They are necessary… but badly handled…
Look, I’m the first one to acknowledge that the current situation was untenable for Bioware. Servers were dying, players were left stranded and things could have spiraled quickly out of control. Servers tranfers/mergers are a necessity if they want to provide a fun environment for the remaining players.
But yet again… Bioware is doing a kick ass job of messing things up. First of all, the transfers are not mandatory when they should be. Why? Because the servers that people are transferring from will be even more empty after the change. So for any player playing occasionally and not following the news actively, it’s entirely possible that they miss the mass exodus and log back in later to find out that everyone is gone. On top of that, by the time they log back in the free transfer period might actually be over…
Picture this, you log back in after a few weeks because you were out-of-town. You didn’t follow the game news and log back in to find out there’s no one left on your server. Then, you realize that in order to transfer you will have to pay money… how would you feel? I can tell you right away that some people feelings might involve simply quitting the game. The transfers need to be mandatory!
Not only that but they should actually do mergers. Right now, guilds and players on transferring servers have to deal with the hassle of a transfer. You have to transfer all your characters one by one, the guild bank has to emptied and the content transferred to characters. Then, you have to recreate the guild, ask a gm to give you back your bank tabs, transfer everything…. It’s a pain in the ass to manage.
So why not simply merge the servers and save everyone a lot of trouble? No problems with people left behind, no hassle with the transfers… saves everyone a lot of trouble right?
I honestly don’t get how Bioware operates. I remember communications at launch to be a mess, they failed to communicate properly with the issues on Illum, a lot of performance bugs are still not addressed and now this. Common Bioware, I really love your game and I see a lot of potential but why do you keep doing these things?! It’s like you want to fail sometime… stop antagonizing the remaining players you have please!
Think of it this way; they’re giving folks the opportunity to stay if they want. Not many will take it, but can you imagine the furor and uproar if they made them mandatory without giving those diehards a choice to stay?
Sometimes it seems like Bioware’s damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t. In my estimation, the server transfers couldn’t have been handled better … it was a smooth process that brought folks together.
Then we will have to agree to disagree
How dare you be civil about this! How dare you acknowledge that we can have two different opinions! WHAT TYPE OF BLOGGER ARE YOU. I will not stand for this!
Sorry.. that was an awful breach of etiquette. Let me retry.
You are wrong you dawdling daffodil!
Get out of my head!
But seriously, I agree completely on this one.
Glad that someone can verbalize so eloquently what I’ve been thinking , Ionomonkey.
Targeter, you’ve put your finger on the real question: what happens to those who remain? Have the die-hards been given a real choice, or are they going to find their servers quietly closed around their ears in six months time?
I prefer a low population server. I don’t like tripping over other players when I’m doing something. I hate to wait in queues simply to log into the game. My core group of friends allows me to do almost everything in the game, since we don’t pvp.
I certainly don’t want to be herded onto a giant super-realm with node ninja’s and trade trollers. Somehow, I don’t think they will keep the server open for just the 8 of us though.