Beating the dead (server) horse one last time

Don't worry, this isn't another moan about the server transfers. I just received so many sympathetic and encouraging comments to my last post that I thought I should give the people who were interested an update on what has been happening.

Basically, after some discussion and a vote on our guild forums, the majority turned out to be in favour of moving. There's still some grumbling and it's obviously not going to be all sunshine and rainbows, but most agreed that it's bound to be better than twiddling our thumbs on an abandoned server. We're looking into getting the guild reformed on The Red Eclipse tonight.

Our guild leader wants to leave the old guild up for a couple of weeks however, headed by an alt, in order to use the guild message of the day as a pointer for people who haven't logged in during the past week and might be confused about what's been happening upon returning. We'll be able to do without a guild bank on our new server for a little while.

I do have to give credit to my guildies for keeping my spirits up during the past couple of days. I did the Black Hole dailies in a group three times in three days (which is unusual for me), and there was lots of fun and laughter going around. Yesterday a guildie and I ran into another person at one point and my guildie assaulted him with a drive-by sparkle. The poor guy stopped dead in his tracks and just stood there staring at us for a moment. "I bet he's like... what the hell is this, I thought I was alone on this server!"

As a matter of fact, the Black Hole actually seemed to be one of the areas that has been the least affected by the transfer, probably because doing dailies is one of the few things that you can do at max level that doesn't require other people (with the exception of the heroic dailies). We actually had people "ninja" the button to summon Quick-Hands Quarl right in front of us and struggled to find enough boxes for the area daily. "Man, this server is way too crowded," I joked to my guildies.

The place that was undoubtedly hit the hardest by the transfers is the fleet. Again, a guildie managed to find humour in the situation as he posted on the forums: "I'll need two days advanced notice to take down all my GTN listings. That said, there's one person on the fleet at the moment... and that's me. Sooo, I'm not sure who I'm trying to sell stuff to - that's how much I love selling things!" Also, when the population counter on the fleet hit 14 last night, he immediately cried out for a party in general chat, which elicited some chuckles from people as well.

The total server population, including both factions and all levels, has shrunk down to less than a hundred even at prime time, and less than ten during the more quiet times of the day. In a way it's interesting though that those players are still around. The vast majority of them are low-level as well, so I can't help but wonder whether they are people who are happy or at least indifferent about levelling through their story in solitude, or whether they are new players who simply don't know any better and are wondering why nobody is around.

Anyway, soon this will all be behind me. No more wandering through a post-apocalyptic empty fleet while the loudspeaker server admin repeatedly tells people to bugger off already read up on the wonders of server transfers. To be honest, in the long run I would expect people to move away simply due to the annoyance of being spammed by that server admin message every fifteen minutes or so. I've only seen it five times and it's already driving me bonkers.