Bugged for a Decade

I have a low-level trooper on Satele Shan that I created ages and ages ago - I don't remember when it was exactly, but it must've been at least close to a decade ago. It was before you chose an advanced class at level one, and looking at my achievements for Ord Mantell it might've even been before the achievement system was introduced with Rise of the Hutt Cartel.

I originally created this character to say hi to Redbeard on whatever server he was playing on at the time and which later got merged into something else. I also remember that I only got to level seven because I ran into some sort of bug that prevented me from progressing - which didn't bother me too much at the time because it was just a random alt and I figured I'd just come back to it at a later date, by which time the bug would hopefully have been fixed.

Only... that never happened. I made other alts on Satele Shan, but for some reason I remained reluctant to go back to this one. I remembered making a lot of dark side decisions during those early missions and felt kind of bad about that in retrospect. So she just sat there, for years and years.

However, this week one of the weekly seasons objectives was to do fifteen missions on a trooper, so I thought I might as well use that as an opportunity to dust off this particular alt on Satele Shan. I logged in, cleared out a decade worth of subscriber reward emails and ran around a bit to pick up some exploration missions. Then I talked to a twi'lek NPC just outside Fort Garnik for my class story. When the conversation finished, my personal holocom popped up and the mission instructions changed to tell me to take the call. So I clicked on the holocom and... nothing happened, except a short voice line from Aric Jorgan telling me to get a move on already. I could get that to repeat by clicking again, but no conversation would actually start. In fact, I could not move at all.

And in that moment I remembered that it was this exact bug on which I had gotten stuck last time - it was still there a decade later! I did a quick Google search to find whether other people had any experience with this bug in "The Ambush" and whether there was some sort of workaround, but all I found was someone complaining on the forums back in 2015 that this bug still wasn't fixed even though it had originally been reported in 2012. I've got bad news for you, buddy...

I tried the usual standard procedures to deal with that kind of thing: relogging, resetting the quest, restarting my entire game... and while those allowed my character to move again, I could not get past that bugged holocall. Eventually I submitted a customer support ticket describing the situation and asking whether they could move me past that step of the quest somehow. And to their credit, they did! I got a response within less than 24 hours that the matter had been handled, and I found that my trooper was now level eight and on the next step of the quest, meaning I could finally continue.

I was just kind of surprised that such a game-breaking bug was still around after more than a decade, and that there was so little documentation about it. I can only guess that it's pretty rare and triggered by an obscure set of circumstances, seeing how I've taken many troopers through Ord Mantell myself without ever running into the issue. Fortunately it wasn't a big deal for me since the character was just one of a million alts and customer service responded within a reasonable time frame. I'm just a little worried whether she's still bugged in some other way as I noticed that while running around and questing I kept getting constant "out of range" error message pop-ups without doing anything...

Farewell to the Customer Service Forum

I was just wondering which of my drafts to flesh out into a proper post tonight, when I found out about some breaking news via Massively: Bioware is shutting down SWTOR's customer service forum in a week! Instead people will be directed to a generic EA help page in the future.

Reduced customer support? Does that mean more staff lay-offs? And that during a time when the game should be growing and getting hyped up... dooooom!

Well, not quite, though I'm sure that a lot of casual readers will interpret it that way, because people love to see bad news everywhere. As a SWTOR player since launch however, I can't help but take a different view.

Fact is, the name "customer service forum" has been a misnomer pretty much since launch, because 99% of the time no actual customer service took place in any of the threads there. Personally I suspect that Bioware may well have had plans for this forum to serve as a genuine customer service channel once upon a time, but when launch came with its two million players and oodles of bugs, they were clearly overwhelmed by the response. Given limited resources it must have made sense to focus on the more "urgent" channels such as phone support and the in-game ticket system, while letting the forums fall by the wayside. While the launch hype eventually died down, customer services suffered further cuts instead of receiving increased support, so they probably never had the manpower to actually revive the idea of providing proper help on the forums.

What the customer services forum has been for the last four years is an online support group for players who had technical trouble with the game. Whenever I had issues launching the game or logging in, my first instinct was to go to the customer services forum and check if anyone else was having problems, because if they were, there was bound to be a thread about it. When it came to certain gameplay issues, people were sometimes even able to offer useful advice: Back in 2012 I had issues with my game crashing all the time after a certain patch, and it was the customer service forum where I eventually found my solution, buried on page 55 of an even longer thread. I still don't know if Bioware ever bothered to apply an official fix for that problem.

So, what does this mean for SWTOR players? Well, we're certainly not losing any official customer support, because the forums weren't providing it in the first place. I'm confident that nobody at Bioware lost their job over this, because most of the time nobody responded to all the issues that people posted about anyway. I have no idea how good those official EA help pages are - EA's customer support doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation - but even bad customer support can't be any worse than not getting any at all. Dare I say that it might even be an improvement?

I'm not sure how well people will take to it, because I'm sure I'm not the only one who happily plays Bioware games while still avoiding their "evil overlord" EA whenever possible. To me as an MMO player it also won't feel nearly as natural to go to an EA page as it is to simply go to my game's official forums when I have a problem. (Even if I don't expect to receive support there, talking to other players about it can still be valuable.) I can easily see threads about various tech issues or "Is the server down?" type questions making an appearance in places like the general discussion forum in the future. If that happens, will Bioware be hardline enough to keep closing those threads down or will discussions like this simply continue in other sub-forums? We shall see.

The only potential downside I see is that a complete deletion of the old forum would result in the loss of a lot of accumulated knowledge and user-created fixes for a variety of problems. So I second the suggestion that they should be allowed to remain on the site as a read-only archive, at least for now.

The Curious Case of SWTOR's Gold Sellers

In the comments of one of my recent posts, a commenter went a little off topic and brought up the subject of gold sellers. (I suppose that, strictly speaking, we should refer to them as "credit sellers" in this case, considering that gold isn't used as a currency in game, but gold seller is just such a well-established term... I'm sure everyone knows what we're talking about.) This is actually a subject that I've been meaning to talk about for ages, so this is as good an opportunity as any.

I always thought that the most interesting thing about gold sellers in SWTOR was that, at launch, they were practically non-existent. People didn't really talk about this much back then, I suppose because we were busy enough talking about which parts of the game we liked and which ones we didn't - why worry about the absence of minor nuisances we knew from other MMOs? Maybe we also thought that the technology had simply become advanced enough that gold sellers had finally been defeated for good. All I know is that it took several weeks (maybe even months, I'm not entirely sure) until I saw my first advert to buy credits. It wasn't in chat either, but someone had managed to sneak an in-game mail through the filters and was encouraging me to buy credits for real money that way. It was a memorable moment precisely because it made me realise that actually, until then, I hadn't even seen a single gold seller advertising anywhere. That was two years ago now.

It didn't really strike me just how remarkable that was until I followed the news surrounding the launches of ESO and Wildstar this year, both of which were apparently absolutely inundated with gold seller spam and hacking/botting issues (caused by gold sellers needing wares to sell). So clearly the technology isn't there yet, generally speaking. Bioware just happened to have some secret anti-gold seller sauce. Too bad they got little credit for it.

What's really sad though is that said secret sauce has started to fail in recent months. I don't look at general chat often enough to be able to say whether any gold sellers manage to spam it, and I'm certainly not being accosted in whispers or in-game mails... however, at pretty much any time of day, there's a character standing near the GTN who advertises a gold-selling website in both /say and /yell.

I've blanked out the URL in this screenshot, but most people have probably seen the site advertised at some point or another. It's quite annoying, and the sad thing is that Bioware doesn't seem to be very responsive when it comes to reports. I can right-click "report spam" all I want - the next day the exact same character is still standing there doing his thing. And by the time they finally remove him, the gold selling company has already run the next alt to the fleet. It's not like I expect an instant response (I work in customer service myself, I know how it is), but you'd think that silencing these guys would be a very straightforward task that doesn't require much investigation before you can at least mute the character to shut down his shenanigans. I suppose it doesn't help that the game doesn't use the placebo you commonly see in other MMOs, where reporting someone for spam automatically adds them to your ignore list as well, so even if customer service is slow to react, at least you don't have to see any more of the same spam.

I wonder if the inventor of the anti-gold selling spam secret sauce no longer works at Bioware?

2.8 - Broken Servers

Even with 2.8 being a much lighter patch than originally intended, I was looking forward to trying out and writing about its new features. What I didn't expect, especially with the patch delivering much less content than planned, was for the game to break down and become more or less unplayable for a lot of people (including me) immediately after patch deployment.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm usually pretty easygoing about this kind of stuff. I know that unexpected things happen... just acknowledge that there's a problem and get to fixing it. I love the song "Happy Patch Day" by Greyfoo - the random issues he sings about are certainly a good illustration of the kind of problems that can occur after a bad patch, even if it's been a while since I actually experienced one that bad myself. The point is, I do remember what it's like, and even if the refrain of the song rings very true for me right now ("when nothing's working, all I wanna do is play"), I can generally look at these things with a sense of humour.

On Tuesday I didn't even bother to log in, after guildies immediately warned me about just how broken the game was: subscribers being flagged as free-to-play, people continually getting kicked back out to the character selection screen, group invites having a five minute delay, warzones starting with a total of three people (one on one team, two on the other)... the list was endless. I figured that, based on previous experience, this sounded like a case of "server dying" more than a buggy patch and decided to just stay away from the game completely that evening, as these kinds of things usually result in a bit of a rollback once they restart the server.

The problem is: Bioware didn't restart the server. They barely even acknowledged that there's a problem at all! There's been a note that they are investigating an issue with area transitions and might get around to fixing it in a few days. Um, you realise that there are a lot more problems than "area transitions" and that your game is pretty much unplayable right now, yes? At least for people on The Red Eclipse...

I logged in early on Wednesday and immediately noticed that there was a considerable delay on me updating the guild message of the day and it actually appearing in chat. A couple of guildies were online however and claimed to be able to do group content normally. I queued for a GSF match and that seemed to go okay. When I tried to access the guild bank, I was unable to - as in, I clicked on it and no window popped up; nothing happened at all. I gave it some time in case there was simply a delay on that too, but it just didn't work at all. I went to Nar Shaddaa to have a brief look at the casino thing, and got stuck on the "ship flying towards the planet" screen for a good minute or so before it switched to the normal loading screen. When I hit my quick travel to ship to leave after having inspected the casino, nothing happened. Everything around me froze and I soon ran into invisible walls if I tried to move, so I hit my quick travel again as it hadn't gone on cooldown. I tried to fleet pass. Nope. After a few minutes of being stuck in limbo I suddenly got teleported back to my ship after all. I logged out again, deciding that the game still wasn't playable enough.

In the evening, some of my guildies tried to raid, but from the sounds of it the server was back to being as bad as on Tuesday evening and they didn't get much done.

This morning (two days after the patch) I logged in to check on a few things and they seemed... better. I was able to access the guild bank and everything seemed to be as responsive as it should be. However, people in general chat were saying that the game was only playable in the mornings and that it would likely all go to hell again in the evening. Again, this sounds like more of a server issue to me than a universal patch problem, especially as people on other servers are reportedly able to play as normal.

More than anything, I wish that Bioware would communicate about this issue. I know others might disagree, but usually they really aren't that bad at this. I've seen my server go wonky a few times since I started playing, and their usual reaction is to acknowledge that there's an issue, whether it's on the official forums or on Twitter, then take the server down for a bit and fix it. This time, they haven't acknowledged anything but the "area transitions" and done nothing.

More than anything, I just hate not knowing what's going on. If I log on now and the game seems to be working, how can I trust it not to suddenly go all buggy on me again at a crucial moment? I don't believe in bugs miraculously fixing themselves, and Bioware themselves apparently haven't done anything (yet). I just want to check out the new patch content in peace. This sucks.

Minor Out-of-Game Systems Rant

I briefly thought about titling this post "Customer Service Rant", but then I realised that this would be doing an injustice to all the times Bioware customer service was perfectly helpful with issues that I've had. This isn't really about the customer service reps anyway, more about two out-of-game systems that have annoyed me as of late.

First off, you may or may not have noticed that I added my referral link to the sidebar a little while ago. It's no big deal; I just saw other sites doing it and figured that I might as well. People that use it get some goodies, I get some goodies - it's a win-win, right?

The other week a friend e-mailed me to say that he had used my link to give the game another go. He had forgot his original account information, so he just signed up through the link again, made a new account, bought several months of game time... and neither of us got anything. Scouring the forums for information on what had gone wrong, I found out that I had missed an important line of small print that says that referrals only count if the referred person ticks the "please send me promotional e-mails" box when they sign up. D'oh! I can't decide what's worse: that this is a requirement to make a referral to begin with, or that they've hidden this requirement in the small print so that it's easy to miss. I mean, most people probably wouldn't mind ticking that box at account creation in order for the referral to go through, after all you can always untick it in your preferences later if the e-mails annoy you. But for that, you actually have to know about that requirement...

Oh, and forget about trying to ask customer service for help afterwards, apparently they have no way of tracking referrals if you don't accept those promotional e-mails at signup. Clicking that referral link and confirming that you want to be referred by an existing player is clearly just for show. /facepalm

The funny thing is, the other day another friend of mine used the link and his referral did go through. so now the referral page on my account management has updated to show that I've earned the first referral reward, the Kurtob Alliance speeder. Except that I already earned that one from referring a friend one and a half years ago, under the old referral system, and it has been landing in my mailbox on every character I've created since then. But clearly Bioware has no way of verifying that either. /eyeroll

It's not a big deal for me as I'm not exactly dying to get any of the referral rewards; it just strikes me as a very badly thought out system.

The other thing that has bugged me has been Bioware's billing. I had to change to a new credit card recently and was able to enter it into their system just fine, but when my sub ran out today and I tried to re-subscribe I kept being given an error message: "An error has occurred while trying to process your request. Please, try again later." Where had I seen that before? Oh right, I remember having the same issue at launch - Tobold even blogged about it back then. I can't believe that it's two and a half years later and they are still giving out the same completely unhelpful error message. I get that there can be problems with these things, but is it that hard to actually let me know what's wrong so that I can fix it? Again I tried Google to see whether anyone else with the same problem had made any useful discoveries, but all I found were reports of how phoning customer service about this issue would only lead to them blaming your bank - even if you had already tried three different cards from three different banks and they all assured you that they weren't blocking anything.

In the end I settled for borrowing someone else's card... the same thing I had to do back at launch. I love the game and am clearly willing to jump through all kinds of hoops to be able to play it the way I want, but you'd think that Bioware would be interested in making it a bit easier for people to give them money...

Bug Spray, Please!

Last week I actually had a good customer service experience! I just think that's worth mentioning since we're always happy to moan about bad customer service; the good times deserve to be called out as well.

Basically what happened was that I couldn't log into the game because it kept asking me for a one-time password that I'd never received (and I'd never had problems with getting them before), and yes, I did give it plenty of time, about one and a half hours in fact. In the end I decided to call their UK customer service number, got put through to someone right away, explained my problem and it was all resolved within minutes. Apparently they were aware that there were some issues with one-time passwords, they were working on it, and in the meantime the CSR just gave me one over the phone so that I could log in right then and there. Oh and by the way, would I like to get a security key to avoid any of this hassle in the future? I did give in and finally ordered one after that. I've wanted one for a while actually, but I don't have a smartphone and the physical ones were unavailable in Europe for the better part of a year and only recently came back in stock. Better late than never I guess.

Earlier this week I had a brief moment of panic when I looked at my character selection screen and my beautiful little Cathar with her golden fur was suddenly... very pale.

Waaah, what happened to me?

At first I thought that her fur colour must've been changed to a different setting or something, but after doing some reading up on the forums I found a comment from Bioware stating that the Cathar fur colour number one was bugged and that they were working on fixing it with the next small patch. Phew.

The one issue I've had recently to which I haven't found a good solution is my trooper's crowd control not always working. The first couple of times I thought that it was just a fluke or that somebody must've broken it early, but it's happening pretty much every other op now and I can see quite clearly that nobody else is interfering. Concussive Round just fires, the visual appears to hit the target, but nothing happens to them. Nothing. The combat log says so too. Grrr.

I made a post about it on the Commando forum to see whether other people had the same issue, but the replies have been a very mixed bag so far and not really particularly useful. I suppose there are worse problems I could be having, but it's still annoying to be asked to CC things and it being so unreliable.

Crash-To-Desktop Workaround

Behold, it's time for one of my biannual posts with actually useful information in it!

I've complained in the past that my game has been crashing non-stop since patch 1.4. It's a widely known issue, but more than three months later there still hasn't been any kind of update from Bioware on how to actually get it fixed.

How do you know whether you're affected by this particular problem and not something else?

1. It started with patch 1.4.
2. You're probably running a 32-bit operation system.
3. Your game will crash to desktop very frequently, very smoothly, and without giving any kind of error message. Most commonly this happens at points when it's very obviously trying to load more information, such as when you're on a loading screen, using quick travel, initiating a conversation or something similar; however, the game will crash after a while regardless of what you do, even if you're just idling in a random spot. The common consensus seems to be that this is due to a memory leak in the game.

Today I was having a quick look at the official forum thread on the subject to see whether there were any updates, when I stumbled upon a post on page 55 where another player actually offered a simple workaround for the issue. Holy crap! User Aortaex had the following to say:

After I tried this I didn't have single crash for over month now, before that it was either 1.5 hour idle game crash time or crashing to desktop after every 5th or 6th loading screen usually after switching from one char to another, hope it will work for you guys as well.

To enable the 3GB switch on Windows Vista™ or Windows 7:
1 . Right-click Command Prompt in the Accessories program group of the Start menu. Click Run as Administrator.
2. At the command prompt, enter "bcdedit /set increaseuserva 3072"
3. Restart the computer.

Since several people replied to his post to say that this method had worked for them as well and seeing how it was a really simple thing to do (basically it just allows the game to use more memory), I tried it myself today (after having previously verified that today's patch still hadn't done anything to fix the issue), and for the first time in several months I was actually able to play all evening without experiencing a single crash. Logging on to all my alts, doing multiple warzones, traversing whole planets - none of it a problem. It was amazing.

In part I just wanted to share my joy about this on here (really, you don't know what a pain it is when your favourite game constantly crashes on you unless you've experienced it yourself), but I also thought that it was generally worth spreading the love around since this information is currently very well hidden in the middle of that one thread on the official forums. I consider myself quite lucky for having come across it at all. I don't know if this fix will work for everyone (I saw at least one comment about it supposedly only working in windowed mode for example, which is how I always play anyway), but if you've been as frustrated with this problem as I have been over the past few months, it's definitely worth a try.

Hurrah, we broke the server!

When other people rage about things not working, I can only laugh. What's wrong with me? Whatever it is, I wouldn't want to live without it, as it surely makes life a lot more fun.

Today my new guild was planning to do EC hardmode, but when people tried to enter the operation, they got stuck. All of them at once. In the end I was the only one safely left standing outside, since I had wanted to wait for someone else to zone in first. (An old habit that goes back to times where entering a raid before the raid leader could muck up which version of the instance you landed in - thank god for old habits!) Meanwhile, my guildies got stuck on the loading screen, had to Alt-F4 out of the game, and then found themselves unable to come back online on their stuck characters. Now, if this had happened to just one person... it would have been something that happens sometimes I guess, but everyone at once? Most peculiar.

Even better, when the raid leader tried to submit a ticket about it, he was faced with an error message there too, so he made a post on the customer service forums instead. In the meantime, people kept trying to log back in but kept running into the same trouble over and over again. Eventually they more or less gave up and went on alts instead.

I joined two guildies for a round of the Black Hole and was surprised to find a mad amount of world PvP going on there. On another day, that could have been the subject of a post of its own really! Today though, I didn't pay much attention to it.

After we finished all of our dailies, there was some talk about maybe doing another round on some alts. I logged onto one of mine who hadn't been to the Black Hole before to take care of the breadcrumb quest while the others were still making up their minds. So far, so good... but after I finished the conversation, my character didn't exit cinematic mode and I was left staring at a wall. Eventually I escaped out and reset the quest. Weird. I tried to just pick up the dailies from the terminal, but a couple of them were behaving oddly too - as in, I could officially pick them up, but they showed no quest objectives. Figuring that this wasn't going to work, I hit my fleet pass... and it did nothing. Looking at chat, I saw people complaining that loot wasn't dropping and their quests weren't completing either. What the...?

Checking back on the raid leader's forum thread, it turned out to have gathered a considerable following in the meantime. First it was just other people confirming that they had trouble with entering hardmode operations. Then it seemed to affect story modes too. Then class quests with cut scenes. And then everyone was just talking about how generally borked the server appeared to be. Eventually Bioware had to take it offline and the news even made the official Twitter!

I think this guy from the official forums had the right idea:

Once they took the server offline, they managed to fix the problem quickly enough, and it's now back up and running again. But maaan... those were some funny couple of hours, with nothing working as intended. Funnily enough that brings back fond WoW memories for me too. ("Is Kalimdor broken again?" "Yep.") Nothing unites people like everyone complaining that shit's not working.

But wait, what am I saying? I meant to say: raaage!

Referring A Friend

A good friend from WoW has been interested in trying out The Old Republic for a while, but unfortunately his old computer wasn't up for it when the game first launched. I was delighted when he e-mailed me the other day to let me know that he had finally upgraded his PC and was ready to give it a whirl.

I was simply happy about the prospect of having him around, but a guildie pointed out that I might as well make use of Bioware's refer a friend feature, especially as they are finally implementing a reward for successful referrals.

As it turned out, using the system was quite hard in our particular case. First off, there is currently a bug that will prevent you from referring a friend if they already have an account with EA and ticked the box to not receive any "promotional" material. So I had to get my friend to untick that... except that he couldn't log into his account(s) because he couldn't remember making them! Resetting the password didn't really seem to work either. After a lot of digging through old e-mails he found that one of the accounts associated with his e-mail addresses was actually an old Ultima Online account and managed to access it again, so I could finally send him the referral mail. Soon another gaudy speeder shall be mine! To be honest I think my friend should be the one to get something though, considering the hassle he had to go through to be referred. Bioware really shouldn't make it this hard for people to play their game.

Once he got into the game though, we had a very good time. He rolled up a trooper and did Ord Mantell on his own, just to team up with a gunslinger alt of mine on the fleet. We ran the Esseles together and then spent the entirety of Friday evening questing on Coruscant. It really can't be overstated how great this game is for small group play, as the design manages to hit that sweet spot where it's perfectly possible to solo and have an enjoyable experience, but playing with a friend is simply so much better.

The group conversations make for some of the best fun ("God, there that goodie-two-shoes goes offering our services for free again... why can I never win those rolls?!"), and being able to duo most of the heroics is great too. We felt really challenged when we tackled our first four-man heroic with no healer and wiped several times on the last guy. Eventually we went back out to gain another level and wait for our cooldowns to come back up, and when we came back to it later we just about managed it with my tanking companion surviving with only a sliver of health left.

It was also interesting to see some of the small quality of life changes that Bioware made to the lower levels. They might have been announced in the patch notes somewhere, but I have to admit that I never read the whole lot... most notably all the final stage bosses for the bonus quests on Coruscant are now summoned by clicking on something, which was a nice change from endlessly having to wait around for respawns like I sometimes had to do during previous playthroughs.

The only thing I didn't like was discovering that all the security chests on the Esseles had disappeared, which gave me unpleasant flashbacks to when WoW removed all of its dungeon chests. However, at the moment the jury is still out on whether this was actually an intentional change or whether it is some kind of bug.

Server Transfer Blues

I have to admit I've been feeling a bit down on the game for the past couple of days. Nothing to do with the game itself really, but this whole server merge "transfer" business has really been getting to me. I hated not knowing what was going to happen to my server. Of course I suspected that it was going to become an origin server like ninety percent of the others, but I didn't really know. It was as if a black cloud was hanging over my usual enjoyment of the game all weekend. It feels a bit silly to get this hung up on MMO business I suppose, but in game it was a really big deal for me, bigger than even the biggest guild drama I've ever had to deal with.

Then the dreaded update finally arrived on the official server transfer thread this afternoon:

Luka Sene --> The Red Eclipse

Less than two hours after the announcement went up, I had an e-mail from Bioware in my inbox with the title "Transfer your Character Now". Three minutes after I logged into the game in the evening, a giant server admin message flashed up in the middle of my screen, raid warning style, also telling me to check out more information about the free transfers on the website. Geeze, no pressure or anything! "Optional" transfers indeed.

My heart sank as I only saw ten people on the fleet at what was usually prime time. A quick /who command revealed less than a hundred people per faction on the entire server. A couple of players were levelling alts and one or two guilds were raiding but that was it. No warzones were running all evening, which didn't really come as a surprise as the well-known PvPers had all been talking about looking forward to the free transfers for weeks. From the looks of it, a third to fifty percent of our active server population left on the first day alone. It was depressing.

I've pushed for discussion of the server transfer issue on our guild forums, and as expected opinions are split. Two or three people are cautiously enthusiastic, others like me are not necessarily completely opposed to transferring but still unhappy about having to deal with this issue at all.

My guild master is adamant that he's not going, as all of his current character names are taken on The Red Eclipse, including his main's name which is also his real life nickname. Meanwhile my boyfriend has worked himself into a rage about how stupid he thinks the entire thing is, how he doesn't want to have to deal with queues and how he's thinking about cancelling his subscription now, simply out of protest at how badly he feels Bioware has been handling this entire situation.

Really? And I'm supposed to be happy about this?

As I was collecting mail on my alts (and not bothering to relist my auctions in case we do end up transferring in the next couple of days, not to mention that hardly anyone seems to be left to buy things anyway), I spotted an out of guild acquaintance near the bank. If the game allowed for more emotional expression, I probably would have run up to him, grabbed him by the lapels of his robe and yelled "Oh my god, someone is still here!" like a crazy person, but as it was I just waved at him and asked him whether he and his guild were going to transfer too.

He said that they were all planning to go, probably even today. I replied that my guild was still undecided, adding a frowny face for emphasis on how I felt about that. He gave me a smile in return. "I think everyone will go." "See you on the other side then," I said, "... maybe. If we recognise each other after all the forced name changes." Again he seemed to be completely unburdened by worries like mine. "There's a Luka Sene chat channel!" I thanked him for bringing that to my attention and logged off.

I'm trying to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel and pray that it's not an oncoming train. I hope that my guild master and my boyfriend will come around, because anything else will leave a massive gash in my little circle of gaming friends. I still don't really want to transfer. I don't want to stop being Shintar because the name's already taken on The Red Eclipse, nor do I want to have queues upon logging in, deal with spam in general chat or fight 50 people for quest mobs in the Black Hole. But I like the prospect of staying on a dead server until it's closed and never playing another warzone again even less.

When free transfers are not a good thing

So Bioware finally announced the first of the highly anticipated free server transfers today. I think they did a good job at trying to communicate how it would all work in advance, but forum trolls who don't bother to read are unfortunately unavoidable. I feel a bit sorry for the moderators that have to deal with all the "why isn't my server included" threads.

That said, I was still very unhappy with what I saw, as it seems that my fears in regards to transfers are about to come true: the current free transfers all offer to move characters from low population realms to high population ones instead of the other way round. This means that Bioware is trying to consolidate server populations instead of balancing them. I don't think that this is a bad idea per se, but I do think that trying to do so via free transfers is a bad move for a variety of reasons.

Even with transfers being free, it's inevitable that a lot of people won't use them, whether that's because they don't even know that the feature exists because they don't follow the news, they are only moderately active, or they like(d) their server to begin with. However, many people will transfer, and removing some of the most active players from an already low population realm is going to have dire consequences for those that remain. Server community will fracture as familiar faces disappear without notice. Warzones might stop popping completely. Guilds will crumble under the pressure of arguments about whether to transfer or not. New or returning players will find a server that's completely devoid of life. Do you think that they will all bother to read up on transfers or just quit because "this game is clearly dead"?

At the time of writing this, Luka Sene hasn't shown up on the transfer list either way, but I'm not looking forward to when it does as I expect it to become an origin server now.

The thing is, I don't think that consolidating servers is a bad idea in general. I can absolutely believe that there are too many servers right now to balance the population in such a way that all of them will offer a good play experience. But if you want to merge servers, then just merge servers. Some people will be annoyed initially if they are forced to change their name, but at least all their friends will still be there, not to mention that they'll have more people to play with in general. All this bitty transfer approach is going to achieve is the loss of existing server communities and cohesion issues for guilds. Not to mention that the current free transfers might turn out to be a "fake choice" anyway, if Bioware decides to close down the near-dead origin servers later on (as many people suspect).

Don't get me wrong, I understand that they probably have reasons to do it this way - presumably technical issues as well as a fear of bad PR - but I'm worried that this might end up coming back to bite them in the back in the long run. Actively killing off low-pop servers while leaving them up as ghost towns might not make the big gaming news, but players will be affected nonetheless.

After browsing the forums for a bit and seeing a lot of forum warriors spew hate at anyone who doesn't think that these free transfers are a good idea, I think this set of comments sums it up best:

"If they do it like was done with Warhammer, they offered the free transfers to specific servers then after a couple months they merged all the rest. By doing it this way you do not have as bad PR issues and you also are getting a more realistic view of the new servers user count based on who actually transfers."

"Warhammer? Where is that game now? LOL"

Rakghoul Event: The End

So, the rakghoul event is officially over. I say "officially" because in practice I still got the plague about four times today, and people continued to puke and explode all over the station. I mostly seemed to get infected in warzones, which shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone - I don't even want to contemplate where some of those Imps must have been...

I expect that the sickness will slowly dissipate over the next couple of days, though I find it amusing to think that OMG the plague can't be stopped. Bioware, what have you unleashed?! /dramatically shakes her fists at the sky.

I feel quite satisfied with the way things have gone for me during this event. Initially I was a bit worried about missing out on some of the social gear, since Bioware insisted on gating some of the event quests on a personal level, and if you didn't log on for a day there was no way of catching up. Fortunately they did leave some "margin for error", so even though I missed a couple of days I still got all my pieces in the end, and then some.

I wasn't sure whether I was going to be able to unlock all the event codices either, as the world bosses initially appeared to be camped to oblivion. When my guild tried to kill Infected Trapjaw on Friday night, there were already a whole bunch of people spawn-camping the skull by the time we got there. By some stroke of luck (or very intense focus from certain guild members) we managed to get the tag, but activity levels around the other bosses were even worse and we had no luck with them whatsoever.

I had already given up on the idea of getting to kill them, when I came to Tatooine on Saturday afternoon and saw a pug raid forming in chat - or rather, a group of eight people said that the boss in Outlaw's Den was up and that they had tried to kill him, but they had failed due to Imperial interference and were now looking to boost their numbers before trying again. We ended up with over twenty people in the end (somewhat to my surprise - I didn't expect to be able to expand an ops group beyond sixteen, which is the largest group size for which there is currently content in the game), and it turned out that the other boss I was still missing was available too, so we scooted over to him right afterwards and I ended up completing my codex entries after all.

It had been ages since I was last in a pug raid out in the open world, but I really enjoyed it. There were a lot of familiar faces around, and everyone was very friendly, not to say kind - even though some people bimbled around for ages and took forever to make it over (some didn't even know where the Outlaw's Den was!), we waited for everyone and nobody made a fuss. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Now, unlocking all the available event codices should have granted me the Containment Officer title, but it bugged out and didn't work (surprise). However, in Bioware's defence I have to say that after I submitted a ticket about this, I got a response from a customer service representative only a few minutes later, and another CSR managed to correctly grant me the title on the same day. Apparently they are getting better at this whole customer service thing.

In summary, I really enjoyed this event. It had:

- voiced story content
- story quests limited to the duration of the event
- a well-hidden scavenger hunt
- pets and other unique cosmetic goodies to acquire
- world bosses
- world PvP
- and last but not least, people doing crazy stuff all over the place!

I think they managed to cover a whole lot of ground there, especially for something that was only going to be a one-off thing. (Daniel Erickson confirmed in a recent interview that they are not going to repeat this event, as they want to give the game a sense of history, and for that some things simply need to be in the past - another decision I approve of.) I do hope that we'll see more events like this in the future, though for now I could do with some quiet time to recover and actually focus on the main 1.2 content properly. Also, as much as I enjoyed the rakghoul plague outbreak as it was, I do hope that future events won't all follow the same formula (i.e. I hated how WoW turned every single one of its holidays into a tedious token grind plus event boss). I'm not asking for dramatic innovation here, just some variety. For now however: simply keep up the good work, Bioware.

Oh dear, customer service

I've been hearing stories about Bioware's customer service being terrible, but I didn't pay them too much heed. Some people always complain about customer service, and anyway, I'm willing to cut the company some slack for being new at handling this particular beast. When my trooper was bugged out and I couldn't play, it would have been nice to receive some help, but I figured that they were probably swamped with tickets at the time - and hey, in the end I did figure out a way to solve the problem myself.

However, today's experience has me a little bit worried I have to admit. It wasn't even anything big - I just observed an inconsistency in a quest chain about three days ago, and submitted it as a bug report. Without spoiling anything, due to my choices the quest ended one way, but the follow-up I received in the mail talked about a different outcome that didn't match up. So I thought I'd be helpful and submit that as a bug report. I kept it fairly curt and just described the quest in question since I couldn't remember its name. My ticket was a total of three lines long and I expected them to just forward it to whoever handles these kinds of bugs and not respond to me at all.

However today, three days later, I received the following response:

"Greetings [name],

I am Protocol Droid U3-F6 of Human-Cyborg Relations...

I have received your transmission regarding unscannable gathering nodes."

Wait, what? I tell you about a bug with a quest and you come back to me about unscannable gathering nodes? You couldn't even read three lines of text?

Since the message also included a request for more information, I wanted to give the guy the benefit of the doubt at first, thinking that maybe he had just copy and pasted the wrong "please provide more details" message, but when I tried to update the ticket with more details (courtesy of Torhead, which apparently has more information about the game than the average customer service rep), it just came back with an error message. Everything I had written just disappeared and I gave up.

At least the end of the message contained one of those "give us feedback about our service" links, which I followed and filled out. Sorry, U3-F6... I did give you full marks for politeness because I really can't fault you in that area, but everything else was a big fat negative. It's a real shame because I wasn't even expecting a response to a simple bug report, but if you do bother to reply, the very least you could do is talk about what I actually wrote instead of some random stuff about gathering nodes.