Moved!

I have moved my char­ac­ters from Trask Ulgo to The Pro­gen­itor (Eurpean RP-PVE, Eng­lish). I was very pos­it­ively sur­prised how fast the move of ALL my char­ac­ters was done — the whole pro­cess was fin­ished by the Bioware team while I was still fid­dling around with the List of Doom.

Big. Fat. Kudos!

Now, all we can do is wait and see how things pan out. I am cur­rently optim­istic that things will work out well. Con­sol­id­at­ing serv­ers at this point of time seems to be a good thing, and face it, the naysay­ers (you know the ones… SWTOR IS DEEEAAAD! DOOOM! FREEE TO PLAAAY! *insert wail­ing and gnash­ing of teeth here*) would have piped up with their proph­es­ies of doom, no mat­ter what. Let them choke on them, is what I say.

I also had a look at other SWTOR blogs to see what their authors had to say about the char­ac­ter trans­fers:

Alice Wilkes at TORWARS wrote:

I’ve been through dir­ec­ted server trans­fers in other games, and I always enjoy them. Deser­ted areas are sud­denly full of people again, the trade net­work blos­soms, and new friends (and enemies) are made. It’s a par­tic­u­larly busy time for guilds, as recruit­ment increases and the more com­pet­it­ive guilds size each other up.

Shintar at Going Com­mando:

That said, I was still very unhappy with what I saw, as it seems that my fears in regards to trans­fers are about to come true: the cur­rent free trans­fers all offer to move char­ac­ters from low pop­u­la­tion realms to high pop­u­la­tion ones instead of the other way round. This means that Bioware is try­ing to con­sol­id­ate server pop­u­la­tions instead of bal­an­cing them. I don’t think that this is a bad idea per se, but I do think that try­ing to do so via free trans­fers is a bad move for a vari­ety of reasons.

Even with trans­fers being free, it’s inev­it­able that a lot of people won’t use them, whether that’s because they don’t even know that the fea­ture exists because they don’t fol­low the news, they are only mod­er­ately act­ive, or they like(d) their server to begin with. How­ever, many people will trans­fer, and remov­ing some of the most act­ive play­ers from an already low pop­u­la­tion realm is going to have dire con­sequences for those that remain. Server com­munity will frac­ture as famil­iar faces dis­ap­pear without notice. War­zones might stop pop­ping com­pletely. Guilds will crumble under the pres­sure of argu­ments about whether to trans­fer or not. New or return­ing play­ers will find a server that’s com­pletely devoid of life. Do you think that they will all bother to read up on trans­fers or just quit because “this game is clearly dead”?

Anexxia at Inquisitor’s Road­house wrote last week:

Well, at first blush, I’m bummed. You see, my ori­ginal char­ac­ter is marooned on a PvP server with all my cred­its. And I’ve determ­ined that I don’t actu­ally really dig PvP serv­ers though I am glad I tried one out. So I am cross­ing my fin­gers that she will, in the future, have the oppor­tun­ity to move else­where to join the rest of my char­ac­ters on a PvE or RP server.

Sigh. So basic­ally, the ini­tial wave of char­ac­ter trans­fers will not affect my play­time for the bet­ter. For now, I’ll have to keep aligned with my other serv­ers to make sure I am in the loop on where folks are mov­ing to. It will be nice to move with them to a server that has more oppor­tun­it­ies for end game con­tent com­ple­tion, but I am bummed I will not be able to reclaim Anexxia at this point. And I have to again say pub­licly that I am more than happy to pay to move her in the future!

Blog-Meta, The Old Republic blogosphere, servertransfers, superservers