Server Merge Discussion Thread

[Ratajack]

If the game engine allows for cross server group que, that would be all that is needed to fix ALL the dead servers.

Pro's

1. Group content would be available at all times.

2. Player bashing in general chat, due to a bad OPS or PVP run, would be almost eliminated.

3. It would be a software change not a hardware change.

4. Everyone can keep their character names and guilds in place.

5. There is never a need to merge servers, even if one server has low population, it will not affect the players on that server, as they can still participate in group content.

Con's

1. The economies on servers will differ. (this is really ok, as if you have one mega server with a bad economy, there is no where to transfer to a better economy.)

 

It just makes good sense to do a cross server group content que, before merging or buying a mega server. Also, if the population of the game increases over time (like after the release of the next Star Wars movie this year), there is no need to add a new server for a while.

 

You left out a MAJOR con--the loss of behavioral accountability.

 

Why should Johnny behave in a respectful and responsible manner when the rest of his group is from different servers and he will likely never have to worry about seeing them again? Why should Johnny care if he ends up on the ignore lists of a few people from other servers? There are other people on those other servers that don't have him on ignore.

 

As it stands now, if Johnny decides to be D-bag, that WILL get around and Johnny WILL get a bad rep, likely landing him on many ignore lists.

[Icykill_]

No that will not work. Greifers and trolls will still be able to grief rp. There is no way adding a rp instance will help keep griefers off the rp instances. It will not work like a pvp instance because I think if you grief a pvp player he can just kill you on a pvp server, there is nothing stopping a troll/griefer from doing that on a rp instance.

 

The fastest way to kill roleplay is by giving it an instance like this and allowing people to troll or grief them. This happened to me before on SWG and my friends and I got fed up that we just stop playing. We don't want people to stop playing so this is not a way to handle roleplay.

 

As someone who doesn't RP, I am ignorant as to how people can grief you. I've got a few toons on TEH and I see the RP guys about and read some entertaining chat. But for the life of me I can't work out how they can grief you outside of chat.

Can someone please elaborate?

[Ratajack]

I've seen quite few people say that they enjoy 'dead'/quiet servers and do not wish to play on high population servers. The client settings could help there. There is a setting most of you seem to overlook. It may be enough as it is or maybe additionally improved.

 

If you got to Preferences => Graphics => Visible Character Limit you can control how many players you see around you. They may even add as an option None. Other UI elements, such as number of people in instance or Chat can be turned off and you'd feel like you've got whole galaxy to yourself

 

Would this be a satisfactory solution to those players?

 

How would "not seeing" other players prevent the fighting over quest objectives, resources, etc?

 

How many people would try to harvest a resource, only to find that it was already harvested by someone they cannot even see?

 

Ignore lists are limited. Turning off chat is not something that anyone should have to do. How do you address the "chat trolls"?

[AscendingSky]

As someone who doesn't RP, I am ignorant as to how people can grief you. I've got a few toons on TEH and I see the RP guys about and read some entertaining chat. But for the life of me I can't work out how they can grief you outside of chat.

Can someone please elaborate?

 

 

Allow me to repost what I said earlier in this very thread:

 

Don't forget all the griefing during the rakghoul event! People running into or jumping down from higher levels onto groups of people RPing right as they're about to explode to make everyone get infected. Your ignore list doesn't mean squat in terms of preventing that!

 

Also, any items or class abilities that force other players' toons to behave in a certain way (I'm looking at you, Party Bomb) can be spammed on top of RPers to be disruptive. AoE abilities like Mortar Volley can be spammed on players. Even when you have players on ignore, they can still flood built-in emotes in the game to make the chat window scroll up constantly so you can't catch what other people have said. Or they can just bypass the ignore list entirely by switching to an alt and continuing the harassment/disruptive chat behavior. Really nasty sorts of griefers just mass report spam on RPers to squelch them temporarily, completely preventing them from doing the thing they're paying their subscription to do in the first place.

 

In short, those who like to grief and harass RPers have many creative and disruptive ways of doing so.

 

 

And that's not even covering everything, that was in response to another poster who mentioned other methods of harassment/griefing.

Edited June 6, 2017 by AscendingSky

[LordTurin]

As someone who doesn't RP, I am ignorant as to how people can grief you. I've got a few toons on TEH and I see the RP guys about and read some entertaining chat. But for the life of me I can't work out how they can grief you outside of chat.

Can someone please elaborate?

 

Emoting at them (ignore doesn't work on that apparently) and so filling up the chat window, or sending them hundreds of jawagrams at one time, thereby covering them up. Just 2 examples I've read about recently.

[DWho]

I've seen quite few people say that they enjoy 'dead'/quiet servers and do not wish to play on high population servers. The client settings could help there. There is a setting most of you seem to overlook. It may be enough as it is or maybe additionally improved.

 

If you got to Preferences => Graphics => Visible Character Limit you can control how many players you see around you. They may even add as an option None. Other UI elements, such as number of people in instance or Chat can be turned off and you'd feel like you've got whole galaxy to yourself

 

Would this be a satisfactory solution to those players?

 

I think it is less about how many characters they see than the perceived difficulty of completing the content. On lower population servers you don't have to worry that someone is going to rush past you and grab the objective you are fighting in front of (Having done 9 DvL characters on Harbinger, that was a constant problem there and I took to ignoring the fight and grabbed the objective first even if it meant dying as a result - I never did go past the lvl 25 mark on them for a variety of reasons related to that server). There is also a substantially lower probability of having a troll (defined however you want to) in chat. While they are present on every server, the likelihood they are on when you are is lower on lower population servers. Turning off chat also turns off the messages you might want to see, like "LFG", and ignoring them only stifles their comments not the comments replying to them which can be just as hostile. Your ignore list can grow quite rapidly. I don't play a lot on low population servers but these are the reasons I do go and play on them when I do.

 

If they could adjust the map instancing to a lower number, say 50, I think there would be less concern about highly populated servers. The objectives available on the starter planets are pushed to the limit once the population goes past 100 in the instance. A chat moderator with the ability to silence "offenders" would also be nice.

[Icykill_]

1 Mega Server for each region (US, EU).

Instanced versions of each zone and chat divided in: PVE, RP, PVP, RP-PVP.

To determine which instance/chat you go to it would use flags (like the PVP one we have now).

 

There done. Problem solved.

 

Now how to solve the name collisions during merge time that is another question

 

That won't work for regional players in the APAC area unless the server was located on the west coast, which would alienate people on the east coast.

There would need to be one in each current region, west coast, east coast and EU

[Icykill_]

Emoting at them (ignore doesn't work on that apparently) and so filling up the chat window, or sending them hundreds of jawagrams at one time, thereby covering them up. Just 2 examples I've read about recently.

 

Oh, ok, thanks for letting me know. 😊

[Icykill_]

Allow me to repost what I said earlier in this very thread:

 

And that's not even covering everything, that was in response to another poster who mentioned other methods of harassment/griefing.

 

😳😳 oh wow, I just never thought people would go to that extreme. The depths people go to is mind boggling.

 

And sorry I hadn't read through all the pages yet to get to your post. Thanks for reposting it. 😊

[frennky]

How would "not seeing" other players prevent the fighting over quest objectives, resources, etc?

 

How many people would try to harvest a resource, only to find that it was already harvested by someone they cannot even see?

 

This can be solved with lower spawn timers or lower instance caps or a combination of it.

[AscendingSky]

😳😳 oh wow, I just never thought people would go to that extreme. The depths people go to is mind boggling.

 

And sorry I hadn't read through all the pages yet to get to your post. Thanks for reposting it. 😊

 

It's a sad reality of life that some people derive pleasure from ruining other people's fun. I don't understand the mentality myself, but I see examples of it regularly while RPing in public spaces on Ebon Hawk. Some RPers I know flat out refuse to RP in public areas anymore, either keeping everything in group/ops chat or staying in strongholds, specifically because of how many people there are around who like to hassle RPers for some immature reason. EAWare removing the official designation of Ebon Hawk as an RP server has only made things worse.

 

Given the stories I've heard about how toxic Harbinger's community and fleet chat can be? Yeah, I don't want to be forced to RP around that crowd, ever.

Edited June 6, 2017 by AscendingSky

[DWho]

😳😳 oh wow, I just never thought people would go to that extreme. The depths people go to is mind boggling.

 

And sorry I hadn't read through all the pages yet to get to your post. Thanks for reposting it. 😊

 

It is really sad that people would go out of their way in this manner to make other peoples game experience bad. In a lot of ways, griefers, ruined the possibility of open world PVP on most planets by standing on objectives to prevent people from completing missions or otherwise interfere with people trying to complete missions. It did go both ways where people would use the "PVE shield" to take advantage which is griefing as well (though I sometimes wondered if that wasn't a griefers tactic just aimed at PVP players instead of PVE players). Unintended flagging was one of the reasons PVP was changed to an instance on all servers.

 

Even more sad is that it only takes a very few to ruin it for everyone.

[Icykill_]

90cc isn't free. People are at liberty to move should they choose, but someone with 90+ alts like myself, moving a server's worth of toons wouldn't be free, by far.

 

This is something the 90cc doesn't solve for people with lots of alts. It also doesn't help with moving guild items, etc.

[Ratajack]

This is something the 90cc doesn't solve for people with lots of alts. It also doesn't help with moving guild items, etc.

 

What many seem to ignore is that server merges would not help with moving guild items, either.

[frennky]

This is something the 90cc doesn't solve for people with lots of alts. It also doesn't help with moving guild items, etc.

 

Initially, I welcomed the idea of cheap transfers and even transferred my entire legacy (20+ alts) only to bring half of it back to origin server. Why? Because some of my friends moved while others stayed. Now my friends are spread across multiple servers.

 

Having a split legacy robs me from a lot of conveniences like sharing gear etc. I'd love to transfer my alts, but to which server? Which group of friends should I say goodbye to?

 

One EU server would mean I can play with all my friends together again...

[Icykill_]

300-400? Ouch are you still on dial up or something or is east coast that much worse? I play with around 170 on Harbinger...

 

I'm in Australia and it's 200-300ms on the west coast for me. When it's 200-220ms, pvp is playable, when it goes to 300ms the lag kills you more than other players. When it hits 400ms it's time to log off because it's unplayable.

PVE questing, etc, can easily handle 400ms, but lag sensitive parts of the game like pvp and NiM OPs can't.

Not having a west coast server for people in the APAC region is a death nail for lag sensitive parts of the game.

We already lost our APAC servers and went from 20-40ms to 200ms+. I would guesstimate that 70% of APAC players didn't make the transition and stopped playing. The people I know from Western Australia did because the lag was even higher for them.

[Icykill_]

While I *like* the idea of a server merge (the Bastion is my home server with my oldest toons), I don't *love* it for two main reasons.

1) Even though my toons aren't on a designated RP server, I'm loathe to combine my characters with others of a different legacy. My different legacies each have a different "flavor" so to speak, so I'm not stoked about mixing them. At the very least, include a free name change for every toon that is transferred so I can add the prev. legacy name as a surname.

.

 

Wouldn't it be good if we could have seperate Legacy Families, so you could actually have a few different legacies together on the same server. Then you could keep the "flavour" for each one and we could also have different rep and Imp legacies

[Soljin]

What many seem to ignore is that server merges would not help with moving guild items, either.

 

Maybe not in the past...But it would likely be a requirement to avoid substantial sub loss...And they can do it, they just have not put in the leg work previously.

[Icykill_]

Something that's been thrown around before to help with the low population is a designated free server transfer for whole legacies.

 

They would have to be a one off all legacy transfer to predetermined servers. Certain servers that maybe seen as ones depopulating would not be available destinations.

 

Once the transfer was complete, that legacy wouldn't be able to receive a free transfer again and any transfer after that would need to be paid for.

 

This would enable new, returning and current players on servers who can't get group content or players who want to get away from certain server cultures, a chance to relocate those legacies to more active servers.

 

If, in the future the internal Bio statics show a sever has basically depopulated beyond Biowares internally set guidelines for it to be viable, then that server could be merged with an active one. At that point it would be safe to assume most of those being merged would be inactive accounts

 

Keith, there are lots of reasons for mergers and lots of reasons against mergers. Why not let the players make the initial decision by giving us "free" whole legacy transfers, similar to how a merge would happen anyway. Let people's feet do the talking.

[AscendingSky]

Something that's been thrown around before to help with the low population is a designated free server transfer for whole legacies.

 

They would have to be a one off all legacy transfer to predetermined servers. Certain servers that maybe seen as ones depopulating would not be available destinations.

 

Once the transfer was complete, that legacy wouldn't be able to receive a free transfer again and any transfer after that would need to be paid for.

 

This would enable new, returning and current players on servers who can't get group content or players who want to get away from certain server cultures, a chance to relocate those legacies to more active servers.

 

If, in the future the internal Bio statics show a sever has basically depopulated beyond Biowares internally set guidelines for it to be viable, then that server could be merged with an active one. At that point it would be safe to assume most of those being merged would be inactive accounts

 

Keith, there are lots of reasons for mergers and lots of reasons against mergers. Why not let the players make the initial decision by giving us "free" whole legacy transfers, similar to how a merge would happen anyway. Let people's feet do the talking.

 

Offering free transfers for legacies off the lowest of the low population servers would be a simple enough step EAWare could make to try to help the situation--especially if those players were given one-on-one support from Customer Service to rebuild things like guild banks, flagships, strongholds, etc. Starting with a small number of players would hopefully make it easier for EAWare to handle going through and replicating all those accomplishments on the destination server.

 

Something else they might want to consider is blocking anyone who doesn't already have characters on the low pop servers from making new characters there. That way, new players won't roll on one of the old PvP servers, decide the game is 'dead' due to the low population there, and quit the game.

 

Or they could just go back to listing the population levels of all servers at character creation and login... I'm not sure why they stopped doing that.

[Ratajack]

Maybe not in the past...But it would likely be a requirement to avoid substantial sub loss...And they can do it, they just have not put in the leg work previously.

 

They could not ensure that guild assets were not lost when they merged servers the previous two times.

 

What makes you think they would do so this time?

 

 

IF (and that is a HUGE IF) BW does find a way to 100% ensure that NO ONE loses ANYTHING, then server merges become a much more viable option.

 

Until/unless BW can and does resolve ALL the issues surrounding server merges, server merges should not be considered, IMO.

[DWho]

Something that's been thrown around before to help with the low population is a designated free server transfer for whole legacies.

 

They would have to be a one off all legacy transfer to predetermined servers. Certain servers that maybe seen as ones depopulating would not be available destinations.

 

Once the transfer was complete, that legacy wouldn't be able to receive a free transfer again and any transfer after that would need to be paid for.

 

This would enable new, returning and current players on servers who can't get group content or players who want to get away from certain server cultures, a chance to relocate those legacies to more active servers.

 

If, in the future the internal Bio statics show a sever has basically depopulated beyond Biowares internally set guidelines for it to be viable, then that server could be merged with an active one. At that point it would be safe to assume most of those being merged would be inactive accounts

 

Keith, there are lots of reasons for mergers and lots of reasons against mergers. Why not let the players make the initial decision by giving us "free" whole legacy transfers, similar to how a merge would happen anyway. Let people's feet do the talking.

 

I think it is a good idea. It would be relatively simple to implement (sort of like a small server merge) and would allow the players that feel that the impediment to their moving servers is the number of characters they have. It would also leave those that want to play on the medium population servers in an environment to their liking. Alternatively, if cross server queuing doesn't work on a broad scale, would it be simpler if the transfer was only to and from a specific server (say to a specific Nightmare OPs/Ranked PVP server) and then back to their original server instead of potentially going to server A one time server B the next time. Server lag would potentially be an issue so it would likely have to be a regional server. I think point to point lag within the US, for example, is sub 100 ms for everyone (doesn't really help APAC out though). I am assuming that PVP warzones are on the server you currently queue on and not a completely different server.

[Otaktey]

You left out a MAJOR con--the loss of behavioral accountability.

 

Why should Johnny behave in a respectful and responsible manner when the rest of his group is from different servers and he will likely never have to worry about seeing them again? Why should Johnny care if he ends up on the ignore lists of a few people from other servers? There are other people on those other servers that don't have him on ignore.

 

As it stands now, if Johnny decides to be D-bag, that WILL get around and Johnny WILL get a bad rep, likely landing him on many ignore lists.

 

If Jonny is being a D-bag, you can still report him in a ticket. However, if someone is just not the best player in the world and Jonny wants to be a D-bag about it in general chat, then it will do him no good to bash the player who is new to the content and not up to Jonny's expectations.

[DWho]

If Jonny is being a D-bag, you can still report him in a ticket. However, if someone is just not the best player in the world and Jonny wants to be a D-bag about it in general chat, then it will do him no good to bash the player who is new to the content and not up to Jonny's expectations.

 

They could put a moderator online (I'm sure there would even be volunteers among the community) in the most egregious areas (fleet and starter worlds) with the ability to "silence" someone for a period of time in response to their comments or even "kick" them from the server for some period of time. That way it would be an immediate response instead of something that may or may not happen in the future.

[TUXs]

They could put a moderator online (I'm sure there would even be volunteers among the community) in the most egregious areas (fleet and starter worlds) with the ability to "silence" someone for a period of time in response to their comments or even "kick" them from the server for some period of time. That way it would be an immediate response instead of something that may or may not happen in the future.

They don't even need that. Just have some guy on-call who reviews the chat logs when someone is reported. He can read a text file on his cell phone...generate an email report that he can review. It could not be simpler.