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SWTOR locks servers in preparation for merges
If step one was giving some players the opportunity to transfer servers for free and step two was incentivizing those moves, then step three in BioWare's plan to consolidate the community is closing the door on the source servers in preparation for an inevitable merge. The studio announced that as of today, several of Star Wars: The Old Republic servers have been locked. Locked servers are still playable, and inhabitants can create new toons; however, no new players can roll a character there. These source servers will eventually be merged with destination servers this summer. BioWare's move to merge SWTOR's numerous servers follows a post-launch drop in subscriber numbers. Players on source servers are encouraged to manually transfer to destination servers before the game does it for them. [Thanks to Paul for the tip!]
The Daily Grind: Have you ever let the queues win?
One of the worst MMO launches I ever sat through was Star Wars Galaxies' in 2003, I'm sad to admit. My guild was split over two servers from the start because Sony Online Entertainment had locked off our preferred server to prevent it from becoming overcrowded, so half of my friends were stranded and unable to create characters. A week later, the locks were still in place, and we grudgingly rerolled on a new server, losing our day-one characters, favorite names, and even a few members in the process. Years later, that second server was one of the first to dry up, and we spent cold hard cash moving our characters back to the original (and still heavily populated) server. It was a lesson hard-learned. Star Wars: The Old Republic has thus far avoided hard locks on servers, preferring to persuade players to move organically with long queues. So today we ask you this: Have you ever been swayed to leave your launch server by long queues or temporary character creation bans, or do you ride out the launch period and figure it'll resolve itself eventually? Have you ever given in and let launch-day locks or lines win? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
CoX Server Cap reminder
As Lighthouse announced on 6 February, NCsoft has made significant investment in the CoX servers to assist with the current concerns for Double XP weekend as well as for future events, but there's still the possibility that servers will reach loads that risk performance degradation. At such times, they may have to lock players out of specific servers until the load lessens. While this is an unpopular decision with players who want to use specific servers, NCsoft feels that it's a necessary step to take in order to ensure game play for all players on the server is not severely negatively impacted.Based on this concern, they have instituted a server cap, and when servers that have reached their maximum allowable capacity they will show as grayed out with a status of Full. Unfortunately, the server load seems to be hitting the West Coast servers particularly hard, as Freedom and Virtue were bouncing between yellow and red most of Friday afternoon and well into the night. Then again, as Lighthouse noted, "The Freedom server is accommodating more players than it, or any other City of Heroes server has, ever has before in recent history. In reviewing the last several years of log files I can't find where we've even been within 30% of the new number." That being said, if you have any issues with, concerns over, or questions about the server cap, please don't hesitate to visit the official forums.
