Badger's GCW Profession and Server stats - June
GCW Participation by Profession
Here's the latest graph compiled from stats on the Star Wars Galaxies: GCW Points Calculator website.
GCW Participation by Profession Summary
GCW for everyone! GU12 has led to an explosion of GCW points available in the form of Battlefields. Typically, participation in one busy battlefield is enough to secure you the GCW points required to advance in rank so we now see an incredible surge in numbers of all professions... except one.
Take a close look at the yellow line on that chart, that's Spy. All other combat professions had an increase in numbers, Spy actually lost a considerable number and are in danger of replacing Smuggler on the bottom rung of the combat professions in terms of GCW participation.
How much of this is to do with the Spy Changes in GU11? How much is to do with their effectiveness in Battlefields? Discuss!
GCW Participation by Server
New for this months stats I put together some stats on GCW participation by server over that last two years.
GCW Participation by Server Summary
In my mind, the migration of players all started after the NGE, for two years we had really broken PvE that was easily solable, you could solo the HK-47 instance and take a walk on your own to the bottom of the DeathWatch Bunker and pick off the Death Watch Overlord it was that easy.
Chapter 6 in 2007 changed all that, making PvE challenging again as it was Pre-NGE, although many players relished this increased difficulty, many found it hard to find the groups required for the content as SWG at the time had no community tools to help you find groups, such as "Looking for Group" chat channels and player search tools.
Players either paid to transfer to more active server communities where groups were more readily available, or re-rolled a new character and leveled up. SoE caving in to the demand for a Free Character Transfer then killed off twelve servers and left five on 1/3 of the population of the top eight servers because few people chose to transfer there.
If you track Gorath on that chart, you can see they were doing pretty well at the beginning and were similar to Ahazi just before the Free CTS, so lets check another chart to see how Gorath ended up in their current situation and Ahazi didn't:
Ahazi did a whole lot better in terms of transfers and pulled itself right out of the "1/3 population" server bracket.
I added stats in current player cities of Rank 2 or over to back up what we are seeing in terms of GCW stats:
Green: Destination server
Yellow: Destination server with 1/3 the population of the top eight.
Red: "Transfer from" server.
West Coast USA Servers
Flurry - 1219 GCW Ranked players and 188 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Bria - 910 GCW Ranked players and 187 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Ahazi - 726 GCW Ranked players and 152 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Sunrunner - 233 GCW Ranked players and 69 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Kettemoor - 1 GCW Ranked players and 7 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Valycn - 12 GCW Ranked players and 5 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Corbantis - 1 GCW Ranked players and 5 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Intrepid - 0 GCW Ranked players and 5 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Scylla - 5 GCW Ranked players and 3 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Naritus - 1 GCW Ranked players and 2 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Tempest - 2 GCW Ranked players and 3 Rank 2 or above player cities.
East Coast USA Servers
Starsider - 1749 GCW Ranked players and 216 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Bloodfin - 931 GCW Ranked players and 184 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Chilastra - 861 GCW Ranked players and 155 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Shadowfire - 380 GCW Ranked players and 93 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Radiant - 363 GCW Ranked players and 76 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Gorath - 334 GCW Ranked players and 87 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Eclipse - 334 GCW Ranked players and 84 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Kauri - 9 GCW Ranked players and 4 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Lowca - 3 GCW Ranked players and 4 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Tarquinas - 0 GCW Ranked players and 6 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Wanderhome - 0 GCW Ranked players and 4 Rank 2 or above player cities.
European Servers
Europe-Chimaera - 827 GCW Ranked players and 162 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Europe-FarStar - 903 GCW Ranked players and 156 Rank 2 or above player cities.
Europe-Infinity - 3 GCW Ranked players and 4 Rank 2 or above player cities.
What can we learn from all this? Don't increase the PvE difficulty of your MMORPG without having some way for people to find groups, or you will go from having a nice even spread of 400 odd GCW officers over your 24 servers to having them all piled into eight of those servers.
SWG still doesn't have any default chat channels to find groups, something that is standard in all modern MMORPGs, so there seems to be no way to stem this current tide.
But then I guess we would all be playing on servers with Shadowfire's levels of activity, which are good, but Starsider has four and a half times that population... a level of population which I am wondering if it is an all time record.
If I take off my rose-tinted glasses I remember servers crashing in previous incarnations of SWG when too many players entered the same sub server. In Pre-CU the game was a much smaller place, everyone knew everyone because you were all jammed into Coronet starport for ten minutes anytime you played and all doing quite similar things rather than spread out all over the galaxy doing the multitude of things you can do today.
Looking at the server stats again, Bloodfin is doing well, Bria seemingly suffered from it's ability to generate anomisity to potential transfering players but is still up there.
Flurry is looking pretty great, their rise to busiest west side server has been meteroic. Was the PvP community responsible for this I wonder, or were there other contributing factors?
Ahazi and Chilastra have recovered remarkably. They seem to have been facing the drop to the 1/3 population bracket but managed to get themselves back in the race, Chilastra even has more GCW officers than Chimaera now.
In Europe, Farstar is now challenging Chimaera for the top European Server.
I play on Infinity these days, which is one of the servers that you see in the group of lines converging on the zero line after the Free CTS. I know that many of the twelve "Transfer from" servers have players there, like us, that are in the process of rebuilding the server and have made excellent progress.
Some of these "Transfer from" servers may well be able to recover in a year or two, but how long will SoE be willing to keep us running? A couple of these servers have no rebuilding efforts that I know of going on, what should be done with those?
What will SoE do next in terms of server consolidation? When, for all that is holy, will we get default chat channels for finding groups? Lots more scope discussion here too.
I hope you found this all as interesting to read as I did making it and I look forward to reading all your feedback.
