As a fellow software developer, I have to say that I was also impressed with how smoothly the transfer process went. I was also happy to see that you took your time and watched the populations as transfers occurred, rather than giving in to the complainers and rushing the process, which is what got us into the population mess in the first place.

There are two major flaws in defending the idea that "it could change, so say nothing" mentality. Stuff changes constantly after it's been released, so that alone shouldn't stop them from communicating plans. The other major flaw appears to be that they really don't know exactly what they're planning to do, and their developers are simply making it up as they go along. If they started out with a clear achievable plan, and then worked towards it, there would be no problem sharing information going along.

As a software developer, I'm shocked that bioware doesn't have more control over it's patch processes. No way to revert/roll back a patch? That's a standard in almost every software deployment I've seen throughout multiple companies. And now your download servers can't even keep up with the mess that you made. You better compensate your customers for this error.

Will you be adding multiplayer space combat? I think this could add an interesting game element that isn't currently available in other MMOs.

Every Rakata piece that can be crafted is BoP. Right now if you want all the craftable rakata pieces, you'll have level up multiple crafting skills.

They said back in beta that they were going to improve trooper healing, but it's still yet to happen.

Actually, 10-20 of the active lvl 50 PvPers would actually fix most servers enough to be playable. If balance is currently 70:30, and even 10 people switch to republic, that shifts the balance to 60:40. 60:40 is actually a playable balance.

Thanks OP for putting together a well thought out post. Can someone from bioware PLEASE confirm that they're even working on something to combat the population imbalance, as this is the one thing they've completely ignored in their posts.

The patch fixed one of several problems introduced in 1.1. The spawn camping was bad, yes, but the overall change to Ilum was actually worse then the spawn camping "bug".

We're not even talking about something that would make it a "fair fight" The republic players at this point would be happy to be able to take a few people with them as they get slaughtered. At least then we could eventually finish our quests.

There's a lot they could do, they've just chosen to do nothing. Stat buff for the under represented side, exp buff to the small side, valor buff to the small side, npc helpers on the small side. All of these things have been done successfully in other games.

To keep players engaged, bioware knows they need to provide an incentive to win/run the operation/complete the hard mode. I agree that gear scaling can quickly ruin a game and should be tempered back down a bit, but removing it completely would have a financial impact on bioware guaranteed.

Fully agree with everything from the OP. Bioware hire this guy.

Do you have evidence of this happening on any servers whatsoever?

Can we get a post from a developer on what they're planning on doing about faction imbalance, because that's the real problem in Ilum. If it wasn't for the faction imbalance, spawn camping wouldn't have been possible. Now we've succesfully moved the wholesale slaughter of republic players out of the base to... anywhere else they dare show their face. We formed up a full op group, tried to use hit and run tactics, got consistently wiped off the map by the 4 imperial op groups running together.... They've got more in each op group then we have players on the planet. No way to compete.