This is not a riot/petition/unsub thread. It's just a rant thread. If you're looking for ea-ware hate speech, then look somewhere else.

 

I just want to share my frustration as a long time SWTOR player and a little about my story so far. I don't know if this is the section to do it, but I'm sure someone will tell me I'm wrong about everything nonetheless.

 

I discovered this game through a friend in Europe. We sometimes played other small MMOs out there and he recommended that I play SWTOR with him. It was at a stage in life where I had little to no time to spare, so I ended up buying the game and paying for the subscription, only to end up giving my account over to this friend of mine for the first 3 months after launch, with me saying I'll get to it eventually.

 

Time passed and at the end of these 3 months, my friend decided he's bored of the game and I should cancel my sub if I'm not planning to play. I said screw it all, and decided to launch the game and play it seriously for the first time. My server of choice was the same server that my friend was playing on, Vulkar Highway. There I rolled my first character, a Marauder named Vangloria. There were already other characters on my account, but I didn't feel like they belonged to me, so I never touched them or the items on them.

 

I absolutely fell in love with the game at that stage. I would come home from work, undress on my way to the shower and as soon as I'd come out get back to playing SWTOR. I was a noob and I didn't know anything, and that's what made it fun.

 

Not too long after that a new set of servers were announced. Hooray, the APAC servers are opening. As I live in Western Australia, this was a joyous moment for me, as Vulkar Highway was not quite as responsive as I'd like in terms of ping.

 

And that's where I really exploded. Once I had transferred I put my marauder aside, and decided to join the Republic, and rolled what ended up being my main for 2-3 years. A Vanguard called J'Hellsing. I joined my first major guild with more than 10 people in it and stepped foot in my first raid nights. I made friends who taught me about PvP and other friends who taught me how to tank and raid. It was a great period for me as I was learning the ropes.

 

Eventually guild drama broke the guild apart. The PvPers left to find guilds who did mainly PvP, and the hardcore raiders left to make their own guild(with blackjack and ******s, if you will). I was left somewhere in the middle.

 

I decided to go back to the Empire in order to finish my Marauder, and I ended up rolling a powertech and an operative. I decided I would only level these two classes via PvP, so I get more exposure. As I reached lvl 50 with my powertech, republic guilds started noticing me. This was the day when warzones were mainly Imp vs Pub, and not a clusterf*ck of factions.

 

I got an invite to join one of the biggest(I would say biggest, but there would be several people that would like to contradict me almost immediately if they were here.) pvp guilds in the Republic. I joined MVP and things were fun from there on.

 

While levelling my Operative through PvP, I met another player who I guess I sort of clicked with, running a marauder. He wasn't a hardcore anything, he just enjoyed playing, and he was damn good at it. So we grouped together and smashed lowbies to the point of people raging at us. These were the days when bolster was broken, and wearing purple gear at lvl 40 would allow you to two shot people all the time(with crits of course).

 

Things were going well for a while, until the game started losing it's magic. It seemed fleet was less active, and little by little my guildmates were ditching the game for better options. I stayed with the game through all that, only having my hiatus periods when I could not spend any time playing video games.

 

Fast forward a while, and surprise, APAC servers are closing down. We're all getting booted to NA. If you're not an APAC player I cannot describe to you how horrible of a blow that was to our community. Already struggling with activity, moving to a new server on a different continent caused a big portion APAC players to ditch the game. People I had been playing with for ages said "screw this, I'm finding another mmo."

 

But I still stuck around. When the news hit, our guild, MVP, decided to merge with several other guilds on the APAC servers, and create a sort of "APAC PvP Guild" for all that's left of us. Egos clashing and all, it was eventually named Samurai Pizza Cats, a guild that sometimes still lurks around.

Considering that EAware was killing off half the community with this action, they at least had the good graces to let us pick what server to go to. We ended up going to The Bastion. My 16 characters were all transferred there and I was getting used to the 210 latency from Western Australia. My operative which happened to be my favourite character at the time was practically unplayable outside of heal spec. Backstabs would not hit, hidden strikes would not trigger, acid blades would not trigger, it was really tough to go from 50ms to 210ms and still play operative.

 

Moving on a while later, The Bastion started showing signs of dying. Although marked as a PvP server, there wasn't much open world PvP going on, and it seemed that in terms of warzones, Harbinger was doing far better. So, I bit the bullet, left Samurai Pizza Cats which was by all means dead, and transferred all my characters to Harbinger. At that time, the transfer fees were 1k+, so I had to pay an arm and a leg to transfer, but I got it done.

 

Once here, I could not find a spot to settle down in, so I just did solo PvP for ages, till one of my old friends(the marauder I was playing lowbies with) recognised my character and invited me to his small guild of friends. <Your Companion> (the original one)

 

By this point in time we were all in it for fun, and while we were really good PvPers, we weren't elitist. We went in there and had our fun in all brackets. We rolled matching characters, tried new specs, new gear, and simply enjoyed our time in-game.

As all good things must come to an end, so did this. Bunch of us went inactive for a while, with only myself and another bloke logging in every now and then, and things were quiet. Before my friends went inactive, the guild leadership passed to me, as I had invested my credits into the guild ship and it's decorations. It really stung when I came back from my holiday and the guild had been sold to what I imagine is the owner of the current <Your Companion> guild. I'm still really bitter at that, because everyone in the guild was mates, so I guess I felt a little betrayed(f*ck you Mokey :< )

 

I moved on from that as well, and for the first time in my life, I decided to go into hardcore raiding. This was in the SoR patch, and I entered the raid scene just as it launched, so I can catch the new progression teams. I joined a pub guild called Excession, and managed to fill a DPS spot in their second raid team. Along that expansion, my experience in PvP and adaptability allowed me to quickly develop as a raider, and by the end of the expansion I was 9/10 on ToS and Ravagers, with Revan left to kill. Overall I was happy with my progress, but disaster struck again.

 

Come KOTFE, my guild fell apart. The lack of new raids pushed many raiders away, and it became significantly harder to find a decent raid team to go on with. I once again returned to my solo PvP days. KOTFE and KOTET brought a different kind of story content, and when I recruited a friend of mine to play the story of SWTOR with, we found ourselves blocked by KOTFE's solo online idea. What's the point of making an MMO if it's gonna be solo only?

 

Class changes, gearing changes, mechanic changes, all that never bothered me. I accepted them and moved on, I had a huge character pool to choose from, and I felt it was easier for a solo player to gear up alts this way. With 3 characters at CXP 300, and having a blast just doing my own thing, the news of server merges once again brought back an ill feeling to me. Having moved servers several times before, it was a worrying experience. But I knew it would happen, so I decided to make the most of it.

 

When The Harbinger was moved, I felt this crushing feeling inside of me. Once again, my latency had jumped. West Coast was no longer an option for me, as all there is left is East Coast. From 210ms to 295, it was yet another blow for me as a player and my enjoyment of this game.

 

Even with this latency I can play, but being competitive is slowly moving out of the picture. On top of that my connection to East Coast is also unstable, spiking up to 400-500ms quite often, while I had a steady 210 on Harbinger.

 

I have supported many changes this game has brought. I have accepted changes that worked against me. I have accepted my class nerfs. I have accepted my gearing changes. I took it all in and moved on.

 

I'm not going to say "I gave you everything and you gave me nothing" because I received years of fun times. I am leaving this thread here and cancelling future payments for my subscription today. I have 19 days of sub time remaining and then I will drop to Preferred and just play the story when I feel nostalgic.

 

I fear that with this server move, you've pushed a great deal of APAC players away from SWTOR by making the game harder for them. All you have left from this bunch is the casual "let's do a little story" bunch because they are not able to play anywhere near peak performance.

 

Soon enough my playtime window will be desolated as most of my fellow APAC players would have moved on to greener pastures, and all that will be left would be the solo story content players that are not affected by latency as much(since they play no competitive content).

 

This thread serves no purpose except for me to reflect on my journey within this MMO, and maybe someone can relate. I don't know if any of this makes sense, as I wrote it all in one go and I can't be arsed to go back and re-read what I wrote.

 

Good luck to you all.

My ping went from 200 to 320 and I could deal with 320 but it's constant spiking now to 440 but like keith said ping doesn't effect gameplay

All you have left from this bunch is the casual "let's do a little story" bunch because they are not able to play anywhere near peak performance.

This is exactly the kind of people they are aiming at.

 

They are not that demanding, do pay their subscription fees religiously, even drop in real cash in the CM for cosmetics from time to time.

 

Top of that they never ever complain on the forums.

 

P.S. Be safe and you WILL BE missed, by the players...