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Will Server Transfers see a sale this summer?


Rrusalka

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Why? There are two NA servers and three EUR servers.. I wouldn't ever expect them to offer another server transfer sale.

 

I gotta agree here. I was a huge server transfer player. Those 90cc days are done. There's a better chance we see 1 server before another server transfer sale.

Edited by Zerileth
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I’d love a sale. I’ve recently had to start playing on DM because pvp pops have now stopped for me at some of the times I play on SF/SS.

 

Being in Australia and watching the times I can play, keep continuously shrinking, is very disheartening. I’m now like a server nomad.

 

Up until 6pm Aussie time I can play in the US, after 6:30pm (AEST) my pvp pops basically stop (during the week). So now I’ve started to play on DM after my 6:30pm. Pops are still slow at that time, but it’s only 9:30am. As my evening progresses, it improves.

 

My point is because of population decline, I’m unable to play pvp on the US servers at what should be Aussie primetime. I’m basically following the sun around the earth, just to play this game. A discounted transfer cost would be extremely help at this point :o

 

It’s very painful having to lvl 4 advanced classes through story to get the buffs I need for pvp. Plus there is the legacy issue, collecting datacrons and also lack of credits and SHs.

 

I would love it if Bioware could throw a bone to us people not living in the USA or the EU. It would show they still sort of cared.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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I really dont see a reason for that now. People had more than enough time to transfer around. Server merge happened and everyone had enough time to sort their stuff. If people are new and realize they are on a wrong server its little effort to start new on a better server.
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I really dont see a reason for that now. People had more than enough time to transfer around. Server merge happened and everyone had enough time to sort their stuff. If people are new and realize they are on a wrong server its little effort to start new on a better server.

 

How about my situation / reason? I’m only asking for discount transfers because circumstances in the game beyond my control have changed. ie population shrinkage and pop times stopping at the times I play.

 

As you know I’ve had to migrate some of my play time to DM to still be able to play pvp at what should be my prime time. It is very painful starting from scratch on a new server. It will be a while till I get some lvl 70s and even longer to gear them reasonably. Especially with no credits (I’ll have to farm them).

 

I wonder if Bioware can selectively issue discount transfers for people in the APAC, Asia, Eurasian regions to allow “nomad” players the same opportunity to play the same as our USA-NA and EU brethren.

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How about my situation / reason? I’m only asking for discount transfers because circumstances in the game beyond my control have changed. ie population shrinkage and pop times stopping at the times I play.

 

As you know I’ve had to migrate some of my play time to DM to still be able to play pvp at what should be my prime time. It is very painful starting from scratch on a new server. It will be a while till I get some lvl 70s and even longer to gear them reasonably. Especially with no credits (I’ll have to farm them).

 

I wonder if Bioware can selectively issue discount transfers for people in the APAC, Asia, Eurasian regions to allow “nomad” players the same opportunity to play the same as our USA-NA and EU brethren.

 

Well technically I was surprised you even was able to play before!! I mean your prime time 8 pm is like 3 am LA time and 6 am NY time! This means its night in the US and you play on a US server. Even if EU people play on NA servers its lunch 12:00 am for them. So yes, the best for you was to play on EU servers. If you had pops before it would only mean it was the APAC people and since they left you dont have that now.

 

At the time of this post its 10 pm in Sydney and 2 pm here, so now people might be login in, but those are kids, students that are home from school. The "adults" start login in like 4-6 hours when its already too late for you.

 

What I mean is that this situation was predictable. Anyway, if you can finaly PM me, I can send you a 2400cc code for free to ease your pain :)

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Well technically I was surprised you even was able to play before!! I mean your prime time 8 pm is like 3 am LA time and 6 am NY time! This means its night in the US and you play on a US server. Even if EU people play on NA servers its lunch 12:00 am for them. So yes, the best for you was to play on EU servers. If you had pops before it would only mean it was the APAC people and since they left you dont have that now.

 

At the time of this post its 10 pm in Sydney and 2 pm here, so now people might be login in, but those are kids, students that are home from school. The "adults" start login in like 4-6 hours when its already too late for you.

 

What I mean is that this situation was predictable. Anyway, if you can finaly PM me, I can send you a 2400cc code for free to ease your pain :)

 

Warning, long post, it got away from me (still in bed having my tea)

 

We still had APAC players when we had a west coast server. Plus west coast shift workers, stay at home parents, retired people and students. Then the 9-5 adults would get on and a lot of my old guild seemed to play through the night. I know a lot were shift workers.

 

Since the west coast was moved, the majority of APAC players left the game as well as a lot of west coast players. Then as pop times got slower or longer outside during my old primetimes you menstioned, more and more people just stop playing and move to other games. APAC hasn’t had a prime time since the server moved.

I call it the snow ball affect. As fringe times shrink, more people leave because they can’t play as much group content at that time as they used too. They get sick of sitting in queues that don’t pop.

Eventually this creeps into the the main server primetimes as it started to last year before the mergers, when this happens, primetimes start to shrink as well.

 

After the mergers, the servers were nearly 24/7 for pvp. This lasted a little over a month and then started to decline again. By the time we got to March and a borked conquest release, things started to look like they did for me on Harbinger about February last year when pops slowed to be nearly non existent outside of prime time.

 

We lost a fair amount of people from the conquest release/changes, more than people realise. You can really feel the ripples from the things Bioware do when you often play at fringe playtimes, if they do something good, the affect is very discernible, much more than in prime times. In prime time you might see a very tiny bump, but in fringe times or completely out of prime time, it can be like a steroid injection. The same can be said when Bioware blunder, but it’s the reverse affect. One minute you can go from having 5 -10 min pops usually at that time of day, to them being 30mins. Then the longer Bioware dawdle to fix things (if they bother), the more people leave and those times. If Bioware don’t fix things to all those people’s satisfaction, they don’t return and the time bracket never recovers and pop times continue to get longer. I now can’t pvp with rep toons at my old time and Imps pop about 1-2 times an hour (if you’re lucky). These are my observations on both SS and SF. I’ve no idea what it’s like on DM.

 

Sadly this is a recurring theme with Bioware and they have systematically reduced the amount of people playing outside of prime times through negligence or lack of care. Then they take too long to do anything about fixing the things that made people angry and leave.

 

3 months ago I would still see 2 fleet instances for rep and Imp, I would still get lvl 70 pops very 10 mins. Only a month ago I would see semi healthy US fleets at my time. There were always atleast 100 people on the rep fleet and 200+ on the imp fleet. Pops had slowed to 30-45 mins rep side, but Imps we still 10-15mins. Now I’m seeing 26-28 people on the rep fleet and 40-60 people on the imp fleets and pops are non existent most of the time. Weekends are obviously different, but there is still a noticeable decline, especially in the amount of people participating in the queues.

 

This is why I’ve had to start looking at DM at those times I used to play only a month ago. But even that wouldn’t have been an option for me because my ping was over 400ms to DM. The reason I can now sort of play on DM is I changed ISP and got an upgraded fibre connection (just so I can play swtor), which has reduced my ping to about 330ms on DM (not stable though, I get some large spikes).

 

I don’t want to start saying the game is dying because in prime times it’s actually pretty good. But out side of prime times, the players are leaving in droves. Player participation at those times is approaching another all time low, I would say it’s nearly worse than before the mergers.

 

My concern is if this trend doesn’t slow down or reverse some, you will soon see prime times affected.

First they will reduce in length. Then pop times during prime time will every so slowly start to get longer. This probably won’t be noticeable for most people, especially if they play smack bang in the middle. The problem is once they become noticeable, it’s too late and you’ve gone past a tipping point and the snowball speeds up really fast. This is what happened late last year and Biowares answer was mergers. I’m praying Bioware make no more mistakes before 6.0 is released and that they speed up the release of it or we may see more mergers before then. From my experience with 3 geological server moves (APAC to west coast to east coast), Fringe time is like a canary in a cage. Once it’s past the tipping point there, it’s not long till it starts to affect primetime and the tipping point has been and gone for fringe time on the US servers :(

 

I do have hope that this roadmap will boost pvp numbers and bring some old pvpers back to the game (at least for a bit). But I have grave doubts it will do much to reverse the damage already done to the fringe and outside of prime time participation numbers. Hopefully I’m proved wrong.

 

It would be in Biowares and the game’s best interest if they actually sent out a promotional email to all those old subscribers who left to promote 5.9,2 when it’s released, instead of relying on social media or people telling friends.

 

Anyway, that’s my analysis - observation of what’s been happening to me. Hopefully that explains why I was able to play the game most of the time on the US servers up until recently.

 

As for playing on DM, yeah, at 10pm I’m probably getting kids, retirees, shift workers and some stay at home parents. But at 2pm London time, it’s actually 11pm my time. Luckily there are also some adult eastern Euro players on early than you guys finish work and I do get reasonable good quality pvp at that time. But it does means if I want to play with normally 9-5 working UK adults, I have a choice of either playing really late (for me) till the wee hours and then sleeping in late. Or going to bed really early and waking up at the wee hours of the morning. Being semi retired allows “some” flexibility.

 

Anyway, I hope we’ll pop into each other online. Are your character names the same on each server? If you still want to send me that CC code, just PM me back and I’ll transfer a lvl 70 over to DM.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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We lost a fair amount of people from the conquest release/changes, more than people realise..

 

I'm not convinced we lost all that many people (total game population wise anyway, because the planets are nearly as busy as they were about a month after the server merges), but what did happen was a serious change in the way people played. PVP was a good way to fill out conquest points on alts. Now it is not worth the time. I suspect what happened is the "fringe" PVPers, those that played only for conquest or only occasionally, completely dropped out of doing any PVP, which totally killed pops (as an aside, they were probably the players doing PVP in off hours US time having spent their prime time doing other conquest related objectives). Hardcore PVPers were going to be playing regardless of the "incentives" and the casual PVPers needed the incentives to justify allocating play time to PVP.

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I'm not convinced we lost all that many people (total game population wise anyway, because the planets are nearly as busy as they were about a month after the server merges), but what did happen was a serious change in the way people played. PVP was a good way to fill out conquest points on alts. Now it is not worth the time. I suspect what happened is the "fringe" PVPers, those that played only for conquest or only occasionally, completely dropped out of doing any PVP, which totally killed pops (as an aside, they were probably the players doing PVP in off hours US time having spent their prime time doing other conquest related objectives). Hardcore PVPers were going to be playing regardless of the "incentives" and the casual PVPers needed the incentives to justify allocating play time to PVP.

 

That’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it. But my observations say otherwise. If you don’t need believe me, take a week off work and play at the times I do. I don’t expect you to actually do that, but if you did, I think you would see what I see.

 

Fleet numbers and pvp pops aren’t all I look at, but they are a simple picture into what happens in the game. I go to planets and SH holds regularly to see how many people are there. It helps me decide wether I should stay logged in.

There was a decernable pattern when the conquest change happened. For a week there was an increase in population and group participation activities, then it dropped off fast as it seems Bioware weren’t going to react to the player rage and feed back, Then it settled as Bioware said they were going to do something. But the longer it took for them to improve it, the more people kept leaving. Some may have come back when Bioware finished fixing it to the Devs idea of what it should be. But a lot didn’t because it wasn’t enough for them or they’d finally lost confidence in Bioware listening.

 

Since then numbers have still been dropping, but hopefully have plateaued outside of prime times. I can’t see they can drop much further. If they do, it will only be solo or organised group players on at those times. Pugs in any form outside of primetime will be impossible for most people. Which isn’t good for the game or it’s image.

 

People such as yourself who don’t have the experience of playing at those times on a regular basis can’t see what the trends are. You are doing even more of an arm chair analysis than I am because you have no first hand experience. You’re like a theorical physicist saying this is or should be the case, instead of an observational or evidence based physicist who actually uses real observations to come to a theory or conclusion.

 

You don’t have to believe me, but at least make the effort to find out first hand before you come to your conclusions.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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  • 3 weeks later...

I'd like some Transfer sales too to explore more servers. I used to be one of those transfer-holics (though, probably mostly because I was on TOFN then and majority of people wanting to raid/group started immigrating elsewhere...), but anyway I quite liked jumping servers and interacting with people I'd likely never would otherwise.

 

Though I do admit I have an alternate motive for transfers too, I have too many toons and dont want to delete any :rolleyes:

Transferring all of one-class to somewhere else could potentially keep me active for a long time with legacy gear elsewhere too.

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The EU servers are based on language even though a lot of French and German players already started coming to Darth Malgus. But they need to preserver those language servers as part of being able to offer the game in those countries.

 

For the US there are two servers only and undoubtedly cheap server transfers will further the difference in population between the two. I don't think they want to go down to one US server because it doesn't look that great of course. So basically you're asking them to make one server a complete ghost town. It seems unlikely therefore that they would want to have a sale on server transfers. Chances are though that between the two they could possibly already reduce it down to one server. I suspect that in essence you already are on the same server and that the servers as we know them by name are just sub-sections of a single server. But that's just my suspicion.

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The EU servers are based on language even though a lot of French and German players already started coming to Darth Malgus. But they need to preserver those language servers as part of being able to offer the game in those countries.

 

Why? They stabbed APAC and the west coast in the back, what makes you think EA cares about the French or German players?

 

I don't think they want to go down to one US server because it doesn't look that great of course.

 

Getting rid of the West coast server "looked" great? Either that's their goal or they don't care. I wouldn't be surprised at all either way.

 

:)

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What about if you want to transfer from the EU to the US or vis versa? Moving some alts to another server to see what it’s like shouldn’t be expensive and it also shouldn’t affect server populations.

I see no reason for them to make that cheaper or to see that as something desirable when people start server hopping. Besides, people also use the low prices for getting cheap name changes and such.

 

The truth is that it's so easy to level characters these days that you only need one transfer for the legacy stuff you built up and there you are. In the time some people take to moan about things they can also level a new character. But server hopping isn't good for server stability as far as population is concerned. And just because you won't cause trouble that way with what you have in mind, doesn't mean others won't.

 

And you call it expensive but in fact the price for a server transfer in SWTOR is quite reasonable and a lot cheaper than other games. People just forget that sometimes because they just want everything dirt cheap while the company needs to struggle to keep finances up to keep the game alive.

 

I mean, I'm fine if the game dies out but for people who still want SWTOR to last for years, asking for cheap stuff and things that disrupt server populations because they cannot see how other people would use or abuse cheap transfers is frankly naïve.

 

If you wanna keep playing, you should really be happy to pay for things knowing it keeps the game alive. That is more true today than it ever was before.

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Why? They stabbed APAC and the west coast in the back, what makes you think EA cares about the French or German players?
No because of legal requirements in those countries. It may be that those countries require language servers or they might subsidize translation work also as part of that deal. These 2 countries are very particular about safe-guarding their languages so they tend to require the game to be translated into their languages and have language servers.

 

Getting rid of the West coast server "looked" great? Either that's their goal or they don't care. I wouldn't be surprised at all either way.

It's clear they didn't care about APAC players because there were too few to keep running the costs the way they were. The reason for them to not have a west coast server is purely a cost point of course. As far as looking good, I don't think Americans could stomach having 1 server when there are 3 in the EU. That's all.

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I think that these threads demanding server transfer discounts are launched absent context.

 

What do I mean?

 

Well.. go back in history.. to when they ran 95% discounts (to the old transfer prices) on transfers for the better part of a year. Why did they do it? Because there were some servers that were very low populations (mostly old PvP servers, and PvP as a server choice no longer even exists), and the studio wanted to give these players an escape hatch until such time as they got around to another set of server consolidations. The studio even held the low cost transfers open for several weeks after they consolidated into the new current set of servers... to give players time to make any final moves of characters after getting a chance to "kick the tires" on the new servers to see where they felt most comfortable.

 

Of course players quickly used the discounts to proliferate legacies and cherry pick GTNs (moving goods back and forth for profit in game). PvPers also took advantage of the discounts to cherry pick ranked play as well. I'm sure there were other clever uses for low cost transfers as well.

 

Fast forward to today.. and there are no such "empty servers", and there is really less need or motive to even use transfers to game your legacy across servers or to farm GTNs on one server and move the goods to another server. So there really is no comparable context today to the reasons why server transfers were long discounted in the past.

 

TL;DR: there used to be a fairly compelling need to offer low cost transfers. That need no longer exists, at this time. Of course players can conflate an alleged "need" but it is just that.. conflation because they want discounts to whatever corner case need they personally have for wanting to move a character these days from one server to another.

Edited by Andryah
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I see no reason for them to make that cheaper or to see that as something desirable when people start server hopping. Besides, people also use the low prices for getting cheap name changes and such.

 

The truth is that it's so easy to level characters these days that you only need one transfer for the legacy stuff you built up and there you are. In the time some people take to moan about things they can also level a new character. But server hopping isn't good for server stability as far as population is concerned. And just because you won't cause trouble that way with what you have in mind, doesn't mean others won't.

 

And you call it expensive but in fact the price for a server transfer in SWTOR is quite reasonable and a lot cheaper than other games. People just forget that sometimes because they just want everything dirt cheap while the company needs to struggle to keep finances up to keep the game alive.

 

I mean, I'm fine if the game dies out but for people who still want SWTOR to last for years, asking for cheap stuff and things that disrupt server populations because they cannot see how other people would use or abuse cheap transfers is frankly naïve.

 

If you wanna keep playing, you should really be happy to pay for things knowing it keeps the game alive. That is more true today than it ever was before.

 

Or I can just stop paying and go preferred like so many others. Wouldn’t it be better to allow someone who “is” currently paying for a subscription to transfer characters at a discount rate than make them unsubscribe because they can’t play the game at the hours they want to?

I’m not sure if you read my previous posts, but I live in Australia. Since the west coast servers were closed, most of the apac community left the game and the servers in the US are becoming ghost towns when I want to play. (5-11pm Aussie time). So my only recourse is to play on EU servers with 330ms ping.

Already I am paying the same price for a degraded service because my ping is increased, but you think I should have to pay more just to play the game the way it was meant to be played?

I’ve already been forced to pay an extra $15 a mo th for WTFast VPN gaming service since they closed the west coast servers just to play pvp because of the increased ping.

You pay $15(US) sub, I pay $20(AU) sub +$15(AU) for WTFast just to play this game. I’m essentially paying $35 a mo th to play this game, so yeah, paying full price for a character transfer is expensive for me.

If we follow your logic, I should be willing to pay even more money than I am now to play the game the way I want to and when I want.

You don’t have to want cheaper transfers, but you also don’t have the right to lecture me on what is expensive and what’s not. A discounted transfer sale is not going to affect you one bit. Why are you even here telling me that it’s not needed and that I should just pay more to support this game.

SERIOUSLY, what the hell man? I’ve been playing this game for 6 years on 2 accounts (until they moved the servers), I’ve spent $100s on Cartel coins over the years. Bioware and this game have had my financial support and I’ve paid well above the average person. I’ve paid my share and then some.

Personally I think 1 transfer a month should be free as part of your sub, but it’s not and that’s NOT what I’m asking for. I’m not asking for anything free, just a discount like theyve done in the past.

Your post telling me that I should support the game by throwing more money is Highly insulting. What about all the free loaders not paying an dplaying most of the game for free. What about the fact that content has dried up. What about the fact that I have degraded play because there are less people online or that I’ve got to play with 300ms ping?

Honestly, you post was insulting and not welcome. It would have been better is you hadn’t “poked the hornets nest” because now that I’ve written all of this, I’m wonder why the hell im still paying for this game. If anything, you’ve made me question wether I should support it at all.

I guess the game might lose one more paying sub, so I hope you can see how that is more detrimental than allowing a discounted transfer. :mad::mad:

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I think that these threads demanding server transfer discounts are launched absent context.

 

What do I mean?

 

Well.. go back in history.. to when they ran 95% discounts (to the old transfer prices) on transfers for the better part of a year. Why did they do it? Because there were some servers that were very low populations (mostly old PvP servers, and PvP as a server choice no longer even exists), and the studio wanted to give these players an escape hatch until such time as they got around to another set of server consolidations. The studio even held the low cost transfers open for several weeks after they consolidated into the new current set of servers... to give players time to make any final moves of characters after getting a chance to "kick the tires" on the new servers to see where they felt most comfortable.

 

Of course players quickly used the discounts to proliferate legacies and cherry pick GTNs (moving goods back and forth for profit in game). PvPers also took advantage of the discounts to cherry pick ranked play as well. I'm sure there were other clever uses for low cost transfers as well.

 

Fast forward to today.. and there are no such "empty servers", and there is really less need or motive to even use transfers to game your legacy across servers or to farm GTNs on one server and move the goods to another server. So there really is no comparable context today to the reasons why server transfers were long discounted in the past.

 

TL;DR: there used to be a fairly compelling need to offer low cost transfers. That need no longer exists, at this time. Of course players can conflate an alleged "need" but it is just that.. conflation because they want discounts to whatever corner case need they personally have for wanting to move a character these days from one server to another.

 

Servers might not “be empty” as such, but they aren’t active 24/7 either. People such as my self cannot play parts of the game at the hours we can get online.

As my earlier thread posts explain, I’m now having to server hop at different hours to be able to play pvp because it nearly completely dies out side of primetime. Especially in lower brackets (which are even bad during primetimes and I know is partly a different issue).

 

They may not have empty servers, but they are not doing as great as they were after the merge 8 months ago. Since then there has been a steady decline in player activity at the times I can play. I’m now facing a similar situation as I had last year when I was advocating mergers because I just cannot play the game the way I want at the times I want.

 

I want to be clear here, I’m not asking for mergers, I think it’s too soon for anything as drastic as that. But if I can’t play the game the way I want without having to keep paying more (transfers) just to play the game the way the average person does for $15 a month, then I’ve got to question wether I keep paying for a sub at all (which I know is something I have to weigh myself and no one is making me pay more).

 

What I am asking for is the ability to pay a discounted price to transfer some characters over to the EU server from the US so I can continue to play the game at the hours I can get on. I’m not asking for anything free, I’d still be paying for it.

There is also the cost of it being region to region. It’s not just a standard server transfer, it actually costs more to transfer from the US to EU than it does to transfer between US to US servers. So even with a discount, I’d be paying more than the average person who may want to transfer between US to US servers.

 

I know Bioware don’t give a crap about APAC players, that’s been abundantly clear from the closer of the APAC servers and then the move of the west coast servers. If I stay to play it’s on me and no one is making me. But isn’t it better to keep my paying for a sub then making it even harder for me to justify staying. I love(d) this game for many years and I really don’t want to have to stop playing. There are no substitutes that I’ve found to replace it, but if I can’t play it the way I want to and when I can play it, then the decision gets made for me.

 

I don’t think the discount should be permanent like it was for so long last time. I understand why they did it, but that’s not what needs to happen at this juncture in time. What I am asking for is a sale, the same as we have gear sales, unlock sale and also XP events. It’s doesnt need to be 6 months, 3 months or even 1 month. It only needs to be for a couple of weeks.

I can not see how a “sale” for a few weeks will have any major or long lasting negative impact on any server. All it will do is allow people to transfer cheaply for a short period of time and help out some players like myself. Bioware may even make some extra money out of it.

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