During last Friday’s Community Q&A session, one very good question regarding what happens after servers transfers was asked:
“What will you be doing to keep guilds and server communities together once server transfer is implemented?”
Here is the answer that was received:
Joveth Gonzalez (Online Community Manager): “Once server transfers are implemented, we will re-evaluate our server group forums and make any changes that are necessary. We also have Community Coordinator Eric Musco as the liaison to guilds and he has a lot of good ideas on how to work with them. Finally, we’re going to begin to highlight server community events on the Community Blog section of our site to make sure that they get proper attention. Rest assured that guilds and server communities are part of our overall focus within the community team.”
Not a terrible answer, but both the question and its answer avoided one of the largest questions on many SWTOR players’ minds right now regarding the upcoming server transfers: What if server transfers aren’t enough?
The obvious unsaid answer here is generally server merges. A few players expressed their opinions about BioWare’s decision to not include merges right away. Here’s part of one of them:
“I honestly can not believe how the question was dodged and how little Bioware is showing it cares about guilds with this planned player transfer mess.I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.When player transfers are allowed people are gonna quit guilds and just transfer to more populated servers and either start new guilds or join a guild there. This will leave many guilds left sitting on dead servers to die out.”
The full community response thread for this Q&A can be found here.
It may have made more sense for BioWare to prepare both transfers and merges at the same time, but one interesting point about providing players with transfers, and only transfers, is the fact that once the transfers take place, the ideal servers to close off will naturally show themselves. This allows BioWare to quietly close them with as little rebuttal as possible. Everything could work out well in this manner.
Is that the correct way of going about fixing SWTOR’s population issues, however? We’ll have to see.