After the recent free weekend, EA and Bioware are hopefully celebrating a new influx of players, keeping their servers nice and teeming, and their coffers nice and filled. Still, with a troubled few months, plans are being set in motion to properly reinforce SWTOR’s core servers, while letting the unnecessary peripheral servers fall by the wayside. It sounds drastic, but it could be just the right move to keep the game hale and hearty.
As well as being a free weekend, Bioware also made character transfers free from certain ‘origin’ servers, incentivising it with a creepy/cute pet and 25 Black Hole Commendations for your trouble. The idea being if they can get their population all on busy, healthy servers rather than spread out among too many underpopulated servers, people will engage with one another more, and they’ll have the social platform that keeps people playing and having a good time.
What’s going to happen now is that they are going to stop people being able to create new characters on those ‘origin’ servers, to funnel people further to the ‘destination’ servers. It does make me wonder about the people left behind, who either refused to move or didn’t realise they could, the last survivors in an empty, NPC filled wasteland. Must be lonely.
Even if that is the case, the blog post states ‘Any remaining characters on selected origin servers will be automatically moved to designated destination servers.’, so as if by magic, one day suddenly the people will come back. It’s the happy ending no apocalypse film ever gets. Aww.