Star Wars: The Old Republic Launch

Today is the official launch of the new Star Wars MMO: The Old Republic. I'm not currently playing this game - though I am considering starting up - and I wanted to get a feel for how the launch was going. I did a quick Google search for 'SWTOR login queues' and found a 13 page thread on their forums. That's not so bad... I read it a bit and found that it was only 13 pages long because it was closed by a moderator. The moderator directed people to post in the official 'queue complaint' thread. (It's easier to ignore whiners when they're all in one spot!)

I went to check out the official thread and it turned out they'd actually hit the forum limit on posts in a thread and had to start up a second one. Which is currently up to 415 pages. And is growing faster than I can keep up. For the most part it seems to be pretty standard MMO-launch trolling. I paid for my free month and need access now... I'm already level XX and don't want to re-roll on another server... People are botting to stay connected so they don't get stuck back in the queue... I want more PVP-RP servers... Bioware is the devil... Bioware is awesome, noobs are the devil... Etc... I'm pretty sure I've gotten involved in this sort of thread for things in the past and it makes me weep for myself. And then I find a post that I'm sure is wrong and feel a need to make an account and reply! And then I weep some more...

From what I've been able to gather a lot of the problems are arising from the way Bioware chose to help out hardcore players. They let people sign up quite a while in advance to create guilds. These guilds would then be assigned a server during the early access period and the people who signed up would then get to create characters on those servers to play with their guilds. On the surface that sounds like a good idea. Having to arrange what server to make your characters on is a real pain. Even with FFXI when we played earlier this year it was tricky making sure everyone was on the same server. If I could have just filled out a web form and sent some email invites to my friends to guarantee they join the right server and automatically join a guild? That's pretty sweet!

The problem that's arisen is Bioware didn't properly divide up those guilds. They created a bunch of servers for the early access period and sent all the guilds to those servers. That makes sense, since the people likely to sign up early for a guild are also likely to be the people who pre-ordered well in advance. So you need the guilds set up during the early access period if you're going to get any benefit from the sign-ups at all. Then the game launched for real and they needed more servers. So they put up a bunch of new servers. From what I can gather those servers don't get any guilds on them because they were all assigned to the first wave of servers. This creates two big problems...

First of all anyone joining now who signed up for a guild is locked into one of the first servers. Bioware needed to make more servers because the existing ones were filling up but they're now funneling new players onto those servers so they can play with their guild. Clearly this is a good idea for those guilds but it means already full servers are getting filled up even fuller. This is causing huge queues for anyone on those servers.

Secondly all of the hardcore people are all on that subset of servers which I imagine is going to hurt the communities on the newly created servers. They're going to be populated by people with no existing ties to anyone who got early access to the game or who were keen enough to start a guild before the game launched. This isn't necessarily going to be a bad thing but having spent the last 4 years playing World of Warcraft on a low-pop backwater server I can see why people would want to avoid getting into that situation. It's harder to find enough people whose schedules sync up and who are on equivalent skill levels to enjoy doing endgame content together. It was really hard to find pvp teams, for example, and nearly impossible to find enough people to raid with who weren't either bad or mean.

Of course, as someone with no existing ties to anyone hardcore into SW:TOR and who has no real intention on getting tied up in endgame stuff this actually seems like a good deal for me. Many people who are trying to play now have to wait 3+ hours to log in to their servers while there are servers up with no queues at all. I was on the fence last week on if I wanted to give it a shot or not but I'm definitely going to do so now. Especially since the Old Man said he'd play too!

I don't think my laptop can handle the game so I'm going to have to finally get around to fixing my desktop. I'm also going to be in New Brunswick from the 22nd to the 27th and I imagine there will be board games to play! So I'm thinking I'll probably try to buy the parts I need on the 27th when I get back to Toronto and then start playing on some low population server on the 27th or 28th.