Can we get free transfers off dead servers please?

[StrikePrice]

SS is completely dead. Admit it and move on. Give us transfers so we have something to pay for. 

[AwesomeTacoCat]

Are you sure the other servers are better? Is SF substantially better or has everyone there quit too? 

[manlymandayruin]

35 minutes ago, AwesomeTacoCat said:

Are you sure the other servers are better? Is SF substantially better or has everyone there quit too? 

I used to play on Satele Shan. Spent money to transfer to Star Forge. Huge difference. Star Forge is a very much alive and vibrant server. At this point they should just merge the two servers together.

[Toraak]

12 minutes ago, manlymandayruin said:

I used to play on Satele Shan. Spent money to transfer to Star Forge. Huge difference. Star Forge is a very much alive and vibrant server. At this point they should just merge the two servers together.

No they shouldn't. SS has a different gameplay style then SF does. From what I've seen Satele Shan server still has plenty of people on it, however they do only guild activities or are more solo play oriented. Just because Group content doesn't happen as often on Satele Doesn't mean it is a dead server.

 

The simple truth is if your a group oriented content player, you should move 1 character to SF if you were on SS. Use those free CC's from Galactic Season's for that.. Simply because some people can't find the content they desire on a server doesn't mean it is dead and needs a merger however. When I want to do some things I like to play on SS. When I want Group oriented content I'll play on SF simple as that.

 

Edit: also not everyone wants to be on a huge Mega server. So just because you may want all US servers or all servers to be merged into 1, doesn't mean everyone does.

Edited July 12, 2023 by Toraak

[manlymandayruin]

52 minutes ago, Toraak said:

No they shouldn't. SS has a different gameplay style then SF does. From what I've seen Satele Shan server still has plenty of people on it, however they do only guild activities or are more solo play oriented. Just because Group content doesn't happen as often on Satele Doesn't mean it is a dead server.

 

The simple truth is if your a group oriented content player, you should move 1 character to SF if you were on SS. Use those free CC's from Galactic Season's for that.. Simply because some people can't find the content they desire on a server doesn't mean it is dead and needs a merger however. When I want to do some things I like to play on SS. When I want Group oriented content I'll play on SF simple as that.

 

Edit: also not everyone wants to be on a huge Mega server. So just because you may want all US servers or all servers to be merged into 1, doesn't mean everyone does.

This is the strangest post ive seen today. Satele Shan doesn’t have a set playstyle and there isnt a secret sauce to the server. Its quite obvious that Satele Shan is a very low population server which is why solo play and guild activities are the only things to do.

whats more likely is that youre  from SS and youre coping.

lastly despite your strange ideas the majority of people in multiplayer games want to be on servers that actually have people running all of the content in the game.

 

TLDR: SS is a dead server and has been dead for a while now. Transfer to Star Forge, its better.

[Darkestmonty]

1 hour ago, Toraak said:

No they shouldn't. SS has a different gameplay style then SF does. From what I've seen Satele Shan server still has plenty of people on it, however they do only guild activities or are more solo play oriented. Just because Group content doesn't happen as often on Satele Doesn't mean it is a dead server.

 

The simple truth is if your a group oriented content player, you should move 1 character to SF if you were on SS. Use those free CC's from Galactic Season's for that.. Simply because some people can't find the content they desire on a server doesn't mean it is dead and needs a merger however. When I want to do some things I like to play on SS. When I want Group oriented content I'll play on SF simple as that.

 

Edit: also not everyone wants to be on a huge Mega server. So just because you may want all US servers or all servers to be merged into 1, doesn't mean everyone does.

what? Satele Shan has a different gameplay?

no, every single "well we are special on this server" has boiled down to one thing, people are afraid they will lose their character names on a server merge.

Satele Shan has the exact same gameplay as Star Forge, as Darth Malgus, as Leviathan, as Tulak Hord. The only real difference is the amount of people which are available to keep group content going through out the day. PvP players are still arrogant and talking down to each other in /2, gen chat is still full of politics no one knows anything about but apparently are experts at, trade chat is full of people trying to buy and sell along with people begging for free credits and items, warzones are full of people who can't play objectives, and SM ops are constantly being run for tech frags.

The only difference I have seen between Star Forge and Satele Shan is Star Forge has a lot of ERP (erotic role players) spamming the cantina on fleet and asking people for credits to emote dancing while stripping.

Satele Shan has a serious population issue when things are slow. It was enough to make a lot of players jump servers which impacted the population more. Trying to ignore the low population on Satele Shan because "we are flavor town" is going to do more harm than good in the long run.

Edited July 12, 2023 by Darkestmonty

[Traceguy]

Satele Shan is definitely dead. I have some toons I can use to "spy" on the SF server. They have nearly 3x more players.

The problem is the more players you have, the more over crowded daily areas get. I will keep the dead/solo server for this reason.

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by Traceguy

[ThanderSnB]

SS may be dead compared to SF, but not compared to Leviathan and Tulak Horde. Those servers have like 10 people on fleet during primetime (most other places 5 or less). That's truly dead and should be merged with Darth Malgus. Most of those players are using French and German names, so there wouldn't be a lot of character name conflicts.

During primetime, SF is like 300 on fleet while SS is 100 on fleet. On SS, you have to play during primetime if you want to do anything with premades outside a guild. Also, time your activities with the galactic seasons objectives. For example, warzone queues are much faster when one of the season weeklies is for warzones. The only fast queues are veteran flashpoints. Everything else is pretty slow unless it has a season weekly that week.

Edited July 12, 2023 by ThanderSnB

[Darkestmonty]

1 hour ago, Traceguy said:

Satele Shan is definitely dead. I have some toons I can use to "spy" on the SF server. They have nearly 3x more players.

The problem is the more players you have, the more over crowded daily areas get. I will keep the dead/solo server for this reason.

 

except that isn't always true when more instances open up or you can always drop down to the completely empty PvP instance when available.

Plus this isn't an issue like it was in the past thanks to the tagging system and the devs have been lowering the respawn time of mission items since tagging was introduced.

Edited July 12, 2023 by Darkestmonty

[Traceguy]

15 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:

except that isn't always true when more instances open up or you can always drop down to the completely empty PvP instance when available.

Plus this isn't an issue like it was in the past thanks to the tagging system and the devs have been lowering the respawn time of mission items since tagging was introduced.

What isn't true? Over crowdedness? When you have 3x more players, and people with the same mindset as you who think to change instances, every instance will be just as crowded.

The tagging system means literally nothing. You can't tag world objects and quest items. Tagging is an enemy thing, and rarely is a daily/heroic about enemies.

Take Dromund Kaas for example, you have

1. Plant explosives on a ship. Ships cannot be tagged.

2. Find exlposives from dead slave. Explosives cannot be tagged.

3. Plant explosives on drill. Drills cannot be tagged. And tagged enemies here break the quest (see bug section)

4. Collect sith runes. Sith runes cannot be tagged.

 

[TrixxieTriss]

If the server really has depopulated so much that you can’t reasonably queue up for group content 16 out of 24 hours, then they should offer free transfers off the server until the AWS migration.

But I don’t think they should merge the servers because not everyone plays group content & some actually prefer quiet servers. 

Also, when the servers are moved onto AWS, they probably won’t need to merge because they should be able to offer cross server group queues for servers on the same AWS instance. 

[SteveTheCynic]

1 hour ago, Traceguy said:

What isn't true? Over crowdedness? When you have 3x more players, and people with the same mindset as you who think to change instances, every instance will be just as crowded.

The tagging system means literally nothing. You can't tag world objects and quest items. Tagging is an enemy thing, and rarely is a daily/heroic about enemies.

Take Dromund Kaas for example, you have

1. Plant explosives on a ship. Ships cannot be tagged.

2. Find exlposives from dead slave. Explosives cannot be tagged.

3. Plant explosives on drill. Drills cannot be tagged. And tagged enemies here break the quest (see bug section)

4. Collect sith runes. Sith runes cannot be tagged.

 

You left out:

5. Kill solo white-yellow star dude in a room, for which tagging is a benefit.

And you forgot to mention the bonus missions, and the fact that the explosives for the ships are gathered from dead mobs.

[LittleEwina]

Ok I would love to know when you play because as a european players on SS I never have troubles finding players to group up with. I tried SF and sheesh no way would I move there. You can't even pug SnV because most of the players there are just so bad it's mind blowing. SF has a bigger pop of pvp players yeah but I prefer SS for any pve content.

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

21 hours ago, manlymandayruin said:

At this point they should just merge the two servers together.

Hell no.

If peeps over on SS are unhappy with their experience there, they always have the option to transfer to another server.

Edited July 13, 2023 by WayOfTheWarriorx

[Darkestmonty]

1 hour ago, LittleEwina said:

Ok I would love to know when you play because as a european players on SS I never have troubles finding players to group up with. I tried SF and sheesh no way would I move there. You can't even pug SnV because most of the players there are just so bad it's mind blowing. SF has a bigger pop of pvp players yeah but I prefer SS for any pve content.

I pug everything but R4 HM on SF. And I can pug it almost any hour of the day thanks to the larger population

[Darkestmonty]

3 hours ago, SteveTheCynic said:

You left out:

5. Kill solo white-yellow star dude in a room, for which tagging is a benefit.

And you forgot to mention the bonus missions, and the fact that the explosives for the ships are gathered from dead mobs.

Also the fact that the mission required mobs respawn faster now and so does the ship after it blows up. There are probably a few mission items that need lower spawn timers but the devs have been updating (lowering) mission respawn timers on mission items consistently. Some have been lowered so much you can stand in a location and pick up a mission item multiple times before the trash mobs respawn.

People on SS may have forgotten about this feature but if there are too many people in a zone a new one will open up and most planets have a pvp option which very few players, even during peak hours on SF, use.

Edited July 13, 2023 by Darkestmonty

[Toraak]

All I know is regardless of the time of day, I seldom see Groups forming on SS, but I see plenty of people on the server playing the game. What this tells me is.

 

1) People on that server prefer small population server or they'd have transferred 1 character to get the legacy to where they moved to.

2) More people on that server are solo players in general because I seldom see GSF or PvP pops (could be when I play however afternoons, and at times primetime). 

3) I never see pug Operations going, so that means raids are mainly done in guilds there or more people are interested in Solo play (as I said in number 2).

4) Whenever I'm out on planets on SS I see plenty of people doing dailies, or heroics which again points to more of a quiet solo player style. 

5) while the population on Fleet is far less then on SF, it is by no means dead. I've played on dead servers before the current merger, as well as the old PvP servers (Now those were truly dead). As another poster said go to Leviation sometime. Even during Galactic Season's it's hard to get the group objectives done on that server. SS has far more people then that server.

 

Edited July 13, 2023 by Toraak

[xordevoreaux]

23 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:

every single "well we are special on this server" has boiled down to one thing, people are afraid they will lose their character names on a server merge.

Whenever the discussion of merging these two servers cropped on the forums in the past, I'd say nay, I don't feel like standing in line any more than I already must to click a blue quest update object, no thank you.

I have characters on all servers, and I agree with comments posted above that servers have no secret sauce that make them special. People might be comfortable with the niche they've carved out on a given server, but their experience is not representative of everyone's experience everywhere.

I've adjusted my thinking. At this point, with Broadsword taking over, I'd rather see a merge occur now rather than wonder if it'll ever happen later, when it makes the most sense to, if the populations of both SS and SF dwindle.

[Shayddow]

The only reason I would hesitate to have a merger is because on Star Forge I have 12 strongholds and on Shan I have a bunch of duplicates from when the old server mergers happened, which would put me over the top of maximum. So I'd have to shut some down, and I like to decorate. Some people play space Barbie, I like decorating my SHs. 🙂

As for the rest, I wouldn't mind a merger of the EU servers. Would make it easier to complete seasons. Because I only know a limited amount of German (mostly because I know some Yiddish) and I don't speak French, but I have characters over there to help me get season stuff. I've tried to do group content but it doesn't exactly go too well on discord when you don't speak the language. And I'm too old to learn it. And trying to get group content on Horde or Leviathan is like trying to water-surf on Tatooine.

[Char_Ell]

4 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Also, when the servers are moved onto AWS, they probably won’t need to merge because they should be able to offer cross server group queues for servers on the same AWS instance. 

Curious what makes you say this.  I haven't seen SWTOR dev comments addressing the possibility of cross server group queues for years.  The current NA servers are in the same data center and maybe on the same hardware even but we have no cross server queues for SS and SF.  I'm not sure why someone would think the transition to AWS will enable cross server queues for the game when the devs have not even mentioned that as a possibility.

With respect to Satele Shan merging with Star Forge I think the dev team has some seemingly difficult decisions to make with the transition to AWS which may also contribute to the delay in the timeframe for the transition.  As you've noted elsewhere, steamcharts points to downward trend for SWTOR player activity in June and over the past 30 days.  If this is indicative of overall player activity (unclear if it is) then, in my view, this points to the events of June having a cumulative negative impact on SWTOR player base.  7.3 releasing in mid-June with new story content should generally be viewed as a positive (I'm sure others would claim otherwise) while the leaked news of SWTOR transition to Broadsword, despite SWTOR dev efforts to portray this as positive development, and 7.3 implementation of significant fees for player-to-player trade and in-game mail trade were largely viewed as negative.  So it looks like negative had greater impact than positive in June.  So should SWTOR devs just b-i-t-e the bullet and go with single server for NA and single server for EU when they transition the game's servers to AWS?  Or do they leave it as status quo?  Or does AWS, as you seem to think, enable cross server functionality which could help improve activity finder based group formation and improve retention of players that see activity finder features as an important while avoiding the negative impacts of server merges (character name conflicts, legacy bank overflow, etc.)

NOTE: forum automated response indicated b-i-t-e (without the hyphens) was a term that was not allowed.

[Darkestmonty]

1 hour ago, xordevoreaux said:

Whenever the discussion of merging these two servers cropped on the forums in the past, I'd say nay, I don't feel like standing in line any more than I already must to click a blue quest update object, no thank you.

I have characters on all servers, and I agree with comments posted above that servers have no secret sauce that make them special. People might be comfortable with the niche they've carved out on a given server, but their experience is not representative of everyone's experience everywhere.

I've adjusted my thinking. At this point, with Broadsword taking over, I'd rather see a merge occur now rather than wonder if it'll ever happen later, when it makes the most sense to, if the populations of both SS and SF dwindle.

respawn timers for almost all quest objectives have decreased. Every planet that has a PvP instance is usually empty even on SF during prime time. I may see 1-2 other people in the PvP zones after hours of play and I have only been attacked a couple of times in the years I have used PvP zones to do Heroics mainly because very few missions overlap objectives with the opposing faction.

I can't think of any quest marker on a PvE only planet that is longer than 30 seconds and with the new tagging system I'm finishing missions faster than ever because I can tag a group of mobs already engaged in combat, move to the next group then come back and loot.

Your reason for being against server mergers, the "I don't want to wait for quest objectives on the very rare occasion I run into other players and there is no PvP instance I can drop to" hasn't been valid for almost a year now.

Edited July 13, 2023 by Darkestmonty

[Darkestmonty]

1 hour ago, Shayddow said:

The only reason I would hesitate to have a merger is because on Star Forge I have 12 strongholds and on Shan I have a bunch of duplicates from when the old server mergers happened, which would put me over the top of maximum. So I'd have to shut some down, and I like to decorate. Some people play space Barbie, I like decorating my SHs. 🙂

As for the rest, I wouldn't mind a merger of the EU servers. Would make it easier to complete seasons. Because I only know a limited amount of German (mostly because I know some Yiddish) and I don't speak French, but I have characters over there to help me get season stuff. I've tried to do group content but it doesn't exactly go too well on discord when you don't speak the language. And I'm too old to learn it. And trying to get group content on Horde or Leviathan is like trying to water-surf on Tatooine.

You will have to delete some of the duplicate strongholds before you buy more. Which shouldn't be a problem. No one needs (in my case after a few server merges) 6 Tatooine strongholds with little to no decorations. I kept them on servers I don't care about for the conquest bonus but deleted the duplicates I don't need on servers were I wanted all the strongholds.

The one benefit to a server merge would be all your decorations will be duplicated as well. If you have 5 of Shatter Sith Artifact on one server and 5 Shattered Sith Artifact on another server, after a merge you will now have 10 Shattered Sith Artifacts.

Edited July 13, 2023 by Darkestmonty

[Shayddow]

Obviously you don't do bonus missions on Coruscant or do the heroics with the Drill on Dromund Kaas. Because those DO have timers that are over 30 seconds. And there is no PVP instance on either planet. Because TAGGING doesn't WORK on the mobs after the drill. If someone else comes along and tags your MOB, you have to RESET the quest. And that can get nasty if it is 7:55 AM and the heroics Vanish in 5 minutes. (some people like me DO play in the A.M. before work).

[Shayddow]

Quote

The one benefit to a server merge would be all your decorations will be duplicated as well. If you have 5 of Shatter Sith Artifact on one server and 5 Shattered Sith Artifact on another server, after a merge you will now have 10 Shattered Sith Artifacts.

That is not true. It is the same as transferring a character. You only get the larger amount.

In other words, if you have 5 SITHY-DreadMaster Heads of Doom on 1 server, and 7 SITHY-DreadMaster Heads of Doom on the other, you will now have a total of 7.

[Darkestmonty]

13 minutes ago, Shayddow said:

Obviously you don't do bonus missions on Coruscant or do the heroics with the Drill on Dromund Kaas. Because those DO have timers that are over 30 seconds. And there is no PVP instance on either planet. Because TAGGING doesn't WORK on the mobs after the drill. If someone else comes along and tags your MOB, you have to RESET the quest. And that can get nasty if it is 7:55 AM and the heroics Vanish in 5 minutes. (some people like me DO play in the A.M. before work).

I do DK missions all the time and Saving Face has a respawn timer of 30 seconds for the explosives... oh no I would have to wait 30 seconds to pick up a mission item...

We also, at this very moment, have 2 instances of DK up and when I went to the location for Saving Face there were zero people there.

Your argument against merging servers because "I have to wait forever for mission items to respawn for Heroics"  isn't valid and hasn't been for a long time. The fact that you think waiting 30 seconds is more detrimental to the game than standing around on fleet for 30 minutes for a PvP match or flashpoint to spin up during off hours shows where your mindset is.

Edited July 13, 2023 by Darkestmonty