by early July. Oh wait, 4th of July vacation... Maybe August....

Just an FYI, good companies attempt to please all of their customers, not just "A greater number"... You will never please everyone, but you ought to try or your company will go down the toilet. Look at Apple. Have you ever been in one of their stores. Those people do everything they can for the customer. Every customer. Apple = $500 Billion Net Worth. Correlation???

It seems odd that the 2 Dr.'s haven't chimed in as of yet. Are they even aware that 20% of their populace in SWTOR is languishing away? Gonna go look for e-mal addresses for these guys...

This^

Am I the only one who would like people who have already been transferred and are enjoying the game to stay out of our QQ fest. We're glad your happy. We're glad that your in-exhaustible patience won out and your were transferred on day 2. We are not able to play the game. The game is a service. The service is not working. We want it fixed. If my cable goes out, I call the cable guy and get it fixed. If it takes more than a day the refund me the money for the time period it didn't work. If my cell service stops working, I call them on my landline and report the issue and they fix it. All the people are asking BW to do is to fix our issues. The majority of us are old enough that we have worked overtime when issues have arose in our company. When things are going wrong, the boss comes in a-la Office Space and let's us know we are going to be needed over the weekend. Bioware let its weekday staff go home. They have a script running pulling population totals, transfer totals, etc... Early Monday they will look at those and start transferring again. They could easily come in on Sunday and look at the script and start transfs then. Friday and Saturday are the busiest days, Sunday's population will not be higher then those days, especially since its Father's Day ( And yes I'm a father of 2 who can't play the game he wants to play on the day of the year that celebrates what I do the rest of the year, once again thanks Bioware). If my company was having issues like SWTOR is having issues, my but would be in all weekend getting things set right. I love this game, make it so I can play this game.

Some poor analogies: If I pay the same for lunch as another person but I dont get my meal and they do, I would get my money back, and if it was a place with good customer service, I'd also get a free lunch. I pay taxes, you pay taxes, if you get your money before I do it is due to when you submitted your refund request and whether it was digitally or by mail (Digital refunds come quicker). We are talking about services rendered, not products purchased so your grocery store analogy doesnt work at all. Go back to your heavily populated server and let those of us with nothing better to do (Because the fleet has a pop of 12) rant and rave, and in general find some entertainment from something at least about this game if not the actual game.

If I were to guess, they came in with a basic plan with very little in he way of contingencies. The transfers were more popular than they assumed and the servers filled faster than they expected. May not be a popular opinion here, but the best way to do this would have been a forced merger of a set number of servers (Based on total population mixed with average utiltization) to a set destination server, set this up for all server types/regions (Sorry foreign language RP'ers), and merge every account during a scheduled downtime so the moves could be batched and done quickly. It would have been a very predictable outcome for the total populations. The way they did it by basically merging 60% at once and then throwing a few in here and there to fill the proverbial pots is much more of a guessing game based off of a day or two of metrics instead of basing this off a far larger sample set of about the least two months (From 1.2 on so we get the high pops of the first few weeks vs the low pops of the last few weeks). In the end, they are a big company, they have a plan, but that doesnt always mean it was the best plan (Nor am I saying mine is either). Big gaming company does not equate to big server management company. A hosting service like GoDaddy could probably have handled something like this in a 30 minute meeting, implemented it in 24 hours, and had very little fallout because its what they do, day in and day out. Here's to hoping they get it together because the other servers populations are dwindling even further over the weekends.

Said the guy on the second highest populated West Coast PVE server. Your tune might change if you were on the second lowest populated West Coast PVE server.

I am trying, just not understanding. You, and it seems Bioware as well, are planning on some kind of mass return to the game because server transfers have happened. We will never reach the levels we were after 1.2 launched (First few weeks) no matter how many people return. The last couple of months of aggregate populations, accounting for types of servers, locations, populations on specific days (aka weekends), populations at different times of the days (Peek time to off time) should be a fairly accurate representation for population planning. You seem to have a head on your shoulders so I don't need to explain to you how IT can pull this type of info quickly and painlessly, and regularly need to do this for resource and expansion needs as well as server consolidation and virtualization. They are not re-inventing the wheel here. We are probably talking about a 1-2% skew in population - or + to account for returning players, net new, and people unsubscribing from those aggregate numbers. If I could not plan a resource action for my systems based on those types of figures, they would outsource me and find someone who could.

And to the Monitoring of populations through the weekend? I am part of a team that manages 16,000 servers nationwide. I could write a script in 10 minutes that would analyze population on my systems, pipe this info out to an Excel file or a SQL DB, and then draw up reports with pretty graphs on this data and have it mailed to all the people who make decisions at 8am on Monday. These guys went home because they had a long week of work.

So with your argument, we should wait a month because 2 dudes are in jail that play this game and we need to make sure when they get released if they are going to transfer before we move anyone else...

That was everyone on the fleet at the time, lol.

I'm seeing a lot of posts from the team celebrating the fact they already transferred 150+ servers. If a plane goes down and the rescuers save 80% of the people, do you thing they are celebrating? Why not pull a Sully Sullenberger and save everyone? Then we can all celebrate.

I can just see next weeks message: " As 3 of our customers were on summer vacation last week at the beach, we will be holding off any more transfers until Bob, Jim, and Salley get back and see if they transfer so we can monitor how there toons effect server population."

Hyperspace Cannon as of right now (imp side only): 54 people on entire server, 4 people on fleet, 18 level 50's, no pvp pops all day, cant do heroics, cant do fp's. You cant tell me there isnt room for us on Drooga's or Harbinger. At least merge the last 8 West Coast PVE servers together for the weekend so we can play.

Those people could choose not to tranfer...

A free month would go a long way to saying we are sorry for the population issues and the way server transfers have been handled. Would make me endure the waiting a little easier knowing I wasnt paying for it at least.

I think you may be missing the point that they have known the burst cap populations of these servers before they started this process. We all remember the heady days of patch 1.2 and how busy our servers became. They know that population and could easily make plans for these moves based on those numbers, and now they say they need to monitor to figure this out. Give me about 30 minutes with the numbers and Excel, give me the max and min pop's they are looking for on these systems, give me the aggregate numbers from the past couple of months and I will pop out a list of Origin>Destination servers that we could go with. Would there be some issues due to some people coming back and other still leaving? Probably. Would they be minor compared to 21% of the customers being left to cry out in the wilderness?

So the last 20% of servers get screwed. Thanks Bioware! Another weekend of paying you to sit on planets and fleets with no one one them. Another weekend of queueing for hours to get one pvp pop if that. Another weekend of trying to do heroics leveling new toons with no one on the planet to do them with. Another weekend of trying to do OPs with my guild but 3/4 of my friends are playing Diablo or another game because they cant get anything done. As i've said before, you need to error on the side of risk at this point. I think to a man, the people on the low pop servers would rather wait in a 30 minute login queue to get on and then be able to PVP, HM, OP, or anything else their heart desires as opposed to sitting in a PVP queue for 4 hours without a pop.Too many people are fed up and leaving. If my guild dwindles more over the weekend, I may be forced to follow their path and un-sub because I dont want to play this game without them. You keep stating that you have to monitor the transfer process and server populations as well as stability, but you had months of data telling you burst populations from every server. You know how busy it got when 1.2 was launched. You know what has been the highest pop for these servers on the weekends. It's obviously not going to get more populated then that (see the dwindling populations), so make an educated assumption based on those numbers and lets move on. I wish the Bioware Dr's would chime in on this one, because they have never struck me as the type that would leave 20% of their customers out in the wind. At this point i'm almost wondering if they assume they will lose 20 to 30% of the subscribers on these last servers over the weekend into next week which will help those final pops fit on the existing destination servers. Here's to hoping were still playing next week, once again, well done Bioware!

While I understand the need for metrics, at this point in time you would be better to error on the side of risk. The servers left are so under-populated that people are beyond fed up. Add to that the lack of definitive information on server transfers and the general bad luck to be on the servers not transferred yet is breeding a very angry populace. We are paying you monthly for a service that doesnt work. PVP is MIA from 12am to 12pm. The economies are dwindling (Lack of items on the GTN), and the leveling planets are so underpopulated you cannot do Heroics. So many of the people in my guild and on our server have their paid time coming up in the next few days and a large amount are ready to let their subs drop. I don't want to play this game if all my friends ive been playing with leave the game. Waiting through the weekend is going to cost you subscriptions. We love this game, we want to play this game, please enable us to do just that.

People who hit BM and WH before they started giving 3k valor per match. We worked very hard for it.