Sorting through the SWTOR server transfer mess

Yesterday, Star Wars: The Old Republic began its second wave of server transfers. The process started normally without too much issue: Small, nearly empty servers were given the opportunity to transfer to larger, more-populated servers.

Then about noon EDT, many well-populated servers were given the opportunity to move. Communities on PvP servers like The Swiftsure were asked to go to The Bastion. According to TORStatus.net, The Swiftsure's population out-ranked The Bastion's by several points. This was not the only case of the confusion in the population. Lord Adraas, arguably the largest roleplay community in the US, was asked to move to an equally populated server The Ebon Hawk.

Taking into account some of the comments on the official forums and on the roleplay fan site SWTOR-RP, many players are confused as to what BioWare's ultimate goal might be with these server transfers, and if the players on the origin servers don't take this opportunity to transfer now, will they have opportunity to do it again in the future? Because no communication has come from BioWare regarding fate of the origin servers, some like Vlayue on the official forum believe that the server transfers are meant to "even out server populations not just tip the entire server over and pour it into another." However, a large majority have voiced their opinions by transferring their characters and guilds to the new server because they see it as BioWare's way of killing off the origin server's population.

Unfortunately, because of the PR speak surrounding the situation, even BioWare appears to be uncertain of what's happening. On the blog addressing the transfers specifically, the team writes (emphasis ours): "This character transfer service will be available as long as is required to help maintain population balance across the service and create a better overall gameplay experience." However, a few weeks ago, Lead Designer Daniel Erickson suggested that the team was looking to make massive servers and not keep the current server landscape. "We are coming up on a huge move to servers with massively higher population caps than we have today," he told PC Gamer.

Which is it: balance across the servers or massive servers? Hopefully, BioWare will clear up this unanswered question soon so that people on origin servers are not holding on to false hope.

[We originally marked The Swiftsure as a PvE community; it is in fact a PvP server, and we have fixed the post to reflect that, with thanks to tipster Dengar.]