Star Wars: The Old Republic servers are being merged to make players feel less lonely, who would’ve thought? After reports that the MMO was after all not the WoW-killer people wanted it to be, with plunging numbers earlier this year, there will be fewer servers available for the game.
BioWare had been testing with high population servers until 18 September when subscribers had the chance to transfer their characters for free before the switch. SWTOR had reported a drop in player population during peak hours. BioWare commented that that although subscriptions hadn’t dropped, but the number of people logging in had; seemingly a result of servers being poorly populated.
So in simple terms, servers are being merged to put together the scattered players across various servers – so that maybe they might feel like it’s worth logging in again. Even thought this might have some effect on the number of players logging in, would it be the solution to fixing the fact that the game hadn’t reached the success hoped for? I think not. BioWare however did start to make some significant changes to the game; making it a more well rounded MMO, adding necessary features like group finders.
That being said, I don’t believe that BioWare expects it to be the big solution and is only implementing it as one of the steps to getting the game where they want it to be. It might be too late though, the game has lost a significant amount of the gamers who were actually interested in it since its announcement, and so it’s either fixing it and inviting the sceptic gamers back or marketing once again to an unknown audience.
Last Updated: September 21, 2012
