Maintenance: October 24th, 2017

[TUXs]

And this is not something that was a snap decision. There are contracts plans hardware allocations... this was known well in advance.

Yup! It sure was...but it was hidden from all until now. An absolute lie by omission. Unreal lol. Edited October 24, 2017 by TUXs

[Costello]

Wasn't this meant to be an upgrade to software and hardware. Shouldn't that improve the situation for players, if its not an improvement how was it an upgrade?

 

Wasn't there meant to be better communication, it seems less communication and its last minute information that is usually bad news.

[Azerdayne]

As a west coaster, if my connection quality to SS is the same as it is to Starforge, and character transfers become 90cc again, I will move all my toons there, because all of my RP friends are there. I only stayed on WC for the connection, because my pvp experience on TEH was impacted by connection speed. Now my ping on BC is the same as it was on TEH earlier this week before the change.

 

The community will want to move together if there is no difference between servers.

 

I highly doubt that I am the only person who feels this way. RP'ers will want to move together, PvP'ers will want to move together. And those who don't want to get ripped off on server transfers will have another very good reason to quit.

 

Can Star Forge handle it when most ppl on SS head there? Why did you even make 2 NA servers?

 

*shakes head* This was such an utterly, profoundly stupid move.

 

Shame on you BW for lying to us ... again.

 

And if there IS a good reason for doing things this way, what is it? An explanation is required, stat.

[darkwarrior_]

So what i see is the game is going down the toilet and because money is tight they decided to consolidate into one slightly better server on the east coast where its cheaper for them to run it, my ping just tripled as well and i have some choice words for you inconsiderate jags as i have been playing and paying since it came out!!!!!

 

EAT SHIZ INCOMPETENTS AND EA IDIOTS, MY SUB JUST ENDED!

[DarthHammer]

I am guessing that they discontinued the 90cc character transfers because they were afraid that we might do this on our own once we found out what they were doing.

 

At least this way, if people to decided to transfer toons anyway they will see increased profits, and then they can pat themselves on the back for having a winning strategy.

 

Of course what they probably didn't account for is how many people that were thinking of leaving anyway will just decide that now is a good time to quit.

 

I guess we'll see.

 

Yeap we were all misinformed. I've played in Harbinger for many years even though Im east coast. Yesterday I decided I wanted to play with lower ping and transfered all my toons (13 aprox) to TEH (1,170 cc). I left my legacy, strongholds and friends there and now I'll probably have to transfer them back at full rate (23,400 cc assuming each transfer will cost 1,800).

 

I know some people might disagree with this but those extra 60 - 80 ms that west coast users are getting now do make a difference in PvP. I used to play with 160 ping in Harbinger and in many cases I had the disadvantage because of that. Ex. Running towards a jugg or a mara and using force charge but they will always charge first no matter how fast I spam my keybaord lol.

 

Also RIP APAC players' ping.

[Nebdar]

Liars, deceivers, manipulators.....

who would have known

This stuff that is happening with SWTOR now is very similar to to Episode III : Revenge of the Sith...

 

Keith you are suppose to bring balance and save the game...

[Exly]

How about we get some damn answers, devs?

 

They are probably to busy talking to each other about how much better they are at communicating with us now than they used to be, that the don't have time to talk to us anymore.

[teclado]

Uh...I'll have to see what my ping is when I get home later. I live on the west coast and have been getting 60ms on harbinger (unusually bad, but playable). I've never bothered to play much on east coast servers because I would get 250ms. So, if I am effectively forced to play on an east coast server, and get around 250ms, I think I'm gonna be done. I don't want to have to pay for an e.g. WTFast subscription just to get playable ping.

 

UPDATE: 60ms to 110ms now. Not as bad as I feared, but still almost doubled. Ran a warzone and it seemed playable, but still not cool to blindside us with this.

Edited October 25, 2017 by teclado

[Rrusalka]

So 26-30ms on Harb to 90-160ms. Hilariously enough TEH has lower ping for me now. So glad their communication improved.

 

I remember working IT and doing data center moves usually planned them out months to a year in advance. Amazing that they could plan it out in the time since the last update they gave us.

[DarthHammer]

They are probably to busy talking to each other about how much better they are at communicating with us now than they used to be, that the don't have time to talk to us anymore.

 

Or they are probably copy pasting the typical answer "Oh dudes sorry we forgot to put that in the patch notes/road map... blames on me".

Well at the end it comes to this:

1) It is a 5-year+ game that it is starting to see the effects of having a small player base (vs. others) so and Im pretty sure they moved servers to save some datacenter and maintenance costs.

2) Why they left 2 servers in the same location?: 2 reasons: 1) To still have one last merger window in the future to keep the game active for the remaining subscribers before this game dies, and 2) to keep server transfers alive as right now the gold mine for gaming companies are games with microtransactions such as in mobile games. Server transfers are one type of those.

 

Blame the shareholders!

[Costello]

I'm guessing the plan is just to ignore it until west coast people go away.

 

It does feel like calling this an server upgrade may have been misleading so people suggesting an investment in servers was a good thing may need to rethink that assessment.

[orangenee]

mostly curious, but where are the actual servers located now? where they moved to a geographically located east coast location? Are they in Texas? Tennessee? Florida? Maine? North Dakota? Utah? Puerto Rico? India?

 

Guatemala. Or somewhere super cheap.

[Elssha]

So 26-30ms on Harb to 90-160ms. Hilariously enough TEH has lower ping for me now. So glad their communication improved.

 

I remember working IT and doing data center moves usually planned them out months to a year in advance. Amazing that they could plan it out in the time since the last update they gave us.

 

 

Nice how this happens right after they lock transfers, no?

 

 

T_T I'm now afraid to look if my ping on SL/EH is lower or not. I was at 25 on BC and saw 80 when I logged in... though it did initially hit closer to the 120 mark T_T

[raxantano]

I'm getting a better ping on BC and The Harbinger than I am on Ebon Hawk as an east coaster... This is a massive problem... I should not be getting 23ms on BC and getting 40ms on EH

[darkwarrior_]

You guys do not understand what they just did do you? They got rid of multiple locations, the locations they had before and now only have one physical location for servers and it is on the east coast!

It might say harbinger or any other name but the physical location of the servers themselves is now on the east coast.

Its called saving money because this game is now a liability to EA who publishes it!

:mad::mad::mad:

Edited October 24, 2017 by darkwarrior_
because i can

[Jnaathra]

Pretty dirty to completely do away with west coast servers.

[Aztang]

Could this even be undone if they put their energy into reestablishing a west coast server?

[Kaizersan]

Could this even be undone if they put their energy into reestablishing a west coast server?

 

Not likely as they already physically moved the data centers to the east coast and that cost money.

[KendraP]

A few questions and I'm not trying to be overly obnoxious, just don't really know all the technicalities.

 

I have several guildies who play from the Pacific. Wouldn't this inevitably affect their server lag, and thereby their gameplay experience? This is based on my own observations playing on harby from international locations anyway.

 

More fundamentally, if they're in the same place anyway, why bother having a "west coast" server if it's going to be located on the east coast? Is there too large a population still playing?

 

Again, hunting for answers. Not purposefully beikng obnoxious or stupid.

[EnzoForMe]

Hi all,

 

Today’s maintenance was part of the United Forces effort!

 

We have completed the upgrade of the Game Servers along with all their supporting infrastructure in the Data Centers. We made a large investment of new hardware and software and one of our primary goals was to substantially reduce our footprint while improving our overall server capacity. During our evaluation of the new servers, we determined we could also combine our North American datacenters. That also occurred today and we have officially moved out of our West Coast location. Our testing showed no impact on the gameplay experience, but we expect some of you playing on formerly West Coast servers may see higher ping times. We’ll use the next two weeks to smooth out any kinks and resolve any performance issues encountered.

 

Cheers!

 

-Keith--

 

You don't "work out the kinks" of latency caused by physical distance. It will simply be a fact that APAC and West Coast players will have a degraded play experience and claiming otherwise is asinine.

 

If you could "smooth out" latency due to physical distance I'm sure actual tech companies like Oracle, Amazon, and on the cable side Verizon/Comcast would love to purchase your proprietary technology and leverage it to be ridiculously profitable.

 

I think we both know that's not the case.

 

I'm an East Coast player so this doesn't even affect me directly but this may be the most bizarre and tone-deaf thing you've done, particularly to pvpers.

Edited October 25, 2017 by EnzoForMe

[AscendingSky]

Why not just have one US Server then? There's no point having west and east anymore.

 

Also, this is going to have a negative impact on APAC players

 

EA has made it abundantly clear over the years that they don't give a toss about APAC players.

[Mdgshorty]

Hi all,

 

Today’s maintenance was part of the United Forces effort!

 

We have completed the upgrade of the Game Servers along with all their supporting infrastructure in the Data Centers. We made a large investment of new hardware and software and one of our primary goals was to substantially reduce our footprint while improving our overall server capacity. During our evaluation of the new servers, we determined we could also combine our North American datacenters. That also occurred today and we have officially moved out of our West Coast location. Our testing showed no impact on the gameplay experience, but we expect some of you playing on formerly West Coast servers may see higher ping times. We’ll use the next two weeks to smooth out any kinks and resolve any performance issues encountered.

 

You’ll see the same Servers today that you saw yesterday. They’re just running on new hardware and, some, in different locations. As announced previously the move to the five (5) new Servers will be on Wednesday, November 8, 2017. At that time all Game Servers and the SWTOR website will be down for up to 12 hours. We’ll let you know the actual start time a few days before.

 

Report any specific issues you encounter to Customer Service as we’ve established an escalation process for critical issues. Please be a bit patient with us over the coming weeks as we unite players from a variety of servers and try to make this a smooth and painless process for everyone.

 

Cheers!

 

-Keith--

 

Keith,

 

I don't think this was really a good idea here, but I see both sides of the coin though. You really should have let us all know that this change was going to go in effect before the merge so that people could make the right choice as to which server they want their characters on.

 

I see why though, that you decided to move the west coast servers. Its probably easier to manage both US servers from one location.

 

I live in the midwest, so I live in the central time zone so the ping make little difference to me. It was only 20ms difference between the east and west servers. Though the east coast, I always had slightly better ping. I feel for the people who are farther aways and see a difference though.

[KittyKat_Karrot]

If all NA servers are now in the same physical location, it would be awesome if you just merged them all into a single NA server. It would be great for the pvp community. No reason to keep it split in half if there's no latency difference.

[Costello]

Does it seem that this is being handled particularly badly.

 

Firstly its announced they will be upgrading the hardware and software. Naturally this produces a few forum goers to cheer with joy but aside from this what was the upgrade and what was the end result. Now I'm all for upgrades, give me less ping, better graphics, enhanced combat, beautiful expansive worlds I love it. But it doesn't appear this upgrade is for any of that, so its great there are upgrades but for what open world PvP? It feels like what they meant to say was 'we have upgraded the servers but you wont see any benefit', which begs the question was there any upgrade.

 

But then it seems people have been negatively effected by this upgrade, notably Germany and West Coast, not small segments of the player base. So it doesn't seem this has been an upgrade but a downgrade.

 

And instead of increased communication, its one post about ironing out some of the kinks, I would have though the big kink was distance and thats not something that can be ironed out. And aside from reducing a footprint which I can only imagine is the carbon footprint its not clear at all what has been upgraded for those not in Germany or the West Coast. Is the Carbon footprint of one west coast server really that big a deal? I'd wager there are far more effective ways of cutting the carbon footprint such as what was the carbon footprint of flying the dev team to New York for the cantina event. All we can hope is that EA gets recognized for it work combating global warming I'm sure that will make the players effected feel better. Even if it makes their performance in game worse.

 

It then is left with asking players for feedback and patience while completely ignoring the forums. This ranks up there with Charles not being willing to talk about lag in 16 man ops till someone asks nicely then says they don't know whats causing it and would players please help to resubmit tickets. You don't have a go at people and then ask those same people for help cause you don't know whats causing it. You want tickets logged and patience, it make sense to engage with these people not ignore them.

 

So it seems that for whatever reason this is being handled badly and you got to wonder why would you handle it like this. I doubt anyone could spin this as being handled well for the game and likely to have people that may have come back for their free SOR stuff thinking that a game with a future.

Edited October 25, 2017 by Costello

[MerriwxOne]

Hi all,

 

Today’s maintenance was part of the United Forces effort!

 

We have completed the upgrade of the Game Servers along with all their supporting infrastructure in the Data Centers. We made a large investment of new hardware and software and one of our primary goals was to substantially reduce our footprint while improving our overall server capacity. During our evaluation of the new servers, we determined we could also combine our North American datacenters. That also occurred today and we have officially moved out of our West Coast location. Our testing showed no impact on the gameplay experience, but we expect some of you playing on formerly West Coast servers may see higher ping times. We’ll use the next two weeks to smooth out any kinks and resolve any performance issues encountered.

 

I'm not on the West coast....my lag has been a problem since launch, AND now you say you've fixed it but my lag is worse today????

 

Report any specific issues you encounter to Customer Service as we’ve established an escalation process for critical issues.

Seriously??? Like WHY??? Customer service never helps...I upload this ping test, that ping test, all that crap every single time i've called ....to get level2 support...that doesn't know more than level1.

You have crap servers and server lag, because you pay for cheap service for your customers that you nickle -n- dime with CC crap, re-skins of old gear, and nothing new...even the "new" planets look like pcs of other areas jumbled together.

Please be a bit patient with us over the coming weeks as we unite players from a variety of servers and try to make this a smooth and painless process for everyone.

Asking for patience has wore thin....you all should be embarrassed. Does anyone have the balls to say..."Hey..we have *%$#$ up" Let's fix this before our cash cow runs dry"...NOPE....not one of you. Bad class changes, acting like you don't know that class utilities are broken, and you all are acting like we should be praising you all...."Ohh TY Keith" , "No problem Bio-ware", "We understand Musco!"....SERIOUSLY...."GET OUT OF STUPID!!...Seriously!"