So there I was grinding away, waiting almost 2 hours for a Warzone to pop on a Monday night. With Shii Cho being added to the server transfer list earlier that day our already struggling population to a pretty massive hit.

 

I began doing a ton of reading and came across several posts that (though unsubstantiated) mention server “merging” which indicates to me that soon the origin servers will more than likely be brought down. Being an IT professional myself, I cannot see BW justifying the cost of maintaining an entire server for less than 50 active players who may or may not be n at the same time.

 

Feeling like I had no choice and that I was forced to either transfer or stop playing completely, I logged on to the destination server for the first time and started looking at my naming options. You see I am one of those people that believe everything is in a name, and when you carry a name and a naming convention since closed beta (and in my case for more than 10 years’ worth of gaming) you get rather attached and known for that name. I mean I pre-ordered and paid for next day delivery of my CE not to play as quickly as possible, but just to be able to keep my in-game names. Now I am staring at the screen and learning that each and every one of my character names is not available, nor is any variation.

 

After the total disappointment and anger set in, and almost 3 hours of naming attempts, I finally came up with a naming convention that actually made it through all 8 of the character slots as available. So now it was time to delete a couple of the name-placeholders and begin the transfer.

 

I bring over my main first just to set up the Legacy name and ensure that all of my perks / conveniences transfer over as well. When I first log in everything seems fine until I attempt to name my Legacy… GO FIGURE, it is also taken!!!! So now I am really just flat out disappointed. Forced to transfer or sit alone on a dead server, not allowed to keep any of the character names I have been using since closed beta, and now my Legacy name itself is gone too.

 

The only thing that I didn’t lose was the one thing I thought I would, convenience unlocks! Yay, I got to keep my mailbox on my ship and the astromech droid, the battle dummies and my rocket boosters, you know the irreplaceable things.

 

Now after finally just letting go, I trying to decide if I want to allow my subscription to renew next month or not, I moved onto the task of completing the transfer of all 8 of my characters… which by the way had to be done 1 at a time. The first 7 went without a hitch, click the name, click next, next, and done a few seconds later there it was on the new server just needing it’s new name. The 8th character on the other hand, not so easy.

 

I spent more than an hour attempting to get the server selection to recognize that there were only 7 characters and not 8 as it indicated. Finally in another “How disappointed are you?” thread I discovered the work around from a player and not a Dev. If you too run into this, you must create a character in the 8th slot, then run it and let the title crawl pass all the way through on it’s own, complete the initial conversation in the starting area and accept the first class quest. Once you have made it this far, log out and delete the character from the selection screen, exit the game, refresh the swtor website, log back into your account and attempt the transfer again.

 

Anyhow, this was my experience with the transfer system, I hope yours is better if you are on a dying server and you feel like you have to transfer, be alone, or stop playing.

To be fair every name that you have had since BETA is probably owned by someone on your new server also since BETA, they have probably also had that name/surname through years of gaming .

 

If it didn't happen to you it would have happened to someone else, if the servers were more populated from the start you may never have been able to get those names in the 1st place.

 

It sucks but it is an aspect of any server transfer and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

I feel for you, but, seriously, what was the alternative?

 

For me the transfer (or merge, 'cause I believe, like you, that when some servers fall below a minimum threshold, the remaining players will be forcibly moved) brought a world of good.

 

Now I can actually play a multiplayer game. Just as an example, there are now usually 40-50 people in Black Hole, which means that you find a group for the H4 quite easily. Before, my original server had 3-5 people, and you can see how difficult would be to find 3 like minded guys.

 

I understand that this caused damage to the people who had to move, because some lose the names, some other end up guildless, and so on, but you can't make a omelette without breaking the eggs, and in this case I think the gains far outweight the losses.

 

Try, and I am sure you will find names for your Legacy and characters that you will come to love.

 

Good luck!

Afraid not mate, EXACTLY the same here. Logged in and only 1 other player on the old server, So off to the only server I am allowed to transfer too. So far, so hoopy. Oh dear your name is now PDBWEJIGFHZISWVUH. Great, so my lvl 50 HAS to have a new name. Legacy? No that is taken too. Brilliant so my main characters, have had to change name AND legacy. After the MASSIVE grind that is getting a decnetley geared toon I am now left with a toon that I now personally feel I have no connection too. Also a lot of my old friends have had to do this as well so, I can no longer find them without a massively tedious trawl through variants on names.Unbelievable.

A well articulated post. I am in a similar boat with my names, naming many from the world of Harry Potter. Everyone has their own reasons for their names, and I chose Potter. I ended up getting lucky, I only lost one name, the traditional spelling of Narcissa, which I worked around with an ALT 141 for the i. This actually worked out to my advantage as that one character is also the guild leader, so the funky character has cut down on my whispers by about 80 percent. The people I do want whispering me have learned how to type my name or have added me to their friends list.

 

I got lucky though. I happened to be online when my server got the word on the transfer. We were the first server on a list of 6 being sent to one server and that destination server did not have any transfers to it at that point. When I got onto the new server, there were 51 people on fleet. Two hours later, 300, and by the end of the day 700.

 

I just don't feel like there is any way around this system without being unfair to the community as a whole. Yes, people who did plenty of extra work to ensure they aquired their names at launch get hosed, and thats a shame. However, I feel that establishing some sort of seniority or accomplishment based system to give a priority to players is twice as unfair.

 

It's just a real shame for people who lost their names. I do feel for you guys.

 

Hopefully, the new state of the game will overrule your displeasure from losing your names and you will continue to play.

 

Good Luck.

I play republic on one server, empire on another. Last week my republic server was selected for transfers. Even though I wasn't keen on the process they chose for transfers, I went ahead and transferred and was lucky enough to keep all my names. Then yesterday my empire server, which was reasonably healthy, got selected to be moved. This time, almost all my names were taken, and like you, I was very disheartened as I've been using some of those names as early as UO (one was actually a name I used for my save file in the first Zelda game). I wouldn't be nearly as unhappy with Bioware if they had made any effort at all in trying to help impact character names as little as possible. There were better ways they could have done transfers that would have impacted fewer players. I still have 3 months left on my subscription, and I'm right there with you in debate about whether or not to renew. It's less about the actual loss of names and more about the poor customer service in trying to fix a problem that they created.

I have a lvl 50 sentinal and a lvl 47 Bounty Hunter on Krayiss and all my friends and other high level characters are on jedi covenant. Imagine my pain after having waited since january for server transfers only to have jedi covenant not be the server krayiss can transfer to. Server transfer on select servers.... useless.

Depending how you look at the game, NAME is everything.

EX: I'm on an RP server. On RP servers, your name is who you are. If you change your name, you essentially change your person.

It's all just a matter of how you view it. I'm sorry if you can't understand it from other perspectives.

 

[NOTE: That's not my reason for NOT transferring. My names are -all- available on -all- destination servers. I just don't want to transfer yet.]

Edited June 19, 2012 by LexiCazam
Rude - quote

I feel your pain, I really do. I've already become truly attached to my name, and being one of the last servers assigned to transfer to Harbinger finding even a slightly related spelling was pretty much impossible.

The only name I lost int eh transfer that I actually was sad about was my name Brooks. So I was no longer able to be Darth Brooks.

 

Other than that, none of the names I lost mattered too much. Nothing a simple apostrophe, or ascii character couldn't fix.

I also lost my name. I had to rename "Dariuss" (which I've had on several games, before which was Darius) to Dåriuss.

 

Honestly... if that little change makes me 'lose all connection' to a character I wasn't that connected to them in the first place.

My main was York and now is Yørk instead... eh i'm over it there were 280 people on fleet and my guild went from active to very active as 3 guilds from my origin server were tired of going it alone and merged up with us.

 

Life is good on Corellian Run atm. Embrace change, find more *****in names and have a good time. There's no perfect solution here. Instead of playing the victim you should understand that and move on gladly gaming with a large population.

 

Sure Bioware messed up out the gate, but this was also because of forum uprisings.... so.

Instead of playing the victim you should understand that and move on...

 

That is exactly what a lot of the people that have taken up the greatest issue with this are going to do, but they are going to move out of the whole game, instead of to their new destination. The question you should rather be considering is whether SWtOR is currently in a state where it can afford to alienate more of the remaining loyal customers at a time when the subscription base is already visibly dwindling over numerous other reasons that are far more difficult to solve, which has, after all, lead to the server transfers in the first place...

Better let a whole game die because you can't keep your name.

 

Logical? No.

 

Another thread that should have be moved to the "R U INSANE" forum.

Well if your names are being used by active players, I don't feel bad for you. The players already using those names have as much right to them as you do, they just got lucky.

 

Sadly my guess is most of the names you all lost are sitting on zombie alts and expired accounts, which just simply sucks. Probably would have been a good idea for the transfer process to look at the last played date of a character, and if it was more than 90 days ago, force rename the zombie and let the incoming player keep it.

 

It would also be good manners if people leaving the game would delete their old characters to free up those names on their way out the door, but now I'm just dreaming.

Greetings,

 

We understand that losing a character name is a serious concern for many players in our community. You may want to join the other players as they discuss transfers and the issue of names here:

 

Character Transfers: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=477344

Names: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=479804

 

We will be closing this thread now. Thank you for your feedback!