Old Republic Address High Server Population

Stephen “Rockjaw” Reid, Community Manager for Star Wars: The Old Republic, has put out another official statement in both tweet and forums form.  This update focuses upon server and wait time.  The four concepts the SWTOR team is toying with are:

• Raising Server Caps
• Advising players not to create new characters on certain servers
• Possible Character Transfers (theory)
• Getting DCed from the server and NOT getting put back into the queue

All of those MAY help but we’ll see.  I’ve been reading many tweets today about fans raging about both server queues and DCing back into the queue once they got in.  That is beyond frustrating.

I’ve been enjoying SWTOR thus far, but I haven’t tried to play since the official release.  After reading this, I’ll boot it up as soon as I get home despite when I decide to start playing.

The official statement is below:

As many of you know, we're experiencing high load and corresponding queues on some servers. This is to be expected during launch, as a high number of people want to play the game, and for long stretches at a time.

We're monitoring all of our servers around the clock, and we're raising server population caps where required. However, to ensure our long-term goals of server stability and healthy populations, we do not want to raise population caps too rapidly. We want incoming players to populate lower population servers. At the same time, higher population servers will not be 'locked' because we want to allow people to join a server to play with their friends if they wish to.

With this in mind, we wanted to notify everyone of some consistently high population servers. These servers are closing in on their absolute population cap (the maximum amount of players who can be on the server at any given time) and will likely have a queue to enter even at off-peak play times.

We strongly advise you to not create new characters on these servers, unless you are prepared to queue to play.

US-based servers

The Harbinger – US West Coast – PvE
The Swiftsure – US West Coast – PvP

The Fatman – US East Coast – PvP

EU-based servers

Bloodworthy – EU English – PvP
Frostclaw – EU English – PvE
Legions of Lettow – EU English – PvP
The Red Eclipse – EU English – PvE
Tomb of Freedom Nadd – EU English – PvP

Darth Revan's Mask – EU German – PvP
Darth Traya – EU German – PvP
Jar'Kai Sword – EU German – PvP

Hrakert Rift – EU French – PvP

Many of you who are already playing on these servers are asking for solutions, and we understand your frustration. At this time we can only ask for your patience. Population caps are being gradually raised on these servers, but raising them too fast will create an influx of new players and perpetuate the problem. We do not expect the queues to alleviate on these servers for the foreseeable future. If you do not want to queue, you should consider playing on another server, many of which have very low or no queues.

Character transfer is a common request for these servers. The ability to transfer your characters is being worked on, but there is no ETA on when it will be available.

Finally, we are also aware of the issues some have experienced where they have been disconnected during a queue due to internet issues, and had to restart their queue once more. This is a high priority for our server team and we'll be deploying a fix as soon as possible.