Server population is dropping...

it's really a meaningless reference point...

last night, the # of 50s on my server didn't change by more than 5 or so in an hour, but the number of people in fleet varied considerably: ranging between 6 and 30 depending on raid wipes, and pvp queues.

I don't really understand why they couldh't have the same legacy name really, as there's more ways to mark a legacy name than the displayed name itself.

Really it hurts no one to have the same legacy name, anymore than it hurts someone to have the same last name IRL.

Bit ridiculous that we are still waiting for a reasonable amount of info on this

Because the future of the Legacy system has dependencies that require your name to be unique. Also Transfers is much much simpler than merging servers.

That's what I'm saying, there's absolutely no need that the displayed name be the defining factor.

Just because two legacy names display "Whatever" doesn't mean they can't be marked behind the scenes to be "Whatever001" and "Whatever002".

Doing it in a way that requires the displayed name to be unique is actually harder work in the long-run.

To be honest i do not think they thought of that. The system is already hardcoded and they have stated that the legacy system is one of the factors in making merges/transfers difficult.
BW has boxed themselves into a corner so to speak.
I really wish these games would stop with the unique name stuff. If i do a name search in just my state there are hundreds of people with the same first and last name as myself.

The main problem here is BW has little to no real experience making a mmo. That is highly reflected in swtor.
BW aprocced swtor the same way they did single player games they are known for then tried to tack on the mmo elements.
We ended up with swtor a great story driven single player mmo with subpar mmo elements.

Apparently Bioware can't even tell us if they are working on mergers or are only going to allow for transfers... some day.

As such, I would wager that we are months away from an answer and months and months away from any kind of solution. I have re-rolled on a new server and am praying that one day they allow me to bring my 50's from my ghost-town server to my new Legacy on The Harbinger.

if they didn't... that's a VERY rookie data design mistake.

and it's not hard to fix: you can pretty easily go back and assign autogenerated numeric id's to each person's legacy, re-link everything on that id instead of the legacy name and and go back and remove the uniqueness constraint on the name.

I really suspect that they didn't make that kind of simple mistake and it's more a design thing: they want people to have a unique legacy name even though it's not required.

This is so funny because people were crying about server queue times, myself included, now there are dead servers..... Sucks actually. LFG for any FP on a wide range of char. Lvls and roles.

Well those queues were on purpose, they reduced server caps and wanted to spread out people. Look where it got them now. And heck just about every server had hour long queues and now most of them are light/standard. We only have 5 servers that are heavy in peak with 1 having queues.

All bioware need to do was raise server pop caps but no they didnt. And Dead servers do help no one, MOST PEOPLE will not reroll and do the same old crap again they would rather quit. I have talked to many ppl on my server which is now a low pop server they feel the same. They will quit come Diablo 3 or GW2 or sooner.