Gamebreaker on "Merges"

http://www.gamebreaker.tv/video-game...server-merges/

Server merges are coming; there is no denying that. Sure, BioWare is not going to call the free transfers being offered for Star Wars: The Old Republic the start of server merges, but realistically that’s what they are. Our whole panel agrees; however, it also agrees that server merges are a good thing. The server populations are spread way too thin. In fact, it was spread too thin the week after launch, and that’s when the game had hit its current peak. The most frustrating issue is not that BioWare is doing servers merges, but how it is handling them. Justin Lowe sees no other good way to move the situation forward, but Larry Everett, on the other hand, is extremely disappointed. He said, “Out of all the ways you could possibly handle server transfers [...] the way BioWare is handling them is the worst.”

To find out more about Larry’s frustration, the exciting updates coming to SWTOR in update 1.3, and Gary Gannon‘s impersonation of Ed Park tune into the show today. We have three media personalities — Gary Gannon from GAMEBREAKER, Justin Lowe from Darth Hater, and Larry Everett from Massively — to tell us what’s what in the world of Star Wars: The Old Republic on our forum called The Republic!

I agree with them so much. Listen to it, because they bring up critical issues that most people are denying.

Watch out people! Another totally original thread here!

Lol, you can read it any way you want, Besides, Justin Lowe > Larry Everett.

BW may not call them merges, but that is definitely what the industry and gamers in general will be viewing it as.

For every one person that tells a friend "hey, swtor is offerring xfers to beef up the pops again, come back" someone will probably tell 5-7 of their friends that "swtor is merging servers and dying, don't bother".

So really. It doesn't matter what BW wants to call them, most with a clue will know the reality of the situation, and it isn't as pretty of a reality as BW and some others around here would like us to think.

i agree they're a good thing too. they're not completely transfers since we cannot choose the destination. by BW controlling the servers you can go to, it feels more like staged server merges, than a true player controlled transfer, since we cannot transfer to any destination of our choosing.

that said i agree it's good and hope my main and original server of kaas city gets added in because there's never a population there and i'd love to go somewhere with hundreds of folks on the stations and planets with populations of over 100 of leveling toons.

like how it was at launch and how fatman is now.

I agree with them 100%, these arent transfers, theyre optional merges. Companies may be scared to death of the word "merges" but the fact is they were what they needed badly and i dont think just flat out shutting down servers and merging them could have lowered biowares rep any further than it already is.

Finally, someone who gets it.

Only because he runs Darth Hater.. if it wasn't because of that, he would be very critical of swtor, but the fact is, he can't, because he gets money off that website, and gets exclusive interviews.

It's not pretty and you might be right about the writting on the wall. But at the end of the day it was needed for those of us who still play. I am hopefull that the game survives, but at the same time I have my reservations....kind of a 50/50 thing in that regards I guess.

If you look at the most recent batch of added servers under Europe (English), you'll see that there are 7 servers that go to either Tomb of Freedon Nadd or The Red Eclipse. This could either be a big coincidence (doubtful) or a means of pushing the low population servers onto high population servers, so they can then remove servers that have 0 people on them. That way they can say that those servers had 0 people on them and were just wasting space, instead of having the investors and shareholders think the game is dying if they were to do a real server merge. If the remaining servers have only a small handful of characters left they forcefully transfer the rest, saying that the cost of hosting the server and waste of bandwidth outweighed the low population number.

Perfect smokescreen to cover up their true intent. It's devious in it's brilliancy.