14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the initial impact of Star Wars: The Old Republic, from BioWare and Electronic Arts, has been more successful than the two companies originally envisioned, with a number of game servers now approaching their player population cap.
Stephen Reid, who is the senior online community manager at BioWare, has stated on the official forums, “As many of you know, we're experiencing high load and corresponding queues on some servers. 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.”
The BioWare executive says that the team working on the MMO is monitoring all the servers and making sure that population caps are raised where that’s a possibility but strongly encourages newcomers to orient themselves towards servers with lower populations in order to make sure that the game is stable and balanced in the long run.
He added, “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.”
The list includes The Harbinger, The Swiftsure and The Fatman in the United States and Bloodworthy, Frostclaw, Legions of Lettow, The Red Eclipse, Tomb of Freedom Nadd, Darth Revan's Mask, Darth Traya, Jar'Kai Sword, Hrakert Rift in Europe.
BioWare has not said how long the queue problem might continue plaguing those on high population servers.
The developers are working on a feature to allow for characters to be transferred but this mechanics also currently lacks an estimated time of arrival.
The next few days will however see a fix for the disconnects that happen when queuing for too long.