I'm seeing a lot of people here trying to speak on behalf of everyone else here. Firstly I'm seeing people from dalbora saying there's no population problems. Try playing on gav daragon if that's the case and see what it's like to be in group finder for hours at a time during peak times without a pop.

For the people complaining about ping times - Like many people I played on a US server for several months before apac servers even existed and I never remember having a big problem with ping. Only reason I moved to the APAC servers when that option presented itself was so I could play on a server with people in the same timezone. Perhaps ping an issue is if you're hardcore pvp but then again hardcore pvpers have a habit of forgetting that the game doesn't revolve around pvp. I had to laugh at the people saying they'd go back to wow because of ping. Wow as far as I'm aware has never had servers physically hosted in australia. Their apac servers are hosted overseas so the ping is no different from their US servers. And considering how much that game has sucked since cataclysm I'm not interested in going back there.

My only problem with this announcement is how long it's taken. Promises about action began in the middle of last year which is about how long ago the NA servers were merged to fix their population issues. Should have just done ours back then rather than the whole 'wait and see how FTP pans out'. I wish we had a choice of servers to go to. There's more than on RP server for instance and I'd rather go to the one that the people on my old server ended up on rather than just being shifted on to a particular one.

This ^ Nice Post

Exactly dude, I'd rather play on a server that has people and suffer a ping increase. To all the people saying "**** this I'm unsubbing, why are you still here posting on the forums?

I want to watch them buuurrrnnnn, they FU.cking dragged this on for 6 months and made us feel like ****. They couldn't take 1 step that would help us, they milked what they could in every situation. I'm determined to give them a bad name after this. They were probably saying 'fu.ck them, we will make a better profit elsewhere' while they made their decision.

PS. I feel most sorry for the Dalborra players, their server was the best of all and was functional, not great but you could get stuff done and now they have lost that..

Yea Dalborra was a great server.

RIP.

Firsly, appreciate the fact that you folks at BioWare gave us something substantial to work with. All these talks of "we have plans for the APAC servers but nothing concrete" were... a bit... frustrating to handle. Understandable, but frustrating.

There are two main reasons you cited for not consolidating the APAC servers:

Why did we decide not to merge the three APAC servers into one large APAC server? We decided this for two main reasons. 1. The issue in doing this is that two play-styles (PvE, PvE-RP, or PvP) would need to sacrifice their desired play-style in order to have one server with a higher population. We feel that it is important that each player is allowed to continue to play SWTOR in their preferred play-style. Therefore, accommodating all the existing play-styles was a primary goal. By allowing you to move to a NA West server, you will be able to keep your play-style. 2. The move to North American servers better delivers on our ultimate goal of providing the best play experience, with the most possible players, long term.

The first I think ultimately is a non-issue. Whilst I full-well understand how play-styles are an important aspect of gameplay, throwing us onto an NA server into a community of people we (well, most of us, I assume) have never interacted with before, with high latency to boot... well. I can't help but feel we'll be seen as that small group of exchange students thrown into a pre-established high school environment. Maybe it won't be like that. RP communities will either need to reintegrate into a larger society or stay in their cliques, which are already probably going to be broken by the prospect of server transfers.

The second, well. If there was a decision to turn this decision on its head and offer a server consolidation, I think you will find a more positive reaction. Sure, population is never going to "fantastic" but it will be better than what we've got now without making us sacrifice our community, our latency, etc etc.

More to the point is that, sure, there are active voices on the forums regarding the issue. Sure, some people are so anti-losing-their-element-of-game-play that a transfer is what they want over a merge. But that doesn't speak for the many. Most people don't even check the forums. A brief log-in to prime-time APAC servers and a "Hey all. We're proposing a migration to NA servers instead of a consolidation. What are your thoughts on the matter?" would probably yield a lot of "/unsub"-esque responses.

For relevance, there are threads on the three APAC servers right now about this:

And there's also this lovely thread on the Harbinger. It just screams "Welcome!"

Offer transfers if you must. If that is what you *feel* is the right thing to do for the players. I personally think offering of transfers is a good thing. Forcing a merge into NA though, I think is a rather poor idea. Offer the transfers, time a month or two to see how the populations across the APAC servers go. Consolidate APAC servers.

That way, those that want to leave for the "ohh shiny population numbers" get to leave. Those that want to "sacrifice" their playstyle stay as an APAC community get to do so without losing their friends, their ping, or their sense of worth as players in BioWare's eyes.

I've already had too many friends say they're quitting since this announcement came out. I won't go as far as to say I will be joining them, but seriously. It is my personal opinion that both short-term and long term gain are going to be in their negatives due to this decision, should it go through. Definitely short-term.

Okay. This has been tossed up before -- and before we get too into it understand this -- I play all aspects of the game -- I kid you not, PvP, PvE and RP. And yes I really mean RP in the same sense that the RPers who've been getting vocal about being against merges. I'm going to say this -- the RP population? An extreme minority within a minority. The RP community isn't all that large. Furthermore, majority of the RPers? Don't actually quite care. After conversing with each one -- even the ones who aren't vocal on the forums, some are even FOR merged servers.

The main reason why people want RP servers: maturity and retarded names.

The thing is? Even then, we STILL don't get those -- and the names? We're lucky if they get enforced. We still get "Snakesurprise Inyourpants" or "**** the <insertgenitalshere>puncher". Maturity? Well we call our server "Gav Dramagon" for a reason. I'm going to assume you can draw the conclusions.

But let's do the hard numbers. My nightly Teamspeak numbers from 7-15 people. Out of the 15, 5 RP. All of us PvP and at least 12 of us PvE. Out of the 5 RPers, 4 were for mergers -- the last was indifferent because for him, he was member of several progression groups so he had what he needed. After hearing the news, I login to TS and already I'm hearing the raging. This is at 11 AM in the morning for us -- on a Tuesday. Normally, this amount of people (8) don't login until late afternoon but the news spreads fast and here we are.

Now something else to understand -- I've always been for merge/transfers -- that is, one or the other. I understand the frustrations that the RPers would feel (but personally, I've always felt it was naysaying because our server is still actually quite bad in terms of enforcing the darn ruleset). But trying to be a better person, I say to support transfers instead because I know that the majority of people aren't gonna' stick around to make a couple of RPers (some of whom are even) happy and you know -- fair enough. Why force people to stick around when they really don't want to?

What the hell am I getting at?

Well, merging us to US servers? Probably one of the worse moves you can make. One of the major selling points that keeps us APAC players here is... APAC servers. Low ping. It's why we've had the gall to suffer having a low population for this long. Why we've done everything we can to stick it out -- why we as a server we came together (gav-daragon.enjin.com). Out of the people who're currently online, majority have already declared their intention to leave. The hard numbers you're looking at? Chances are you ticked off more people by doing this than simply merging us. The RPers? Minority within the minority -- I said it before. Had merges happened over this, you would have had a healthy community and worst case scenario -- you lose all the RPers. The truth is, many of the RPers would come around.

The best move, in my opinion and I'm sure quite a few here might agree is that you merged our servers and when transfers became available, offer it for free (or paid, seriously I doubt it makes too much of a difference at this juncture). The truth about RPing? You don't need to be subscribed. You are not making use of whatever functions you get by being subscribed so if you're an avid, hardcore RPer? You're actually cheating yourself. But from the money point of view? I'm going to assume that 2+2 is still equal to 4.

We're on Gav Daragon (if I didn't make that clear).

should have picked it up, patch times no longer come with australian times and haven't since the last downtime. thanks for wasting our time guys, it doesnt take that long to look at 3 server populations and decide "no thats not sustainable" and then wait another 4 months to tell us ur closing the servers.

also, totally the wrong solution because what u didnt count on is that people would come back from american servers if they APAC ONE server was good. you would have actually had an expanding population rather then what u have now. play style doesnt mean anything to people on MDN (PVP) and RPers can RP anywhere, they will find a way and good on them. Your explanation is false. Admit its about money and you might retain some shred of credibility. but I still expect my money back for the expansion.

Hey everyone,

 

To clarify a bit more about this decision. We did previously ask what folks on the forums would like to do as an APAC solution and some, but not all, offered up the solution of merging all APAC into one.

Ok Eric, let's start here.

You asked for a solution. The overwhelming consensus on this forum, one of the most viewed forums in your game, was for a Server Merge. The OPTION for FREE TRANSFERS to NA was brought up sparingly for a few reasons. Primarily for players that had re-rolled out of APAC and wanted their toons to join them on a different server. (With the exception of Allie who wanted to not play with some people due to conflicting personalities, and non-oceanic based players.)

The other option on the table was to merge APAC into the NA servers. When we discussed the options internally we looked to address everyone’s primary issues with APAC, low populations were creating a less than optimal game experience.

 

We went and looked at what current server populations looked like across all of APAC and to put it simply, even merging all of APAC together into one server would not solve the population problems. Even with that solution you would still see long queue times for things like Warzones and Group Finder. It was because of this that we decided that moving APAC into the NA servers was the best option.

Eric: You know this to be spin and more accurately, to be completely false.

Bioware and EA have not provided the community with numbers. But if you go to the community you will see that people have done the calculations, have spent countless hours calculating the number of active players on EACH of the three servers and determining that if they were merged, it would be a HEALTHY, SUSTAINABLE population.

What you have said here, is a LIE and you should be ashamed of yourself for even typing those words without PROVING with numbers that dispute what the COMMUNITY has gone out and gotten in the MONTHS you postured and ignored our concerns.

One thing to note is that there is no catchall solution here. If we move APAC to NA some folks will see increased latency

ALL will see increased latency of massively varying degrees.

, but they will have healthy server populations and can remain on their chosen server types.

And what about the masses of people who re-rolled on a DIFFERENT server type while you ignored us? For examble, how many people on Master Dar'Nala re-rolled on Harbinger? They are going to have characters split between two servers (Harbinger and Bastion) because you aren't even giving players the option to transfer to the server of their choice!

If we merge everyone into one APAC server, latency will remain in place but the current population issues will exist and players will lose their preferred server type.

*sigh* DId you not even read these forums? Did you read the massive threads of PvE players WELCOMING the PvP players into their community? DId you see how no-one from PvP cares if they lose PvP?

You asked what the community wanted and the overwhelming majority responded. Merge the servers, provide limited time free transfers.

Leaving things as they are leaves all of the current issues in place without a solution at all. This is one of the reasons getting the plan out to you folks took so long, we had to think long and hard about all of the implications of our decision.

 

-eric

No-one asked you to leave things in place without a solution. Eric, I understand you are just the messenger, but this is NOT what the community asked for and wanted.

People are going to vote with their wallets. You are going to see a massive drop in subscriptions AND active players when this happens. You didn't think long and hard about this, what Bioware did was make the simplest, easiest decision it had available to them.

Close the APAC servers and merge with corresponding NA servers: THE CHEAPEST OPTION.

You've got time now to see the community outrage, to see if maybe there's a way you can salvage something out of this decision. Offer transfers to server of choice. Find a way to help APAC players keep their character names. Do whatever you can, because if you don't change your attitude here, your going to suffer financially in the very near future. Look at how many people, in just a few short hours, have already decided to cancel their subscription.

For those of you that think this is right for you. Good on ya, but let people voice their personal concern and just leave it at that. Just cause it suits your personal needs don't mean this is the best solution for everyone and to be quite frank, the people I've talked to are all unsubbing, which I did just minutes ago.

Now, you might say good riddance, but that just proves the point of what a short minded wet cloth you are.

For those of you that think this is right for you. Good on ya, but let people voice their personal concern and just leave it at that. Just cause it suits your personal needs don't mean this is the best solution for everyone and to be quite frank, the people I've talked to are all unsubbing, which I did just minutes ago..

Yup I'm just voicing my last words before my sub runs out and I'll never come back to this game aswell. Played since APAC launch and enjoyed the game a lot but this was the final straw for me. Sick to death of overseas MMOs treating us like garbage.

BW, can you at least give priority for transferring character names over inactive accounts and F2P?

There really needs to be a name releasing policy going forward.

It seems to me that the only people complaining about populations and pop times are the players from the RP/PVP servers... If you're on those servers and complaining about these things, move to a populated server! I play on dalborra and have only experienced slow pops from just before f2p hit, since then and before that period it was great! I never got asked for any feedback on this issue and would have suggested a server merge for those players to move to dalborra. Or the option to move to a west coast server of the same type if it meant that much to them. But closing them all down is just ridiculous! I understand that 3 servers might not be cost effective to keep but surely 1 is?

I have played on the US servers from day one (final open beta weekend + early access) and transferred to the oceanic servers the moment it was available and I don't intend on keeping a sub going if I have to go back - I already get average ping at best and considering my girlfriend and I do mainly pvp, thats just going to be god awful to do and more frustrating then it already can be. Plus, I have NO ISSUES with population on the Dalborra server.

i also feel ripped off at the fact Biowoare gave us the pre-order option to pay and take our money for ROTHC only to close our servers down before it hits. Very underhanded move and we should be entitled to a refund due to them not providing a product as it was intended to be used. "I intended to play this on oceanic servers and now I can't do this"

This game experience on US servers is not worth the subscription fee

APAC's 3 servers are less than 1 NA server because of how long it took to get around to making a change. If this had been done 153 days ago you could have just merged 1 server and then had 2 instead of 3. Now there's 0.

dont believe their lies. merging all three servers will be viable. atleast 80 players on dalborra at peak, so its fair to assume if merge all three , there will be atleast 160players peak. thats viable. i would take dalborraas it is then being forced to 250ping. and i sya atleast cuase thats the worse it gets 80 players, on average its 100 on dalborra.

I would absolutely love to simply transfer to the APAC PvE server, and live happily ever after.

Is BioWare underestimating the APAC population? I can almost manage on Master Dar'Nala, so a merge of the 3 APAC servers would render a perfectly respectable population.

So instead of merging the Australian players they will keep us split into 3 groups and send us off to try and help fill in the dead times on the US servers. So we'd get about the same regular Australian population to play with (minus the multitude of players that will be quitting over this), PLUS we get the added benefit of playing with 5-10 times the latency. Awesome solution that absolutely sounds like what we all asked for.

More than likely it solely came down to cost. They have these US servers they are already paying for and maintaining, and during our Australian/NZ peak time the server numbers are vastly depleted. Transfer the remaining loyal APAC players and keep charging them for an even more degraded experience.

Thanks BW, very decent of you.

This is wonderful news for the server transfers.

I know it sucks at the same time but considering that the server populace is popular on those servers. I just hope you guys at Bioware would be able to compensate with the latency issues and of course grant us free transfers but the question is now. What's going to happen about our current character names? Are we going to lose those too?

meh, im looking forward to this, probably the minority at this point

You're not the only one buddy. I for one am happy this is happening. Glad to finally be able to play my mains on a populated server. Queue times begone!

Not at all phased by ping increase, as far as I'm concerned it will hardly be an issue and all these people qq'ing will quiet down and all will be well.

I think a better option than merging to the US is simply giving all APAC players a free transfer to anywhere.

But that's a messy step to the beautiful goal of ONE (1) consolidated APAC server.

In my mind the wise course of action would be to firstly;

1) Merge the APAC servers into one.

2) Give time for the dust to settle.

3) If for some reason it simply isn't providing the gaming experience players on the APAC servers are accustomed to, or a large part of the population abandons the game (which from what I've seen in the chat is going to happen anyway if they merge to NA westcoast servers), then and only then, merge to the NA servers.

At least they will have given the APAC regional players a chance to play on a local server, and not just close up shop and loose half the player base here... because of an unwanted merge...

Checked ping on bastion ....................... eat a bag of d.icks EAware you c.unts

/UNSUBBED

f.uck yas later