It's been 9 years and Oceania has no server.

In 2014, ten full years post release date, Blizzard added Australian servers to WoW. It's not that you can't, you just don't care to to take the leap.

Australia is 24 million people strong, so it's not as if you're taking a serious risk and now that AWS is so popular, it's easier than ever to add servers without the need for physical server racks in countries across the globe.

Please consider the feelings of the Australian player base.

Well, swtor had an APAC server.

Three, in fact, in 2012, less than three months after launch.

Bioware/EA shut them down just one year later. The players were moved to West Cost USA.

The reason given for moving us to North America instead of merging the three server was to "accommodating all the existing play-styles".

Then, four years later, as Bioware focus on Anthem and with swtor leaking subs, we got United Forces, which merged the three west coast servers to Satele Shan. Thus all the APAC guilds are on Satele Shan. The play styles they used to justify not keeping the APAC server? Not mentioned at all.

One thing they also didn't mention: "west coast". It is intentional, and we knew why soon enough. They were going to merge west coast to the east, and after the merge they officially say they didn't want us to know in advance. They also said "We expect some of you playing on formerly West Coast servers may see higher ping times. We’ll use the next two weeks to smooth out any kinks and resolve any performance issues encountered."

Well, two years come and gone. The ping issue capped by lightspeed is still here. The solution is obvious, and we don't know why it hasn't been "resolved".

I left because of the stealth server move and the later conquest update which made it an ugly grind (a recurring theme over the history of swtor, really). Resubed a month to see how it goes. New level cap ruined my gears, but ok, I'll regrind. A few new stories, a few new fp, one new op.

The good? There are still many players. Some real newbies. Some old newbies like me. Good for swtor.

The bad? The ping is very bad when there are more players. I press a hotkey. Nothing happens. I move around and press some more hotkeys from muscle memory. A few seconds later I am teleported and if I am lucky I saw the abilities rapidly taking effect. If unlucky, that is a few seconds wasted doing nothing. Either way, I need to catch up with my cooldown status, the boss's new facing, the team's new positions etc.

Guess I'll give Bioware another two years to smooth out the kinks.

Would you still trust Bioware/EA on any APAC server?