Time to merge the US servers... again. Primetime window getting smaller and smaller.

I think Biowares mistake is marketing and making the game only about lvl 70 and by making it too easy to lvl and removing a lot of little rewards you got along the way. They’ve incentivised people to rush to lvl 70 and basically disregard everything along the way. If they made the game more about the journey and all aspects like it used to be, I think it would be more healthy.

Which leads me to question, do Bioware count all the F2P people as their main audience or do they count their subscribers? Numbers on a spread sheet saying “we have have this many people playing”, doesn’t equate to the same amount of money being made or a health game. F2P are fly by night players who I believe rarely bring funds into the game and more because they are so restricted in participating.

I’ve never been a proponent of F2P in this game, I think Bioware made a mistake early on and gave too much of the game away for free.

Which server would that be and can you define quiet active and what days and times during the day and night.

I don’t think the thread is about paying to transfers. I think it’s about people wanting mergers. But before mergers are needed, Bioware have options to try first. One would be cheap or free transfers.

But! I don't think giving more leeway for the preferred players is a good idea. It's giving away more for free, and lessening the need to have a sub. It's hurting the game, what for the sole purpose of filling queues? That's like giving the food away at a restaurant just to say you have clientele. There needs to be an incentive to sub.

I'm on SS and I always see plenty of people roaming around. No specific time, since I log on a random times, but there's always people around and pvp pops pretty regularly.

How many weeks after the last round of merges did it take for a thread like this to show up? I'd look myself, but it's more a point of "merges don't work" than "I'm curious to know". Issues with PvE queues are more often related to static groups than to actual population issues, and swtor PVP just isn't that popular amongst the general MMO community, let alone the general swtor community. I have never read a thread anywhere else that said "Hey, ya'll should come to swtor for PvP, it's the best ever in any MMO". My youtube feed doesn't have a single "check out the awesome swtor PvP" video, although it does have pages of story content, from Vanilla to comp returns.

Merging isn't going to make it more popular. It's not going to bring burnt out or frustrated with developmental direction players back either. It's a niche game mode in a niche MMO, the price is going to be the queue times. I know I've never been in a WZ, even locking comps behind them didn't make me want to go. For me, however, it's more an issue of "1...2...3...GO" not being my idea of fun PvP. Ilum, however, was fun. There's a reason I don't have Gree rep finished yet, and it's not because I never went to Ilum.

At the end of the day, if I don't find anything exciting to hold me, I'll move on, yet again. At that point, if they do merge, they're not likely to see any more money from me, I just got all my toons sorted out from the last round, and I'm not anxious to repeat the process.

Warning: I’ve a wall of text coming. My reply got out of hand again.

I think this is the second thread I’ve seen and actually been active. The first one died really fast because it was pointless. This ones only been around for a short time. So I guess about 8 months (29 weeks?) after the last merge.

Personally, with the move of the servers at the time of the mergers, they only helped me till around March, when they messed up conquest. The affect of that mess up was felt in pvp, especially outside of primetime and it’s never recovered.

Prior to March, I did see a decline again at the times I would usually play. I put that down to them moving the servers and making most of the people in my region (APAC) stop playing.
I think the west coast server move nearly negated the west coast mergers because it caused a large portion of players to leave. I believe the mergers for the SS server would have been more successful if they had left it on the west coast.

I took steps to look at playing on Darth Malgus because I couldn’t get pvp pops outside of primetime (which has continued to shrink). Sadly, it’s just too hard to pvp at 320-350ms. I tried for a bit, but it’s just to frustrating, especially with all the increase in dysnc the game has been producing each time they add more content since 5.0.

The only saving grace for pvp pops was the 5.9,2 patch. It’s brought in match making, cross faction to all maps and the queue defaults to arena pops when the queue gets low. (The new Match making doesn’t work for some of us, so I’m pretty annoyed about that. That’s also made more pvpers quit and I’m close to it myself. But that’s another topic).
The combine factions queue and the arena default does mean lvl 70 pvp pops more outside of prime time. But I do play a lot of arena now, which isn’t my favourite type of pvp and you are always playing with the same 8-12 people (gets boring).
Neither of those actually help lowbie or mid pvp. Both are still ghost towns due to lack incentives to play it (as I mentioned in an earlier post).

If I was only looking at this from my perspective of getting low pops or only arena, I would say mergers were needed. But it won’t help me at the times I play because I don’t think the combined US server populations at those times would make a lot of difference, since Bioware effectively drove off the majority of the people in my region who would usually play at those times.

I don’t think mergers are currently needed for US players to play during primetime or even during a lot of their daylight hours. That doesn’t mean they won’t be needed in the future. And before that happens, there are a slew of options Bioware could take.

Bioware have damaged the game beyond repair for people who would usually play on the US servers, but don’t play in US primetime, all because of the server move. There is nothing that can be done about that now. They aren’t going to move SS to the west coast again and even if they did, I doubt they would get enough players back to justify it (people got burnt bad with the move and loyalty and trust went with it).

For the time being, the cross faction and default to arena pops when the queue reduces, should be enough to keep the pvp part of the game going. I can’t comment on the other group content because I don’t play it.
I will say, if they don’t fix the match making soon, they will see another exodus of experienced players, which won’t be good for the quality of pvp and will reduce numbers even more.

The game has become less fun for me and a slew of others since 5.0. It’s the continued degrading of fun in the game that is causing a lot of long time players to leave (example : conquest) If they made the game fun again, people would stop leaving and others would come back.
But Bioware don’t care about long term players. Recently they said as much in a pod cast. According to them, we are the minority of their player base and not their target audience. (look how well that’s worked for them).
It’s no surprise we are the minority now because they drive longer term and dedicated players away. We continue to leave and that’s why the game is in the state it’s in.
Apparently this has probably been their model since launch (if you read between the lines when reading Daniel Erickson’s recent comments on Reddit). The model is obviously faulty

I could go on with my analysis of why I think the game’s declined. But I think we all know why. Plus I’ve said most of it before.
It will be interesting to read comments and memoirs of the team in the post swtor era after the game closes down. Maybe then we’ll get an insight as to why the game went this way.

This is probably the most important part of the entire post. More people are leveling than are playing end game (assuming everyone who is level 70 plays end game or the number of "end-game" players might be even smaller). This is something that has been disputed by the people who are having difficulty with random groups for a very long time and now there is "proof". There are "lots" of people playing the game that are not queuing for PVP or Raids.

New characters are more fun to play in the current "atmosphere". And with the dismal CXP rate, I only play 70s during 2x windows and that's only if there isn't any new toons I want to over level.

They did everything they could to make PvP more "appealing", and broke PvE to do so. That's going to cause people to do what I did, and just leave, especially if, like me, they have a lot of experience to know that until they make every class but the FotM use nothing but basic attacks, PvP is always going to be "broken" in the eyes of a majority of the PvP community, that is, after all, an industry wide phenomena.