Hi all,

I’m just another guy waiting for early access to begin, I and some friends are discussing what faction we should roll, and I’m wondering if any of you can share your own impressions of the current situation. We are most likely rolling on a PvP server, and me myself are mostly drawn to PvP in all games.

The things I’m wondering about are as follows:

• Is there a clear and noticeable in-balance between the factions, and who’s in the lead?

• Is there any noticeable difference in the type of players and resulting “culture” that each faction draws for itself?

• What is your personal recommendation for faction choice if story, esthetics, light/dark-side and such aspects all are secondary to a great PvP experience with balanced population, mature competition, and minimal downtime?

Simply, if PvP “fun” goes before RPG preferences, where should we go?

If you search the net or look at forums and http://swtorprogress.com, I get the impression that Empire are in majority, and I personally feel that being on the minority side is usually better, especially when it comes to queued PvP instances. Open-world PvP seems to be, in most games, the most fun if essentially balanced, more fun for the underdog if the in-balance is small, and not fun for anyone but less frustrating for the majority side if the imbalance is significant. But does this hold true for SWTOR?

Also, I have never been a WoW player, EVE-Online, Guild Wars and Warhammer Online where my games. But if we take WoW as an example, my impressions from vanilla-WoW friends where that their where a tangible and really noticeable difference in what kind of players each faction got. Horde seemed to be (or so if heard from friends, read on forums, and glimpsed in articles) the side with a higher age average (which doesn’t secure but heightens the odds for more “maturity”) and also the side with a more developed PvP community and PvP culture. Are any such similarities visible this early in SWTOR, and how are they then playing out?

Disclaimer: Don’t take my WoW parallel as a point for discussion or provocation, I just used a reference to my impression of WoW as a bystander to get my point across that I’m interested and curious about any perceived differences between Empire and Republic when it comes to the drawn playerbase in SWTOR So please avoid any WoW vs. SWTOR flamewars.

And I know my English is bad, sorry, it’s not my first language, and all trolls, please leave me be, I’m a friendly guy looking for some information!

Thanks all!

All polls and recent data mining of the SWTOR launched guild sites shows the Empire ahead on every server.

Some are really bad off and some are pretty even. I chose Republic for me and my friends and on the Helm of Graush server, because all recent info has shown it to have the closest ratio.

A few more Republic people to this side and it might be completely balanced.

I am actually shocked they did not do like Aion and put a population cap on the factions.

They made it in that game where you could not roll one faction if it was overpopulated the other faction until it was brought in line.

By release some people that were planning on playing the other faction swapped and it actually worked for a while, then somehow after they removed those caps a year later the underdogs became the over crowded.

Crazy, that is a pretty big difference at 86%...

I see some threads floating around about "balanced"/"fun"/"best"/"compatative" PvP servers and so on. Is there any merit to this? Are some PvP servers actually drawing more of some kind of established PvP crowd, maybe with stable and successful PvP guilds from other games?

If so, me and my freinds are based out of Sweden, if anyone have any suggestions

as others have said, empire by FAR has the most numbers on all of the servers, some are as high as 87% to 13%, with many over 80%. Seems all the WoW kids wanted to play baddies...... /sigh

On the positive side, since there is so many of them the 9/10 times the only warzone they will get is hutball vs other sith, which is lol.

Are any of you on one of does pretty unbalanced servers so you have any experience with the PvP instance ques?

Hutball should always be quick as it's cross-faction, but is it the classic "instant access" for republic and endless wait for Empire for the other two?