I have really long load times on my agent but not on my BH or Sorc. Very strange.

Actually that was a shameless troll and I apologise for it. Girrada The Hutt has a terrible republic community though (or did) bad enough to make me re-roll empire. I haven't looked back since. The Fatman on the other hand is equally angry and miserable on both sides!

You and me both.

$200 seems to be the accepted budget estimate of the time at least it's the estimate that come from people who were actually willing to show their maths and back up what they were saying. Though that number is really unknown since EA would have to make a definitive, public statement to confirm the estimate. We can forget the $300 million crowd, people who won't show their work are just talking not estimating.

These threads never get old. I think the Republic is underpopulated because not enough players have the required "11" setting on their whiny control.

I agree, I want a fast travel node on my ship.

Fortunately no, I play on two servers are pretty solid. I'm still angry though, I blame society.

I think if you did a census there's probably more posts from people attacking whiners than there are whining posts.

As soon as the players all do what they did when SWG was still the "greatest game EVAR!!1!". They all quit and the company making the product realises that it is beyond terrible and try to rescue it with half-hearted measures. Fortunately I don't think TOR is even remotely close to as terrible as that abomination was so it won't shed subs anywhere near as fast as SWG did. Companies respond to money, not whining.

Somebody is probably going to come in here and tell the OP he is lying and that the game is growing by leaps and bounds soon to overtake Windows as the most installed software. Somebody is going to come in here and tell everyone that this game is dead and there are only four players left on all the servers, plus that one of those players triple boxing. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but there has been some pretty significant migration happening, so the only advice I have for the OP is would be: Either start over on a better server and risk all this happening again, or just keep making noise to get some form of response from Bioware. You'll have to take a lot of abuse and be labelled an "Astro-turfer" or a "doom-sayer" but it's your game experience your fighting for, offending people that live to take offence is just one of the hazards you will have to tolerate. I almost forgot, you'll also be told that you have entitlement issues. That one hasn't gone out of style since the 80s when the first self-important, pseudo-intellectual snot posted it on a BBS to insult someone he didn't agree with.

I don't think I've ever found an MMO that was tolerable without friends, this one comes the closest to being fun to solo. Friends make every single game better though. Also: ME3's multi-player is actually good!

On one server I play on that's standard it's pretty low, but on the other when it says standard the place is jumping. I would infer from that observation that "Standard" covers a pretty broad range of populations.

There always has to be one...^ Edit: Removed line for being uncalled for.

It is pretty good, no two ways about it. I still prefer the Inquisitor and the Sith Warrior though. But then I love the female smuggler's character as well, the VO is so perfect for the class.

Wait you're saying that if you group with people the game will feel like there's other people playing it!?

I just checked the population on my server, it turns out I'm still having fun! It was still a neat read though, that's a lot of work to go through for that data.

I never noticed it, it's pretty clear I was a bad beta tester.

Yet you lay out more pseudo-intellectual, self-important insults. You call everyone "entitled" and "immature" that doesn't share your zealous devotion to this particular product. Yet in your effort to display superiority you simply quote the same clap-trap that has been spouted in game forums for the same purpose with each new game: to insult people that criticise your chosen game. Personal attacks are the standard method of pointless people trying to prove a point. For the record, I wasn't referring to TOR as broken. You might have noticed that if in your fervour you had bothered to read the whole post and accept the post's context instead of trying to apply your own context to the post in order to continue what is clearly a pointless debate.

I'm not meaning to bag on Bioware specifically, I really mean the state of the industry as a whole. There are some growing pains happening and game developers across the board are playing catch up with their market.

I think the gaming market is no longer gamers, it's consumers. Consumers have expectations, game companies have traditionally had a tremendous amount of leeway when it came to producing broken, useless product and those days are rapidly coming to a close. Things like SWG and AC were tolerable back in the ancient days of gaming, when gaming was a nerds only venture but games just aren't like that now. Electronic gaming is now full market entertainment and has the budgets to prove it, it also has the increased standard of service that comes with that status to deal with. I suppose people would love to call it entitlement because that's the cheapest insult du jour on most internet forums. I would ask though, would anyone buy a house with no windows and happily wait for the contractor to put them in when he gets to it? If the shingles start to lift after a day is the roofer not going to hear about it? Sure you're house isn't just a game; but being held to a high standard with regards to product doesn't mean the consumer is the weak point. Maybe the real problem is that game developers just aren't up to the task their booming industry has put before them yet. They have a vastly more complex product than the rest of the home entertainment industry for sure, but maybe it's time for gaming companies to start to take their customers a little more seriously. There aren't very many consumer markets where "we'll fix that later" will wash, gaming is rapidly becoming one of them.

To be honest it makes everyone one "wrong" depending on what they want to see. Tracking "populations" by EA's metric doesn't yield numbers and will therefore always be subjective. EA is in complete control of the perception by simply changing the values required to trigger each population display level. Continually lowering the population required to trigger "Standard" and "Heavy" would be a very easy way to manage the perception of your game. You could also be continually increasing the numbers to trigger those readings if you wanted your players to feel worse about their server's population. Not that they have necessarily done either, but it would be a very effective (if a bit cynical) way to manage perception of your game's success.

The end of servers is the answer! This game is instance-a-palooza anyway. Why not just go whole hog and bang all those servers together into one huge, massively instanced community? Who cares if you're on "Imperial Fleet 307" it could kill the endless cross server bickering and it would also end the "my server is dying" posts. Well, OK. If there was a lot more "my server is dying" chatter after the mega-merge it would be a really, REALLY bad sign.

/inb4it'syourfaultstopsucking And all that. I gave up on spamming fleet and the phenomenal number of tiny guilds in this game has already gutted the community. A teleport to instance, cross-server instance queue would make a huge difference. Especially since the way you travel to your instance is by magical loading screen anyway.

Wait... So two corporations are having some ridiculous tinkling contest and people in this thread feel it's important to chose sides and back their corporate deities? The internet just keeps trying to kill my faith in humanity.

Tempest Keep was merely a setback. Someone had to say it.