Although Oceanic players got their very own Beta test a few week ago, they were never officially assigned an Oceanic server. This did surprise a lot of players located in the Oceanic region. Although the game isn't officially launched in countries in the Oceanic region, like Australia and New Zealand, thousands Australians pre-ordered from Amazon.
To protect themselves, to ensure they get to play with other people in the same time zones, a lot of large Oceanic guilds have banded together using SWTOR's guild association network, and as soon as servers were assigned to their guilds it became very clear that the majority of the PVE guilds were placed on the one server, The Harbinger. What happened then was that any PVE guild that had not been assigned to the Harbinger quickly moved there.
So now, us Aussies are on a server that is extremely crowded and at any given time there is a half an hour (plus) wait to log on. This morning the wait is close to an hour! There also seems to be a lot of other servers that are full.
My biggest concern is that it's still three days until the game officially comes out. There are still a lot of players who signed up for the pre-launch guild program that are not ingame yet. We're missing about 50% of our members and we know some of them pre-ordered way too late to get access before the 20th. When all these players finally do get to log in and try and join their guild, how will these servers, which are already full and over-populated cope?
Keep in mind that ingame it does not feel over-populated due to the phasing technology which spreads players out. The phasing technology takes a zone and splits it up into several instances. For example, you could have a thousand players on Tatooine but only see a few players around you. What the game does is to create Tatooine instances. I have seen up to ten instances in cities so far and you can swap from one Tatooine instance to the other through your map. This instance technology will automatically give you the option to move to the instance that your guild is in.
Server allocation and server queues are the make or break of any game launch and to be honest, due to the guild association and pre-launch options, it may backfire. If you weren't allocated to a server you would have a choice to choose a less-populated server. As it is now, regardless of population, if you join the game today or tomorrow, you'll be assigned to the server with your guild flag next to it, whether or not it's full already.
Could you go more in-depth about this Server Instances? How many people are on these Instances and is it worth having?
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