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Server Merge Discussion Thread


EricMusco

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All? I'm still waiting to hear more beyond "technical issues" ... from BWA's perspective they could solve that and everyone would be happy?

 

I noted a couple of others around latency that I personally believe prevents massive country wide mega server and something to help RP griefing/abuse (though it's an ingrained issue of the whole game that should be addressed and not just for RP players) that would also be for consideration.

 

Constructive discussion should be about as I see it "these are the problems - what are some ideas on how BWA could solve them" as opposed to just "merge anyway!" or "don't merge it's not needed!"

 

Ping, latency, lag or what ever people want to call it is a major issue in pvp. It is especially sensitive for people who already play with exceptionally high lag, so any increase above 220-230ms for those people in the APAC region basically rules out them playing pvp or lag sensitive NiM OPs without their teams carrying them.

 

I agree there needs to be a more positive discussion here about possible solutions to cross server and mergers. Not just arguing backwards and forwards by stating the same things over and over by the same people.

We understand the concerns and the reasons of both factions by now as I'm sure the Devs do too. It does not progress the thread rehashing the same recalcitrant points.

What we should be discussing are what happens to fixing server population issues and how they can do it with the limited options available. We also need to understand that there are different community needs in this game and completely excluding one for selfish reasons will probably end the game.

As a community our aim should be to keep the game alive and going. Not having it shut down because it can't sustain itself.

This is going to be a hard path for some people and comprises will need to be made. As long as those compromises aren't game breaking and are at worst annoyances that don't prevent people playing the game the way it was meant to be played, then we may need to suck it up for the benefit of the games health.

I encourage you all to stop being negative Nancy's and turn this discussion in a positive direction. Let's offer solutions not the same mud sling dogma we are seeing page after page.

Let's assume first that if they do mergers that they will have the technical problems solved. I think from reading all of the concerns, this is a big one for both sides of the discussion. I can't imagine they will risk moving forward with such a measure without addressing that. We have now moved on many years since the last mergers, the back end systems have been upgraded since then and technology has also advanced. So let's just make a clear point in all our posts to Bio, maybe it could be a byline or our first sentence. "Make sure all technical issues are solved before doing any thing drastic". Then we can move onto the meat of our real posts. I think that will send a message to them that is a major concern they need to address first.

There really should now be no need to use that as an excuse to argue backwards and forwards between us. None of us know wether they can do it, if they have the systems in place or not. Telling each other what they can or can't do it just idiotic and non productive.

So.. what are the options to improve the population.. what are the things we need to make our parts of the game viable for our parts of the game to be healthy...

And please don't attack others needs to play their parts of the game.l if you don't play that part or it's of no indterets to you, it doesn't make it irrelevant and it doesn't make yours better. We are all equal in our needs and we need to accept that.

My idea is obviously the free legacy transfers I've already posted so people can vote with their feet. That's the basic premise of it, but there are lots of details and pitfall ps to it as well. I'll leave it at that till this thread turns around and the idea doesn't need get drowned our with people saying the same stuff backwards and forwards. The more that happens, the more those ideas get drowned out. And as I've said before, that will mean Bio won't listen to any of us and they implement something that could ruin the game for everyone.

Anyway thanks for reading. It's now up to you how you decide to respond and take positive steps towards solutions.

 

** sorry for any bad grammar or spelling mistakes. This was a rush post and wasn't proof read before I posted **

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I don't know how many times I have to say this Ebon Hawk is not dead nor do we need to be merged with Harbinger. We are doing fine. There is no reason at all to merge Ebon Hawk.
Exactly. I play on Ebon Hawk too and it's a perfectly fine server. RP servers are also most suited for solo players, IMO. Both RP'ers and solo players seem to be more into (class) story and lore than PvP'ers and raiders.

 

And why is everything that has/had a PvP designation "dead"? Whether it's servers or instances? As far as I understand from different threads, this is usually blamed on the way Bioware handles PvP (class balance, not enough new WZ's, and so on), but, strangely enough, almost never on the number of players that actually want to participate in PvP. The PvP crowd is obviously the most vocal, but I doubt they make up the majority of the player base.

 

Anyway, I also read some good suggestions in this thread, like one non-RP and one RP server for the West Coast, same for the East Coast and same for EU. That's just 6 servers. I have no idea what can be done for AUS/NZ.

 

Finally, I don't understand where the dogma comes from that MMO equals PvP and/or raiding. MMO means nothing more than a multitude of players playing an online game simultaneously. It allows a number of people to participate in RP events (MMORPG), for example. So even without PvP or raiding a game like this would still be a MMO. Without RP it would also still be a MMO, but not a MMORPG :)

Edited by Tisaren
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There is already a way of increasing your pop it's called cheap transfers if you have a security key you can transfer one a month.

 

If you are not doing this then you are prioritising your virtual assets over this pop and are just trying to force bioware to allow you to have your cake and eat it regardless to whether the general population want merges.

 

Many players are happy on their low population server whether it be for rp reasons, ease of none instanced objectives or other reasons and don't want to be forced into server merges because players refuse to let go of virtual assets and push what they want onto others.

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RP is only one of those non-technical concerns that people have and it seems to me that you basically dismiss it as "not really much of a problem". That is my interpretation of what you wrote, though. Whether you meant it to come across that way, I cannot say.

 

I'm not dismissing it, I'm saying in terms of the amount of people affected by it I don't think it's probably affecting as many people as some would have us believe and it would be even less with decent moderation per my post. I'm not saying people don't RP I just don't think RP would get as disrupted as much as people think it might.

 

As for it being "only one of" ... what are the rest? Latency and someone else put up an issue around "node stealing" but iirc that's been less of an issue in recent content.

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There is already a way of increasing your pop it's called cheap transfers if you have a security key you can transfer one a month.

 

If you are not doing this then you are prioritising your virtual assets over this pop and are just trying to force bioware to allow you to have your cake and eat it regardless to whether the general population want merges.

 

Many players are happy on their low population server whether it be for rp reasons, ease of none instanced objectives or other reasons and don't want to be forced into server merges because players refuse to let go of virtual assets and push what they want onto others.

 

If the cheap transfers were working to fix this population issue we wouldn't have need of this thread.

Are you against free whole legacy transfers as a potential fix to the population issues?

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Ping, latency, lag or what ever people want to call it is a major issue in pvp. It is especially sensitive for people who already play with exceptionally high lag, so any increase above 220-230ms for those people in the APAC region basically rules out them playing pvp or lag sensitive NiM OPs without their teams carrying them.

 

I'm Apac (NZ) and play off a ~170 ping to west coast - are you playing east coast? Iirc the route out of both NZ/Aus to the US is the same so if you are getting that sort of ping it does seem odd.

 

Either way I'm personally not in favour of merging the 2 coasts so ping wouldn't be effected, though if you are east coast a merge to west coast would actually help you.

 

 

My idea is obviously the free legacy transfers I've already posted so people can vote with their feet. That's the basic premise of it, but there are lots of details and pitfall ps to it as well. I'll leave it at that till this thread turns around and the idea doesn't need get drowned our with people saying the same stuff backwards and forwards. The more that happens, the more those ideas get drowned out. And as I've said before, that will mean Bio won't listen to any of us and they implement something that could ruin the game for everyone.

 

Free legacy transfers between what servers though? I've no issue with that off the servers deemed to be dead but offering it on the likes of the still fairly active servers (yet not as highly populated as the top servers) could just promote those servers to die and hurt those who really don't want to move.

 

The good thing with a merge is no one is left behind, people might ***** and moan about it at first but they would get used to it (assuming same coast server merges so no latency issues) is my belief. I went through Dalborra merge and many weren't happy about it but in the end it gave me a far more positive gaming experience than what I was having on Dalborra at the time - all of a sudden I was getting queue pops on all content in APAC timezone (better than the apac server heh) and it was really quite awesome, got me into raiding when before the option of trying to raid was to do so through a guild and commit to a set time to do something I had no idea if I would enjoy or not - now I love raiding. Makes me wonder how many miss out on this same sort of introduction to raiding simply because they can't get groups.

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Free legacy transfers between what servers though? I've no issue with that off the servers deemed to be dead but offering it on the likes of the still fairly active servers (yet not as highly populated as the top servers) could just promote those servers to die and hurt those who really don't want to move.

 

The good thing with a merge is no one is left behind, people might ***** and moan about it at first but they would get used to it (assuming same coast server merges so no latency issues) is my belief. I went through Dalborra merge and many weren't happy about it but in the end it gave me a far more positive gaming experience than what I was having on Dalborra at the time - all of a sudden I was getting queue pops on all content in APAC timezone (better than the apac server heh) and it was really quite awesome, got me into raiding when before the option of trying to raid was to do so through a guild and commit to a set time to do something I had no idea if I would enjoy or not - now I love raiding. Makes me wonder how many miss out on this same sort of introduction to raiding simply because they can't get groups.

 

"Bio guys - Please address all the technical issues people are scared about before attempting anything too drastic and risky 😉"

 

I think the destination servers for the "free legacy transfer idea" would need to be discussed and it's something I would encourage us all to do.

Personally I think there will probably have to be one or two that will have to be locked out of being a destination server or this might just be a big waste of time.

Maybe Bio could start an official poll that can only be answered by subscribers and it is linked to their account so that they can only vote once.

The poll could be more than one question and it could ask possible questions like.. "what is the most important part of the game for you".. ie are you a RP, are you a pvper, are you story focused, group content FP/OPs.. they could even ask you to rank these in order of importance to your gaming experience.

I'm sure there are many other questions or ways to format that quick idea. It would also be good for Bio to see what the real mix of players are and what's the importantance of the different aspects of the games for them. That has to be better than how they currently try to determine what is important to us.

They can put it on the login screen to get people's attention and have a short explanation about it and what it's for.

 

Anyway, have to go, I have Pizza arriving. I'll try to add or respond to this later.

 

Edit : finished pizza... too full now, I was a little. 🐷

 

I forgot the actual reason I mentioned a poll, which is to find out the best destination servers. It could ask people what server they currently play on, wether they would prefer to transfer off it and where would they like to go. Those questions, along with the others could allow them to build a picture on which servers are the better destination ones.

As an example, maybe they would rule out Pot5 and Bastion as destination servers.

I don't know if that is the right answer, I'm just throwing it out there as a possible idea.

Edited by Icykill_
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This would quite obviously help with quece times for people who presently are having long queces. The only problem I can see that might be an issue is this wouldn't allow you to form groups to quece together [premades] because you wouldn't be able to communicate between servers in order to coordinate because you can't tell who's online on a different server. U could still quece with people from your own server of course. Thing is though if some people are on servers with low populations [from which one can presume if there were enough people to make premades on your own server, you probably wouldn't be having long queces.

 

 

Lastly, while this wouldn't be a reason to not contend the idea of cross server queces, I could easily see PVP turning into server wars. Along similar lines, I could also see those server's with larger populations would have an easier time of making premades from their own servers while low population servers would likely not be able to counter them with their own premades a great amount of the time.

 

Just something to consider in trying run with the idea realistically as perhaps steps could be taken to mitigate such imbalances between servers.

 

Even still, server wars would be inevitable [ which could in some ways maybe be fun actually heh if the toxicity wasn't there.].

YES!!! Now we are thinking this through as a group. You are 100% correct about this, and Blizzard has a system for that, which I forgot to mention. They have a cross game communication that players from any blizzard game can not only message each other, but now they have added voice chat with it so you don't even need TS or mumble. It is called battlenet. When you install one of their games, it also installs battlenet.

I believe Bioware has one too and SWTOR does their billing through it now. Origin... So all they need to do is install origin with SWTOR, and if you get in a cross server group with some cool players you can add them to your Origin friend's list. That would be even better because you could see them online if they are playing Mass Effect, and be like "hey bro, wanna throw down in EV with us?" And your friend would be like "yeah I do, let me switch games!" And then you would be like "Cool, but Keith and Eric are running with us, so we are probably going to wipe, cause Keith is healing on his OP again!"

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"Bio guys - Please address all the technical issues people are scared about before attempting anything too drastic and risky 😉"

 

I think the destination servers for the "free legacy transfer idea" would need to be discussed and it's something I would encourage us all to do.

Personally I think there will probably have to be one or two that will have to be locked out of being a destination server or this might just be a big waste of time.

Maybe Bio could start an official poll that can only be answered by subscribers and it is linked to their account so that they can only vote once.

The poll could be more than one question and it could ask possible questions like.. "what is the most important part of the game for you".. ie are you a RP, are you a pvper, are you story focused, group content FP/OPs.. they could even ask you to rank these in order of importance to your gaming experience.

I'm sure there are many other questions or ways to format that quick idea. It would also be good for Bio to see what the real mix of players are and what's the importantance of the different aspects of the games for them. That has to be better than how they currently try to determine what is important to us.

They can put it on the login screen to get people's attention and have a short explanation about it and what it's for.

 

Anyway, have to go, I have Pizza arriving. I'll try to add or respond to this later.

 

I'm not overly worried about destination server as long as it's not a dead PVP server. More so the source server for free transfers should be a dead pvp server. Other transfers (legacy) should cost.

 

This is based on the biggest problem right now being those dead PVP servers, sorting those first is a good step in to anything else in the future as you ideally don't affect too much population if things go wrong. ;)

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I'm not overly worried about destination server as long as it's not a dead PVP server. More so the source server for free transfers should be a dead pvp server. Other transfers (legacy) should cost.

 

This is based on the biggest problem right now being those dead PVP servers, sorting those first is a good step in to anything else in the future as you ideally don't affect too much population if things go wrong. ;)

 

Finished pizza and I edited my last post

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It wasn't the story people that picked up and jetted off, it was the raiders when they went 2 years without a raid.

 

This is wrong again. Population is where it is now, because the story players it brought in with KOTFE/KOTET are not playing anymore. They did leave, as it should have been expected they would. Its fine if you enjoy playing the story on repeat, but you have no basis to claim that players like you that play the story repeatedly make up the bulk of the player base. Its just not true.

 

Gear is their goal and when they were done and there were no new raids to get things they left.

 

This statement just shows a total lack of understanding why pvpers and raiders play the game. Gear is not the primary end goal.

 

I can't see how you can call story players that are altholics as a minority, where are your numbers?

 

They are a minority like every other group of players in the game in the sense that they are not the majority. There is no basis to say most players are here just for the story. Its fine if you are, but that does not mean everyone is. Story players are a subset of players just like raiders, pvper, gsfers, and rpers.

Edited by kvandertulip
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This is a dishonest comment. On the last JC-SL thread that was merged and deleted, I know that one poster from JC came on and made a very detailed case about how crushed group content was on JC. I know that I have said many times how the bulk of Shadowlands NiM teams went to Harb, and I know that I said yesterday how a hapless person on JC was trying to form an EC group finder raid at 8PM EST with only 75 people on the fleet on the Republic side and after more than 5 minutes he had only one bite. Other examples have been offered.

 

 

 

Show me where I said EVERYONE in this thread and the other "merge servers" thread was opposed to merging Jedi Covenant and Shadowlands. I never did. I said "Even in this thread, there are plenty of people who are very happy on those servers and have no trouble doing most group content. "

 

Tell me Rata have you ever done an Operations? As far as ranked, yes ranked pvp gets organized, isn't that making the case that it won't pop without going to extraordinary means and that there's a risk of rigging it with win trading with organized ranked q's?

 

Yes, I have done OPS. The point is that even ranked is possible.

 

Your suggestions on this don't add any value to what's been said already.

 

My suggestions don't agree with your desire, is all.

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Just a thought, really just a twinkling of a thought regarding the possible loss of names..

 

We now have a system in place that allows a space between a name to essentially have two names, ie, Captain Kirk.

 

What if people who clash with and only have "one" name are offered the option to have two names?

It they already have a second name exactly the same, then add a possible a third space so they could have three. This would mean they could even do, James T Kirk.. of course Bio would need to change the name system to allow single letters. This could even be seen as a special reward.

The system would determine who logged in first and took advantage of the name change. If they do, then the second person with that name loses the option to change the name because they already have the name they wanted to protect.

Of course if there are more than 2 servers merged it might mean 2-4 people with the same name. In that case there would be a need for some other option, not sure what.

 

Another possibility is a special title that even shows up in chat so people can distinguish between people.

 

Remember this is just a brain fart and not fully fleshed out. I'm sure there are flaws, but also ways to make it better.

Please don't attack it out of hand or me for suggesting it.

 

I'll try to refine it and think of some other ideas. Maybe some of you guys could too. It might actually be fun and take away from some of the tension currently happening here.

 

"Johnny, we merged servers and you have to change your name, despite the fact that you have had it for 5 years, but here, have a title. "

 

 

What happens to those players who have two "names"? I know that having two "names" lessens the chance of two separate players having the same name, but I use the same names across several servers. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

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I'm not dismissing it, I'm saying in terms of the amount of people affected by it I don't think it's probably affecting as many people as some would have us believe and it would be even less with decent moderation per my post. I'm not saying people don't RP I just don't think RP would get as disrupted as much as people think it might.

 

I think without a separate RP server, those "RP issues" would affect a great many players, far more players than do ranked PVP, IMO.

 

That is just my opinion.

 

As for it being "only one of" ... what are the rest? Latency and someone else put up an issue around "node stealing" but iirc that's been less of an issue in recent content.

 

Those would be two of those "other non-technical issues", right there.

 

I guess you may have missed all the threads asking for many of the non-instanced heroics to be changed, SPECIFICALLY because of "objective stealing" and other issues with over population and limited quest objectives in the open world environments.

 

Unfortunately, it is my understanding (and I may be incorrect) that BW has indicated that they have no plans to make any changes to the 1-50 content.

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Server merges for the most part are a request because cross server queing is not a thing. I think if cross server is implemented, many of the desires for merges will lessen.

 

Restoration of light, moderate & heavy status of servers will help to indicate to new/returning players the server type they are entering - then they can choose to be on a busy server vs a less busy based on preference.

 

There will be those who like playing on a lighter server. If the finances behind the scenes allow for that, then I think they should be granted that ability - but only with cross server and ability to identify the heavy population servers vs the lighter ones so that players make that choice knowingly.

Edited by Jamtas
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Fair enough but what you propose with all the money spent on legacy cargo slots, as well as strong holds? I mean I personally don't make alot of money to spent millions upon millions unlocking strong holds all over again... I did it once because at the time I had no desire to move servers. It was only after I came into CM stuff that I couldn't sell when I made the hard decision to jump onto a high pop server. I really don't think it's fair for those of us on the low pop servers to have to completely rebuy everything we had simply because BW deems low pop servers unreasonable. Do you think that's fair to drop 10 mil on one of the strongholds to completely unlock, where it took you quite awhile to save that much money in the first place because lets face it, unless you are farming CONSTANTLY, the economy of said servers is non-existant.

 

Just to tell you a bit about myself, spent 3 years on JC, made a pretty lovely apartment on Coruscant, unlocked all the Strongholds. Then left JC, went to Harb, think I unlocked all the strongholds there too. Now I play a lot on Shadowlands. So I know a bit about having to do the same crap over and over again with regards to Strongholds and Legacy.

 

I know of another game and when they did things that inconvenienced players they rewarded them. It should be no different with this game. If they're not going to reward us with CC for any inconvenience, then at the very least no one should be penalized credit-wise for a server merge.

 

Apologies to some of the rabid anti folks out there, I didn't live up to your hopes and dreams of trying to destroy everyone who is not a NiM raider.

Edited by RobertFKennedyUS
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They are a minority like every other group of players in the game in the sense that they are not the majority. There is no basis to say most players are here just for the story. Its fine if you are, but that does not mean everyone is. Story players are a subset of players just like raiders, pvper, gsfers, and rpers.

 

This is correct, but I;m guessing that each and every one of those individual subsets is a minority when compared to the player base as a whole.

 

Sure, are players who participate in more than one of those activities. The fact that RP'ers may raid or raiders may also PVP does not necessarily make any one facet of the game the "focus of the majority".

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At least we have some new voices in this discussion. Trouble is I've had to ignore three of the old ones that say the same thing over and over and over and over..... We all get it. You're never going to change your tune. And every one of these threads deteriorate into the same people going at each other over and over and over and over...

 

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.......

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Server merges for the most part are a request because cross server queing is not a thing. I think if cross server is implemented, many of the desires for merges will lessen.

 

Restoration of light, moderate & heavy status of servers will help to indicate to new/returning players the server type they are entering - then they can choose to be on a busy server vs a less busy based on preference.

 

There will be those who like playing on a lighter server. If the finances behind the scenes allow for that, then I think they should be granted that ability - but only with cross server and ability to identify the heavy population servers vs the lighter ones so that players make that choice knowingly.

 

To some extent the labeling of server populations is part of the issue with people coming into threads like this and saying server A is dead. They are looking at the SWTOR website or TORStatus and seeing that servers like JC appear to have the same population as POT5 which is clearly not true. Whereas people who play on those servers are seeing and feeling something very different. Those ratings are a measure of server capacity and I think people who comment based on those values are not understanding that several years ago Bioware did a large server upgrade and substantially increased server capacity. A server that is light now was probably standard then (other than the PVP servers as they are now which would have been light then) and standard was probably heavy for perspective. More granularity in those values would probably help people understand the populations better. Maybe Harbinger near its max should be heavy and the other servers rated accordingly. That would be especially helpful for new players coming in and choosing a new server because only the old PVP servers would register as Light during prime time.

 

The impediment for people to move to servers of their liking should be reduced somehow, then the people who need higher pop rates (or better GTN prices or whatever) can move to the more populated servers and those happy with the pop rates etc. they have can stay where they are. That way the only people determining what servers are healthy is Bioware who actually have the data to back up those decisions. At the same time people would be able to make a more informed decision on what server to create characters on if more granularity was available in the server status page, perhaps a 24 hour graph of server population in some arbitrarily defined unit. There are issues with low population servers like the PVP servers that need to be dealt with but why not let the player base sort out where they want to be. Some kind of control is needed to keep the gold spammers from collecting on low pop servers and then transferring to high pop one to sell their "goods" though. Gold spamming in chat could also be just about eliminated by a moderator. The gold spammer would get one shot then boom, they are done.

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At least we have some new voices in this discussion. Trouble is I've had to ignore three of the old ones that say the same thing over and over and over and over..... We all get it. You're never going to change your tune. And every one of these threads deteriorate into the same people going at each other over and over and over and over...

 

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.......

 

I think what we need is some sort of post that keeps a running log of what the pros and cons of server mergers are and what the technical issues are. That way when someone new comes on and says something like "I don't know why people don't want mergers. It's obvious to me that higher population is better" there would be somewhere to point them to help them understand. The same would be true for someone who came on and said "I don't understand why people want mergers, can't they just move themselves to a new server". I had made a list of 7 or so items a while back of things that we as a group had felt needed to be dealth with for server merges to be smooth and have the least impact. I can go back and get that post and repost it if that would help.

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Maybe read more of the thread yourself because there are posters who actually seem anti having more players on their server be it because "I like empty server why force me elsewhere?" or "It's RP server nad merging will kill RP".

 

So it's not ALL about the actual technical issues that are currently known around server merges.

 

The people saying RP will get killed if they do server merges are VERY wrong. How does a larger playerbase on a server equal RP dying off? It makes no sense, because a larger playerbase will mean more people to recruit to RP guilds or to enlist in RP events.

 

And I will repeat myself, if people don't like populated servers then honestly they should not be playing an MMO. MMO's are meant to have high player population.

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You are free to do that on a low pop server but just remember this is an MMO and it's enver designed so you can have an instance to yourself just to avoid that problem.

 

More to the point what can be done to help if/when merges do occur? The node could be locked to the person engaging the related mobs, smaller instances thus less people competing for the nodes ... couple of ideas anyway.

 

Ok thats fine that this particular MMO wasn't designed for such, but 6 years later here we are low pop servers etc..., so what should we do in order to ensure the majority of people are happy? I think the biggest problem here is if a merge does occur there needs to be some sort of compensation for those of us who don't want the merge to happen in the first place. Again I ask what can they do in order to appease those of us with specific names, or have dropped alot of money for strong holds?

 

And as far as your solution for preventing node stealing, that's putting ALOT of faith in the coders to be able to properly code, without breaking anything either mind you, and make sure mobs tied to a node actually works. Sorry but after all these years and all those nasty little bugs that still haven't been addressed let alone squashed I'm hesitant on believing they have the capability to fix this. Maybe I'm being pessimitically naive but given their track record lately I'm skeptical. Hey if they can by all means do it, it would make my day to have a failsafe system in place to prevent people from stealing objectives from others. But I doubt they will devote their time and limited resources to this when there are other things they wish to do, that frankly are a bit more important >.>. Anyway I just hope they can figure this out without pissing too many people off *sigh*. As it stands though I'm perfectly happy where I'm at right now.

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Gear itself is not the primary goal of PVE and PVP.

 

The reason population is down is because they spent 2 years catering to story only players, and producing content with almost no replay value. Most players here just for story left after finishing the chapters. The people that play the story on repeat are just as much a minority as nightmare raiders and ranked pvpers.

EXCELLENT post!!! Absolutely correct imo...and well stated.

Completely agree. I've never seen the population as decimated as it has been these past few months (noted a small spike for Iokath/Tyth but that's dipped back off) and that's a net result of too long focusing on purely one type of content type and one type of player (and then slapping everyone with GC on the back of it).

 

The road out of this is long and difficult as no doubt there production budget has been slashed in recent years (the lack of content coming proves this) but the key is catering to as many people as possible which means more story content and more group content and this seems to be the direction which is good.

 

The problem many fail to realize is all the group content is pointless if you have people coming to give it a go and can't find a group. When this occurs you quickly move on out of boredom as any sort of grind involving group content seems far fetched and unachievable since half your time would be spent looking for groups.

 

Change that though with say merged servers and groups forming in a few minutes and all of a sudden that experience changes greatly and you've far more reason to continue on playing and paying both for old content and new content (back to the old 2.x days would be lovely and how easily I found groups then and where I spent the most money on this game personally solely because I could do group content easily in with the story content I liked to do). All the while new story content comes out and the story people keep playing and paying as they would regardless of mergers.

And this is a great post as well!!! Great analysis - I could not agree more. We have a long road ahead of us, but it is manageable...dead servers hurt the recovery though. We need consolidation...badly.

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This is wrong again. Population is where it is now, because the story players it brought in with KOTFE/KOTET are not playing anymore. They did leave, as it should have been expected they would. Its fine if you enjoy playing the story on repeat, but you have no basis to claim that players like you that play the story repeatedly make up the bulk of the player base. Its just not true.

 

This statement just shows a total lack of understanding why pvpers and raiders play the game. Gear is not the primary end goal.

 

They are a minority like every other group of players in the game in the sense that they are not the majority. There is no basis to say most players are here just for the story. Its fine if you are, but that does not mean everyone is. Story players are a subset of players just like raiders, pvper, gsfers, and rpers.

 

While I would agree that no group of players can truly claim to be the majority, I do wonder what percentage of the people who have been with this game from the start and have kept subscribed through thick and thin supporting the game are story people. It would seem that population would have the strongest reason to stay. After all there were 50 levels of content (and at least 16 different flavors of character) that has been more or less constant over the 5 years. From posts I've read PVPers and raiders seem to come and go or at least threaten to (not that I blame them seeing as there have been some serious issues in those areas even now). Thats not really the topic of this thread though. Maybe that's a different thread to start.

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