Time to merge the US servers... again. Primetime window getting smaller and smaller.

I've also noticed more poor behavior on Star Forge since the merger. More harassment, more ninjas, more aggressive ninjas, people trying to kite mobs toward you, people being very aggressive about group invites. If some people have not noticed or experienced it, great, but it's been there in my experience.

Only over crowded for solo players. This is an MMO.

As for cross server. I agree, it would be a much better solution and would also make it harder for people to WinTrade.
But Bioware said 4-5 years ago that they can’t do it for technical reasons.

Now, wether that’s hardware or the game engine, none of us know. If it’s hardware, well, that should be less of a problem now since all US servers are in the same data Centre.

What ever they do, Bioware only have themselves to blame for putting the game into a position that some players feel they need mergers.
If they merge to help one group, they piss off another
If they don’t merge (if needed), they piss off that group.
Either way, they piss off people who end up leaving,
It’s a no win situation under those conditions. The only solution is build up the player base again so there are enough people to accomodate people who need others to play the game with. Bioware have it within their power.

(deleted. You know what, I'm not going to bother)

As I stated in my original post:

A lot of said griefers are PvPers (because you see the same names in PvP chat and because they routinely poof out for a few minutes for matches before returning for more harassment), but certainly not all of them.

No, not all griefers are PvPers, and not all PvPers are griefers. I'm not trying to tar you all with the same brush. But a lot of them are. That's a simple fact. They're popping in and out for matches, they're in PvP-centric guilds, they're talking regularly in PvP chat on fleet... if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. I don't know why this is, but there it is.

Of course there will always be jerkfaces and harassment in the game. Even before the mergers, we RPers had to deal with griefing and disruptive individuals now and then. What I and other RPers have been trying to say is that the last server mergers made harassment of RPers happen more frequently and a lot worse. More toxic people are located on the same server, as compared to an RP community that didn't change in size. Players who didn't originally roll on an RP server are more antagonistic to RPers than those players who chose to originally roll on an RP server. Every single time I RP on fleet, or my friends RP on fleet, there's usually 2-3 players (sometimes more) going out of their way to try to ruin our fun. It didn't use to be anywhere near that bad on Ebon Hawk, ever, but it's a fact of life for RPers on Star Forge now.

The emote spamming is particularly annoying, because even if you put the jerkfaces on ignore, if they're spamming emotes built into the game you still see them in chat. Constant scroll makes RP hard to handle because you'll keep missing what other players say. Usually a group of them trade off emoting at eachother so they don't get caught by the the flood filter, so they can keep it up for as long as they want. Other forms of griefing can be hard to report, because spamming AoEs/infecting people with rakghoul plague/sitting on people with mounts doesn't violate any specific rules, and how would EA be able to prove they were doing such disruptive things from logs?

I don't want merges. I also don't PvP. Why? Because of the rampant toxicity. I think that's more to blame for the lack of PvP pops than a lack of server population--or at the very least it's a major contributing factor, especially for the ranked queue. Unfortunately EA doesn't seem interested in policing or punishing bad actors no matter how often you report them.

PVP toxicity is its own worst enemy and has a direct affect on queue pops. Why?
Because you don't get queued with people you put on ignore.

PVP 1: Dude wth bad wrong your tanking sukks!
PVP 2: Don't tell me my tanking sucks you wuss! [puts PVP 1 on ignore]
PVP 1: Oh yeah! Well you need to L2P because you're a total fraking NOOB! [puts PVP 2 on ignore]

This process can only go on so long before all the PVPrs put each other on ignore.

So, if putting someone on ignore did not prevent people from being queued together.... the queues would probably pop constantly....

Are you sure this is true? I don't think it is, but I cannot say 100%.

It's this attitude right here that irritates the crap out of me. People who discount the importance of the solo player by shouting them down with "MMO" like group crap is so much more important. It's not, it's equal.

I knew this would happen, they merged the servers, annoyed people and it solved nothing. For a month is was busy, the pvpers didn't cry about queues, and yet some of them found time to go around abusing and bullying the solo or rp player.

I agree that's the pvp community's toxicity that is the biggest problem. Not all are nasty but there are a goodly number of them that are, that have sufficiently turned much of the population against the activity. No one wants to play with jerks. Or worse, a throng of them.

Merging the servers again, displacing people, annoying them is not the answer. I wish they'd figure out how to the cross-server grouping so that the pvpers will finally stop their incessant whining and the rest of us can go back about our lives and not have to worry about having another assinine merge imposed.

Yep, agreed

I’m not shouting anyone down. I’m pointing out it’s an MMO, it’s supposed to have a lot of people on the server

It's also important to be able to manage the (V)Lans they use in a logical and ordered manner, meaning they need to balance the load of the users on the network hardware in such a way, that the network stays as much out of your way as it can, while it works to keep you connected to your enemy peers.

It's always better to have more servers in foreground instead of one super server, as a single point of failure.

As such, things will not change on the server front. Call friends to play with. Bioware has already done its part