Creating a "unique" name is nothing you can absolutely ensure on your own. I'm also using names I created on my own (and also didn't lose any during all merges on servers I actively play on), but I definitely know that there were name collisions, even for names I invented myself (to the best of my knowledge at least), by checking the names on different servers before the merges. If the name is more than randomly smashing your head on the keyboard and one person in the world could think of it, it's not too far a stretch that there are other persons who also thought of the same "unique" name. Happens for inventions too, there are parallel and completely independent developments of the same principle at the same time. It doesn't happen often and the danger is by far lesser than with common names, but it happens. And since even as a subscriber I "lost" a name (on a placeholder character on a server I don't play on, so no proplem, especially since I now hold that name on all other servers), I'm not so sure the merges would have went so smoothly for me if I weren't subscribed.

Thanks, then I try it out now. If anything happens, I'll blame you. . . . Wow, that looks great. Absolutely lovely, all neatly sorted, the way it was also in the Legacy Cargo. Looks exactly like the Cartel Pack Stash, and even has pages. I'll take some time later to screenshot it anyway, just in case. Good that the names for the items are displayed too.^^ Maybe it takes some time to display? As I said, on the first toon it was only present after I accessed the legacy storage, and from then on it was visible all the time. But what I meant is "If it is displayed at all it's not possible to not see it."^^

When you open your Legacy Storage there's a big red field displayed right under the character inventory. You can't miss it, it reads "Item recovery", the number of items (which seems about right for me) and a button with "Recover now". What I'd like to know: What happens when you click on "Recover now"? Does it just access a storage container which you can just close after taking part of the items and leave the rest there, or does it trigger "load all items to inventory/personal cargo/mail". If it's the latter I might need some time to prepare a toon for that so it doesn't clutter the inventory or I have to sort through about a hundred mails.^^ Edit: After I logged into a different toon it's now displayed constantly under the inventory, without the Legacy Storage to be open. Maybe that's triggered the first time you access the Legacy Storage, or the button just works part of the time. I'll see.

Exactly. As of yet, I haven't seen a single post or heard from a single person ingame that they can actually see the legacy overflow or any item from a second (or third) legacy bank. "Only a few people experiencing it" just results from only a few people having legacy banks on different servers that they didn't clean out before, it seems. Nevertheless, I can wait until next week, as long as the legacy overflow works correct then and I can access all items (preferably without having to pull them out of a dozens mails then^^). Just make sure this time everything goes alright guys. And great work on the server merges all in all. That seems to be the only major problem, and it should just be a temporary one. Thanks to the whole team.

That didn't help for me, but I noticed that I can still craft with the materials missing from my disappeared legacy bays. So the items definitely are there somewhere, you just cannot access this place (the missing overflow storage?).

As far as I know, there wasn't a rollback connected to a patch, was it? They were (for us) seemingly randomly appearing and only for a few servers each time. The worst thing I can remember regarding items lost through patches were the matrix cubes a couple years past and even they were returned in a later patch. That's why I would also say that it's mostly paranoia to pull everything out now. Personally I don't see a reason for me to treat legacy storage any different than personal and inventory storage only because it wasn't around the last merges, so I think items are equally safe or unsafe in either storage option. That's why I even made sure to have all legacy banks on servers I play on stuffed to the maximum capacity and hope that mostly the "right" items will go to the overflow cap. Which is for instance 9999 stacks of crafting mats I only keep around in case I'll need them for a future crafting conquest etc., but don't have to use right now because I also have incomplete stacks of the same materials lying around. Or cartel items I liked the look of but didn't want to complete the set to unlock it in collections, because if anything I'll only use them for a single toon in the future and want to bind it to that one then (the Gav and Jori Daragon chests for example). These two things alone nearly fill a whole legacy bank (2 tabs items, 3 tabs crafting mats), and I have a couple other things that were previously on mule chars, that I likely won't need in the next months or even years and that I therefore put in the legacy storage. I mean I payed a couple million credits for the legacy tabs on different servers that are now combined, why shouldn't I try to at least gain some of that value back now? I'll use the overflow storage as a container for items I don't need right now but want to keep around because it would be way more expensive to have to buy them off the GTN at a later time when I need them. Therefore I also don't need to sort it out later anyway, because it can just sit there until I really need it. Even if something goes wrong, I trust Bioware enough to sort things out later on, which would be fine for me. Call me naive, but I have that much trust left.^^

Oh, I absolutely got that. What I didn't get is their stated motivation for the lie.^^

I'm not really sure I understand what you're saying... So you didn't communicate it to avoid players freaking out unnecessarily before they would even see the impact on their game? Couldn't they have seen that before by immediately logging in/creating a char on an original East Coast server? And why the statement that it was just "discovered" on the 24th that the datacenters could be combined when it was obviously planned beforehand?

And again, that statistic says nothing... I created 200 toons only for the story, and played 8 of them. Why? Because with a couple dozen servers at launch I anticipated that there would be server merges sometime, and I made an effort to save the names of my story toons on each and every server. Even the French speaking ones, in case they would make a European or even a single megaserver sometime. And that's not even counting the chars I deleted and recreated to check the look. I don't know how common that is, though. With all the people worrying about loosing names soon probably not so much, but the point stands: Not every character that didn't make it past the second planet was created in order to play something else than story. Especially nameplaceholders are very common, even though not to that extreme, I guess. Peolpe are really making it too easy for themselves when trying to read statistics. The most common example here: There's almost a perfect overlap between the graphs of the amount of ice cream consumed and the number of homicides commited over the course of the year. When the one number rises and falls, the other does too. Given just these two numbers one could infer that eating ice cream causes people to commit homicides. Of course they just share a similar cause (higher temperatures and therefore more outward activities), but if you want to make it easy and really just infer the absolute obvious from the numbers without investigating any further, you can also "prove" with that statistic that ice cream should be forbidden. By the way, I agree that lack of story was very likely the last thing that made people quit. If SWTOR always had anything in abundance it was and is definitely story. You just can't infer anything from the number of all time created characters. So it would be great to not argue for an otherwise completely valid point with meaningless numbers, that just devalues the argument as a whole. And I'm sorry that I have to bring that up so much, it's absolutely off-topic by now, but it hurts to see a true statement and then read an absolutely far-fetched "proof" for it.^^

Um, here in this thread? I'm quoting it for you though... Later on, after being corrected, you changed your wording to "charac ters", without referring to your mistake though. Considering the above, I could tell you the same.

Where did I say it was your graph? Or was that a try to remind everyone that these are Bioware's numbers, in case anyone had forgotten? Anyway, at least now you're acknowledging that it's 12% of characters created, not players as originally stated. And exactly, the numbers don't support this hypothesis, but only because they support no hypothesis at all. There were multiple reasons given why players didn't finish the second planet on 90% of their characters (for me, as a story player, it's even 98% of all my characters ever created that didn't get past level 10). The statistic of "characters CREATED" says nothing at all. A more meaningful number would have been "characters with at least level 2" or even "existing characters". But I guess that number would have been much lower, so of course as Developers you state the better looking value, even though that value has no meaning at all on closer look.

So finally you DID get it. The whole point was that you preferred one specific explanation for this gap, while several others tried to point out that there are multiple other possible explanations. Therefore you can't use it as an argument for either side here. Personally, with all I said before and experienced in other games, I expected this gap to be even larger, so it doesn't really strike me as odd at all. On the contrary, if anything, it's a bit small, but still in the expected range.

You may not believe it, but for some story players the gameplay of the class is also an integral part of their character. I played both a marauder and a juggernaut to about level 20, but avoided the class story since I didn't want to spoil it for my "real" toon, to see which class would fit the personality of my warrior better. I deleted both toons after settling for marauder. I deleted my smuggler at level 2 because I didn't like his hair color ingame anymore and spent the next hours recreating and deleting him with different appearance options. There are a multitude of reasons for story players to play other characters besides their story toons, which are nevertheless still connected to story.

I'd never argue that point. Even as a story player, I'm absolutely convinced that all kinds of activity are necessary for the game, and that end-game content was on the short end for too long. So even though I haven't played Gods from the machine yet and can't say anything concerning its quality, I think it' a step in the right direction. My favorite expansions were definitely Oricon and SoR (even though mostly the Rishi and Ziost part) and I would love to see a return to it. But really, that statistic... I don't know how else to explain to you that it's utter ******** anymore, so I just hope you're not exposed to any statistic interpretation in your career.

And we just tried to explain to you that you are very likely reading it wrong and there are a mutitude of other ways to interprete it, which makes it completely useless as an argument. Nice that we're finally agreeing on that point.^^