When will there be a "SERVER MERGE?"

[Nicolettexiv]

A) they said transfers are coming

 

B) Dead server here and there =/= dead MMO. So stop exaggerating. While some servers are suffering, the overall population trend for the game is up this month.

 

Actually, my server has become even less populated. 31 on Fleet at 8-9pm PST on a US Pacific server. Fortunately I just re-rolled, which was indeed painful, but I'm holding out for moving over my second 50 and 40, etc.

 

And moreover, being the only person on nearly every planet from Alderaan on, for the leveling of two different characters, at two different points in time, does indeed seem like a single player game.

[JediRaffa]

Guys / Gals - The problem is not with the server. The problem is faction imbalance.

 

Everyone wants to go IMP, not REP.

 

Tested - I am on Thana Val. I rolled Jedi Consular. Im at lvl 48 now and average # of players online in fleet = 30, 8-12 on planets.

 

I then rerolled IMP on Mask of Nhilius. Starting planet = 30. Fleet is averageing around 150 and planets are averaging around 50.....Thats 50 on planet as IMP compared to 30 on fleet for REP.

 

That my friends.....is a huge problem!

 

Server mergers will not fix this. Character / Faction transfers will not fix this because the second you open up the faction transfer.....say goodbye to the Republic because everyone will want to jump ship to IMP in order for a higher population.

 

So......the fix is.......remove faction or make republic characters more awesome. Or here is an idea.

 

First, remove faction. Next you cut it down to 3 classes. Melee Force User, Ranged Force User, Soldier, Swindler. Set all 4 to neutral.

 

Then depending on your choices, light/dark, will mold you into the type of character you will be.

 

Example:

 

1) Melee Force User - light will push you in the direction of Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior

2) Ranged Force User - light = Jedi consular, dark = sith inquisitor

3) Soldier - light = trooper, dark = bounty hunter

4) Swindler (cant seem to think of a better neutral name here) - light = smuggler, dark = IMP agent

 

See how that works ? 1 faction, 4 starting classes that can be molded into light or dark alignment and then further molded into the advanced class system that we have today.

 

To me that would fix the issue at hand.

Edited March 13, 2012 by JediRaffa

[Bluestone]

Ajunta Pall averages 180+ on fleet on republic side during peak hours. Sometimes there are even multiple phases of the fleet.

 

Not all servers are ghost towns, not all servers have a shortage of republics.

Edited March 13, 2012 by Bluestone

[Frozenshiva]

Guys / Gals - The problem is not with the server. The problem is faction imbalance.

 

Everyone wants to go IMP, not REP.

 

Tested - I am on Thana Val. I rolled Jedi Consular. Im at lvl 48 now and average # of players online in fleet = 30, 8-12 on planets.

 

I then rerolled IMP on Mask of Nhilius. Starting planet = 30. Fleet is averageing around 150 and planets are averaging around 50.....Thats 50 on planet as IMP compared to 30 on fleet for REP.

 

That my friends.....is a huge problem!

 

Server mergers will not fix this. Character / Faction transfers will not fix this because the second you open up the faction transfer.....say goodbye to the Republic because everyone will want to jump ship to IMP in order for a higher population.

 

So......the fix is.......remove faction or make republic characters more awesome.

 

Personally I'd like to believe this will partially be fixed through the legacy system and the race unlocks. I can already see people potentially rolling republic on the same servers after unlocking the class they want to play.

Pureblood jedi's, chiss troopers and whatnot.

Coupled with a server merger maybe (not transfer) it could potentially save some of the servers.

 

I also THINK i heard something about shared bank between toons? If at least that works for both factions on the server, i can see not only the population getting a bump but also the economy.

 

But the second part is mostly speculation.

[pahbi]

Kaeteel (east coast server) at 7:10pm est, has 9 people in fleet on republic side and 8 level 50's online.

 

This is typical for this server.

 

The moment server transfers go online I'm gonna G T F 0.

 

- P

Edited March 13, 2012 by pahbi

[CalicoQueen]

I know I'm posting this everywhere.. but I would personally super appreciate it if (when the time comes) Belgoth's Beacon and Death Wind Corridor were merged. Thank you!

[Drakhai]

It's on the way... either wait or quit.

 

Are you purposefully ignoring everything the devs are doing/saying just so you have something to complain about?

 

I already quit. I haven't seen anything from the devs about merging servers. I have seen a few things about server transfers, but no dates, and I'm not going to pay for a transfer just so I can play the game as it's meant to be played anyway.

[pahbi]

For all intents and purposes, Kaeteel is a SWTOR single player experience with a public chat room.

 

- P

[RobCivicCRX]

Logged Uthar Wynn to raid tonight after the reset, 8 people in KP (us) , 16 in EV and 8 yes, 8 people on the fleet. Oh yea 7pm GMT.

 

Still cant believe Bioware say nothing at all about this. No its not all servers but if you happen to be on one of the dead servers the game is no fun at all.

Edited March 14, 2012 by RobCivicCRX

[Mergon]

I can't believe this is still being argued. I'm fed up with logging on and having a grand total of 20-some players on the fleet. Getting into hardmodes has been near impossible, even as a tank. The moment I spent 40 minutes looking for 1 dps, just to have to leave the group, is the moment I realized that unless something changes significantly, I won't be around for much longer.

 

I don't care about new content. I don't care about class balance. I don't care about new vanity items. I just want to be able to play current content with the character I spent weeks leveling.

 

To everyone saying that their server is doing good, great for you. There are far more players suffering from low population servers and I think it's time we get an answer from Bioware.

 

-Signed, a fed up player from Elysium imperial side.

 

I quite agree. What good is new content when you can't find groups for existing content . . . ???

[Daluu]

How can you expect them to have the capability to do a server merge when they can't even do a character transfer/character copy yet. Edited March 14, 2012 by Daluu

[pahbi]

Its hard to believe SWTOR is, 'Alive and Well' when so many servers are ghost towns.

 

- P

[Bobapes]

I find it very sad that after 3 months of leveling and building up a character our guild had to make a decision of starting over in a new server with more population to keep the pace and keep enjoying the game.

The plan is to wait for or a server merger, or the migration of chars from one server to the other. And it is time they start speeding up that process, because really, it is starting to suck a big deal every passing day. And in the end I am a huge Star Wars and Bioware fan, if I weren't...

 

But the question about legacy rises. Ok we know that is server specific. Now assuming that you can in the future (hopefully not a very long one) migrate your main char (from old server (S1)), with legacy lvl with 2 digits to a new server (S2), will the legacy go with you? And the Char which you have in S2 will benefit from legacy from the Char or S1? If not you will be playing in S2 with multiple legacies.

[mendicantdog]

after buying the game and levelling on a dead server republic side(4th biggets server in europe accorindg to torstatus...) i had to spend hours reading the awful forums to find a good place to level.

 

cant you fix the server forums and make a forum for each server so we can chat about issues exclusive to that realm? If i'd have joined another dead server i guarantee i wouldnt have renewed my subscription as there are much more appealing single player games out there that dont cost 45£ and 10£ a month to play...

 

Also please dont destroy the community by letting things like paid faction changes etc to exist, as any slighlty low or even unskilled pvp rep or imp sides of a server will turn into a wasteland quickly.

 

and to point out the obvious, maybe do server merges quickly before people start rerolling to another faction or realm and thus create a bigger problem for yourselves in the future???

 

still loving the game and my realm, but if i hadnt invested a number of hours research before rerolling i would have cancelled my subs and missed out on a pretty fun game, although with skyrim/masseffect/saints row/rage/crysis2 etc etc on my playlist i think only bioware would have missed out not me..

[iCanUseTheForce]

The most I've ever seen in my fleet was 11. ELEVEN! I am on a very empty server, which makes it hard to group up and lonely in the field. When I first started playing in Dec it wasn't so bad. Now though...harsh. Server merges are necessary! I chose a lightly populated server cuz I expected them to fill up and wanted to avoid queue times in the future. Well...I certainly did that.....

[Orizuru]

Hopefully never. Server merging is bad. There is not one MMO I am aware of where a server merge ever made anything better for anyone. The logistics of a merger are a nightmare because you have to separate worlds with rules to enforces unique names for players and guilds. Merging these together will result in thousands of conflicts that will require players and guilds to be forced to rename. And this is just for the rules we as players are aware of... There is no telling how many internal conflicts there could possibly be with the game itself that only the devs would know about.

 

Cross server queues and server transfers are the first solutions that should be implemented. If there are still problems after that, then it's a community problem where it's up to the players to use the transfer tools and/or reroll on other servers.

 

Begging for servers to be merged is like asking for a hole in your head. Sure, it could be done, but you probably won't like the end results.

[mendicantdog]

haha feel bad for you dude.

 

i always choose heavily populated servers as id rather q for 30 minutes+ and play with others instead of playing an mmo as a singpleplayer game, but even the larger servers are "light" now

 

check the server status thing occasionally, its shocking this early in the games life to see that, surely puts people off playing?

[Kratos_EU]

I'm going to add my voice to this thread. Skimming through it everything has already been said but I guess I'll chip in saying exactly the same:

 

I play on a completely dead server/faction (Uthar Wynn EU/empire)

 

People have been quitting the game (or the server) for weeks now due to lack of content.

 

One of my (former) guild members once felt like playing the game: so he took his lvl50 char to do some heroics but couldn't get a group (he tried for 30-45m), then he logged to his alt to do some leveling except he cleared all solo content (including all bonus series) up to Tatooine except that he wasn't yet at the level he could go there and not be killed by the first trash pack. During all that time he was signed up for WZs and was looking for FP groups. He logged out frustrated.

 

Uthar Wynn is like this. Except this was 1.5 weeks ago and now it's worse.

 

I fully endorse the notion of having server communities. I love making friends while FPing/WZing and then running into them in the fleet. It's how an MMO should be. But to sustain the game it needs populated communities. Please merge servers or give free server transfers.

 

Even if the game is completely healthy subscription wise you can still needlessly lose entire communities of (low populated) servers.

[mendicantdog]

Hopefully never. Server merging is bad. There is not one MMO I am aware of where a server merge ever made anything better for anyone. The logistics of a merger are a nightmare because you have to separate worlds with rules to enforces unique names for players and guilds. Merging these together will result in thousands of conflicts that will require players and guilds to be forced to rename. And this is just for the rules we as players are aware of... There is no telling how many internal conflicts there could possibly be with the game itself that only the devs would know about.

 

Cross server queues and server transfers are the first solutions that should be implemented. If there are still problems after that, then it's a community problem where it's up to the players to use the transfer tools and/or reroll on other servers.

 

Begging for servers to be merged is like asking for a hole in your head. Sure, it could be done, but you probably won't like the end results.

 

agree about the technical difficulties but doesnt that just make bioware look idiotic for making too many servers avaliable.

 

problem is solvable though, announce closure dates for low pop realms and free transfers with it. would give the player control over renaming and time for guilds to arrange where they want to migrate etc. there are so many mmo's out now surely bioware had/made decisions before these issues come to pass? i mean didnt ea buy the warhammer guys, surely they had the sense to have a chat with them about issues. isnt that how most companies/people learn from mistakes and not repeat them etc? Or is the tech for tor bad and hard to adapt to changes that the playerbase need/want?

[mendicantdog]

I'm going to add my voice to this thread. Skimming through it everything has already been said but I guess I'll chip in saying exactly the same:

 

I play on a completely dead server/faction (Uthar Wynn EU/empire)

 

People have been quitting the game (or the server) for weeks now due to lack of content.

 

One of my (former) guild members once felt like playing the game: so he took his lvl50 char to do some heroics but couldn't get a group (he tried for 30-45m), then he logged to his alt to do some leveling except he cleared all solo content (including all bonus series) up to Tatooine except that he wasn't yet at the level he could go there and not be killed by the first trash pack. During all that time he was signed up for WZs and was looking for FP groups. He logged out frustrated.

 

Uthar Wynn is like this. Except this was 1.5 weeks ago and now it's worse.

 

I fully endorse the notion of having server communities. I love making friends while FPing/WZing and then running into them in the fleet. It's how an MMO should be. But to sustain the game it needs populated communities. Please merge servers or give free server transfers.

 

Even if the game is completely healthy subscription wise you can still needlessly lose entire communities of (low populated) servers.

 

i really hope bioware are reading comments like this. on a side note this is the first day ive participated in the forums since buying the game a month ago. the fact im on here instead of playing should speak volumes. alderaan is terrible, 2 q's wherever you go then no follow up telling you where to go next. beautiful planet but whoever made the quest's for it needs a stern talking to

Edited March 14, 2012 by mendicantdog

[Orizuru]

agree about the technical difficulties but doesnt that just make bioware look idiotic for making too many servers avaliable.

 

problem is solvable though, announce closure dates for low pop realms and free transfers with it. would give the player control over renaming and time for guilds to arrange where they want to migrate etc. there are so many mmo's out now surely bioware had/made decisions before these issues come to pass? i mean didnt ea buy the warhammer guys, surely they had the sense to have a chat with them about issues. isnt that how most companies/people learn from mistakes and not repeat them etc? Or is the tech for tor bad and hard to adapt to changes that the playerbase need/want?

 

You're only seeing one side of things.

 

I don't know if you've ever participated in the launch of an MMO before, but in the past many MMO's have had terrible launches because they didn't have enough servers deployed at launch. This left those companies scrambling to quickly deploy new servers and many mistakes were made and many hard lessons were learned.

 

I feel that BioWare has done a very good job of being aware of the problems that face MMOs during and after a launch. They deployed a very good number of servers that were very well equipped to handle the launch without many of the problems that other MMOs experienced. However, by trying to be proactive about the problems that they were expecting from what they learned by studying the launches of previous MMOs from their competitors I feel they have learned a new set of lessons about launching an MMO that the industry itself has never seen before.

 

Getting players to spread out evenly across all the available servers is a very daunting task. I've seen some games even go so far to not allow players to choose the server they play on. However, no matter how much "encouragement" the devs make for players to spread out evenly, population distribution across servers is a variable that is largely beyond the devs control because there are a lot of players who will always just transfer or reroll on the most populated servers, which results in some servers being over-populated and there will be queues just to log in, while other servers struggle to maintain a large enough community to sustain gameplay.

 

On a side note though, and this is not directed to the person whom I am replying; but the senseless bashing of BioWare on this issue really needs to be curbed a bit. They have access to a ton more data than players do about the health of server populations. While it may seem like your realm is dead to a player, they player could be an anomaly and located on a planet that only has a few players on it because a majority of the players are lower or higher levels and are just on other planets. There is also the issue of peak time versus non-peak time as well. I'm not saying this doesn't mean there are issues that need to be discussed and worked out, I'm just saying the problems may not be as bad as they seem to many players.

 

At the end of the day though, all BioWare can do is dangle a carrot on a stick and hope the community cooperates and doesn't cluster around a few servers, which is what is currently happening.

[Matte_Black]

agree about the technical difficulties but doesnt that just make bioware look idiotic for making too many servers avaliable.

 

What if there was not the same size drop-off in population as occurred and BioWare had not created that last wave of expansion servers?

 

It's easy to say now what they should have done but, in the early stages of the release when no-one really knew what they had on their hands, there were some pretty damn lengthy server cues. We might still be dealing with sharding and waiting to log in.

 

In all honesty, patience and some thought on the part of the customers would have provided the best way to manage the issue but, it's not something to be counted upon.

Edited March 14, 2012 by Matte_Black

[Celebrus]

At the end of the day though, all BioWare can do is dangle a carrot on a stick and hope the community cooperates and doesn't cluster around a few servers, which is what is currently happening.

 

 

Way to type out a long winded description of how perfectly Bioware executed their launch (my ***), then finish it up with a tiny jab at the players. No. Sorry. It's not my fault that either the game is dying, or BW overestimated the number of servers necessary.

 

Pop is dwindling, whether slowly or quickly, it's *obvious* at this point, but there is absolutely nothing you can say that will make me believe that it is due to anything other than terrible design and poor execution.

 

The remaining *active* players aren't clustering around a few servers simply because they want to and enjoy doing so. They're doing it because the servers that they leveled characters on before are so low in pop that they can't get groups or WZs, they're doing it because they want to continue to enjoy the game but aren't able to do so without re-rolling. They aren't doing it simply because they want to be disobedient to Bioware's aims and throw server populations out of wack like you seem to be suggesting.

 

As other's have said, this is more a matter of perception than hard numbers.

 

My perception is that at peak time a month ago there was 180-240 people on the Imperial Fleet on my server. There hasn't been more than 150 in 3 weeks now, mostly less than 100, at peak times. That is different. That is a perceived decrease in *active* players. That is bad.

 

My perception is that at 2 am a month ago (yes, I do binge play from time to time) by the time my load screen from exiting a WZ was finished, I had a new queue already popped. Now I wait 10-15 minutes at TEN-ELEVEN o-clock to get a PvP queue. That is different. That is a change. That is not good.

 

My perception is that at anytime a month ago, I had no problem getting a heroic 4 group for my alt. Or getting a HM FP group for my main, there were so many anxious and eager players available I virtually had my pick of more than one group to join AS A DAMAGE DEALER. Now I spend 30-45 minutes finding groups. That is different. Thats a perceived change. It's a negative one.

What I perceive and what impacts my play matters much more to me than what you feel about BW's launch and the "hard" numbers that don't seem to exist.

Edited March 14, 2012 by Celebrus

[Orizuru]

Way to type out a long winded description of how perfectly Bioware executed their launch (my ***), then finish it up with a tiny jab at the players. No. Sorry. It's not my fault that either the game is dying, or BW overestimated the number of servers necessary.

 

You missed my point. I wasn't saying the launch was perfect. I was saying it had a new set of problems that were unique to SWTOR because they learned from other MMOs launches.

 

I also wasn't saying it's your fault entirely. I was simply saying that it takes work from both the devs and players to balance server populations.

 

 

You should go read a few threads on the World of Warcraft forums. They have millions of players and are having the exact same population balance issues. So are just about all of the MMOs being played today. The problem isn't entirely on the devs to fix because players tend to cluster around specific servers. The devs can't do much to control this.

[Kourage]

I'm not so sure that's a bad number. 1:20pm on a workday. 67?

 

I don't really know what people's expectations are. Go pick a random WoW, EQ1-2, War, Aion, ETC server and try to find 67 of one side playing at 1:20pm.

 

That would be very easy to do in WoW. Our servers here are supposed to hold the same pops as theirs.