If you think that Bioware "cutting servers" by improving their server tech like this is a bad thing, then you should think that Eve Online has been on its last legs for...um...well, since the first day CCP started operations, right?
Don't be wankers. You just like to make sensational headlines about games gamers hate.
Here's what you didn't report:
- SWTOR now has 9 EU servers, three each English, French, and German, of which one each are RP, PVP, and PVE rulesets.
- SWTOR now has three Asia/Pacific servers, one each RP, PVP, and PVE rulesets.
- SWTOR now has nine US servers, RP/PVP/PVE set on the West Coast time zone, and on the East Coast time zone there's RP/PVP/PVE/PVE and the lone RP-PVP server. Apparently there are more nerds on teh east coast, despite EA being a California company? Who knows.
But the point here is, the load on the mega servers is now balanced among these servers by server ruleset. On my server, the EU/English/RP server The Progenitor, we got a reasonable bump in population although honestly I think most of it happened with the prior consolidation.
- We got four extra character slots, and some other nice perks in prep for patch 1.4 when they add the Cathar race. If you had >12 characters on other servers that got consolidated, you get >12 characters forever, as long as you don't delete them. It's worth it just for the bank space for a lot of people I know who had alt sets for RP purposes on other servers.
My guild is already picking up some of the new folks in Void and Dark Void, our republic and empire twin guilds.
But, really, TE, could you have reported on any of that? Nooooooo. Because that would have been actually reporting the news about the game and the people who actually play it, and the business of that actual game, rather than the schadenfreude over the imminent demise of the damn game pandering to the people who are wishing it dead -- which is the fashion.
Who do you work for, Rupert Murdoch?
I bet you won't report on this either:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ShavaNerad/20120919/177911/The_countdown_to_Bioware_II_begins_today.php
...because you'd rather report how the boys leaving means the end of the game -- admittedly a more likely catalyst than the server consolidation. But you'd have to understand actual game business, not just be a knee-jerk fanboi hater to think about that one.
Give me a break.
It's pandering like this that is killing the game industry. The rabid fans just circle like a pool of piranha, buy a game, tear it to bloody tatters comparing self-involved notes, and then go to the next game. But at the same time, they want brilliant AAA next gen graphics and design that cost millions, in a hit driven industry, and they won't pay past buying the box, because they hold every title in contempt -- it's the fashion that the press encourages and whips up.
While a majority of gamers who don't participate in online forums would probably want to play the game and enjoy it, the money men see the bloody shreds, panic, see mass migrations, and shut things down. The more cautious introverted players have learned not even to buy a game for six months.
Well, the industry can't afford it forever. Good luck to you. I'm pretty much retired at this point, and no one is going to fire me for saying it, but the fans are killing the games because they would rather find fault, and the producers are killing the games because they will panic and pull out because they don't understand the business or the fans, and the devs kill the games because they think they are there to design games and don't have to learn the business and legal bits to educate the fans or the producers to create an environment that will actually allow them to give you games you will actually enjoy.
In a few years, there's going to be nothing but little dinky indy games on your mobiles, Zynga, EA, and the F2P Asian mills, and every one of them is going to be using neuromarketing to nickel and dime you to death. And all you will be doing is jumping one F2P game to the next paying to win to get to end game, carrying guilds with you, if you have money -- and grinding little commercially sponsored f2p games with friends in one place if you don't. It'll look a lot like Cory Doctorow's FTW. The art and story will be incidental if present. Something the marketing people will throw in as a competitive edge. Window dressing.
Emo idiots. And you will probably all dismiss me as an old fart with no sense of humor. But you remember this in a few years. Hell, you won't. You can't remember past the next "ooo shiny."
We're freaking doomed.
