Many players from the Oceanic region have been concerned about server populations for a good amount of time. Today, Joveth Gonzalez, Global Online Community Manager posted in this thread on the official forums giving an update on the issue and starting to re-open the dialogue.
Why are we all so alone?
Posted by Joveth Gonzalez
Hi everyone,
I know it’s been a while since we’ve updated this thread, and I wanted to let you know that we haven’t forgotten about our Oceanic players. Now that we’re at a more stable point in time (post Free-to-Play transition and post holidays), we wanted to re-examine this issue. We’re going to be completely honest with you: there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution for anyone. We’ve seen many ideas from you folks such as merging all three servers into one, allowing for transfers to North America servers, and even not doing anything at all, but none of them seem to be an ideal solution for all. This is why we are now opening up this dialogue with you.
In this thread, please let us know what you think the best solution will be for your servers. I know there have been many suggestions already, but I would like to collect the most current ideas for us to consider. After that, our team will review and discuss what is feasible and what makes the most sense to do. Please remember to follow all forum rules and be respectful of each other’s ideas, even if you disagree with it.
Thank you all, and we look forward to your ideas.
Seems like a tough situation for both sides. What do our Oceanic TORWarriors think? Let us know below!
SWTOR Community Cantina Audio: Q&A Live With Musco, Hickman, And Schubert
Blow up the Oceanic servers and join the TORWars guild on the imp side of the shadowlands server!
/shamelessplug
LOL – great idea.
I don’t think there’ll be an ideal solution to this.
I think many have done like me and joined US servers – probably because we thought there are more players to.. well.. play with.
For me the timezone is really not the big issue, since I normally only play weekends, where I can stay up late.
Only thing I could see maybe working, would be to advertise BIG in the larger oceanic countries to attract more people.
Plaster us with TV commercials, posters in stores, on business walls, add toys in McDonalds boxes etc.
Maybe have little flyers in the Star Wars DVD movie boxes…
We love to buy those DVD’s
I have a few characters on Gav Daragon (the APAC RP server). I don’t see a good solution. One would think that US & EU servers would be too lag-prone for most people. It’s not a huge deal while leveling, but it seems to me that the lag would be enough to be would be a real handicap for the two whiniest segments of players: hardcore raiders and PvPers. Consolidating down to one APAC server risks horking off 2/3 of the APAC players.
It may be better to try to organically increase the populations on these servers. Maybe a big advertising campaign combined with a push toward cheap/free boxed copies of the current game-client (IIRC a lot of Aussies have pretty low bandwidth caps and just downloading the game can be a barrier), but I doubt EA would pony-up the coin for that.
I would recommend that Bioware avoid doing anything too drastic, too soon. It’s still summer down there and one would think that server populations would be at their lightest, but maybe I’m wrong on that. Given how hot it is right now, Aussies might not be spending as much time on the beach as usual.
1) Different maintenance times on differently located servers. I.E. don’t take the Oceanic servers down at 7pm on a Tuesday or Thursday night. Especially don’t take them down for emergency maintenance on a Friday night at 7pm.
2) Allow (free?) server transfers, so that all those Oceanic users who ordered the game prior to Oceanic release can move their characters to Oceanic servers rather than being stuck on US servers.
1) due to not regiolocking servers they have to bring them down at the same time. moving the maitenance time would bring them to prime time for european or us market.
Finally, we might be getting somewhere!
My ideal solution is merging our 3 Oceanic servers down to 1 or 2.
Well I rerolled on the shadowlands sever and join some guild
So a transfer for my 50 sith would be great !
I do feel for pvp and the ping issue
So I went over to put my thoughts on the “offical” site and…..
I cant Im free to play scum , my thoughts are not needed
I’ll repost here what I wrote on the official thread:
I haven’t read every post in this huge thread but what I’d like to see, in case it hasn’t been suggested yet, is for free (manual) transfers from US servers onto APAC servers to be offered again for a limited time (like Bioware offered when the APAC servers initially launched) – I know a lot of Oceanic players that either missed the original transfer window or didn’t want to transfer at the time for whatever reason (and so are still playing on US servers) that would LOVE another opportunity to move to the APAC servers.
They can offer that for 2/3/4 weeks to see if that helps to bolster the populations on the APAC servers – after that we can still look at server merges if populations aren’t to a comfortable level.
The only other solution that wouldn’t involve players losing their character names (which some have had since launch) is to market the game more in the Oceanic region in order to simply get more players playing the game on the APAC servers…
Move the servers to Singapore or Taiwan or any place where network is best for the majority of APAC players. I believe that one of the biggest factors that the Oceanic servers failed is that a lot of APAC players(mostly from South East Asia) thought they were going to experience the best connection on servers that were made for their geographical location, but instead, these players found out the connection was worst than when they were on NA servers save for Australia and NZ because BW/EA didn’t think the placement through enough. I’m from NZ and was ecstatic about it when it was announced and was implemented, as my connection definitely was better. But to my dismay, I found out that it was really shitty for my 2 brothers who was living in South East Asia, with whom I was more excited and wanted to play with. So both of us ended up staying on NA servers, which was better for them.
BW/EA basically f***ed it up when they made “Oceanic”(which was originally called Asia and Pacific if I’m not mistaken) servers intolerable for a lot players in that region.
I think the only option is a merger. The pop on the RP and PvP servers is very low, move them to Dalborra imo. I know this will result in name changes and I am not looking forward to that BUT I dont want to lose my 50ms ping and I am sure a lot of other people are the same. Having a 400ms connection when trying to interrupt a 1sec cast is not as much fun as you might think