Change, oh how we loathe it sometimes. I’m writing this to say farewell to the glory days of SWTOR’s endless servers and the concept I had of how my legacies and character concepts would work, and to grumble about it.

Farewell to Z’ha’dum and Krath

In the early days of long queues and many servers, we had this idea of splitting Imperial and Republic between multiple servers. Thus began my orderly Vorlonn and strength-through-adversity Z’ha’dum legacies. It made sense for my fierce red-skinned Sith Warrior to go by Z’ha’dum from Babylon 5. My cooperative but manipulative and secretive Smuggler made sense to go by the inscrutable Vorlon name and thus was born my two primary servers. One would focus mainly on Republic goals and characters while the other would explore the Empire side of things. Each would give me the option to try two versions of each class in each faction, one dedicated to the dark side and one dedicated to the light side. That was then…

This is now… With shrinking populations and a much smaller player base, decisions were made that didn’t take my concepts into consideration. My thought processes weren’t shared by the game decision makers. Someone decided, hey, lets give people more slots and then smoosh them all together onto crowded servers where they get to fight each other over daily quests and world bosses like children squabbling over pinyata candy. But, rather than smooshing them in such a way that they could play light side dark side of every class, lets only give them 12 slots instead of 16. And rather than letting them pick which servers they get squished onto, lets just take that pesky choice  out of their hands and only make it to suit our own needs and desires.

Time and energy invested here

The initial step to consolidation left me with characters stranded for months on a dead server. I deleted characters and moved Imperials over as I could, but still had some remnants of my Imperial glory left behind. That would have been the perfect time to give me options. Instead, I was given a carrot on a stick, which I couldn’t fully take advantage of due to a lack of available character slots, and then left to wonder what would become of my hard work and legacy? What would become of the crafting skills I laboriously built to support my characters?  I still wonder what will become of the XP bars for each of my Legacies when one is forced to consume the other later today.

It would have been nice to be able to preserve my legacy by moving it to a RP server, thus giving me the freedom to pursue my idea of seeing the classes from both sides. If I want to explore new options, I have to start over on a RP server. Now I’m stuck without legacy perks or crafting skills that are duplicated and wasted on my brave new mega server, because I wasn’t given choice or options. That more than anything else makes me mad. I’m a victim of the MMO market overflood, but have been a loyal paying customer from the day the servers opened. I sure don’t feel like that now.

So farewell Krath and Z’ha’dum. I suppose I went there and died.

(Update: post merger, my level 23 legacy still has the same XP as before, so none of the merged legacy XP was added in.)