Photo-Receptor Focus on: Let the Games Begin – Again!
By Maer
Finally server mergers, excuse me character transfers, are here and oh, what a relief that is! The dust is starting to settle and I’ve had a chance to snatch more than a few hours’ sleep. Most of our guild members have found their way to our new server. Our bank tabs have been restored and all of our little mule characters have been emptied. Already I’m seeing how this move is revitalizing the game for a lot of us.
More rejoicing after the jump…
The biggest hallelujah came when we realized that the magic number of almost 300 players was just in one instance! There was yet another instance with another well over 100 players. On fleet! After seeing less than thirty players on fleet for so long, the sheer numbers were intoxicating. Lag on fleet was viewed as a good thing. We were no longer alone in the Star Wars universe and it felt good.
As I predicted, the move was exhausting for our officers. Getting everyone’s characters invited and making notes on our rosters, both in-game and out, is still an ongoing process. But most of our members have made the move. Also as expected, there were quite a few name changes. However, many have embraced the use of apostrophes, hyphens and non-English letters.
The best part of being on a heavily populated server again is the return of that community feeling. Refugees, as we were called, were greeted warmly and welcomed with open arms. The celebrating continued as players met up with others from their own servers, happy that friends had not been left behind. I imagine that the origin servers we left are mere ghost towns now.
In keeping with our renewed sense of community, we noted that our new server’s presence on Facebook consisted only of a page that hadn’t been used since February. That was quickly remedied and we now have an actual group for our server. (Thank you, Carla.) It did my heart good this morning to see server events already being posted and planned.
There are quite a few other large guilds ready and willing to participate in the kinds of events that can help keep a new game alive after the honeymoon period has passed. I’m looking forward to joining in as either a participant or spectator to the various things being discussed.
As to the process itself, one of the hardest parts was what felt like endless waiting to hear where we were going. We were pretty convinced that we would not be a destination server. Not with our numbers. So, our officers cleared off their characters’ GTN items and emptied their mail the first day of server transfers, in preparation for the move.
We didn’t learn our fate until Day Three. Many of us were ecstatic to find that we were going to the same server as the Republic chapter of our guild. However, there were some members who had been playing characters on that server and they had to choose which ones they would keep. That was hard for some and I sympathized at having to delete characters they’d spent so much time leveling. (More than eight character slots, anyone?)
One of the best surprises was how painless the actual transfer process was. Bioware did an awesome job of making it easy, user-friendly and lightning fast. My characters took about ten seconds after I clicked the button. I spent more time making sure I had the right character and that she was ready to go than I did on anything else in that process.
Thank you, Bioware, for the hard work and care that went into making this process a smooth one. While it wasn’t my first choice for a solution, the important thing is that we now have other people to play with. I’m even almost caught up on my sleep and it hasn’t even been a week, yet.
So far, I’m enjoying the new server even more than expected. I’m leveling my Sith Marauder and having fun with her storyline. My raiding continues on my Sith Sorc. I even plan to play some Republic characters, as I hear there are a couple of storylines over there that are reallly cool.
Overall, I’m a happy camper. And looking forward to more fun times with Star Wars: The Old Republic.
That’s my two credits. What’s yours?
Ready… Set… Discuss…
so love having population again!!
I don’t have much to say other than nothing has changed there are just more pugs. I for one choose not to run with people that are not in the guild I am in and in mumble. The reason being is that it is more fun to play with Guildies and it its also imperative to have communication during flash points and Raids. I also don’t think the lag on fleet is worth having more people I will never group with any way. Lastly SWTOR makes it very difficult to make up events to have fun with no real social aspects. There will probably be more people to sign up and come to events in this early transfer but that will die down before 1.3. The true test will be 1.3. If for some reason stuff that are horrible ideas in refrence to the augments and kits remain the way it is on the test server you will see many people leave yet again. Also what else is going to be broke day 1 of the patch how long if ever before the fix them. Again this to me was not a big deal (transfers) 1.3 will have to be solid gold and not just shiny.
I’m loving the Xfers also! Went from max 30 people on fleet on Vornskr to ~250 per instance on The Harbinger.
The only hiccup I ran into was accidentally renaming the wrong character with a name I’d saved on the new server, forcing me to decide between deleting that character so the correct one could have the name, or choosing a much less fitting name for the second character. I ended up deleting the wrongly named one in favor of keeping the correct name. It was certainly not BW’s fault, so I’m not worried about it except for the loss of time on the character I had to delete.