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

Agreed and for some reason your wording and phrasing cracked me up.

Whatever.

Oooh ooh, and the snow plops on Alderaan will no longer float in the air! That's a good one too right? Yes! I contributed.

On the other hand, if a person is trying get -everyone- merged just because PVP isn't happening to -their- expectations, it does beg the question of why they think their side of the game requires everyone to bear the price of their personal satisfaction. Perhaps the reason people don't queue for PVP is because of the people who PVP? I know almost every time I have tried to do it, it has featured about the most toxic players I've ever met, and never seems to change. Why would anyone want to play with people like that?

Ultimately, if PVP isn't popping, I wouldn't blame the servers at this point, but the PVP community. There are plenty of people playing, just not the PVP side from what I am hearing.

Unless it is to give the full KOTFE/ET as it was first intended as in 3 expansions with 16 chapters each, give better companion reunion (especially for LIs) and remove all the kill options on companions, no thanks.

I'd rather keep the story as it is right now and keep the newer companions i like more than most of the vanilla ones. And i may be in the minority here, but i'm really not thrilled to go back to imp vs pub.

You're free to pretend that all this never existed or was a bad dream all you want though.

(Edit : Sorry for my long reply. As usual, the post got away from me and I actually edited out half. I could have elaborated a lot more)

It’s more complex than that. But I can see and understand your point of view, especially with the experiences you’ve had.

Pvp toxicity is there, no one will disagree with that, but it’s not as prevalent as people say or some unfortunate people have experienced.
Some of the toxicity will of course be from douche bags who do it regardless. There is no excuse for them
A lot of the remaining toxicity is of Biowares own making from bad decisions and policies in pvp. I could list a few pages worth on how they’ve fostered it to this point, but I won’t bore you. Let’s just say that most of it is born out of frustration at the situation and not the people at the pointy end of the toxicity stick.

To the inexperienced pvper, it must seem every pvper is toxic. I do get that. But you’ll find it’s just a select few who do it every match they are in and they are “loud and obnoxious”, so they stand out. Most pvpers just bite their tongues and not say anything cause it just sets them off more. It’s because those few are loud, that it seems like all pvpers are like that.

An analogy would be this. A new swtor player joins the Imp fleet for the first time. The loud mouth gen chat trolls are being their usual obnoxious selves and flooding gen chat and trolling. The new player sees this and sees no real community or decent people posting. So they think everyone in the game is like that and there is no community,
Those loud mouths drown out or silence the majority and give a bad reputation to the game. It’s the same in pvp with those few toxic idiots.

Lets talk about someone wanting mergers because they can’t pvp with out them. As a pvper myself, I can say if the pvp population is spread across too many servers, it becomes harder and hard to get play time. Pvpers need a consolidated population as much as possible to play pvp and with the declining population due to self inflicted Bioware mistakes, this gets to a point where that part of the game can’t be played.

Now I know that doesn’t affect all players and why should they have to suffer another merge because only one group of players can’t play anymore. I can understand that point of view a lot more than you think because I’m a long term pvper (sounds a bit backwards doesn’t it).

The reason I understand is because pvpers had to suffer for about 3 out of the first 6 years of this game because raiders got the most attention at the detriment of pvpers. Then solo story took over from raiders. Basically, pvpers have always been treated the worst in this game and those of us here long enough, know how it feels when another group is prioritised over us. It’s not pleasant and it seems like it’s not fair, which it’s not. So I can put myself in your position if mergers were to happen.

Sadly, this game’s population has shrunk so much, that we really can’t afford for more people to stop playing. Which is what happens when you can’t play your part of the game (ie pvp as an example). If it does, there are less subs, which means less revenue, which means less content for all parts of the game. Ultimately that affects every aspect of the game, including yours,

I will agree that the dedicated pvpers like myself aren’t a major part of the population. But here is something to consider. Even though you personally don’t pvp, there are lots more people than you think who do pvp casually. They may not be dedicated pvpers like myself and play hours of pvp. They might just jump into do their dailies or weeklies.
If they can’t do that, it is another part of the game they can’t play or enjoy. It leads to the game being less enjoyable for them and they leave as well as the dedicated Pvpers. Causal players probably make up the bulk of this game. They dabble in all content from pvp, to flash points, story, heroics and some operations. Start removing things for them to do and they leave.

Mergers are traumatic for all involved, including pvpers. Nobody likes them or the fact they are needed so often. We shouldn’t have to have them and if Bioware did a better job, we wouldn’t need to. The way they merged and made two servers in the same data Center was dumb. They should have just made it one server if they were going to have them in the same geographical location.

From the time they made those two servers, another merger was always going to be needed in the future and I predicted it would be 6-9 months till we were in the same situation we were in before the last mergers. Especially when they must have known a tonne of people (APAC+west coast players) would leave over the server relocation.
It was another biofail decision that is coming back to bite them and sadly, the community in the butt. If they had just made one server, the whole traumatic experience could have been over by ripping off the “band aid” once. Now they will probably have to open up the same wound again.

Where this game is concerned, pvpers are the canaries in the mine when it comes to group content. They always feel the lack of population first. Then the causal pvpers and then the casual group players. Which flows onto the dedicated guilds losing people and not being able to recruit more. The guilds shrink or die and less and less people are in the game till only story people can play because they don’t need to organise people to play the game. When that happens, they will never get any new content because Bioware won’t have enough money to make any or see the need with so few people playing.

At that point they’ll merge all the servers into one to save what ever money they have left to run the game a little longer in non support mode. Bottom line, pvpers leaving because they can’t play, ends up with story people getting no new content and being force to merge anyway,

So you really shouldn’t be putting all the blame on the pvpers (dedicated or casual) who will ultimately need mergers to play that part of the game. The blame falls solely on Biowares shoulders for neediing to merge “again” in the first place and not thinking ahead.

This game is a an MMO, not a pvp game, not a solo game, not a barbie fun house game and not a raid game. Its all of those things that are tied to gather with story and they are in a symbiosis with each other. Lose one and you ultimately lose the lot,

Regrettably, sometimes that means making unpopular decisions and compromises to keep all parts viable in the game. Ultimately that will require mergers to allow, not only pvpers, but all group content players to be consolidated or they can’t play.
If that doesn’t happen and they leave, solo story people will get merged regardless to save money. The choice is simple. Merge servers when they become needed or the result is the game fails faster than it already is, you get merged anyway and then game gets shut quicker.

There is no simple solution here to make everyone happy. Either they merge and make people unhappy or they don’t merge and make people unhappy,
Nothing is as decisive in this game as mergers and it splits the community because of self insterest (human nature). But if we as a community can’t rise above it and look at the big picture, then we deserve the game to fail.

I just hope, what ever Bioware do, they do it so it causes the least amount of pain for everyone. There have been many suggestions on how to do that from last year when we all debated this before the last mergers. If Bioware were to implement some of those ideas when mergers become inevitable, they could reduce a lot of the traumatism caused by the merge,

No thanks on that one. One of the worst parts about MMOs is elitists demanding everyone play particular fotm point setups or hit the door. Those same elitists are still bad enough as it is with the cookie-cutter builds. "OMG are you running RAGE???" Seriously, anything that shuts the majority of those people up is a good thing.

I have to agree with this. Asking for the entire game population to lose real world money, strongholds and names, and have more crowded PvE questing, simply to accommodate PvP pops, isn't fair to anyone who doesn't PvP.

People won't PvP even with more rewards than PvE (more UCs) and they will pass up companions (Pierce) rather than PvP. The PvP servers emptied out as soon as people had a choice and the PvP instances are empty.

Maybe people aren't playing PvP because they don't like PvP, for whatever reason.

You do realise just as many players from all parts of the game have been leaving. It’s not just one part of the population. ie conquest players, group content players and even story players (due to lack of content)

If you try to play any group content at the times the OP is trying, you will see a drop in flash point and operations participation as well,

I think if we could see Biowares data on what mix of people play pvp or we could see a properly run poll somewhere, you would see that there are a lot of casual players who pvp as well as doing other stuff.

Obviously I don’t know the percentages of the player population of who play pvp full time, play pvp casually or just dabble in pvp. But I believe it is much higher than you think and I dont believe it’s right for you to try and say otherwise.

Are there problems with pvp, yes. Are the problems because people don’t like pvp generally? The answer is no.
There are many underlying problems with pvp at the moment, even with this supposed “pvp content patch”. Nearly all of them stem from Bioware and not the players. Even the things from the players, Bioware have allowed to fester from inaction for too long and bare some of that responsibility (any toxicity)

If people are turned off from pvp, a lot of its because of bugs, dysnc, matchmaking not working, poor class balance, wintrading-cheating-hacking (mainly in ranked, but not limited too) and few loud and obnoxious toxic fools

Every single one of those things ruins a person’s experience and enjoyment of pvp, including my own. But every single one of those things is completely within Biowares ability to control.

* They’ve let bugs go unfixed for years.
* They’ve allow those bugs to fester and multiply with every expansion and content patch,
* They’ve created the dysnc problems and they are getting worse everytime they add any new content to the game. Not just in pvp.
* They’ve allowed for extremely poor class balance since 5.0 and what they did change had either no affect on the situation or made other classes worse.
* They’ve supposedly introduced a matchmaking system in 5.9.2 which has made pvp teams worse than with no match making. This is ruining pvp in a big way for a lot of people (myself included)
* They’ve allowed cheating in this game since day one, but their lax attitude towards it for so long only emboldens cheaters to do it.

Every single one of those things can be contributed to Bioware directly or in the case of the cheating or toxicity, fostered by Biowares in action.

This whole 5.9.2 patch has been a royal mess for pvpers. The only thing that seems to have gone smoothly and is working as intended is the cross faction.

When you consider the patch was touted as a pvp patch, they sure spent a lot of time and energy working on strong hold decorations, hooks and design at the detriment of the pvp aspect.

If they had spent time on properly testing the pvp aspect of the patch and better listening to the feed back of the testers, maybe we wouldn’t have had a bug riddled patch and matchmaking would have worked and dysnc would have been fixed,

As it stands, this patch has had the reverse affect and is making pvpers stop playing (myself included). The whole situation is reminiscent of the conquest patch all over again. Which made dedicated player leave the game.

If people aren’t pvping, it’s not because they wouldn’t get enjoyment or want to play if things were working, it’s because it’s broekn on so many lvls.
It’s for that reason that I think it’s unfair to try and paint pvp as something people hate playing. I dont think they hate playing pvp. I think they hate playing broken pvp.

You can put all the incentives in the world, like UCs and it won’t get people to pvp is it’s not fun because it’s broken. So you really can’t gauge wether the UCs really ha e a positive affect on pvp participation.

Of course there will be those people who don’t like pvp, I get that. Just like there will be plenty of people who dislike other parts of the game. It doesn’t make any part of the game less important than the next because a bunch don’t need like content A and another bunch don’t like don’t B, which a third bunch doesn’t like A or B.

I’ll keep coming back to this point over and over. Every part of content in this game matters. None will not survive long with out the rest. If you disregard story, pvp, flash points, Operations and even strong holds for too long, then the whole game suffers and they have a flow on affect.

I think we all saw what the changes to conquest did to the game. Even people who didn’t really participate in conquest were affected when people had to change their play style or people left the game. Every bad thing that affects one part of the game, always seems to negatively flow through to all other parts.

I had high hopes this patch would breath some life back into pvp. On paper it was exciting. But I warned that if they messed it up, it would have the reverse affect and that is where it’s heading.

Those remaining pvpers who might stick it out will require some help from the community and the Devs to allow them to play. That may end with Bioware doing mergers or trying something else.
But I think we should all remember, it’s not the pvpers fault. They (we) are as much a victim of circumstances as everyone else will be if mergers are part of the solution.

^^ Classic whataboutism.

The point remains.. the number one reason (based simply on forum discussion topics) some players want/demand more server merges IS PvP queues, and for you to pretend false equivalence here is just silly.

Why not own it rather then deflect and change the subject?

Players leaving MMOs is as old as MMOs... as is players coming in to play an MMO. You attempted to inject a complete non sequitur here.