SWTOR: BioWare warns against creating characters on high population servers

BioWare has warned Star Wars: The Old Republic players against creating characters on high population servers – unless you’re prepared to queue to play.

Some SWTOR servers are reaching their absolute population cap, senior online community manager Stephen Reid wrote on the SWTOR forum.

Players have reported waits of up to two hours to play the game. This, Reid said, is to be expected, and will continue on some servers.

“As many of you know, we’re experiencing high load and corresponding queues on some servers,” Reid said.

“This is to be expected during launch, as a high number of people want to play the game, and for long stretches at a time.

“We’re monitoring all of our servers around the clock, and we’re raising server population caps where required. However, to ensure our long-term goals of server stability and healthy populations, we do not want to raise population caps too rapidly. We want incoming players to populate lower population servers. At the same time, higher population servers will not be ‘locked’ because we want to allow people to join a server to play with their friends if they wish to.

“With this in mind, we wanted to notify everyone of some consistently high population servers. These servers are closing in on their absolute population cap (the maximum amount of players who can be on the server at any given time) and will likely have a queue to enter even at off-peak play times.

“We strongly advise you to not create new characters on these servers, unless you are prepared to queue to play.”

Reid published the servers that are reaching their population cap. They are reproduced below.

US-based servers:

• The Harbinger – US West Coast – PvE
• The Swiftsure – US West Coast – PvP
• The Fatman – US East Coast – PvP

EU-based servers:

• Bloodworthy – EU English – PvP
• Frostclaw – EU English – PvE
• Legions of Lettow – EU English – PvP
• The Red Eclipse – EU English – PvE
• Tomb of Freedom Nadd – EU English – PvP
• Darth Revan’s Mask – EU German – PvP
• Darth Traya – EU German – PvP
• Jar’Kai Sword – EU German – PvP
• Hrakert Rift – EU French – PvP

“Many of you who are already playing on these servers are asking for solutions, and we understand your frustration,” Reid continued.

“At this time we can only ask for your patience. Population caps are being gradually raised on these servers, but raising them too fast will create an influx of new players and perpetuate the problem. We do not expect the queues to alleviate on these servers for the foreseeable future. If you do not want to queue, you should consider playing on another server, many of which have very low or no queues.

“Character transfer is a common request for these servers. The ability to transfer your characters is being worked on, but there is no ETA on when it will be available.

“Finally, we are also aware of the issues some have experienced where they have been disconnected during a queue due to internet issues, and had to restart their queue once more. This is a high priority for our server team and we’ll be deploying a fix as soon as possible.”