Shae Vizla Launch Updates

[DWho]

1 minute ago, emperorruby said:

@JackieKo @KeithKanneg hell at this point in time a subscriber bundle to get old apac players free transfer (8 to 16) to shae vizla server as a perk that expires in like 30 days from purchase is better than nothing you are drive apac players away due to your botch shae vizla server transfer launch

I like this idea. How about a special subscription package. Buy a 2 month non-renewing package and get 4 free transfers to SV (up to the 16 max per account). Have them "extend your sub time"  and change your renewal date if you have a recurring sub. If you buy 4 of them (8 months total) you'd have 16 transfers. Win/Win for everyone.

[eabevella]

It's just my luck that my credit card company falsely blocked the re-subscription in jan and I only discovered it and renewed it a day after. Of course that made me not qualified for free transfer and of course the customer service said there's nothing I could do.

Yeah yeah I'm not qualified by the rule by the letter, but BS can tell from the payment record that it's just some technical issue that I solved it asap so it still sucks. SV doesn't even give me faster ping I was just planning to transfer some in case my guildies move there but now I question my wisdom of staying at all.

[FrontLineFodder]

31 minutes ago, DWho said:

I like this idea. How about a special subscription package. Buy a 2 month non-renewing package and get 4 free transfers to SV (up to the 16 max per account). Have them "extend your sub time"  and change your renewal date if you have a recurring sub. If you buy 4 of them (8 months total) you'd have 16 transfers. Win/Win for everyone.

Do us all a favour.

Step back and look at this whole launch from a former players perspective, What would make you think about spending ANY amout of money on this game given the way Shae Vizla has been launched.

now think you are a former APAC player (you know, those players the APAC server would most benefit) with the 16 characters that you used to play but were left on NA servers.

what would make you want to spend $120USD (over $180AUD) on this game ? (4x 2month game time passes as you suggested)

• Good experience playing the game previously ( either on NA servers with huge lag or on the APAC server that was shut down, and you were forcibly moved to NA)
• Is it the updated content ( the 7.0 story arc has been going on for 2 years now ? )
• The communication from the developers (we have not heard a peep from them regarding Shae Vizla for 4 weeks)
• The quality patch releases ( just look at 7.4.1 )

The main things the game has going for it in the more immersive VA story and the lore of Star Wars.

That alone would not be enough for me, If I was not already playing the game and somewhat invested, you would not find me paying $180USD to return.

 

your post on how it costs so much to run a server, and transferring all these characters for free would be a bad financial investment. Unless you are actually a Broadsword employee with numbers on subscribers and the server operating costs, perhaps such statements should be left to them.

From my perspective on the effect of having free transfers to Shae Vizla:

1. it makes no difference to how much it costs if a player transfers (and plays on) 1 character or 16. It is 1 player, the cost of running that server for the additional player does not change if they have 1 character or 16, you can only play 1 at a time. (the actual cost of transferring a characters data is negligible)
2. more players helps the server as those who are paying subscriptions will enjoy a more active server and stay
3. you must think APAC players are a bunch of criminal freeloaders, What makes you think the ratio of APAC subscribers to APAC FTP would be any different to those in NA or EU ? Sure offering transfer for free may mean they are not contributing directly to the costs initially, but if they can be allowed to enjoy playing on the local regional server again they would make their choice to subscribe or not to get the subscriber benefits. (Subscriber benefits being something that the (IMO stupid) credit restrictions dilute.
4. Charging as much as they are for APAC players to play on an optimal server can not seriously be seen as anything other than a money grab, Yes it can earn some dollars in the short term, but in the long term it is just hurting the game.

 

Also, Welcome to the 13th of Feb, where us APAC players were suggesting making the sub requirement forward dated to get the transfers, I'm glad you are now on board with that concept. Wouldn't it be nice if the Dev's actually responded to us on the matter?

[DWho]

18 minutes ago, FrontLineFodder said:

I'm glad you are now on board with that concept.

I always was

[emperorruby]

1 hour ago, FrontLineFodder said:

Do us all a favour.

Step back and look at this whole launch from a former players perspective, What would make you think about spending ANY amout of money on this game given the way Shae Vizla has been launched.

now think you are a former APAC player (you know, those players the APAC server would most benefit) with the 16 characters that you used to play but were left on NA servers.

what would make you want to spend $120USD (over $180AUD) on this game ? (4x 2month game time passes as you suggested)

• Good experience playing the game previously ( either on NA servers with huge lag or on the APAC server that was shut down, and you were forcibly moved to NA)
• Is it the updated content ( the 7.0 story arc has been going on for 2 years now ? )
• The communication from the developers (we have not heard a peep from them regarding Shae Vizla for 4 weeks)
• The quality patch releases ( just look at 7.4.1 )

The main things the game has going for it in the more immersive VA story and the lore of Star Wars.

That alone would not be enough for me, If I was not already playing the game and somewhat invested, you would not find me paying $180USD to return.

 

your post on how it costs so much to run a server, and transferring all these characters for free would be a bad financial investment. Unless you are actually a Broadsword employee with numbers on subscribers and the server operating costs, perhaps such statements should be left to them.

From my perspective on the effect of having free transfers to Shae Vizla:

1. it makes no difference to how much it costs if a player transfers (and plays on) 1 character or 16. It is 1 player, the cost of running that server for the additional player does not change if they have 1 character or 16, you can only play 1 at a time. (the actual cost of transferring a characters data is negligible)
2. more players helps the server as those who are paying subscriptions will enjoy a more active server and stay
3. you must think APAC players are a bunch of criminal freeloaders, What makes you think the ratio of APAC subscribers to APAC FTP would be any different to those in NA or EU ? Sure offering transfer for free may mean they are not contributing directly to the costs initially, but if they can be allowed to enjoy playing on the local regional server again they would make their choice to subscribe or not to get the subscriber benefits. (Subscriber benefits being something that the (IMO stupid) credit restrictions dilute.
4. Charging as much as they are for APAC players to play on an optimal server can not seriously be seen as anything other than a money grab, Yes it can earn some dollars in the short term, but in the long term it is just hurting the game.

 

Also, Welcome to the 13th of Feb, where us APAC players were suggesting making the sub requirement forward dated to get the transfers, I'm glad you are now on board with that concept. Wouldn't it be nice if the Dev's actually responded to us on the matter?

my proposal subscriber bundle was more about giving apac players the option of guaranteed safety ideally some time before shae vizla server opens and shae vizla server transfer open as a marking promotion and good will gesture most old apac players would have to resub to the game anyway to unlock the expansions and level 80 it would cost money but at least it would put apac players at ease  

[DWho]

13 minutes ago, emperorruby said:

my proposal subscriber bundle was more about giving apac players the option of guaranteed safety ideally some time before shae vizla server opens and shae vizla server transfer open as a marking promotion and good will gesture most old apac players would have to resub to the game anyway to unlock the expansions and level 80 it would cost money but at least it would put apac players at ease  

I think he was directing that criticism at me because he doesn't agree with the idea of linking free transfers to sub status/continuation.

At this point it's all moot though. The player economy Broadsword had wanted to try and preserve has been blown to pieces by the influx of credits. Now if you aren't sitting on hundreds of millions of credits or have lots of real world cash to spend on CM items to sell, you're pretty much shut out of the player economy. They might as well open up the server to unlimited credit transfers, at least spreading out the credits on the other servers might help them. It's too late for Shae Vizsla in that regard.

[heeeysa]

Many of us knew and said this was going to happen if they let too many credits into the server, which they did. Unfortunately the people that don't play the game but whinged the loudest ruined it for us again.

[TrixxieTriss]

8 hours ago, DWho said:

With 16 free transfers, there basically would be no income from transfers anytime in the near future

You’re assuming preferred Aussie players are willing to spend $15 AUD to transfer just one character. Which some might, but the majority won’t. 

It’s more likely they’d pay the $22 AUD for one months subscription with 16 free transfers. 

And sure, maybe that means a reduced possibility for future paid transfers if they go preferred. But look at it this way, we have a cost of living crisis in APAC & everyone is looking at things to cut spending on. So spending more money to transfer more characters isn’t likely to happen that much anyway. 

BS are more likely to make more money off subscriptions offering 16 transfers than they will off paid transfers for preferred or F2P accounts. Because the sub costs more & there would be more value in it. So people are more likely to see the value in subscribing. 

At the end of the day, it’s about understanding your customers in the region & neither you or BS do because you don’t live here. 

 

[TrixxieTriss]

4 hours ago, DWho said:

At this point it's all moot though. The player economy Broadsword had wanted to try and preserve has been blown to pieces by the influx of credits. Now if you aren't sitting on hundreds of millions of credits or have lots of real world cash to spend on CM items to sell, you're pretty much shut out of the player economy. They might as well open up the server to unlimited credit transfers, at least spreading out the credits on the other servers might help them. It's too late for Shae Vizsla in that regard.

And this is what some of us realised back in January. Which is why we were saying forget about the credit restrictions & just open up the server transfers. We needed the transfers back in January, we knew the economy would get blown up regardless of restrictions. Sadly, we have had to continually argue with people who don’t live here & think they know better for the APAC region. 

Edited March 16 by TrixxieTriss

[TrixxieTriss]

21 minutes ago, heeeysa said:

Many of us knew and said this was going to happen if they let too many credits into the server, which they did. Unfortunately the people that don't play the game but whinged the loudest ruined it for us again.

Here’s the problem with that statement. If they didn’t allow any credits, the server would 100% fail. 

[DWho]

13 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

And this is what some of us realised back in January. Which is why we were saying forget about the credit restrictions & just open up the server transfers. We needed the transfers back in January, we knew the economy would get blown up regardless of restrictions. Sadly, we have had to continually argue with people who don’t live here & think they know better for the APAC region. 

Glad your happy with it being blown up so you can say "we were right"

[DWho]

19 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

If they didn’t allow any credits, the server would 100% fail. 

Unlikely. what caused the problem was APAC players boycotting the server because they couldn't get their legacies transferred. If they had done that shortly after the server opened they would not have needed to offer transfers with 15m credits/character and the server would be functioning fine. There were plenty of players playing on the server in the first month without bringing in credits.

[TrixxieTriss]

4 minutes ago, DWho said:

Unlikely. what caused the problem was APAC players boycotting the server because they couldn't get their legacies transferred. If they had done that shortly after the server opened they would not have needed to offer transfers with 15m credits/character and the server would be functioning fine. There were plenty of players playing on the server in the first month without bringing in credits.

We’ll never know. But I can tell you from my perspective & many others I know who were forced off our original APAC servers, we weren’t prepared to leave everything we’d earned or paid for over the years. 

And considering BS have not advertised or promoted the game to new players in the region, the most APAC people playing are old players who have characters & stuff stranded in the US. 

What has been obvious is the majority of the fresh start server people went back to their old regional servers after the novelty wore off. Because once you get to 2-3 months, it’s no longer a fresh start server for most of them. 

Edited March 16 by TrixxieTriss

[DWho]

8 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

We’ll never know. But I can tell you from my perspective & many others I know who were forced off our original APAC servers, we weren’t prepared to leave everything we’d earned or paid for over the years. 

Yup, too many mistakes made and there will be no way to sort it out. At least we know how few insta-credits it actually takes to blow up the player economy (though I am suspicious about how quickly buy prices got out of hand - I hope Broadsword is combing the transfer data to make sure there were no exploits in play).

The next server must be a no transfer server if the economy is to be maintained.

Edit: At least the server seems to be getting busier.

Edited March 16 by DWho

[TrixxieTriss]

7 minutes ago, DWho said:

Yup, too many mistakes made and there will be no way to sort it out. At least we know how few insta-credits it actually takes to blow up the player economy (though I am suspicious about how quickly buy prices got out of hand - I hope Broadsword is combing the transfer data to make sure there were no exploits in play).

The next server must be a no transfer server if the economy is to be maintained.

BS haven’t admitted this happened & I haven’t been able to confirm it, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt. There are reports in the community that some people were able to transfer way more than 16 characters for free (upwards of 40). Which if true, was most likely the real reason for the emergency patch. The mount not working was probably just the cover excuse they used. Which would explain the real reason for the huge leap in credits. 40x15 mil = 600 mil

Edited March 16 by TrixxieTriss

[FrontLineFodder]

5 minutes ago, DWho said:

The next server must be a no transfer server if the economy is to be maintained.

Another thing we can agree on, and something that players have been saying since Keith’s December post.

except it should never have been the APAC regional server.

Of course in the meantime APAC players have been screwed over, but you don’t care, you blame them because many went to their old servers (or left entirely) after the restrictions were announced.

[TrixxieTriss]

23 minutes ago, DWho said:

Glad your happy with it being blown up so you can say "we were right"

Who says I’m glad. Please don’t put words in my mouth. All I said was it was obviously going to happen & some of us realised that early on. It’s why we changed our position on restrictions & said to just allow transfers without them.  Having more people on the server so that it isn’t dead should have always been the priority over the economy. 

[TrixxieTriss]

6 hours ago, DWho said:

There were plenty of players playing on the server in the first month without bringing in credits.

Because we expected the server transfers to allow us to bring them later. None of us realised it was going to take 4-5 months or that we would then be limited with how much we could bring.

Edited March 16 by TrixxieTriss

[DWho]

6 minutes ago, FrontLineFodder said:

except it should never have been the APAC regional server.

Well, i still believe the only reason you got the server in the first place was they wanted to clearly see how their "economy adjustments" were impacting starting player (which they couldn't do on any of the other servers). I don't believe for an instant that it was going to be a "fresh start" server even after people "begged for one". There was a delay in opening it to full transfers to see how the economy was going but I'm sure they intended to open it up at some point. A good interim position would have been to allow legacy only transfers to APAC players while they were gathering their data.

[DWho]

9 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Because we expected the server transfers to allow us to bring them later. None of us realised it was going to take 4-5 months 

And that was probably the biggest mistake. Not having a legacy transfer mechanism ready to go. The credits/gear could have come later, once their "economy experiment" was completed. Honestly, if you had been able to transfer over your legacy and the gear on the character (or even a couple characters) right away, would you have been happy for 4-5 months while they collected their data?

Edit: Being honest about their intents with the server would have helper too instead of letting the doubt fester.

Edited March 16 by DWho

[FrontLineFodder]

10 minutes ago, DWho said:

they wanted to clearly see how their "economy adjustments" were impacting starting player (which they couldn't do on any of the other servers).

This is untrue, there are these people canned playtesters, their job is to go and test the game. Given the instruction, go, play but don’t trade with players in any way.

they would quickly see how much the credit sinks affect a new player.

and allowing a boosted character they would see how repairs affects ops players

[DWho]

1 minute ago, FrontLineFodder said:

This is untrue, there are these people canned playtesters, their job is to go and test the game. Given the instruction, go, play but don’t trade with players in any way.

they would quickly see how much the credit sinks affect a new player.

and allowing a boosted character they would see how repairs affects ops players

Just like the Playtest Server catches all the issues?. You don't get a good idea on how a change is going to work in a game until it goes live and is used by the full population. Playtesting is to find the big bugs, not determine impacts

[FrontLineFodder]

11 minutes ago, DWho said:

And that was probably the biggest mistake. Not having a legacy transfer mechanism ready to go. The credits/gear could have come later, once their "economy experiment" was completed. Honestly, if you had been able to transfer over your legacy and the gear on the character (or even a couple characters) right away, would you have been happy for 4-5 months while they collected their data?

I don’t know about 4-5 months, you are talking about established players here.

if the characters came across initially with 0credits…no I think that is too long for an experiment on established players.

 

even fresh characters quickly ran into credit issues when doing operations regularly.

[TrixxieTriss]

1 hour ago, DWho said:

And that was probably the biggest mistake. Not having a legacy transfer mechanism ready to go. The credits/gear could have come later, once their "economy experiment" was completed. Honestly, if you had been able to transfer over your legacy and the gear on the character (or even a couple characters) right away, would you have been happy for 4-5 months while they collected their data?

Edit: Being honest about their intents with the server would have helper too instead of letting the doubt fester.

Probably, if as you say,” they had been up front about it at the beginning & given us a predetermined timeline that they stuck too.

Having a real launch plan & being upfront with the player base by telling us their intent at the start & saying something like - “we’ll give you 2 free transfers now that are limited to just legacy transfer & gear” & “then in 90 days days we’ll give you 14-16 free transfers with all your stuff & credits” if you stay subscribed for 90 days, would have been one way to do it. 

Which would have given them time to check their economy changes & given early adopters a fresh experience if they’d wanted it. Then old APAC players could have moved all their stuff over for free at the end of that period without all this fuss. 

At the end of the day, the whole debacle has been caused by bad communication with the community & either rushed or poor project management. 

One of the biggest issues that I don’t think they even considered is the 7.4 content patch they dropped 2-3 weeks after opening the server. It meant anyone who want to play that, had to go back to the old servers. That was one of their biggest own goals in this whole process. 

Also opening the server with zero notice & not aligning it with GS & PvP seasons was a mistake. They should have timed it to open about a week before either of those were about to start. They should have also been hyping up the opening months before & then they could have said “be subscribed for X time frame & get 16 free transfers”. And lastly, sending out the marketing emails to old players should have been done well in advance of opening the server, not 2-6 weeks after it opened. 

At the end of the day, NONE of this is the APAC players fault. But we are being made to feel that it is by members of the swtor community. We have been the most hard done by of any regional community in the history of this game. And we are still being told by parts of this community that we shouldn’t be put first on our own regional server. The way we’ve been treated through all of this is why many of us are pissed at non APAC located players & the dev team accommodating them ahead of actual APAC players.

And sadly, that’s not all. The continued silence on the whole free transfer problem is not making it go away. It’s actually making it worse & simmering in the community and that resentment won’t go away. It just gives players more reason to not want to subscribe or buy CC’s from these guys. So many people in the game & other SM, who can’t express their feelings here are very angry at the situation. The bad will generated from all of this has undone any good will they hoped to generate by opening an APAC server. 

Edited March 16 by TrixxieTriss

[DarthBrundleFLY]

Well I am done with Swtor for now as I resubbed when the Apac server was opened, made 8 characters but really wanted my 20+ characters from Satele Shan to be on my now local server.  I used the 60 day Join The Fight Bundle which got me to around the 17th of January.  But due to RL issues my sub lapsed & I resubbed when I noticed so now not eligible for the free transfers.

I have been here since Beta & launch of the game, was fully subbed for 11+ years and getting a local server made me want to resub & play again.  The restrictions to getting the free transfers is a slap in the face to Apac players & in doing this Swtor has lost a customer.  I should NOT have to pay for the privilege of having my characters on my local server, is NOT going to happen.  You would have gotten a monthly subscription out of me to be subbed & play on the low ping Apac server, but now you won't even get that.

What makes it even more maddening is the rules for getting the free transfer being put in place after the time needed so players who were not subbed couldn't sub in time to get the offer.  To add insult to injury last Wednesday they sent an email proclaiming the Apac server and how to transfer, we should have got that back in December.

This is such a farce, surely it would have been better to allow Apac users the option that if you resubbed this month you could get the free transfers.  Surely they would have bolstered the player numbers on the Apac server doing it this way.

I also love the 2nd last line of the email... Welcome Home APAC players!

A real welcome to us would have been free transfers for all APAC players for a limited time.

Edited March 16 by DarthBrundleFLY