The thing is tho, Unrestricted server transfers should be here now. Shut it down or whatever but Unrestricted Server Transfers should be here by now. fyi, APAC doesn't concern me but I feel for them. Offering Unrestricted Server Transfers instead of continuing the restricted one would've been a better choice. Then look at APAC's population again to see what they should do. They could've merged all three servers and Offer Unrestricted Server Transfers which will keep as many APAC people happy as well as Universally, keeping the players playing the game happy.

Of course just my case, but SWTOR was or is still struggling to turn a profit and survive, and management just decided that APAC servers weren't worth the cost. From my understanding of corporate governance EA would have recently had a series of board meetings in preparation of their annual report, which coincides with the stepping down of the CEO last week, and the new team decided to cut out APAC. Just a guess.

On behalf of myself and anyone I have ever spoken to who currently plays on APAC servers, this is the wrong decision. Lets be totally clear, I would prefer you did nothing than do this.

My ideal scenario is still to merge all 3 APAC servers.

 

For me, and I'm sure many others, the most crucial elements to this issue and the reasons we continue to play this game are in the following order of importance:

1. Ping

2. Population

3. Legacy

4. Server Type

 

Lets break it down:

• If you remove my choice of Server Type, I will still play, because I have my own Legacy, high Population and low Ping.
  
• If you remove my Legacy, thats alright. I will start over willingly if I have a high Population and low Ping.
  
• If the population dies, its not ideal, but I will still play because I have low Ping (this is the situation right now).
  

 

Instead of attempting to solve issue number 2 (the biggest issue in-game currently), even if it means sacrificing issues 3 and 4, you have instead totally eroded the biggest reason I am still playing. Without element 1, it doesn't matter how good 2, 3 & 4 are, its no longer worth playing this game.

 

It'd be awesome to know you have read and comprehend the point I'm trying to make, even if you do not change your course of action. But just knowing that you understand why I believe this is a terrible outcome would bring me some small vestige of satisfaction.

 

TL;DR Any solution that even slightly improves populations and still lets us keep our low ping is good enough. Any solution that increases our ping, regardless of population increases is a terrible one.

THIS. I can't believe that they think the solution is to dissolve APAC servers. Get off the glass pipe, get straight and open your eyes BW/EA.

Game killing decision for anyone who's NOT east coast AU. My ping here in WA is close to 500ms. Half. A. Second.

You guessed it, about as long as you took to read that stuttored fullsrop ridden sentence. That's how far behind everyone else i'll be. Goodbye PVP. I hope you make your new PVE content for people with mild disabilities in terms of reaction time because i'll need it.

Oh wait, I doubt i'll bother to play at all. I am a CE VIP with two accounts and this is the first time I have even considered unsubbing. <Core> are gone for good. Basically everything's ****ed. Apologies to everyone else on APAC servers, MDN has killed the game for you and ruined your low ping (along with our own, but we dug our own grave, we never meant to drag you into it.)

Bioware, you have no soul.

Aussies won't forget this knife in the back.

I am unsubscribing from SWTOR and demanding the refund of my purchase of the 'Cartel Expansion Pack', as you mislead me into believing i could play it on my current APAC server with my acceptable Asia Pacific ping levels.

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.

 

I will continue to provide updates as soon as I have them. I know the next big question will be “when” and as soon as I have that information to release, I will do so. Thank you for your continued patience on this. I know it took longer than you would have liked but I intend to continue to give you information as soon as I can!

 

-eric

Oh, they're allowing us to do so - how very noble of them. After all, nothing says "best play experience" like 400+ ms.

6 months, for The Path Of Least Effort - thankssssss... but no. (Really glad I held off on topping up my sub until they outlined the fix. "Ah, fix us like dogs, you say? Bye!")

Ping > Population.

Honestly I never cared about the population issues so never gave my voice to this thread. I loved Dalborra as it is, didn't care if queues were popping fast or slow I just did other things as I waited or got guildies together for it.

But now it seems the most vocal crowd is classed as the majority and the idiots at the desk have heard them and threw this back as their reply... thanks Bioware for your compassion and understanding. Considering most that wanted higher population servers have pretty much already left to NA servers.

I know my names will be taken, our guild name will probably be taken...

Why not cross-server queues? Or just leave offer transfers from oceanic server to oceanic server, we as a community can figure out which one we want to make the main server.

Ugh I don't know... this news is just horrible.

EA this is the last straw.

I was actually excited for the expansion but now you have completely destroyed any enthusiasm I had for SWTOR and will be boycotting any future games that your company produces. Thanks for giving us the real Aussie servers to then just dump us all back on the servers we transferred from with no choice of just staying and making do with the population we have or allowing APAC players to transfer and see where the community goes before acting.

Seems like you have written this game off completely and are just cost cutting wherever possible.

#### you EA/Bioware.

There goes our ping then.

 

Back to WoW for me

 

Check ya Bioware.

This.

It kind of hurts to be honest. I've loved playing this game despite all its flaws. Time to move on I guess.

To those of you worried about ping.

I play from New Zealand on The Harbinger had have since i started playing and average around 200ms of latency. Some of my guildies get worse than that and they play from the US.

Let me get this straight...it took them 3207 posts for them to basically say we are closing APAC...after all this time. Are you *********** kidding me? There goes any chance to compete in raiding and any form of competitive pvp...from 28ms to about 200+ now. 3207 posts with 90% asking for merges and we get this...

Thank you Bioware but once ESO is out **** ya later. L2accomodate customers from all regions.

To those of you worried about ping.

 

I play from New Zealand on The Harbinger had have since i started playing and average around 200ms of latency. Some of my guildies get worse than that and they play from the US.

200ms is *********** garbage and I won't consider playing seriously on that for a heartbeat. I played on the Jekk'Jekk Tarr when the game launched and it was a miserable experience. I will never, ever go back.

I seriously want to see about a ROTHC refund however.

I'm sure a big part of this decision were the operational benefits for EA. Shutting down the APAC servers means saving a bunch of $ on server leases. There will be less off-hour support requests as well. WoW never had APAC servers- Aussie players who really wanted to reduce their latency used 3rd party SSH tunneling services.

I'm sure EA did the math and determined that the cost of maintaining APAC servers was in the same ballpark as the revenue from APAC customers. So even though many Aussie players will quit, many will continue playing/subscribing on the US West Coast servers. Once you factor in the cost savings from cancelling the APAC server leases, EA actually makes money in this scenario.

I've been playing since launch, have 3 accounts and 17 toons.

I have never felt a need to post on the forums until now.

I would of thought it would of made more sense to offer the option to all merge to one APAC server first and if that was unsuccessful then merge us to the US servers.

On top of that many of us will lose our character names and have to go back to high pings which already rules out PvP for most of us.

Bad decision and im really struggling for a reason to stay subscribed.

this deal......

this deal......

LOL so true.

Hey everyone,

 

I have an update for you on our long term plans for the APAC servers. Before I do that though I want to let you know up front that we still have quite a bit of work to do to make this happen so I cannot provide any timeframes for you today.

 

We know that when we asked you, the community, for your opinions on what we should do, we received quite a variety of suggested solutions. Some people wanted to be able to transfer to higher populated North American servers, some suggested merging the three existing APAC servers into one large APAC server, and then there were a host of other ideas as well. However, the one common theme from the suggestions, which we heard clearly, is that everyone wants the opportunity to play on higher populated servers. With this in mind, we have evaluated all of the options and determined that the best solution, that will offer the best long term play experience, is to merge the APAC servers with higher populated North American servers.

 

Getting to the point of being able to merge the servers is going to be a multistep process. First off we need to update our Free Character Transfer System to include the game changes that we have made recently along with the upcoming changes in Game Update 2.0 and the Digital Expansion: Rise of the Hutt Cartel. We will then offer Free Character Transfers to anyone currently playing on an APAC server to a North American server of the same gameplay type, specifically:

• Mastar Dar’Nala (PvP) will transfer to The Bastion (PvP)
  
• Gav Daragon (RP-PvE) will transfer to Begeren Colony (RP-PvE)
  
• Dalborra (PvE) will transfer to The Harbinger (PvE)
  

We will also need to update our server merge technology at which point we will ultimately merge each of the APAC servers into the corresponding North American servers as indicated above. We are moving as quickly as we can to make this happen, but we want to make sure this is a smooth transition, so it will take some time.

 

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.

 

I will continue to provide updates as soon as I have them. I know the next big question will be “when” and as soon as I have that information to release, I will do so. Thank you for your continued patience on this. I know it took longer than you would have liked but I intend to continue to give you information as soon as I can!

 

-eric

This is absolute ******** Bioware. You are not giving us anything here. All you are doing is taking away our gameplay experience and forcing us into a worse situation.

WE CANNOT PLAY PVP competitively with your crappy latency to US servers.

Just lost a subscriber. *********** useless.

I was really looking forward to the expansion then I hear this news.

This seems like a bull***** excuse to save money on your part by closing our servers under the guise of

helping us move to higher pop servers.

NEWSFLASH! - We play on these servers because we want low pings! I and many I know played since BETA and moved from the Harbinger to Dalborra in the first place so we could have lovely local servers. Honestly most people currently on Dalborra are more than happy with the serer population at the moment.

People wanted merges, not to be shafted into moving back to a server on the other side of the world.

I play SWTOR specifically because it has local servers. When they were introduced we were blown away because it showed that a big US company actually gave a crap about our experience on the other side of the world. I guess that is no longer the case.

On top of my last post I would like to reflect on EA's/Bioware's actions of late.

In hindsight EA/Bioware has been stringing us along when in reality the year long contracts for the APAC servers are running out early April. We have all been fuc.ked royally and looking back on it now i honestly think that this was their intention all along and we've just been milked with all this 2.0 BS and the release of cartel coins.

I was thinking exactly the same. It feels like them asking for our suggestions and the supposed ambiguity of the future of our servers, was just a BS stalling tactic to sucker us out of as much $ as possible before the server contracts expired, and that they were invariably going to be shutdown then anyway. Why else would they ask for suggestions and then completely disregard what the majority asked for?

I actually feel physically sickened by this treatment towards paying customers. I've played almost every Bioware game since Baldur's Gate came out and I think I can honestly say that this will be the last.

Just glad my sub runs out in a few days.

=_= Seriously EA/BW ***, why even ask what we wanted with no intention of actually listening?

EA/BW please go EADC lol I cant believe that one main reason to merge to US servers was so people didn't lose anything of the play style they like? So their solution is to move us to 2000000ms instead because we all like high ping, Which accommodates whose play style exactly? So in effect PvP is out of question, PvE and end game content is pointless on high unreliable ms so please explain whose play style your catering for? How is this a solution for APAC servers at all the general consensus was people would go without open world PvP and RP to be merged into on APAC server to maintain playable ms.

If this is the final result I hope they at least offer refunds on the X-Pack hell even refunds for anyone whose recently subscribed or purchased cartel coins thinking they had a future playing on this game after misleading everyone into thinking they had a real solution for us.... Well done guys you have ****ed us since release only to completely **** us over in the long run without the courtisy of offering some lube. Some one needs to start a new thread discussing what other games everyone will go to .... Truly disapointing...

Well this sucks. I know i have a few friends that were on master darnala that wanted to transfer to my server ( Gav Daragon). So obviously they are being forced to moved to the american pvp server , or if they did want to be on the same server as I they will have to re--roll until a paid transfer service is offered.

Thanks bioware.....

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.

This is the crazy part, to be honest. Being on a PVP server means almost nothing... there's so little open world PVP in this game it's a meaningless server distinction 99% of the time.

And RPers can still RP on a PVE/PVP server.

I like how they asked for our preference in this thread, then ignored the overwhelming majority that wanted APAC mergers, and just went with whatever they wanted anyway.

Did they actually ask if people would prefer to:

Change from a PVP server to a PVE and lose the non-existant world pvp OR

transfer to the US to pvp where everyone gets to have an advantage over you in the form of ~150ms?

Continue playing on a local PVE server, then receive an influx of new local players to revitalise and replenish an already decent server? OR suffer the 200ms+ while trying to level, raid and PVP

Only ones I can think of who may have had a different frame of mind may be the RPers, which is fair enough.

Solution wasn't too hard tho. Offer the transfers you posted, but also offer the option to transfer to consolidated APAC server.

Sure, some would opt for transfers, but I think the APAC mergers were definitely the pick of the bunch for a vast majority of us =/

I am a subscriber of 16 months but sadly won't be renewing my sub to go back to US latency. Thanks for offering us local servers but you kind of screwed it by your lack of response to our issues. It's a shame because I was really looking forward to reliving the early days of a populated local server.

/salute