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

No disagreement from me on this.

What about those that queue for PvP and DO NOT behave themselves..and in some cases go out of their way to make life miserable for their team mates as well as opponents???? These are the folks that fuel the ongoing meme about PvPers being toxic to an MMO in things like forum discussions, in game chat.. etc.

I don't hold PvPers who do behave themselves responsible for any of this.. unless they continue to queue and stand around silently and let a minority of toxic players effectively ruin a PvP match for the rest of the players. I do feel all players in the encounter have a responsibility to push back, and maybe even agree to boot this sort of PvPer. Since I don't random queue for PvP though.. I don't come across much toxicity in PvP to be honest.. but I do trust the feedback from other players who do experience it, and do suffer in game play enjoyment due to it.

Well, those people naturally are responsible for their own behavior, but I doubt any amount of convincing would make them change their ways. You can post about them on the forums, you can argue with them in the chat, but it's likely they would just enjoy the arguments and then return to being what they are.

What are the pvp players supposed to do, but queue and stand around silently? That's what I do -- I have the jerk in ignore after second or third message, so I don't even see it. You can start arguing with them in chat, but that just means the chat is even more littered with shouting and arguing. Not to mention that sort of people seem to often be happy with negative attention too, as long as they get their attention, so everyone just ignoring them might be the most effective way to get rid of them.

Yeah. There was literally no difference between PVP and PVE servers after the first few years after game launched. Since the only difference was that you could do Open World PVP, and the "big end-game open world pvp zone" was Ilum, which died super fast due to the terribad engine not being able to handle massive scale combat. So the promise of Open World PVP was a complete design fail on BWs part.
Regular WZ had no difference between PVP and PVE servers so there really was no difference what server you were quing from.

To say player toxicity is the main reason PvP failed in SWTOR is just wrong. But managing it now is the only way to save PvP.

PvP failed in this game during development when the engine was chosen. Six months after launch they had to shut down Illum open world because the engine could not handle the amount of players. It was a slideshow.

Structured PvP died when 8v8 ranked had a 2 year preseason, when they came to realize that cross server was not an option because of the engine. At the 1.2 guild summit they announced season 1 would start with cross server. They realized cross server would not be feasible so they had a never ending preseason. PvP died six months after the first server merge. I think that was around 2.0, but I’m not positive,

PvP is a niche game system in a niche MMO. I still love it, but you have to think of it in a more casual way at this point. Getting pissed and toxic at this point is stupid. PvP will never thrive in SWTOR. At this point you just want to keep the pops poppin. This means getting the casual player in queue.

BW has never done any "behavior regulation", so people get to act as they want since BW literally doesn't care. The bad behavior is not only tied to SW, Overwatch has been having massive issues with player toxicity because they were not regulating it at all, so naturally it became a common place to relieve quick frustration at the guy next to you. They tried to "moderate" it afterwards but still to this day they haven't managed to do a thing about it.

I play PVP most days I'm on and the maximum amount of toxicity I come across is when one team or another is literally so oblivious to what the WZ objective that they let the enemy cap it behind their backs without doing as much as writing two letters in chat to call for backup. Then people who know how the WZ worksks start facepalming and lecturing people on how you're supposed to play the map (even though the instructions are literally on the loading screen of said WZ...). Naturally not all lecturing is toxic but people who are not used to PVP or getting told what to do see a lot of rule recap as toxic complaining and criticism and get really upset over nothing.

Merging the two North American servers is a bad idea. Such a measure would not help the game in the long run. It would only alienate certain demographics within the player base causing them to leave. Thus you would end up with fewer players than before the merge. This has been observed previously and will not change with your proposed merge. I agree that two servers sharing the same data centre is futile and useless. However merging would cause more problems than it would solve.

In my opinion a better course of action would be to re-instate the west coast data centre and have Bio-Ware re-open their west coast office.

I quoted the post I intended to, and replied accordingly, choosing to snip 2/3 of it out doesn't validate anything you may have said earlier, it merely gives the perception that you don't want to respond to factual accounts of what happened, and, frankly, what happens industry wide, a lot. However, let's look at some anecdotal stories from other games, which will remain nameless, since they're competitors:

"Capped toons killing lowbies is PvP". That's always one of my favorites. I've seen it thrown around a lot. I wonder if we could dig through the history of this forum and find someone making that statement?

"Portal camping shouldn't be against the rules. So what if the other players aren't loaded in yet, we should be able to kill them no matter what", in a game where you use a portal, go into a loading screen, and when you finally get loaded, you're dead. This was, I should note, against the game's rules, but was also a common tactic of the "hardcore" PvPers.

A common tactic used by griefers here: Camping a node in stealth with PvP enabled, waiting for the unsuspecting PvE player to click the node. I guess there were bonus points if it was a quest node, since they seemed to get camped a lot in this matter. It even raised a lot of fuss during a Rakghoul event, if I remember correctly.

These are the kinds of things that happened to the PvP servers. There weren't a lot of design flaws, or decisions made at this point the game's life, this was well after launch, even after going F2P. There had even been a wave of merges prior to my joining the game initially, I believe. So don't lay the woes of the PvP servers on the feet of the devs, or the PvE players. They quite literally shot themselves in the foot, by simply being who and what they are.

I can tell you why the people that came with me from Aion didn't stick around, since they were more interested in PvP than BW's story telling: They didn't like the carebear nature of the PvP. They weren't into the idea of "participation trophies" etc. Also, "most of the pvp is in WZs". These aren't my words, but something one of my mates said in Vent, when I asked about why they weren't popping in more often. I stayed for the stories, found a guild, and stayed with them for years. But the PvP wasn't good enough back then to hold truly hardcore PvPers, and when they had a chance to make it relevant, such as with Conquest, they totally dropped the ball.

Imagine, if you will, if guilds had to actually PvP against other guilds in order to control a sector, or a planet. All of a sudden, PvP would have meant something, and conquest would have had more relevance as well. As a further incentive to participate, imagine adding an instance to each controllable zone on a planet that you could only use if your guild, or alliance of guilds, controlled it. We could even take that out to faction, but for the sake of making PvP relevant, this will do. Aion had a system exactly like this for it's abyss fortresses, and other end game content as well, only it was faction based. It didn't matter what legion controlled a fortress, if it was your faction, you could use the instance in the fortress.

A very old Korean Grinder I used to play called Rappelz had a siege system that would have augmented the above quite well: Time attacks. This would open a special version of the dungeon, and an attacking guild would then run the instance to set a time. The guild with the fastest time at the end of the week won the right to siege against the owning guild, if there was one, and if there wasn't, they could attack the dungeon as normal, kill the switch, and take over ownership. Owned dungeons paid the guild in the in game currency, and lak, a secondary in game currency. The cash wasn't generated out of nowhere, exactly, either, it was a percentage of what was dropped in the dungeon over the week.

Something, anything to make PvP relevant, would have been great. But we didn't get that, and as far as I can tell, we've never had it, so the hardcore PvPers don't stick around. They see what we've got, and they leave.

I have a feeling its you who doesn't want to respond or read any replies here... Someone other than me already went into more detail on the previous page.

PVP servers literally have no other difference to PVE servers other than you could do world PVP. And BW promised us world PVP, but their endgame World PVP zone failed so miserably thanks to the terribad engine that that dream never got delivered. Otherwise World PVP was a niche activity which didn't reward you with anything, so not many people even did it after Ilum poopfest. It was a design failure on BWs part, nothing at all to do with players. Overwhelming majority of PVP players focused on instanced WZs after Ilum got killed off, and it literally makes no difference if you que to WZ on a PVP or PVE server, the matches are no different. So it really doesn't matter which server you qued from, larger one just had faster pops which is what everyone wanted to do after their promised content didn't get delivered.

You know, if I wasn't someone who's spent a few afternoons chasing those "hardcore PvPers" out of lowbie zones on planets like Tatooine, where we actually flipped a Pub base trying to get to a trooper that was griefing lowbies, I'd believe everything you said. However, that's not the case. We actually did take over a Pub base on Tat, albeit briefly, so we could kill a griefer, it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. You can lay the blame where ever you like, but you'll notice: I'm not snipping your posts trying to pretend you didn't say something that struck too close to home. The fact is, I have a lot of experience in PvP oriented games, and I know exactly what happens, and for the most part how it happens. This isn't a sudden, new development in games with PvP, it's something that is observable in any game like this, where the primary focus isn't PvP, and in some where it sort of is, such as Aion. I had a Legion of 200 players bail on me to RoM because of OW PvP, in Aion! That really blew my mind...