Server Population?

[kurtarhan]

Hello everyone- new player here!

I created a character on the US Star Forge server but I am locaated in EU. I am not experiencing any lags or problems affecting gameplay. My reason to do so is not to put up with non English speaking people in general chat, guilds and groups all the time. I am not a native speaker myself but I strictly use English in online games, and want to be among an English speaking community. But the server feels quite empty. Now I can come up with some theories; 1- Star Forge has considerably fewer players compared to EU, 2- I become online when very few US players are (given the time difference), 3- There are few players in the game overall so this reflects on all servers. One or more of those might be true and there may be some other reason that I can not think of as well. So my question here is simple; Is it worth creating/transferring character in EU and withstanding people spamming non-English everywhere all the time for the sake of server population (and are there too many beggars/cheaters/external link advertisers as I fear judging by my past mmo experiences) ? (Is there such a big difference in server population or does the time difference have such a great impact to make it feel so empty, long story short: I wanted play on US server to be free of non-English speaking people and beggars/cheaters/advertisers, but I observe very few players there, be it for overall population or time difference or some other reason. Is the status of EU server worth creating/transferring character in there? And is the EU community bad as I fear for the reasons I stated above? New to this game, but had my experince with MMO games and now a thing or two about EU communities (the reason I began in US in the first place).

[Char_Ell]

Welcome to Star Wars; The Old Republic.  Star Forge is generally considered to be the server with the highest active population for U.S.A. and Darth Malgus for EU.  If player activity is a big concern for you then you should create and play characters on both servers to see which server experience you prefer during your typical play times.  Once you do that then you can decide if transferring a character to a different server is something you want to do. 

It does look like overall active player population has decreased over the past few months.  Overall player activity may increase when Galactic Seasons 5, SWTOR's version of a battle pass, starts later this month or in early September but this is of course not guaranteed.  If you are an experienced MMORPG player then you should be familiar with fluctuating player activity levels.

Star Forge has people that play at all times of the day but it will also have peak player activity that lags several hours behind the EU.

[Pirana]

4 hours ago, kurtarhan said:

Hello everyone- new player here!

I created a character on the US Star Forge server but I am locaated in EU. I am not experiencing any lags or problems affecting gameplay. My reason to do so is not to put up with non English speaking people in general chat, guilds and groups all the time. I am not a native speaker myself but I strictly use English in online games, and want to be among an English speaking community. But the server feels quite empty. Now I can come up with some theories; 1- Star Forge has considerably fewer players compared to EU, 2- I become online when very few US players are (given the time difference), 3- There are few players in the game overall so this reflects on all servers. One or more of those might be true and there may be some other reason that I can not think of as well. So my question here is simple; Is it worth creating/transferring character in EU and withstanding people spamming non-English everywhere all the time for the sake of server population (and are there too many beggars/cheaters/external link advertisers as I fear judging by my past mmo experiences) ? (Is there such a big difference in server population or does the time difference have such a great impact to make it feel so empty, long story short: I wanted play on US server to be free of non-English speaking people and beggars/cheaters/advertisers, but I observe very few players there, be it for overall population or time difference or some other reason. Is the status of EU server worth creating/transferring character in there? And is the EU community bad as I fear for the reasons I stated above? New to this game, but had my experince with MMO games and now a thing or two about EU communities (the reason I began in US in the first place).

Star Forge is the busiest American server. Keep in mind, when you posted this it was around 9am on the West Coast and 12pm on the East Coast, and it is a Monday, work or school day for a lot people.

[SteveTheCynic]

Also bear in mind that there are *three* servers in the EU region: Darth Malgus, which is mostly English-speaking; The Leviathan, which is mostly French-speaking; and Tulak Hord, which is mostly German-speaking.

So if you are in Europe and you want to play on a server that's mostly English-speaking, and you want to play when the population of people actually playing is reasonable, play on Darth Malgus, because you won't have the mis-aligned timezones problem.

[Samcuu]

I have trouble believing that starforge was low population even at the off peak time you joined. Which planet were you on? I'm guessing you were on an unpopulated instance. Pull up the map and there's a tab which shows you how many different instances there are. Starforge is a very well populated server.  

[istvana]

Star Forge is far more populated than Satele Shan, the other U.S. based server. It isn't even close. 

For someone from the U.S. any European server will have some trans-Atlantic slowness but although I see slower connection numbers on Darth Malgus I have not actually experienced any issues in actually playing.

[kurtarhan]

Thank you all for the answers people. Sorry for being late, I spent some time playing and comparing both the servers.  I guess I should have done that at the beginning. Opening this thread here instead of seeing both the servers myself seems like an impatient action. First off when I opened the thread  I had been playing for around two weeks, it was not based on a one or two days experience so the time and day of the specific post is irrelevant. Also I was mainly judging by the faction fleet, not planets.

And here are my resuls; Numbers are around the same on fleet, sometimes one has more, sometimes the other. But the difference is never significant. On Malgus, planets are considerably more crowded than Star Forge. Considerably, but not drastically. EU community is far better than my prejudice, but still there are downers. Did not come across any annoyance or immaturity in US. The planets I am talking about are the early ones, I had second story companion when I opened the thread and now I have third. So I do not know about endgame-expansion/dlc planets. And given how inconvenient my play time (evening to night after work) is in the US due to the timezones, Star Forge having same or close (sometimes even more) numbers than Malgus is VERY impressive. Interestingly, regardless of numbers, I visually observe more characters moving around-doing quests in Malgus (which I like), and usually more chat activity though not always pleasant with pointless bickerings. Also I only have experience with Republic so far, do not know about the Empire side of things. My idea is to play every storyline before i decide my main, but I doubt I will do the same comparison by the time I create my first Empire character. I am sticking with Star Forge thanks again everyone.