Free character transfers available on select SWTOR servers

BioWare is now offering free character transfers to select servers in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Those who qualify will be transferred from selected origin servers to selected destination servers. Many have been complaining that Star Wars: The Old Republic's servers feel empty. This is likely due to BioWare opening up too many servers at launch to meet demands for the initial release of the game. Of course, as many of those players begin to leave following the free month, servers begin to get less crowded and demand for space goes down – so don't push the panic button yet.

This service, free of charge, will be offered as long as it is required to help "maintain population balance across the service and create a better overall gameplay experience."

To qualify for a free transfer you must have a character on one of the selected origin servers and meet the following requirements:

• A player’s account cannot be in a banned status.
• The character being transferred cannot be a guild master; they must either resign as master or demote themselves to a lower guild rank to be transferred. (Guild rankings and status will not be transferred.)

You can begin the character transfer process today by logging into your account. It will be made available gradually, in order to prevent potential server load issues, starting with a small number of the lowest population servers and adding more until all servers eligible for transfer are made available in the service. You may have to wait a short period before you can begin your character transfer. You can view the eligible servers here.

It can take up to three hours for the requested characters to be transferred at which time you will be unable to login to any of the characters being transferred, or any other character on that origin server.

EA and BioWare have been under the microscope as of late following reports and predictions that SWTOR is losing thousands of subscribers. Despite BioWare insisting that subscriptions are not dropping, recent reports of layoffs say otherwise. Meanwhile, some analysts are expected the number of subscriptions to decline by nearly 500,000 players by 2013.