Quote Hi.



Incoming wall of text, sorry but I want to say this..



My name is Tom. I'm a New Zealander; living in Christchurch of all places, since the Earthquakes in 2010/2011 this game has been my go-to stress-relief zone, somewhere I can come and have fun and talk to friends and such and to get away from the disasters of the City I live in. I've played this game since APAC launch since a friend introduced it to me, and from then I was hooked. This was my first proper MMO (If you don't count Runescape.... lul) and it was a massive learning curve for me. My progression in the first few months consisted of 'Tanking, whats tanking? Heals? Wait... you mean if I don't spam shadowstrike I might be able to do more damage?'. I've been subscribed since the launch of the game and been active since the launch of the game. I've participated in all the events, done all the raids, played in competitive PvP and have been privileged enough to have played with probably the most tight-knit and close community in this game; Master Dar'Nala. Alongside that I've met some awesome people, developed friendships that'll last throughout any MMO as well as developing rivalries which Im sure will continue beyond just this game as well. Through this I have developed skill 10000000000x better than what I started with, I've gone from spamming grav round to learning every spec rotation and class I can get my hands on.

Basically; I have supported this game as much as I can since I was able to.



At launch the server population on Master Dar'Nala was good. I remember having queue times to log on, something like that was very new to me. I was invited to a guild called <Dare To Game> and played with them for a few months. Over the year of 2012 I noticed the population steadily getting lower and lower, it was harder to find groups while levelling and warzones were starting to become more stale and dry with less diversity in them and the same results every time. At this point the guild I was in died and the last few remaining were invited to <Legit> a group of of hardcore LOTRO raiders who scored world firsts and what-not back int he day, this is where I currently am now. Through the May to Late-August time of 2012 is what we can call the 'Midian Era'. This consisted of entering a warzone, seeing who you were playing against (In this case fully optimized WH in well organized premades of the servers best players) and then half the team going afk on a node/objective or simply leaving as they knew what was going to happen. This was the first real sign of something going bad. Warzones were stale and there was no fun at that point.



Shortly after was the release of Guild Wars 2. This saw a lot of the higher-tier guilds leave the game periodically to try a new fresh release, at this point pvp started looking up again and they slowly became far more balanced and more fun between the two factions, perviously the Emiper was far more dominant. This was then followed by the 'The-Elite' era, which was simply the same as the previous one, except now it was Republic players stomping pugs in full WH premades. Again pvp went stale and a fair amount of people stopped playing, including a whole guild that moved to The Bastion. Over that Christmas break the whole server was quiet, as any game would be. On Master Dar'Nala pvp came to a halt and anything but guild-organized raids were off the agenda, even then over 2 months the most people my guild had online was 6, normally it sat around 10-11 hardcore players. You could not play this game at that point on Master Dar'Nala. At this point the guild <The-Elite> (newly renamed <Not Entirely Stable> left the server and moved to US servers, along with <BOSS>, <The-Inquisition> and mupltiple other guilds. After the christmas break a lot of my guildies returned and we started getting stuck into TFB and doing at least 2 full clears of that a week with our main raid group and we poked our noses into EC NiM despite the massive effort for minimal rewards. Since then my guild has gone through two merges, one of which was failure, one of which was a great success, logging on to see 14+ people online has been amazing. There's been a full team speak all night long and constant action in-game. It also let us sport together a team to participate in the APAC Ranked Warzone Championship organized by two dedicated players on our server, Scorpio and Resk; who I must say despite being dug into by a few people have done an awesome job. Before this announcement about APAC servers being moved to the US my guild was looking forward to 2.0 and the gameplay it brought as well as the class changes and our ability to finally play the classes we liked in PvP instead of the ones we were forced to play due to their utility and power they brought to the table.



Earlier this year we saw the introduction of game update 1.5 and the cartel market. While this temporarily boosted numbers slightly, it was merely adding a small spike to the server population that would soon drop again to what I was normally at. This also saw the return of one of MDN's earliest guilds <Core>, a group of hardcore PvPers that I think would be one the best ranked teams in the game (If not THE best). They are currently dominating our RAW Championship.



Currently on this server as I type there are 10 people on the republic fleet and 68 on the republic side in it's entirety. On the imperial side there will be slighly more, but still under the 100 mark. Back in July last year there would have been a full fleet going at this point and multiple warzones as well as thriving levelling planets.



Now that you can understand the (very) rough history of Master Dar'Nala, I can get onto the issues at hand; APAC transfers, Communication, and the time to respond.



The first thing is communication. I know this cannot be put on Eric Musco's shoulders as he is only a recent addition, but this was the biggest downfall of the APAC servers. Most if not all the guilds that left the server left because they had no sparkle of an idea about what would happen to our population. We were left int he dark for almost a whole year about it and all we got was 'We know there is an issue, just wait 'x' amount of days and we'll get back to it', yet those days came and nothing happened, so people grew tired and left to a more stable and predictable server where their game time and apparent subscriber status wasrecognized with replies on the forums about their small issues as well as server merges and what-not. All this while APAC servers sat dwindling their thumbs. This leads me on to the second issue, the time it took to act on the problem. The thread made by Chippy in September 2012 has now had 340 pages, over 3300 replies and over 200,000 views and multiple Bioware Dev posts not giving any information at all. They've had over half a year to do anything, and they're only just TELLING us what they're going to do NOW. The population since that thread was started relative to the current population is massive. Back then you would get over 120 people on fleet at peak, currently a 'peak' is a double xp weekend when we get 50 people on fleet. If Bioware had acted when they needed to, the option to merge all 3 APAC servers into one would have been perfectly viable and would have made a thriving population where we could all play with good latency. But now? Many months late after no communication? No chance.



Now the reality of APAC merges. A lot of APAC guids went to seperate servers, I know 3 of the biggest of Master Dar'Nala's guilds all went to three seperate servers. So not only will they not get any benefit from the merge, they won't be able to get their characters OFF Master Dar'Nala for their new server. As far as competitive gameplay goes, all MDN's biggest guilds are Australian based, and a lot of those players are Western Australia players already playing on APAC servers with 100+ ping at best. Moving to US servers will boost that to 250-300+ ping which makes and competitive play in PvP impossible, it makes getting precise PvE coordination hard (Imagine Nightmare EC droids on Kephess...) and it makes over all combat sloppy and damn near impossibly due to animation lag and GCD lag and the difference between a player being 15m away and 4m away but not actually showing that diference on our clients. So basically us APAC players cannot play on the same level as US players due to our latency. We can play well, but not amazingly, and when there's a limit on our gameplay in terms of competitivness simply because of latency thats when people will leave.



When Bioware asked us what us APAC players wanted to do, our LAST option/resort was to move to a US server of our choice. Our first was to combine all 3 servers, even the majority of the RP guys were fine with that. But to ask us about our wishes and then totally disregard all input we had and our potential resolutions and just chuck them in the gutter? That's the fastest way to lose subscribers. The only logical reason I can see in this choice was EA making an entirely corporate decision to reduce costs for themselves and once again shaft their player base ( Like we haven't seen this before?). They asked what we wanted, we gave them the perfect solution, and they threw it on our faces. This merely reduces servicing costs for APAC servers in Australia and the support needed to keep them running. Bioware has made an amazing game, one that I'm sure could have been even better... If only it weren't owned by EA.



I played this game because I COULD play it. We had APAC servers and we had a good community. This solution is an easy out and not only ruins our gameplay and effort we have put it, but it also set s a precedence for future MMOs. To them it looks like APAC servers cannot work, but in reality its ALL on Bioware/EA for this failure.



100% Bioware.



I'll be seeing some of you in Elder Scrolls online.



Bye. Tom the Narwhal - <Toxic> Tom the Narwhal -

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