State of the Community #1: From LAN Party RPG to MMO

Posted June 25, 2012 by Brandon (Ragorik) in Editorial

Prior to the server transfers SWTOR was like playing in an awkward LAN party with your guild mates a few times a week to take down some Operations… If you were lucky enough to have a guild.

Now this game is a full on MMORPG. In my personal experience, I have gone from taking several hours to find a flashpoint group and never finding one past 8 pm CST to finding a group at 1 am CST in less than 30 minutes. The fleet numbers have increased tenfold in most cases, and the queues for warzone matches have dropped from an hour to almost instant.

This got me thinking, I cannot be the only person who has experienced this phenomenon. This also cannot be the only opinion about the server transfers. That is when I came up with the State of the Community segment (SOC). This segment will be released within two weeks of every major patch or change in the game, for example: server transfers. I have found some very quality people within my server The Shadowlands who took time out of their play schedule to answer some questions for TOROcast.

The community on my old server Shadowhand consisted of a few nice people that were far and few between, and my guild. When I addressed this issue to Mirika she said;

“There was interaction between a couple of other guilds but that was really about it…. Several of my guild mates actually refereed to the server as a graveyard a few times.”

Most of the people I interviewed refereed to the population that was on their old servers as kind, helpful, and respectful. Most guilds kept to themselves on my old server. If you were not in one of the 4 to 6 guilds that were still running operations your progression was stagnant because they rarely PUG’d.

The population on origin servers ranged from 20 to 60 people on either fleet, with the exception of up to 100 on the Grand Master Zym server, reported Mirika. Finding a PvP match according to my research ranged from taking 30 minutes to over an hour, and putting together a flashpoint was near impossible pre-50 or without a guild. Lairdon stated;

“I gave up on PvP queues after about an hour wait, and I never PUG’d after I found a guild because it would take hours.”

One person from the destination server had different experiences with PvP and FP group forming. Nitharious reported;

“While PvP could take 30 minutes to an hour, flash points could take 5 to 15 minutes to set up, but that feels average to me.”

Helsinia had the same experience on the Dreshdae Cantina server that I referred to on mine;

“Most of the time you had to find a guild prepping to run something and see if they had a spot otherwise, you might not get a group at all.”

Now we finally can move past the doom and gloom of dying servers, and see the improvements that have been made by this game saving move! The results that have been reported are drastic. As I titled this article the game has gone from an awkward LAN party with random people knocking on your door to a full MMO. Lairdon refers to the community as;

“Thriving, and better than Barons chat!”

Kealla-shepard excitedly stated;

“Its big, bigger than any other community I’ve encountered, and it gives all of us the chance to meet new faces and help each other more often then ever before… It’s big, but stable.”

Remedy stated;

“There is 10 times more items on the GTN… About the only negatives are waiting in line for dailies, and the general chat has gone downhill… or maybe there is just more of it.”

On top of the community being better as a whole putting together flashpoints range from 5 to 10 minutes, PvP queues are practically instant, and there are actually people on planets to do heroic quests with.

Just out of curiosity I asked people what they were anticipating most about patch 1.3. Half of those I Interviewed were looking forward to Aug slots and legacy changes, and only one mentioned the group finder. The sample I took may have been very small, but it spanned over 5 servers. The biggest concern about 1.3 is the cost of the new legacy perks. Personally, as a Guardian tank, I am looking forward to the new changes concerning threat and mitigation. The Aug slots are going to allow me to have best in slot without having to waste a tone of time trying to crit on recipes, and the legacy changes are going to give me the ability to customize each of my alternate characters leveling experiences.

This has been a good month for the people who have waited this out. The servers might seem like a refugee camp at the moment, but I know it will get better with time and more people will call them home.

This has been Ragorik… That is all