Character Transfer, Server Populations, and You (Part II)

You are right! You do not understand! But then, I didn’t ask you did I?
You pay to play your way, I will pay to play my way, both of us will be happy then!
Smile

A cruise ship line thinks demand will be high so they build 100 extra ships. Demand is high at first, but it drops off. So they decide to sell off those 100 extra ships, but the few people who like traveling on low population cruise ships are pretty miffed. Those people then demand that the cruise line continue to run low population cruises or they'll stop coming. They don't like shuffleboard or buffet queues, and have had their room numbers forever. Cruise line looks at operating costs and wishes those people well. That's business.

[QUOTE=VulcanLogic;4852388 Cruise line looks at operating costs and wishes those people well. That's business.[/QUOTE]

That is true!

And that is what may happen here.

Life goes on.

Either way, I would still hate to see SWTOR go off line forever. It IS a very good game!

I love analogies and although I agree with the operating cost example above lets add to the example.

They sell off those 100 extra ships unfortunately only a part of your family may actually transfer to the remaining ships. They understand that you want to enjoy all the activities on the ship with your family but sorry, space is limited. Luckily the stranded family members will be somewhere, the cruise line is just not sure where at the moment. That is better than just throwing the family members over the boat though right?

And lets not forget that with the new ship population merge there will be brand new adventures:
1. Queuing for the bathroom
2. Buffet loot sniping (maybe they will spawn more of those hotwings so lines don't form)
3. Slow motion walking. We crammed so many people on the ship that moving around in popular areas is a game in itself.

Oh and by the way, although your birth name may be important to you our ship registry has to have unique passenger names. This opens a whole new venue of entertainment or so says our happy customers Bob_12 and Cassy88.

What I still don't understand is why they refuse to give us any details on what this means. Of course we're worried about the fate of our characters, even if they won't be deleted will they just be spread across these other mega servers as character spaces are available, will the character slots be increased? Why on earth is this information not seen as something we should know at the SAME time forced mergers are brought up? It really makes me think that they hadn't even considered that people may have too many characters for this merge and are stalling til they have an answer.

I've accepted that I need to move, I've even saved somewhat reasonable names to change my characters into to (despite hating with a passion that we must not rename the characters this "story focused" MMORPG cares nothing about) but I'm holding off on making the move until I see how excess characters are being dealt with. Might actually be easier for future alts on different servers(assuming thats the answer) if I save some of my highest legacy characters for that trip.

The Devs are needlessly withholding too much information from us in regards to major changes in the game and it makes it hard to have faith that whatever solution they come up with will make any sense at all since no actions so far have made much sense...

Just canceled my subscription because of this. Several of my toons disappeared after the transfer. Others came over with scrambled names. And I hate that I am forced into moving all of my toons onto 1 server when they came from 2 or 3 originally. Now I cannot create any more on the destination server. Game is more unstable than ever. And here they are wasting time on making it more difficult for people to play by increasing populations until I can no longer log in on a Saturday evening.

Yeah, that was a typo. I actually counted the servers then hit the 3 by mistake and didn't realize it when I made my estimates.

My server had at least 600 people on line at a time at peak hours - and that's not the entire population of the server, it's just how many people were logged on at a time. Krayt Dragon had a healthy enough population (we were the #4 EC PVE server) that we were surprised to be an origin server and not a destination server. I just can't see BioWare creating servers with a max of 300 people when the populations of healthier servers were transferred to destination servers.

Well, admittedly, the fact that the promise that you wouldn't be forced to move has been broken is just plain bad policy. Maybe they didn't know what they were going to do at the time and it turned out that there were so few people left on the origin servers, it didn't make any sense to do anything other than merge them into the destination servers. Most of the people who transferred voluntarily read the writing on the wall regarding the Origin servers in spite of what BioWare said.

That being said, if BioWare opened up another option to people on origin servers now - other than just leaving them there, it wouldn't be fair to many of the hundreds of thousands who already moved who weren't offered that choice. Meanwhile, you're still in the same position that you were in on day one of transfers, in that your names aren't available on your destination server.

If name and server populations are an issue, see if you can reserve your names on a server in the AP region and transfer there from your destination server, when that becomes possible. You're more likely to find your name there because most of the population there transferred from NA or EU servers to a fresh server - so you won't have the issue of so many names locked by inactive accounts (and, for the record, that's what appears to have been the case with the names I and many of my guild-mates lost when we transferred to The Shadowlands, so I imagine it's the case in general), and, since you're on the opposite side of the world, you'd be playing when most of the people there are asleep - voila! Instant light population server!

Considering I mentioned to sticky this quote ( that doesn't appear when you requote it twice ) somewhere and everywhere 24 hours ago , then I think maybe you have made a blunder again , please inform people quicker when you know these things , thank you.

BadOrb.

This is utterly useless!

Hey Bioware, this is indeed your game and you are free to do with it whatever you desire. If you do not care about the subscribers, or a portion of them, and you want to force them to play your way, or the highway.

My money and I will choose the highway!

I am not begging you to consider the remaining players feelings on this matter anymore.

Do as you will.

But mark this. I started on this game on Sedyn Kyne server and intend to stay there, or agree with BW to move to a moderate to standard server, or leave, period!

Even now, this situation has made the game play less enjoyable.

You started out a great environment to play on. Now you are turning into a copy version of WOW.

Bonne chance les amis

Where to start.. I have not played since April , was discouraged when the Special Content only lasted 1 to 2 weeks and was left with a pocket full of tokens and noplace to spend them, I went to play Skyrim and came back to dead servers, both my Imp and Rep Legacy are on different servers I created the toons in the first wave of early access, all my friends play there on both servers and they are both on the origin server list. The Last Thing I want is to get stuck transfering to a locked or full server , or one that will be when people start comming back when Diablo wears thin. So I'll wait till it becomes more evident what server is going to be a medium population, but cancelling my Sub has been bouncing around my head. Until they add holiday content to mix things up every month or two, they will have issues. Tons of people in SWG , CoH , and WoW just to name a few live for the holidays and the little break they offer. As for the lack of a Blockbuster game that was promised ... I love this game, I blame it on execs that didn't put the full EA firepower behind it for advertising ... WoW hires stars to promote their game years after it launched ... Star Wars has it's own Holywood connections it should have tapped into. Imagine Harrison Ford playing his Bounty Hunter .... just an example .. I know that it would be unlikely as he avoids Star wars, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Danials, ....... who needs Mr. T , Chuck Norris , or mini Me .. They coulda Made Yoda playing a Smuggler ... that would be funny, and it would show me that EA is willing to back them. EA also left 38 Studios out to dry with the Game Kingdoms of Amalur .. good game ... no product promotion. EA ...... Advertising is not a 1 time thing for launch. You fail your own customers by not growning your client population.