Ever since the first server merger occurred and it was discovered that there was only one NA and one EU datacenter the idea behind still segregating parts of the community confused me. I didn't understand why it wasn't just brought down to one server for each region to allow each aspect of game to have as healthy a population as possible regardless the time of day.

It's been 7 months since the server merge. The Operation side of content releases has finished for now. We all await the incoming PvP changes. The servers have had their time to settle since.

Since day one of the merger The Leviathan has been no different than any PvP server prior to merger, maybe a little exaggerated, but it is a dead zone that never left low pop when that information was still available. Tulak Hord seemed healthy along the lines of the west coast RP server. Small, dwindling, some communities exist but hurting in size. All the happenings were on and are on Darth Malgus. I understand the point of the servers is to allow players to better communicate via their preferred language but I'd venture to say that's already happening plenty on DM anyway. Back in the North American side of things, Satele Shan is seemingly smaller now albeit not by much than what Harbinger was pre-merger. Star Forge continues to come out strong and healthy compared to SS thanks to getting the 3 most populated of 5 east coast servers bringing it well above what Harbingers size is.

Thing is, the populations for different aspects of the games are broken among the two, made worse by the fact server transfers continue to be expensive. If someone wants RP and are on SS then they're going to have a more difficult time finding what they want. If someone wants NiM raiding but they're on SF they're going to have a more difficult time finding what they want. I'm not saying neither exist on one of the servers because they absolutely do. But with the population for those aspects being segregated by some wires hurts those communities.

The upcoming planned changes for Warzone, Arena, and GSF matchmaking are exciting and extremely refreshing to see. But there's a problem. Skill based matchmaking can definitely help better balance a team. And limiting roles will help provide better games, but such a system can only go so far if only 20-30 people are in queue. Take GSF for example. When it is popping on SS, I see at best 1 match going on at a given time, in some occasions 2. More so depends on the Conquest week actually. So if 10-20 people are queuing GSF and 1 match is going on at a time, skill based matchmaking can only do so much if anything to help balance a team, especially depending on the premade setup. Same goes for Warzones. It has a much healthier population than GSF by far, but even at times late at night, in the early morning where population is low, skill based can only do so much.

Another place that's hurting, at least on Satele Shan, is pub side. PUGs for Operations, Flashpoints, Uprisings are non-existant at times or slow to form (personally I think a way to cross-faction would help this just like what is coming to PvP) but I think step one is to liven up the population first, via a merger again.

I can understand why some people, just like with the previous merger would be against another one. Player names for one. It's something people hold dear to them, and that's fair, I respect that. But maintaining a name at the cost of population health is not ever worth the damage over time that does. Some people worry about not being able to do their objectives for clicking things, all I can say is when the servers were already larger, the issue was much much worse than it could ever be now. That and try out the PvP instances, that's all I play, half the time people don't attack each other... if you even see anyone as PvP instances are typically dead anyway. The only other big one I can see is Conquest, instead of 6 potential winners a week it'd be down to 3 (9 down to 3 on EU), but I think that would lead to better competition because although Conquest from the leaderboard aspect looks quite healthy, there's already some dominating guilds across both SF and SS that cannot be competed with at the moment. Given the changes not requiring top 10 anymore either, a merger would have no effect on hurting the chances of getting the guild target reward anyway.

I think we need one last server merger, all EU servers in one, all NA servers in one. Allow PvP, GSF, Operations, Flashpoints, Uprisings, etc. to have as much a player pool to draw from, which in turn helps keep player retention.

Well.. you are fully entitled to your opinion.... but that does not make you right, nor that others need to agree with you.

I cannot comment on EU servers... but as a player on both NA servers..... sorry.. I disagree.. they are fine at this point in time. Join a guild, make friends, etc etc.. and stop relying on everyone else being there at your beck and call.

Well.. you are fully entitled to your opinion.... but that does not make you right, nor that others need to agree with you.

 

I cannot comment on EU servers... but as a player on both NA servers..... sorry.. I disagree.. they are fine at this point in time. Join a guild, make friends, etc etc.. and stop relying on everyone else being there at your beck and call.

What he said and I'll add that there are people who play SWTOR that don't give a womp rat's arse about PvP, GSF or Operations.

Well.. you are fully entitled to your opinion.... but that does not make you right, nor that others need to agree with you.

 

I cannot comment on EU servers... but as a player on both NA servers..... sorry.. I disagree.. they are fine at this point in time. Join a guild, make friends, etc etc.. and stop relying on everyone else being there at your beck and call.

I'm in multiple guilds, I'm primarily a Nightmare Raider. I have friends on both Satele Shan and Star Forge. I mainly play Satele Shan. I participate in Conquest in both Imp and Pub side. Occasionally try to do ops pugs on pub side. I've watched over the course of 5.0 (1.5 years now) how the population has fluctuated. Over that time I've mained on Shadowlands, Harbinger, and then Satele Shan. I occasionally do GSF. I used to PvP a lot, usually around primetime into late nights. Each server I've been on has been very different in how it could handle all of those if at all. One thing has been certain though, as friends and fellow guild members leave, replenishing their spot becomes more and more difficult, and it often causes a snowball of more to leave, and then you have to find a new home to play. Nightmare Raiding is hurting the most right now. I know plenty of NiM raiders on both servers. Unfortunately I can only play with one side unless I want to have to maintain double the amount of gear and characters, which I don't and know plenty that don't as well that also wished we'd all just be on one server. I'm not relying on people to be there at my beck and call, I don't know what prompted that comment, seemed super unnecessary. I have my set raid times, I know the difficulty those groups sometimes have in finding a fill. I know certain activities I cannot do on pub side as much as I want to, the fleet and the populated guild I'm in on that side never have any interest. I accept that. But I don't accept the fact that the population is fine. It might be suitable currently. But that doesn't mean it couldn't and shouldn't be healthier.

What he said and I'll add that there are people who play SWTOR that don't give a womp rat's arse about PvP, GSF or Operations.

And they don't have to care about those. But if they care about the game and playing it and it still being up, then they should care about a healthy population. We don't know how long the game has left. I like to assume 2 years at this point (around the agreement expiration basically). I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But if a healthier population leads to better retention in the group based endgame aspect of the game then the games stands a better chance of living on longer, and that means more content for the non-group based player in the long run.

No, what we need is a server separation, as in back to the West Coast.

If not that, then merge them, having 2 in one datacenter is seriously pointless.

No, what we need is a server separation, as in back to the West Coast.

If not that, then merge them, having 2 in one datacenter is seriously pointless.

If it wasn't for the single datacenter aspect, I wouldn't even think we should just merge them. I'd still not like seeing as people leave faster than growth occurs in some sections of the game. But given it is basically 2 east coast servers in NA, and nothing more, the only real reason to keep them separated is if the infrastructure can't handle it. And that shouldn't be the case given years ago when servers did deal with populations heavier than Star Forge.

/disagree. We do not need another merger.

Do you feel the previous merger was a step in the right direction?

If yes, how would a second one be a bad step?

Ever since the first server merger occurred and it was discovered that there was only one NA and one EU datacenter the idea behind still segregating parts of the community confused me. I didn't understand why it wasn't just brought down to one server for each region to allow each aspect of game to have as healthy a population as possible regardless the time of day.

 

It's been 7 months since the server merge. The Operation side of content releases has finished for now. We all await the incoming PvP changes. The servers have had their time to settle since.

 

Since day one of the merger The Leviathan has been no different than any PvP server prior to merger, maybe a little exaggerated, but it is a dead zone that never left low pop when that information was still available. Tulak Hord seemed healthy along the lines of the west coast RP server. Small, dwindling, some communities exist but hurting in size. All the happenings were on and are on Darth Malgus. I understand the point of the servers is to allow players to better communicate via their preferred language but I'd venture to say that's already happening plenty on DM anyway. Back in the North American side of things, Satele Shan is seemingly smaller now albeit not by much than what Harbinger was pre-merger. Star Forge continues to come out strong and healthy compared to SS thanks to getting the 3 most populated of 5 east coast servers bringing it well above what Harbingers size is.

 

Thing is, the populations for different aspects of the games are broken among the two, made worse by the fact server transfers continue to be expensive. If someone wants RP and are on SS then they're going to have a more difficult time finding what they want. If someone wants NiM raiding but they're on SF they're going to have a more difficult time finding what they want. I'm not saying neither exist on one of the servers because they absolutely do. But with the population for those aspects being segregated by some wires hurts those communities.

 

The upcoming planned changes for Warzone, Arena, and GSF matchmaking are exciting and extremely refreshing to see. But there's a problem. Skill based matchmaking can definitely help better balance a team. And limiting roles will help provide better games, but such a system can only go so far if only 20-30 people are in queue. Take GSF for example. When it is popping on SS, I see at best 1 match going on at a given time, in some occasions 2. More so depends on the Conquest week actually. So if 10-20 people are queuing GSF and 1 match is going on at a time, skill based matchmaking can only do so much if anything to help balance a team, especially depending on the premade setup. Same goes for Warzones. It has a much healthier population than GSF by far, but even at times late at night, in the early morning where population is low, skill based can only do so much.

 

Another place that's hurting, at least on Satele Shan, is pub side. PUGs for Operations, Flashpoints, Uprisings are non-existant at times or slow to form (personally I think a way to cross-faction would help this just like what is coming to PvP) but I think step one is to liven up the population first, via a merger again.

 

I can understand why some people, just like with the previous merger would be against another one. Player names for one. It's something people hold dear to them, and that's fair, I respect that. But maintaining a name at the cost of population health is not ever worth the damage over time that does. Some people worry about not being able to do their objectives for clicking things, all I can say is when the servers were already larger, the issue was much much worse than it could ever be now. That and try out the PvP instances, that's all I play, half the time people don't attack each other... if you even see anyone as PvP instances are typically dead anyway. The only other big one I can see is Conquest, instead of 6 potential winners a week it'd be down to 3 (9 down to 3 on EU), but I think that would lead to better competition because although Conquest from the leaderboard aspect looks quite healthy, there's already some dominating guilds across both SF and SS that cannot be competed with at the moment. Given the changes not requiring top 10 anymore either, a merger would have no effect on hurting the chances of getting the guild target reward anyway.

 

I think we need one last server merger, all EU servers in one, all NA servers in one. Allow PvP, GSF, Operations, Flashpoints, Uprisings, etc. to have as much a player pool to draw from, which in turn helps keep player retention.

Hypothetical question. Say they merge and it doesn't make a difference. Then what?

Do you feel the previous merger was a step in the right direction?

 

If yes, how would a second one be a bad step?

If they did have one server in NA, it should be on the west coast Imo. It's the halfway point between East coast and Apac as it could be.

If they did have one server in NA, it should be on the west coast Imo. It's the halfway point between East coast and Apac as it could be.

/Agree.

If they did have one server in NA, it should be on the west coast Imo. It's the halfway point between East coast and Apac as it could be.

That requires a massive financial investment they can't make.

Also, there's virtually no apac players left, and it's abundantly clear west coast players are a minority even on Satele now. It sucks to have high ms, but that's not going to change.

Erf, 1 EU server would be a mess with people talking in at least 3 different languages...

I'm already kicked oout of the server too often (and more often since the 1st merger), so unless they find a way to implement an offline solo mode to the game where i can play even when i'm kicked out every 5 min, i don't want another merger. The game would become a living hell for me.

I already can't play any multiplayer content because of that, and sometimes barely my solo story quests, if i can't even play that anymore, i don't have any reason to keep playing

Yes, populations are still sliding and will continue to do so, especially if Bioware keep making mistakes. It’s something that will never stop and yes, at some point mergers will happen again, but not yet.

Would it help the pvp community if we only had one US server? Probably yes, but you have other factors to take into account that are non pvp related and would cause enough harm to make it an iffy proposition at this point.

There was a lot of heart ache over the last mergers and a lot of people left the game. Another merge would see more people leave and the game’s population really can’t afford another big exodus of players.

Bioware must have realised that at some point this year, populations on the servers would continue to drop and mergers maybe needed. Even without all of Bioware’s mistakes this year that have made people leave, the games natural attrition leads to less people in the game.

What they should have done with the last merge is pulled the proverbial band off and made it one server per region. People would still have been upset and raged and left the game. But it could have been done in one hit, instead of peeling back a bandaid and reapplying another that needs to be pulled off later.

It would have been better to get it over and done with in one go. It never made sense to me why they didn’t just do that. The only reason I could see for not doing it was if we still had servers split by location to keep the west and east coast happy. But putting them in the one data centre on the east coast negates that reason for two servers.

What we need now is pvp cross server per region. ie, US based servers Satele Shan and Starforge cross server. EU servers cross server.

With both regions having all their servers in their own location and in the same data centres, probably racked next to each other, there really shouldn’t be a technical reason they can’t add cross server pvp per region.

Lag would be the same, unlike it would have been if they’d tried to do cross server when we had east and west coast against each other. There were also more than 2 servers, which presented other technical difficulties.

Usually cross server is done by adding another server to host match instances between the main servers. They are much smaller than the main servers for obvious reasons. Obviously that would take some work to do and cost money, but it’s long over due and technology has advanced enough in cloud computing etc and the tools are there if Bioware just have the will to do it.

In short, I believe server mergers at this stage are premature. Cross server should be looked at. Bioware missed the boat by not making one server per region. Mergers will happen, but not this year.

Well.. you are fully entitled to your opinion.... but that does not make you right, nor that others need to agree with you.

 

I cannot comment on EU servers... but as a player on both NA servers..... sorry.. I disagree.. they are fine at this point in time. Join a guild, make friends, etc etc.. and stop relying on everyone else being there at your beck and call.

While I don’t think the mergers are needed yet, everything isn’t fine with the pvp situation... and guilds, making friends etc won’t fix the declining population problem. Which starts to affect pvpers before other parts of the game.

Pvp is like the canary in the mine when it comes to population decline. Most pvpers don’t belong to a guild to play pvp as there aren’t many pvp only or pvp centric guilds around anymore. Other pvpers who’ve been around forever, like myself, aren’t even in guilds or if they are, it’s a small personal guild that doesn’t have enough people to form a team. The reason for me and some others is the toxicity or unfriendly nature in some of those remaining pvp centric guilds

I do think the roadmap and crossfaction will alleviate some of the stress, which is geared towards improving pvp and participation. So fingers crossed, that will be enough until the expansion next year.

People need to be patient and wait and see how this road map pans out before jumping the gun for server mergers.

Mergers will happen eventually It’s inevitable because EA are accountants first and will see it as a money saving proposition more than player enjoyment or needs. They probably won’t even do them at the right time, it will be when the only way to keep the lights on is to merge “all” servers into one game server.

I believe Cross server per region should be the next step before mergers to alleviate pvp population problems.

Yes, populations are still sliding and will continue to do so, especially if Bioware keep making mistakes. It’s something that will never stop and yes, at some point mergers will happen again, but not yet.

 

Would it help the pvp community if we only had one US server? Probably yes, but you have other factors to take into account that are non pvp related and would cause enough harm to make it an iffy proposition at this point.

There was a lot of heart ache over the last mergers and a lot of people left the game. Another merge would see more people leave and the game’s population really can’t afford another big exodus of players.

 

Bioware must have realised that at some point this year, populations on the servers would continue to drop and mergers maybe needed. Even without all of Bioware’s mistakes this year that have made people leave, the games natural attrition leads to less people in the game.

 

What they should have done with the last merge is pulled the proverbial band off and made it one server per region. People would still have been upset and raged and left the game. But it could have been done in one hit, instead of peeling back a bandaid and reapplying another that needs to be pulled off later.

It would have been better to get it over and done with in one go. It never made sense to me why they didn’t just do that. The only reason I could see for not doing it was if we still had servers split by location to keep the west and east coast happy. But putting them in the one data centre on the east coast negates that reason for two servers.

 

What we need now is pvp cross server per region. ie, US based servers Satele Shan and Starforge cross server. EU servers cross server.

 

With both regions having all their servers in their own location and in the same data centres, probably racked next to each other, there really shouldn’t be a technical reason they can’t add cross server pvp per region.

Lag would be the same, unlike it would have been if they’d tried to do cross server when we had east and west coast against each other. There were also more than 2 servers, which presented other technical difficulties.

 

Usually cross server is done by adding another server to host match instances between the main servers. They are much smaller than the main servers for obvious reasons. Obviously that would take some work to do and cost money, but it’s long over due and technology has advanced enough in cloud computing etc and the tools are there if Bioware just have the will to do it.

 

In short, I believe server mergers at this stage are premature. Cross server should be looked at. Bioware missed the boat by not making one server per region. Mergers will happen, but not this year.

A big problem has to do with their intention. Right now the strict "raid guild" is outdated and SWTOR is obviously, not attracting raid ppl. A lot of the content require group but ppl are not interested to do them anymore, nor is there a good LFG system.

So it's better to make a huge overhaul to the current content and the LFG system. I always think the forced level sync and making all the ops top level is a HUGE mistake.

Hypothetical question. Say they merge and it doesn't make a difference. Then what?

Then we’d be stuffed and the game would die off for a big part of the player base. It’s pretty easy to see this is the way the game will eventually go if they don’t add a big injection of funds into the game.

While ever they continue to strip funding and resources, the game will continue a steady decline. Some other studios, MMOs and games have seen this and have brought games back from the brink by rebooting them, injecting new funds and in some cases, being aquaired by other companies.

The best hope for this game as I see it, is for swtor to be sold off to another company who wants to reboot it and make it into the game it should have always been. I don’t even think Bioware rebooting it would be enough because they would still have their EA overlords sabotaging their efforts.

Swtor will continue to decline as it gets older and more people leave because its become stale for them. Only a serious effort to revive it will stop it dying in the near future, wether that’s next year or when EAs Star Wars licence runs out. Swtor might last for another 10 years, but it will be a shell of what it is now, the same as it’s a shell of what it was 3 years ago.

I always think the forced level sync and making all the ops top level is a HUGE mistake.

In this, I agree 100%

If they did have one server in NA, it should be on the west coast Imo. It's the halfway point between East coast and Apac as it could be.

Yes, agreed.

I still find it funny NA has two servers when they moved the west coast server to the east coast data center. Seemed silly at that point to have more than 1 server.

Agreed.