To whom it may concern,

When GSF first came out matches were easy to find, however, that is no longer the case. Most of the hardcore GSF players allied under one banner at the time -- a Guild by the name of Black Squadron. Recently Black Squadron took their Guild & transferred over to "The Harbinger" [server], & with their departure so went the bulk of our servers GSF community. It used to take about 2-5 min to find a GSF match, however, it now takes 15-30min.....some nights even longer. I've had nights/days lately where I can't FIND ANY MATCHES! It keeps getting worse.....

 

I'm not sure what the solution is at this point, but something needs to be done before the GSF community collapses as a whole on PoT5. Perhaps we could have cross server ques? Maybe we could have ground rewards [special reputation armor, decorations for your star ship, a buff of some kind], & etc]? Point is, we need help.....SWTOR Devs, you are our only hope......

 

PS: If you're a GSF player on PoT5 please /cjoin Pilot in game.

Edited April 29, 2014 by Lecto

To whom it may concern,

When GSF first came out matches were easy to find, however, that is no longer the case. Most of the hardcore GSF players allied under one banner at the time -- a Guild by the name of Black Squadron. Recently Black Squadron took their Guild & transferred over to "The Harbinger" [server], & with their departure so went the bulk of our servers GSF community. It used to take about 2-5 min to find a GSF match, however, it now takes 15-30min.....some nights even longer. I've had nights/days lately where I can't FIND ANY MATCHES! It keeps getting worse.....

 

I'm not sure what the solution is at this point, but something needs to be done before the GSF community collapses as a whole on PoT5. Perhaps we could have cross server ques? Maybe we could have ground rewards [special reputation armor, decorations for your star ship, a buff of some kind], & etc]? Point is, we need help.....SWTOR Devs, you are our only hope......

 

PS: If you're a GSF player on PoT5 please /cjoin Pilot in game.

 

Yeah, Black Squadron took our mains to Harbinger, the majority of my Characters are still on Pot5, however, and While they don't have Animal's hangar, I can and will fly with them. hit me up if you wanna group.

I've been tweeting to @swtor a couple times every few days to reiterate the GSF population's needs. If this trend of server xfers continues, whole servers will lose out on play without cross servers :/ I'd just like to be acknowledged by the dev's saying "We understand your frustration, and are looking into implementing a cross server que in direct response to increased que times and server emigrations. We're also attempting to incorporate more GSF with the rest of the game to make it something worthwhile to do"... or something along those lines. I'll continue to be tweeting at them, and hopefully they listen :/

Both sides of the story here, Black Squadron and the Burgers did a job on Pot5s community before they transferred out. Matter of fact their habit of pulling in double premades was a big reason why I switched servers. There's nothing quite like having a team that's 75% new players go up against a coordinated team of 8 vets on team speak. I had matches where I got the only kill against their side. So they didn't so much as take the GSF community with them as destroy it, then complain they couldn't get any pops, or play against good people, and finally they left.

 

When they were on Pot5 GSF for all intents and purposes was not a game but a very bad joke. They do serve one good purpose though they SCREAM IN BOLD LARGE TYPE, the problems with the game in it's current state. I can only hope that BW/EA moves to correct things quickly. The alternative is the kind of wasting disease that took down The Secret World. The devs there can't make the balance changes they know are needed because all they have left are the people that destroyed the game.

 

@the OP the GSF community on Pot5 might yet recover, I doubt it will happen by itself though. There is just too much incentive to form up uber groups to beat on new people. Especially true for anyone that wants a record they can brag on.

Edited April 29, 2014 by General_Brass

I've made a few alts on different servers. Even the so-called 'popular' GSF servers have some terrible queue times. I can't imagine what it's like on other servers.

 

One thing that I think would extremely help....

 

Allow players to have some idea of how long queue is going to be. This can be accomplished by:

 

-Putting an estimate in the queue such as "Wait time is roughly xx mins"

 

-Show how many players in your faction are currently queue'd, and what your place in the queue currently is. Would be helpful if you could also see other faction's queue size.

 

-Show if there are any games currently ongoing, and if so, how many? What is the size of ongoing game? Is it same or multi-faction?

 

Right now it's just complete BS....you log in the game and join the queue...and nothing. You really have no idea if the queue is going to take 3 or 30 mins or longer. It is equal parts boring and frustrating.

 

The only real way to gauge it is to become friends with everybody you see playing GSF. Then you can see if anybody is in a game, how many people are currently on, etc....but that is a very lame way of having to do it, and it's not very reliable.

 

The other annoying part is that a lot of people join groups to make queues go faster. This means that if you queue solo, and you're waiting for 20 minutes, there is nothing stopping 2 friends from logging in and stealing your queue when they had 0 wait time -- making you wait another 15 minutes for the next game.

 

A lot of people are joining groups with AFK players just to make queue times go faster. Once the queue pops for them, their friends drop out but they get in the game.

yeah i almost want to make a new character on another server just for the gsf ques but i'd have to start all over and i kinda perfer to do gsf on my main

The only real way to gauge it is to become friends with everybody you see playing GSF. Then you can see if anybody is in a game, how many people are currently on, etc....but that is a very lame way of having to do it, and it's not very reliable.

 

type "/who lost mesas denon". You can't exclude the Lost Island FP, but you can see who is GSFing on all of the maps using this command. Lately, on multiple servers, I don't see too many players as I used to. Maybe the novelty wore off for some (but for all my GSF buddies, this is why we play). Granted, TEH's server que last night died slightly early b/c of issues I'm attributing to the broken chat / soon-to-be-patched servers that would be shutting down soon.

type "/who lost mesas denon".

 

/who shipyards mesas denon

/who shipyards mesas denon

 

OMG!!! Brilliant!!!! Do that one!

Most helpful, didn't think of that, thanks

 

Still would be nice to see your place in the queue and/or total # queue'd...

Edited April 29, 2014 by Kalphitis

Both sides of the story here, Black Squadron and the Burgers did a job on Pot5s community before they transferred out. Matter of fact their habit of pulling in double premades was a big reason why I switched servers. There's nothing quite like having a team that's 75% new players go up against a coordinated team of 8 vets on team speak. I had matches where I got the only kill against their side. So they didn't so much as take the GSF community with them as destroy it, then complain they couldn't get any pops, or play against good people, and finally they left.

 

Ok, I was a large driving reason behind us moving to Harbinger (myself and Da'uno anyway). The reason we moved was because the Q pops had taken a dramatic toll for the worse on PoT5, but they were popping every few minutes (or seconds) on Harbinger (still are BTW). BUT... Honestly... I don't think you can point the finger at Black Squadron and say we killed the community because we grouped up and used TS3. We didn't make a practice of excluding pilots. In fact, we included most pilots in our games when spots were open and there were requests. The reason for this is because ya, it's better to run as a coordinated group than one that doesn't coordinate. Same is the case for any PvP match OR PvE instance.

 

Also, I think server population is a HUGE factor... did you know that on a good day PoT5 sees 75 people on a single fleet instance? Did you know that Harbinger on an average day sees 175 people on three different instances??? That's quite a difference and make the odds of getting Q pops high. Odds are, that when we left PoT5, we were a sizeable percentage of the community simply based on the numbers. Therefore, when we left, a large part of the community failed to exist. That's not a fault you can pin on us though.

 

When they were on Pot5 GSF for all intents and purposes was not a game but a very bad joke.

 

I will agree with this. It was rough on both sides though. We didn't take a ton of pride in smearing our opponents into the ground. We flew T1 ships when this happened simply to help the community (no, really - we did do this). BUT... when you can't play the single most important aspect of this game (per our standards), you gravitate to where you CAN play it.

 

They do serve one good purpose though they SCREAM IN BOLD LARGE TYPE, the problems with the game in it's current state. I can only hope that BW/EA moves to correct things quickly. The alternative is the kind of wasting disease that took down The Secret World. The devs there can't make the balance changes they know are needed because all they have left are the people that destroyed the game.

 

Cross-server Q'ing is something I pray for every night... it's the only way to keep the game balanced. That being said, it's a "community" killer as there is very little "community" feel when you fly against pilots you don't recognize, can't chat with, can't congratulate or dog on.

 

@the OP the GSF community on Pot5 might yet recover, I doubt it will happen by itself though. There is just too much incentive to form up uber groups to beat on new people. Especially true for anyone that wants a record they can brag on.

 

Records are not important to purists of GSF. It's the 1000 to 999 games or the 50-49 or even 49-49 games that really get me back into the next match.

 

Also, all this talk of "when we left" doesn't mean we still don't fly on PoT5... but the lack of Q pops make it hard to.

Well the Harbinger was always the best kept secret of GSF. With the influx of new players I hope the community stays vibrant. One of the best parts of GSF on the Harbinger was that there weren't a lot of hardcore premade teams. Looks like that is going to change. I hope you guys play both factions to keep things balanced.

I just played a match in PoT5, I waited about half and hour for the pop, I recognized half the pilots, we had 5 good ones on our side and they had 3 it was a slaughter...

 

The talk started when one of the aces in our team said: "I was about to log out, I have being waiting 26 minutes", I said: "I'm thinking of leaving the server", someone else said: "Everyone else already has".

 

Right now GSF in PoT5 is a long long wait for a queue to pop for a match you can call before the 1st ship leaves the hangar any server recommendation other then Harbringer?

Well the Harbinger was always the best kept secret of GSF. With the influx of new players I hope the community stays vibrant. One of the best parts of GSF on the Harbinger was that there weren't a lot of hardcore premade teams. Looks like that is going to change. I hope you guys play both factions to keep things balanced.

 

Well... we are giving that a shot, but most of our mains were on the pub side. I'll be honest, we do spend a lot of time on the pub side, but there are about 5 or 6 of us that like to play imp a lot - myself included.

I've been tweeting to @swtor a couple times every few days to reiterate the GSF population's needs. If this trend of server xfers continues, whole servers will lose out on play without cross servers :/ I'd just like to be acknowledged by the dev's saying "We understand your frustration, and are looking into implementing a cross server que in direct response to increased que times and server emigrations. We're also attempting to incorporate more GSF with the rest of the game to make it something worthwhile to do"... or something along those lines. I'll continue to be tweeting at them, and hopefully they listen :/

 

Have they actually said that much? If so that is rather impressive...usually they don't say squat about anything.....

I've been tweeting to @swtor a couple times every few days to reiterate the GSF population's needs. If this trend of server xfers continues, whole servers will lose out on play without cross servers :/ I'd just like to be acknowledged by the dev's saying "We understand your frustration, and are looking into implementing a cross server que in direct response to increased que times and server emigrations. We're also attempting to incorporate more GSF with the rest of the game to make it something worthwhile to do"... or something along those lines. I'll continue to be tweeting at them, and hopefully they listen :/

 

Wouldn't hold my breath. Game companies are notorious for taking advantage of player's hopes they will do the right thing. Hell EA is notorious for doing that to it's own people

Edited May 2, 2014 by General_Brass