The consequences of server transfers vs merging

2 things.

1. People aren't going to abandon their characters that they've spent dozens or hundreds of hours in, and in addition possibly real money, in order to start over on a new server. So the only people who may possibly do this is new players - and do you want new players, who you need to retain to keep the game going - rolling their characters on the servers with the worst gameplay, where they'll struggle to even find fights? They'll never see what makes this game great, and they'll get frustrated or bored and quit. That's worse than doing nothing.

2. If you have too many servers for your population, then spreading your population thinner just hurts everyone. This is a zero sum game. Anyone who transfers to a lower pop server leaves one less person on the higher population servers, and aside from 1 or 2, none of the relatively populated servers are even doing that well.

If you have 1 server at 35% capacity, and one server at 25% capacity, the solution is not to incentivize the people on the bigger server to go to the smaller one - all that does is mean you have 2 servers with 30% capacity even under ideal circumstances. The solution is to merge them, so now you have a server at 60% capacity.

Creating a lot of servers that have equally crappy populations is not a solution to this problem.

OP, This is what should happen but alas, this game cost ALOT of cash to make, I applaud it and have sunk my money into it. Transfers to servers cost SOE time, WE should pay for it.

Daft as it might seem, you don't only pay for a devs time, but for every nut and bolt, building and staff , right down to the electricity for the server.

I love the internet for free speech, but really it is SONY, "we MUST make CASH"

Wish to switch? 5 smeds please.

If they don't manage server populations, they're going to kill their game - or at least cause it to shrink when it could stay steady or grow. That's going to cost them more in the long term than the quick boost they'll get from the transfer fees. It's a short sighted strategy bad for the long term health of the game, ultimately costing them.

I play on Waterson which at times I have felt is a ghost town & we are supposedly one of the more populated servers. I cannot imagine what some of the low pop servers are like. They really need to take server merges seriously.

I play on the West Coast Server Genudine with my main character and over the past week and a half or so it has gotten blatantly clear that merges need to happen. I can understand Sony and their "Cash-in" strategy but they need to be realistic on this issue because if they make the wrong decision, this game will have a severely lower potential to be around in the long run as a major mmo. The short term gain they might get through transfer tokens will not outweigh how much they could make if this game is around after just a year from now.

I played Star Wars The Old Republic from release to the day they announced they were going free to play and it was painful to slowly watch the game I really was into at the time die. The reason Star Wars died was because they mishandled server population, they opened with 4x the amount of servers they actually needed and once the initial hype died down there were 20+ servers that at even peak hours only had 30 people on it. They weren't going to start over on the 4 servers with the massive pop just as I didn't because we put time into our characters, our friends were there and we were stuck trying to make the game survive while we waited to see what EA would do about the major problem at hand. In the end they merged all servers to about 6 high pop servers but they were 3 months too late and SWTOR was already a lost cause.

Now I really like PS2 and I'll admit that I have put my fair share of cash into my character because I truly have fun with it despite it being free to play. But I find myself in a situation rather similar to my star wars experience and if they mishandle this I can assure you Sony will never get a penny from me again because there is little reason outside greed they don't merge servers.

Genudine has become so frustrating with it's Indar importance that playing is almost like banging my head against a wall. I have been doing as much as I can to spread the game out but there is nothing I can do about the average player who says "well the NC and TR are on Indar, I might as well go there too," when I try to pull squads to try and defend what has become the uncontested chore capping of Esamir and Amerish. The average player in PS2 on my server are essentially sheep being herded in tank and air columns doing the same thing on the same continent everyday...and I am sure it is like that on many low pop servers.

Its unreal how much better my gaming experience would be if I could actually have a fight with my BR56 toon at Nott Amp Station or Mekala Tech Plant with more than just 30 versus 3 random defenders. Merge the low pop server, broaden the experience for ALL current players instead of weeding out the people who won't pay and won't be playing in a month and a half and I do not see how Sony could not use that as a platform to make this game into a cash cow for years to come.

you do know TOR is STILL one of the top populated MMOs out? says something when a game can lose over a million subs and still come out near the top in the industry... of course they would be dong a lot better if they hadn't listen to whining people at release and opened way to many servers or had done their mergers quicker... but even after all that the game isn't close to dead... that same scenario won't work here tho because PS2 didn't start of with anywhere near the numbers TOR did... PS2 by being such a nitche game isn't big enough to absorb a hit like that which is even further compounded by the fact that it's a straight PVP game the requires tons of players to work... on a low populated server in an MMORPG players can still play 90 percent of the content unhindered... here we straight up rely on there being other players otherwise there isn't anything to do because the players ARE the content...

honestly given how important having a lot of players in one spot is to this game I still wonder why they didn't go with a cloud type server setup (like say TSW) instead of a traditional one

This is the worst part of this game. If you don't play within a rather short timespan you shouldn't bother. The game is much less fun and rewarding if you play at other times - you'll spend way more time looking for fights than actually fighting.

Genudine Player as well here. I HATE Indarside 2, but that's the only place we can get a good fight(during prime-time). The servers need a merge. The initial cost should be offset by the reduction of player bleed-off. Its annoying that I havn't been on Amerish more than 10 times... and I'm BR 54.

Was going to write a longer post but since this one summed up my thoughts I'll just quote it in the hope that SOE actually reads it.

I agree with this and bump

I don't really know how we'd go about creating an "official" petition, do you have any suggestions? I would say the best way to get their attention would be to get this thread going and get input from a lot of people.

I don't know. While as a Disgusting Self-Entitled Jerk™ I will not be paying for this clearly Fair And Generous Gift™ of server tokens and will most likely stop playing if population issues continue, I think SOE may simply not be able to merge servers so soon. It could be an impossibility. Ever wonder why everyone seems to be so set in not merging their servers in other MMOs despite consequences?

Then there's the possibility of a server merge creating new pop issues or introducing queues where queues were unheard of. And of free server transfers creating an unprecedented amount of problems, though I kinda doubt it. In any case letting people do it for free is risking losing immediate money for nothing.

I guess there are three questions with answers that will tell us the future of the servers for the following months. Why would you move to a lower population server? Who is going to do it? Is SOE going to do anything about the low pop servers to make new players join?

This is ignoring the fact that mass migration to lower(and falling) pop servers could easily cause or worsen faction imbalances. And that depending on massive numbers of new players to populate/"build" servers at this point is not ideal for a variety of reasons.

There is also the possibility of the game not being full enough even with a login queue going on. Never actually experienced the big servers to know if there are fights on all continents everywhere there is a front or not.

^ This! Hell yes
Not enough people even consider looking at things from the dev's pov, or management's pov. They have hours and hours and hours of coding and fixes to go through already, not considering all the work it would take to merge the servers together while keeping balance. They have a full plate, get that gravy outta here

OP deserves a medal for writing one of the best posts on this forum since launch. *applause*
SOE will (hopefully) listen unless they want to kill their own game, due to players leaving out of anger and boredom.

The people who are writing code aren't the same people who are deciding how server populations should be managed. Do you think there are like 6 people working for this game doing everything or something?

All of the fixes on their plate are irrelevant if they ignore this issue. It's so much bigger than minor balance issues or bug fixes.

So Sunday night I played on genudine from roughly 9pm till 12pm. It was almost completely dead. During those 3 hours, I was roaming around looking for a fight, and yet my final kill tally was something like 14 kills 9 deaths. In 3 hours. I couldn't find anyone to shoot. I saw maybe 20 guys on the ground during this entire time, and maybe another 25 in the air. It was absolutely pathetic. I stopped playing.

The next night, I played on my alternate character on Connery, roughly 10pm-2am. There were big fights everywhere. Connery at 2am is more active than Genudine is during primetime. Connery at 10pm on a random Monday has more population than Genudine has at any time in weeks.

No one in their right mind who has a choice about it is going to remain on servers like Genudine. It's already well below the threshold needed to sustain a healthy server. When transfer day comes, and thousands of active players realize that and abandon it, it's going to become completely dead. There will be no reason to have a functioning Genudine server on Jan 31st. It will serve no purpose except to piss off and force the leaving of the game by people who for whatever reason are left behind there. You will have a mass die-off of the remaining players there.

Now as per the OP, I would massively prefer a merging, since you're essentially killing Genudine anyway, but at the very least I hope you give out one free transfer token to everyone. Barring that, at least keep the transfer costs to 500sc or so. Making it any higher than that just increases the number of people who are going to give up on your game. Genudine, and maybe others like it, are going to be completely dead either way. At which point you're finally going to have to admit that it needs to be merged and closed down, only this will be after thousands of people quit out of frustration.

See the second line in my sig about how failing to address these problems too late has killed countless MMOs.

I expect server mergers to occur when the additional continents are rolled out. Not before then. The character transfer token is a band-aid fix to get by until then.

The best part about the server tranfer token is that you have the choice of what server your player goes to. With the coming server mergers, I suspect we'll be left with two servers per region and you might not end up in the one you want.

I'm most afraid of what this will do to my outfit. We are the low pop on soltech (TR) and the reason we stay competitive are some good TR outfits. It's also what keeps the game fun. We might be facing 40 magriders and 100 vs as usual but with 40 guys doing the same thing we can always create a good fight somewhere, or rally the TR to fight the Zerg.

I like this style but I can already see others who would rather not feel like we are reinacting "300" every night. Once we get below a critical mass it will cease to be fun.

The way to go is free transfers with month long cooldowns(random value, but I think a month should be fairly okay-ish), with the option of paid transfers that either ignore cooldowns or timed tokens that let you pick servers whenever you want as long as they're active, assuming changing servers is a simple thing. But sadly I have no reason to believe this is what they're going to do, no compromises for people who will not pay.

And even if we get the ideal server transfer system we'd still have to deal with this other, possibly minor population issue

And if they release the paid server tokens and things go wrong the chances of anything that could fix the problem(lowering the value of the token) are really low. Not good.