Chartman
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Posts posted by Chartman
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^ This. The customer is not only usually wrong, but also usually an a-hole.
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.
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Yea I've been in Apple stores. They make me angry. "$30 for an iPod charge cord!?!?" "$1700 for a computer with less power and compatability than my $700 PC?!?!"
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.
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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.
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Can we get a bit of info on whats going please ? havent heard a word from BW win 2 days.
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....
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Please everyone keep in mind that populations in fleet aren't the numbers they're looking at. They're looking at total number of "potential transfers", which includes people away from the game, waiting for transfers.
They have no way of knowing how many people will start playing again after transfers, which is why they're doing what they're doing. They need time to see the *unknown* variables.
The other point people keep mentioning is 'why not transfer my low pop server ... it'll make no difference."
Again, saving the lowest pop servers for last is the better idea for two reasons: 1) it's easier to top-off servers with small pop servers, and 2) fewer people are left waiting.
Wouldn't you rather have the greater number of people enjoying the game more quickly, or would you rather have fewer people benefiting?
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???
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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...
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A good experience for 82% of the population. The other 18% don't matter.
This^
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Dude chill out.. Its the weekend. Of all the things to quit over, my lord. I am extremely happy with how sever transfers were handled. I was on Krayt Dragon, we weren't the first batch to open but I patiently waited and eventually transfers were opened. I transferred and now there are 300 people on the fleets when there used to be only 30. It is awesome. Wait till next week, I'm sure your chance will come soon. Its only one more weekend. I hate MMO communities, everything has to happen NOW or UNSUB. Just let them do their thing and everything will be fine.
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.
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You pay the same amount for lunch as the guy in front of you.
I pay the same amount of taxes as the next guy, but sometimes when I file my taxes my return check doesn't come for weeks while others get their's first.
At the grocery store, my bread costs the same as the guy who's in line in front of me, and sometimes they even open up a new register for the people BEHIND me who want to buy bread too but have already been waiting less time than I.
This is life. Sometimes we're at the front of the line, sometimes at the back, and there's no inequity about it.
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.
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Remember that I am only speculating, as are we all...
Not a mass return, but however, I think the "Star War" IP does carry a certain level of loyalty that other fledgling MMO's do not. Under the right circumstances, and with enough hard work, I believe it's possible to recover a sizeable amount of the subscriptions lost, but I do agree it's going to be a long difficult road for them. They are going to have to get really creative and not give up, despite the abuse being heaped on them.
I'm just coming up with possibilities as to what they are "monitoring" by waiting until the weekend to continue any further transfers to selected servers. As I don't have access to the data or the meetings they have, and since they are not sharing any of it with us, I start with the following presumptions:
- They AREN'T doing it just to irritate us
- They AREN'T lazy
- Bioware is a successful game company (however currently unpopular with recent game releases) so I find it unlikely they are just "winging it"
- They have some kind of genuine concern at the END of the transfers that they didn't at the beginning.
- They have the information necessary to make this kind of decision, knowing FULL WELL how unpopular it was going to be
Clearly, I can be wrong on any or all of these. I'm just trying to work out what is likely with the information I have without making leaps in logic. The problem with most of these forums is that the posts are usually so wrought with hyperbole that serious discussion can't take place.
There's also the anger factor, and when someone is in "rage mode" (not you), it's unlikely you are going to reason with them if you don't agree.
Agreed, but once again, we have no idea what the actual numbers are or what the issues are they are having as they aren't about to share any kind of technical or procedural failings with us. I completely concede that they may be doing something wrong, I just have no reason to START with that presumption, myself.
I'm completely aware that "crap happens" sometimes and depending on the possible outcome, a corporation is going to keep it under wraps as best they can. It may be just a simple mistake that had catastrophic consequences that some will use as "proof" of incompetence but others would just view as a mistake, nothing more.
I'll also concede that you may be completely right about the data they could use. I honestly don't presume to be a statistical expert. I just don't understand what the previous populations on specific days, servers etc are going to tell you about a situation where transfers are given to the public as an option, rather than a requirement - it puts an extremely random factor into the equation.
Most people would want to transfer to a populated server. But as I've seen from many of these posts, many don't want to, some WANT to be on a "medium population" server rather than a full one, some want to transfer to a different server once those transfers become available. All these factors - to me - seem like reasonable considerations before allowing transfer to a server that may already be full (if the active populations of those servers ALL decide to transfer over)
IGN is now reporting another 400,000 subscription loss. So the possibility that they aren't cut out to run an MMO is completely possible. There's no doubt that the subscribers were fed up with waiting for results. the damage MAY be irreversible.
So honestly, what is your evaluation. Do you believe that they are just incapable of running an MMO? Are they deliberately ignoring this information that you say is so easy to collect and use? What would you guess would be their reasoning behind taking this particular path to repair the populations?
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, I can admit that. I have a little more faith in them as industry professionals. Personally I make the assumption that they have a really good reason, if they are willing to put up with the levels of negativity and hostility being spewed at them and their reputation as a company. But who knows...
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.
- They AREN'T doing it just to irritate us
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You're never going to be able to satisfy all of the people, all of the time. There's always going to be people who complain and whine no matter what you do. "There's not enough people on my server.....now, there's too many people on my server." "The Black Hole is dead, takes forever to find a group for the heroic....now, there's too many people in the Black Hole, I have to wait a couple of minutes for re-spawns on dailies because I don't want to group with anyone for the non-heroic dailies." After all the ranting about dead servers and the game dying or whatever, people are actually complaining now that there's too many people on servers. Geez, BW can't win with some of these people. While some people undoubtedly have legitimate complaints, other people just like to complain about everything and others are just too impatient in this instant gratification, A.D.D. society to wait more than 2 seconds for anything.
From what I've seen on The Harbinger, the transfers have been a rousing success. Our Fleets have gone from 90-130 people during primetime to 230-270 people. The Black Hole used to get about 8-15 people during primetime and there 36 people there last night around primetime. Saw a lot of comments in general chat from people coming from the low pop servers and they were ecstatic....it was like they were playing a whole different game now. Good job, BW!
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.
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You aren't even TRYING to understand what I'm saying if you're going to jump to such an absurd conclusion.
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.
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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.
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You're leaving out several factors:
- How many people only play during the weekend and would only be able to initiate the transfer then (possibly not aware since everyone doesn't monitor the forums)
- Even though the destination servers have been given the green light, how many of those ACTIVE players have actually accepted the transfer?
- Will they accept the transfer at all?
- How many people are going to re-subscribe once it gets out that the server populations are MUCH better? What happend with THEIR characters stranded on a dead server if the destination is full and their friends are there?
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...
- How many people only play during the weekend and would only be able to initiate the transfer then (possibly not aware since everyone doesn't monitor the forums)
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Hyperspace cannon represent
That was everyone on the fleet at the time, lol.
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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.
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A weekend can't tell it either, and the statistic sample will be too small compared to the actual population trends for pretty much anything.
What about the people who wait until next week to accept the transfer? Next weekend? Or the people who accepted the transfer but will stop playing next week, next weekend? Or the people who're not logging in this weekend?
One weekend will tell you nothing.
It's got nothing to do with being angry or any such thing you want to try and paint to invalidate the point.
It has to do with the metrics they gather and the trends they show. You can't take a single sample in time and expect that to be meaningful. It does not work that way. Despite you wanting to try and belittle the point.
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."
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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.
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Some people would rather wait 4 hours.
Those people could choose not to tranfer...
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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.
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I think a lot of people are missing the fact that it wasn't like the day a server opened up everyone who was going to transferred did. Some servers may have seen major migrations, other may have only see minor ones. As more time goes by, more transfers are made and they have to watch that.
Imagine if origin servers that only saw a 20-30% migration, jumped over the next few days to 70 or 80%. (The percentage might not be so drastic, but the hard numbers may be.) You end up with server's that are vastly fuller than they ever intended. Their margin of errors would then mean they have to look at diverting the remaining unopened servers elsewhere, perhaps to more destination servers than the original consolidation process.
I could very easily see Day 1 showing only minor migrations, so day 2 we got a lot more servers, also showing only minor migration, as Day 3 approached, Day 1 migrations were still going. but word was spreading, and they sent the day 3 servers to new destinations. Thursday is for some reason a big game night (I never figured out why). Imagine if migration totals jumped sharply across the board. They were expecting 20-30% from each server, now they see 50%, and the weekend could jump that to 70% or higher.
It's a numbers game mixed with a decision based on a human response (deciding to transfer). I'm on one of those unannounced servers, and as I come closer to the conclusion that I should transfer if and when given the chance, I am actually glad that they are making sure I don't end up on an overpopulated server.
Maybe they screwed up and opened up too many too fast.
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?
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All right folks, I have an update for you.
As mentioned before, because of the logistics in monitoring the rate of character transfers and population shifts onto destination servers, our cadence for opening up origin servers will change day-to-day.
As we approach the weekend, we want to be careful about where to allow additional servers to transfer to so as not to overwhelm current destination servers. Many weekend players will be logging in, contributing to our overall analysis.
This means that we need to monitor populations and rate of transfers over the weekend before opening up new servers. We understand that players are anxious to transfer, but please be patient during this process so that we can deliver the best gameplay experience that we can offer.
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!
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Hi folks, just wanted to let you all know that we will be opening up more servers today. I also wanted to remind everyone that the opening of origin servers for free character transfers is now in the fine-tuning stage. We will be monitoring server populations and seeing how they stabilize. What this means is that, while we will open up more origin servers today, you're going to see fewer opening up this week and into the next. The weekend will also provide more data for us.
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.
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Who actually had to work hard for the valor ranks? Even losing with 4 medals, you get a bunch of valor.
People who hit BM and WH before they started giving 3k valor per match. We worked very hard for it.
Free Character Transfers Now Available On Select Servers
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This^