Star Wars: The Old Republic starting free server transfer

Those of you who started playing Star Wars The Old Republic and then continued to play it for a number of months will have, in all likelihood, have experienced the increasing issue of a dwindling server population. People flooded into the game when it was first released late last year, but since then it seems two thirds of those people have flooded back out, leaving many servers with less than 100 people on at any time. This is unacceptable in a game that consdiers itself an MMO.

The game’s upcoming patch, called Allies, aims to focus on the social aspects of the game and improve the experiences of people who enjoy playing with friends and strangers alike. While 1.3 isn’t actually out yet, Bioware have started a series of free character transfers across the entire game.

In a previous post I wrote my wish that Bioware would be smart about the transfer issue and not let people run riot, all flooding into the same few servers and making the problem worst. Well, thankfully, the people behind this game aren’t idiots and ‘smart about it’ is exactly what they have been.

Over the coming days and weeks, players on certain select ‘origin’ servers will be able to up and move their legacy accounts and character to another pre-selected server. The goal being to funnel active players from several dead servers into one more active one.

I’m glad they’ve done it this way, keeping control over the situation and not letting panicking player all rush to the same place. In the future they will allow players to move between servers freely, for a price, if they’re still not happy with where they are, but for the moment, they’re going to have make do.

I’m happy that this is being done now, before the release of 1.3, as it will get many players settled in new servers for the new content as well as eliminate the problem of moving everyone around when they all come back for the new content.

If you play the Old Republic on or off, and want to know if the process is affecting you right now then go here and find out.