I received an email from SOE. It seems they are doing very well! In fact, they say, “Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service, …we will close the following 12 Star Wars Galaxies servers:”
I can’t say people didn’t see it coming. Yivvits and Mr Bubble pondered what else could come of a free-character-transfer service which only allowed people to transfer from empty servers to high population servers.
As empty as the low-population servers are, there are those that will be sad to see them go. A lot of the player-created content in SWG is in the player cities. The characters can always still transfer off, but the real estate goes down with the server.
I’m amazed they even had 12 left. Feel sorry for people losing prime real estate.
Ack what utterly revolting marketingspeak.
As for SWG I resubbed a couple of months ago. It currently has 25 servers of which 12 are closing. I think it is just a reflection of the population drop in 2004-2005 that is finally being faced rather than a reflection of anything that’s happened recently.
It is still a busy vibrant game in many ways. I found it very hard to get back into though. My guild and friends were all level 90 and my old character was 63. I got him up to about 80 and got my crafter to 90 then I just drifted over to Eve.
It was very hard work levelling a combat character too low level to play with people. Especially in a game where we used to all play together before all this levels crap.
I would say 6 years and running is pretty successful.
Odd way to spin it but yeah, I don’t think 12 servers is at all bad. I’m actually impressed they have so many running :) I thought they were down to 3 or 4.
Population consolidation is probably best in the long run. I figure at this point anybody that’s still playing SWG isn’t going to leave any time soon.
Actually the SWTOR bomb will hit SWG’s population hard, depending how much of the gameplay elements that keep people in SWG (house decorating, ship decorating in particular) are in TOR.
Great success!