Feb 29, 2012

Posted by in News | 8 Comments

Oceanic Servers Officially Live; No Server Transfers Until Late April

It’s a bit of a bittersweet moment for TOR players in the Asia-Pacific region of the world.

This morning, BioWare launched brand new servers in their region hat should greatly improve gameplay performance for the majority of players currently playing but on North American servers. This is great news… but what if you’ve already got an accomplished character on a different server you’d like to bring over to the new Oceanic servers? BioWare has you covered, but unfortunately not until late April.

In an update to the official FAQ this morning, it was clarified that server transfers for those that qualify will occur in “late April”:

Qualified players in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, or Singapore, will be offered one-time free character transfers to Asia Pacific servers for a limited time period in late April. No specific date has been confirmed at this time. We will be sending an email to all qualified players by early March with more details.

What makes you a qualified player? We have the details for that as well:

To qualify for free character transfers, players must meet the following requirements by Tuesday, February 28, 2012, 5:01PM EDT, 7:01PM NZDT, 2:01PM HKT, 2:01PM SGT:

  • You specified that your country is Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, or Singapore during your account registration process.
  • Redeemed an Official Game Production Registration Code on www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com Code Redemption Center.
  • Have had or currently have entered a valid recurring payment method or redeemed a Pre-Paid Game Time Code.
  • Only characters created on The Old Republic servers by February 28, 2012, 5:01PM EDT, 7:01PM NZDT, 2:01PM HKT, 2:01PM SGT qualify for transfers.

Characters created by qualified players on a non-Asia Pacific server after the February 28th deadline will not qualify for transfers to Asia Pacific servers. We will be sending an email to all qualified players by early March with more details.

On a separate but related note, some players are actually reporting much worse latency on these servers than they were seeing on the North American servers. We’ll follow this development as we learn more!

For now, head on over to the FAQ for all of the details of the Asia-Pacific launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic!


  1. Darkthunder says:

    Late April? That’s quite a bit “late” to start offering Free Character Transfers. I would hope however, that the service will be offered TO ALL REGIONS at the same time.

  2. Late April is going to make these servers fail hard. The majority of the dedicated asia/pacific playerbase are already playing – and they’re not moving.

    My guild, and a host of others we talk to on Harbinger, are not exactly going to reroll all our mains. So the new servers are going to be ghost towns, and the americans are still going to cry over aussies/kiwis filling up their server.

    Although I’m sure all the level 1 toons reserving names will enjoy the sweet pings.

    On that note, you’ll probably find the people with worse pings are in countries like say, singapore and hong kong – where the infrastructure of their internet is closer to .us than .au

    It’s not like those are half the asia/pacific region though :D

    • So late April is not the problem then, the same problem would hold true if they allowed transfers today. What you meant to say was it will fail because they didn’t have oceanic servers at LAUNCH.

      I play on a West coast server, what Americans are complaining about Aussies and Kiwies on the server? This makes no sense to me, nor have I ever seen it.

      • You’ve probably not seen it unless you spend time on The Harbinger – which is the unofficial oceanic server from launch. Also they started ruthlessly removing those posts from the forums after the first couple of weeks, when it got old.

        And you’re completely wrong that the same thing would be true if they’d had immediate transfers available.

        We’re happy to up sticks and move the whole guild, but we can’t do that.

        • How can you not wait? That makes no sense at ALL. I understand it is frustrating. I understand it doesn’t make sense to have to wait. But having to wait is not make or break.

          What makes you feel that you CANNOT wait.

    • Sibakero says:

      Is it true? the infrastructure of HK and Singapore’s internet is closer to .us than in .au? How about for the Philippines? I have a brother in Taiwan and Philippines(I myself am in NZ,haven’t tried logging in, forgot it was launching today, lol)and they both have logged in for more than 15 minutes each server and reported that it was on average 400+ms(taiwan)and 700+ms(philippines) across all servers(it was 1000+ms on gav at 1 point they told me). Why??! They both have fast broadband, mind you. We’re not moving our mains as well(we’re on Shadowlands, an East Coast server, and all of us have 120-200ms average)but thought we could play together as Sith on these servers, looks like even our alts will stay away from these servers…

  3. Dirtyshadow says:

    Late April *facepalm*
    Thats 6-8 weeks… seriously, WTF!!!

    How are players suppose to co-ordinate Australian guilds, if existing players are on a North American server waiting for transfer and new players are going to the Oceanic ones.

    Right now, they are creating players on those 3 servers… and what we going to get them full, and more full… new servers… new servers fill and then more servers…. 8 weeks later we get to transfer and “oh by the way you all cant transfer to the full ones”

    Seriously, who “manages” thier server population plans for launches… they got a hole in their heads if they think this is any way acceptable time frame. This should of been sorted already, hell the transfer of toons would of been a good beta test for the oceanic servers imo.

    WHERE IS THE LOVE BIOWARE ? Giving us 20-40ms servers in australia and telling us we cant play our existing toons on them for 6-8 weeks. TERRIBLE!!!

  4. This announcement really should’ve been made on April 1st.

Leave a Reply