Server population is dropping...

You gather wrong. You have not read the definition of the statistics on the web page you cite.

1. These are not percentage points.
2. These are server load statistics. The numbers represent an index where 1 = light, 2 = standard, 3 = heavy, 4 = very heavy, and 5 = full.
3. The number "-5.24" means that if you accumulate the change over one week in the server load index across all 123 servers, you get a total of -5.24. This is equivalent to an average drop in server load index of 0.043 – an insignificant change.

What the number really is telling you is that over the period March 6 through March 20, server load has been stable.

The purpose of staggered access was obviously not to avoid queues, but to balance load, which it did fairly well until a number of extra servers were added at the end due to complaints of queues.

Long queues occurred during short periods for a limited number of servers. Most queues were much shorter and, in general, actual wait time was often less than indicated.

Except it didn't because it locked people into servers stopping guilds and friends from spreading out. By the time everyone was on, some people were L50 with crafting skills raised and this discouraged people from then moving.

So it basically did nothing, except make queue worse.

I can't believe even now people are saying it did anything useful.

Monsterous queues occured on some servers for a good few weeks.

Actual wait time was often much longer than it said on the queue timer, quite often I was waiting a solid 4-6 hours and the queue time was saying 3 hours 45 min.

Why I have no idea, but that's what it was doing.

No it didn't do anything useful. We didn't allow Bioware to follow through with the next step that would have allowed the system to work.

If we had all shut up and let them handle release as they planned we would not be in this mess today.

You are assuming that most of the 1.7 million subscribers were in guilds or in groups of friends.

Let's just say that your perception of what occurred is different than what most of us experienced.

It was always lose:lose unless they had some way to absorb the inital rush.

Leaving ridculous queues was only going to lose subs and generate massive complaints (and rightly so, by the 4th week of them I was sick of having to log on hours before I intended to play).

Ironically SWTOR seems to have been one of the first MMOs capable of maybe doing this with their instanced servers, for whatever reason (maybe too technically challenging) they didn't though.

We were told we couldn't have a "The populations is staying the same" thread and to come here. So I guess we need to change the thread title:

Server population is maybe dropping, maybe stable ...

Lord Calypho pop is dropped huge.1-2 months before was 200-250 player at republic fleet.Now around 50-60.My guild has 150 members , all gone now.

Nonsense.

The reason were in this mess is because Bioware's sharded server tech is archaic. Additionally, terrible planning led to this disaster we have before us now.

Just because people whine and complain doesn't mean that the developers HAVE to respond to it. Blaming the community on what was clearly a miscalculation of the longer term interest the players would have with SWTOR rests completely on Bioware/EA.

Blaming the players/community is just giving those who created the game, the server architecture and the planning of populations a pass.

Sorry, I won't do it when they are clearly to blame for this fiasco.

This will leads to an another population drop if they dont merge server.People will not pay to "play" to a dead server.

And im sorry to say that, but BW/EA deserve it to fail in this gameRelease an unfinished, unoptimized, totall chaos game just becuse they want it to release before xmasAnd what they do (or not do ) now..