The importance of a name

As you all have noticed over the last week, Bioware launched new Asia Pacific servers. This was bitter sweet for me; I wish the servers had been made live in the Asia Pacific area at the time of launch. Needless to say, Bioware made their decision before launch and stuck to it. After the first launch in the US and Europe, I busted my butt to ensure that I got my legacy name. I happened to miss out on one of my naming preferences due to the staggering launch technique they used and what annoyed me even more was that the name that I wanted was nabbed by a player that hasn't even logged in yet! It's a level 1 that has sat for the last two and a half months doing nothing. 

A lot of payers opted to reserve all eight names they could get and obviously the first players in had the pick of the crop. With the Asia Pacific launch, the servers came online and it was another free for all. I saved my three names that I wanted. One of them I used straight away and the other two I will be using when the transfers come around. 

It was funny to see the variety of names that appeared on the new avatars in the first hours of the Asia Pacific launch. We had Yoda, Mace Windu, The Emporer battling it out in chat with some of Australia's current politicians! It seems though, that all these names were short lived as most of them were forced to name change by Bioware. One odd request that affected one of our guild members was the forced name change of an avatar he had named Grave. The player received a notice when he tried to login and he was forced to rename his character. I am a bit concerned that Bioware employees may have gone a bit heavy-handed with the naming rules. It also might have been a case of the GM responsible not truly understanding the meaning of the name, or perhaps it means something totally different in other countries that we're not aware of. 

The second issue with naming is legacy names. Now a legacy name is even more important than your character's main name as it's something you use for all your characters. You don't get your legacy name until you have finished Act 1 so for me, the last week was a desperate race to the end of Act 1 to ensure I saved my name that I've had both on Beta and on the US server I started on.

The name I chose was Sunrider. Nomi Sunrider was a Jedi Knight even before the timeline of SWTOR. I've had a picture of her above my desk for about twenty years. It's artwork from a comic book, which really touched me and I've always used the Sunrider name in Star Wars gaming from when I was first given the opportunity in Star Wars Galaxies.

Nomi Sunrider

A friend and I helped each other through Act 1 over the weekend but he missed out on his legacy name of choice even though he had been using it on the other server. Short of taking medical stimulants to stay awake, I don't think we could have done it any faster!

How important is it to you to have the right name for your character/s? I've spoken to other players in game who specifically rolled on a server due to the fact that the name they wanted was available. With the implementation of a surname I don't see why Bioware can't have five Johns on the same server, all with different legacy names. This might make it more realistic and flexible for players who want to use the first name of their choice.

Australian Servers Go Live Tonight Feb 29

I hope to be one of the first to roll on Dalborra tonight and I'm busting to test out PvP with low ping times. As an Aussie myself I have never played an MMO with a ping under about 180 and most of the time it's about 250 to 300ms, so this will be amazing for us Aussies.

StephenReid posted:

Good morning, or to those of you on the other side of the world, good morning... for tomorrow.


This week we officially launch Star Wars: The Old Republic in several new territories, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.


Lots of more information on all aspects of the launch will be released tomorrow in an update to our official FAQ, but as we've heard requests for server names and timing, we thought we'd give you those details a little earlier.


Here's our official launch timing. All servers will be online simultaneously at approx 5:01AM CST (Austin time), but with timezones straddling a date:


New Zealand: 12:01am NZDT (March 1st)
Australia: 10:01pm EDT (February 29th)
Singapore: 7:01pm SGT (February 29th)
Hong Kong: 7:01pm HKT (February 29th)


We'll be launching with three initial servers dedicated to these territories. As previously mentioned, these servers are physically located in Australia:


Dalborra (PvE)
Master Dar'Nala (PvP)
Gav Daragon (RP PvE)


If demand requires we open additional servers, we have the hardware ready to go. Our Live Production team will be carefully monitoring server population and potential queues to ensure the best possible experience for players.


As mentioned many more details about the Oceanic launch will be forthcoming in tomorrow's FAQ update, so look out for it!

SWTOR Servers Busting at the Seams

Are you finding that your server is VERY HEAVY or FULL? Here's what I am experiencing ...

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.

SWTOR Official Server Types and PvP Rule Sets

Gold post from David Bass

There will be four different server types in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Here's how they work generally, and details on how we're dealing with roleplaying (RP) servers:

PvE (Player vs Environment) – Players will have to manually flag themselves if they wish to engage in PvP outside of designated Warzones and Open World PvP areas.

PvP (Player vs Player) – Players are automatically flagged for PvP outside of the designated 'safe' areas (such as Origin Worlds, Capital Worlds, and the Republic/Imperial Fleets; see below for more info).

RP-PvE – Players are encouraged to roleplay and act ‘in-character’ while playing on an RP-PvE server. Players must manually flag themselves if they wish to engage in PvP outside of designated Warzones and Open World PvP areas.

RP-PvP – Players are encouraged to roleplay and act ‘in-character’ while playing on an RP-PvP server. Players are automatically flagged for PvP outside of the designated 'safe' areas (such as Origin Worlds, Capital Worlds, and the Republic/Imperial Fleets; see below for more info).

The pre-launch Guild Headquarters currently allows you to select between three different server types for your guild: PvE, PvP, and RP, which will determine your server placement during Phase 3: Deployment. During Deployment, we will be placing all eligible guilds that select 'RP' onto RP-PvE servers by default. If a guild wishes to exist on an RP-PvP server, they will need to create their guild manually on a new server once they reach their Capital World (Dromund Kaas or Coruscant) and create their guild.

The decision to make RP-PvP servers an option for players was made recently, which is why the choice was not available in the Guild Headquarters to start with. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes, but we hope you are as excited as we are to be able to choose this option for your guild in the game at launch.

PvP server rulesets

We also wanted to expand on what the PvP server ruleset means in The Old Republic. The obvious overarching rule is that in general, if you see a player of the opposite faction, you may immediately engage them in combat.

The exception to this rule is sanctuaries, which are large areas where PvP may not take place, regardless of whether you are flagged or unflagged for PvP. Examples of this are the Origin Worlds (Tython, Ord Mantell, Hutta, and Korriban), the Capital Worlds for both sides (Dromund Kaas and Coruscant), and the Republic/Imperial Fleets.

Hopefully this post helps inform your decision as to which server type you'd like to play on at launch. If you haven’t already, create a guild on the Guild Headquarters so that you can get placed on a server before the game launches!


What will you or have you picked? I'm a PVE guy as I like to know I can steep away from the keyboard without getting ganked.. But I do love to PVP,