Star Wars: The Old Republic – Ghost town?
One issue I personally have is the lack of players available on planets in order to do Heroic quests. Heroic quests give good exp, are repeatable daily, and help build up your commendations for gear. The problem, you can rarely find anyone to group with. As stated in a well summed up forum post:
Total Subscribed:
1,700,000 (1.7 million)
215
Average Players per server (assumes even distribution):
7,907
Zones (planets plus fleets, does not include instances or ships):
19
Average Players per zone (assuming 100% of subscribed players online and even distribution across zones):
416
Average Players per zone (assuming 25% of subscribed players online and even distribution across zones):
104
Now, factor in who is on their ship, that there are two factions with different available zones, playtimes and server loads and all of a sudden it doesn’t seem outrageous that you might only see 30 people on Alderaan at 11 PM.
Note also that 25% online at any time is actually very unlikely; we do know that there are an average of one million unique logins per day with a four-hour average playtime.
The reality is that I quite often see only 25 – 40 people on lower level planets. As you gain levels and move on to higher planets, the number dwindles down. I went through Hoth and the whole time I was alone or there was 1 other person.
Conclusion:
Bioware made way to many named servers for the number of subscribers there are. A better solution would be to have had a large virtual world where it is powered by many servers. They already had instancing built in, they just need to give higher loads to each world. Say they cut the number of servers in half and redistributed that hardware to the other half. That means you have double the hardware to power a larger world. It wouldn’t feel so barren and desolate. It would feel like a true Star Wars universe.
Edit (7/17/2012):
Just about a month ago they offered a bunch of free transfers to combine populations. This has done wonders for the game. It feels like an MMO again. They are giving 7 free days to previous subscribers, give it a try. Plus try out the new Group Finder.