Server Populations Based on Conquest Points

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't that busy during the last Total Galactic War, and as a result I ended up poking around on the other servers as well that week. Having a peek at the planetary leaderboards was interesting in terms of how incredibly different they looked on each server.

People often ask about server populations on reddit, which server is the best to play on etc., and I do have some information that addresses this on my State of SWTOR page, but it did occur to me that it's hard to find any kind of data to actually back up people's perceptions of each server's size. Over in WoW Classic, the most common metric is raid logs, which is already very limited because obviously there are plenty of players who don't raid and aren't counted, but in SWTOR we don't even have that. It's also been many years since we last had indicators of population size on the server selection screen.

The best bit of hard evidence about server size I've ever seen is probably this Today in TOR post from January 2023, which compared the number of Conquest points winning guilds had earned on each server throughout 2022. However, at this point that's several years old, and I have no doubt that server populations have shifted a little - plus the Shae Vizla server didn't exist yet, so it's not included at all.

I do think Conquest is about as good a measure of activity as you're ever going to get, as most things you do in game award Conquest points, so most guilded characters above level 10 will leave some kind of Conquest footprint if they are active at all. The problem is that in any given week the planetary leaderboards are very limited in how much they show us. Total Galactic War is a different beast, however...

So I spent a few hours logging through all servers on a Monday afternoon and manually recorded the full TGW leaderboards on all servers. The event wasn't over yet and scores were still updating all the time, but I didn't really care about that as I wasn't looking for precise numbers for this exercise; I just wanted the big picture. Let me share with you what I found:

First off, Total Galactic War includes 28 planets, with each one having ten spots on its visible leaderboard, so up to 280 guilds can make their presence known in this event. However, the only server on which all slots were actually taken was Star Forge.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the other servers don't have 280 guilds - the major gaps were pretty much always on the large yield planets, so the open slots on Darth Malgus (19), Satele Shan (32) and Tulak Hord (37) primarily indicated a lack of large guilds valuing visibility on the board over potentially conquering one of the smaller yield planets. In all three cases it seemed safe to assume that there were also extra guilds on the medium and small yield planets that had simply been pushed off the board. (The same was true for Star Forge, obviously.)

However, Leviathan and Shae Vizla were a different matter. On Leviathan, only 149 guilds were visible, leaving 131 spots empty - nearly half. On Shae Vizla the picture was even more dire, with only 102 guilds making a showing, leaving 178 openings. Some planets remained completely unconquered, with not a single guild even trying to claim a spot. (That said, I'm almost certain someone out there will read this and go "I'm surprised Shae Vizla has over 100 guilds!")

OK, so guilds are one thing, but what about their actual scores? A guild showing up with 2000 points is not the same as one showing up with 200 million. So I tallied up all the scores visible on the board. In total, across all servers, I counted a little under 12 billion Conquest points. Across the different servers, they were distributed as follows:

• Star Forge: 4.2 billion (35% of total)
• Darth Malgus: 3.4 billion (29% of total)
• Satele Shan: 1.8 billion (15% of total)
• Tulak Hord: 1.5 billion (13% of total)
• Leviathan: 500 million (4% of total)
• Shae Vizla: 400 million (3% of total)

There are some interesting inferences you can make from these numbers. While it sometimes feels to me like I'm constantly hearing about players moving off the smaller servers to Star Forge, these numbers don't really back that up. In fact, 35% is exactly the same slice of the pie that Star Forge occupied on the Today in TOR graphic from 2023.

Today in TOR doughnut chart from 2023 

Satele Shan does seem to be the biggest loser, having gone from nearly twice the size of Tulak Hord to only marginally larger, but part of that is also that TH actually seems to have grown a little since 2022, contrary to what I personally would've expected. Again, anecdotally I have the impression that both German and French players have been moving off their dedicated language servers to Darth Malgus for the bigger population - I've seen them chatter away in general chat and get yelled at for not speaking English. Darth Malgus does indeed seem to have grown, but seemingly only at the expense of Leviathan. Still, overall the shifts in activity levels are a lot milder than I would've expected after nearly four years.

However, what these numbers do show for sure is that you can expect to have a drastically different experience on different servers. If we correlate Conquest points to active population, then Star Forge is more than twice as populated as Satele Shan, and literally more than ten times the size of Shae Vizla. That's going to make a difference to how busy the world feels and how often group content is popping.

As for how these numbers translate into actual player numbers... it's impossible to say, as people can generate wildly varying amounts of Conquest points. When I go all out during Total Galactic War, I can generate 10-15 million by myself, but more realistically a guild invading a large yield planet should probably have at least 10-20 active members to hit its target without too much difficulty. (I base this on my personal experience being a member of different guilds on different servers.) If we assume 20 players per 5 million points generated, then these scores would be evidence of at least 48,000 guilded players leaving a mark during Total Galactic War, but I'd honestly expect the total number of active players to be higher. (Though it'd also give those people a heart attack who think that the game only has 4,000 active players nowadays because that's the daily average recorded on Steam.)

Adventures on the PTS, Part Whatever

I continue to log into the public test server almost every day. I've never been this engaged with testing anything in SWTOR before; it's quite strange.

First there's the new ops boss. I won't spoil anything about the theme or detailed mechanics, don't worry, but I do want to talk a bit about the experience of testing itself. Back when I tried XR-53 on the PTS, I went in with a group where at least a few people already knew what to expect, we killed it after a relatively small number of tries, and then we got an achievement at the end. It wasn't that dissimilar to trying a boss on the live servers for the first time.

This time around, things have been very different. I mentioned in a previous post that the ops entrance is right at the Odessen spawn-in point, which I assume is not going to be how it's going to work when the operation is finalised. When you go through the portal, you get teleported right into a room with the boss - no trash, nothing. Additionally, there's a droid called M4R-TN (Martin, like the ops dev - get it?) who not only offers repairs, but also has a number of consoles next to him that allow you to tweak things about the boss fight, such as in- or decreasing its health and damage output - a true test environment.

If you wanted to, you could dial down the boss's health to next to nothing and one-shot it. But what for? There's no achievement at this stage, or loot. It's up to you, the player, to decide how easy or hard you want the fight to be, purely for the sake of fun, and that's surprisingly difficult.

I'm guessing like most people, we initially tried to simply do the boss fight as presented, without tweaking anything. We also went in blind, because it's fun to discover things by ourselves. And that did work decently enough for story mode.

Veteran mode was a different matter though - so much damage! So much going on! Pure chaos. Trying to figure things out by yourself is fun for a while, but only until it isn't anymore. I've got to confess here that I've also learned over time that my ops team and I aren't actually very good at figuring out boss mechanics by ourselves. We have a tendency to completely misunderstand what's going on at times, and then coming up with ideas based on those misunderstandings that only make things worse. Myself, I just get completely overwhelmed at some point.

It made me realise that for how much I love operations in SWTOR, I'm a bit like the cliché of a WoW Classic raider - good at a 20-year-old fight that I've had opportunity to practice for literal years, but better not present me with anything new or even remotely difficult - as I'll just freeze up, even if I was actively asking for something new before. It's not entirely the same situation, but there are definitely parallels. I like the familiar, and SWTOR has given me plenty of opportunity to get used to things.

The other week I did multiple runs of Terror from Beyond, and it occurred to me that Operator IX on veteran mode is actually a pretty complex and hard to explain fight, what with everything that goes on with the colour mechanics. It doesn't seem so bad to me now after years of repetition, but the first people to figure out the encounter probably also had to spend quite a bit of time wiping, reading tooltips and experimenting in order to figure out exactly what to do at each stage and in what order. I've tried to take comfort in that thought at times when the new boss felt impossibly overwhelming to me - reminding myself that it won't seem half as bad once I've had time to properly understand and digest what's actually happening at each stage.

So after initially just dialling down the boss's damage a lot so we wouldn't die quite so quickly and had more time to actually figure out key mechanics, we did slowly get a grip on those.. but things were still messy and would quickly fall apart entirely. When I happened to come across a video from someone whose team had killed the boss on the PTS only the other day, I watched it, and it immediately taught us some things to improve.

This meant that the other night we finally realised that we'd hit a point where we understood what we were supposed to do; we just didn't have the numbers to execute it. We'd already reduced the default damage by half, but now we also had to reduce the boss's health, because we were hitting what's effectively the soft enrage with the boss still close to half health. (Mr Commando used to call that point "the 50% mechanic" - see my earlier point about us misunderstanding what's happening sometimes.)

On the next attempt we reduced the boss's health massively and he died with ease. So now the last exercise is going to be to dial the numbers up and down a bit more to see how much more we can take, but then I think we'll be done testing this particular fight for now. We've learned the mechanics and will be prepared in that regard. But if it goes live with the current default health and damage numbers, we won't kill it for a long time regardless.

The person who posted the kill video with the boss set to default values said the tuning felt good to them. In the video I could see that they were doing almost double my team's healing and about a third more damage. I mean, good for them, they are clearly good at the game - I just wish they were aware that what they are bringing to the table is not what the average group that attempts a veteran mode is going to have. I'm desperately hoping that the data we've provided by wiping over and over again is at least sending a signal in that regard, but I do still worry that it won't be enough. I suspect that not many who find the boss too hard in its current state will go through the process of wiping for hours to understand what's going on and fine-tune the numbers; most will probably just give up. And then the data set will just consist of the most elite NiM raiders killing it with ease, suggesting that everything is fine and dandy. I don't know. I can only keep trying.

The other thing that I've been spending time on is levelling lowbies with the new difficulty toggle set to veteran or master. I'll probably have another post about that in me at some point, but it's just so weirdly compelling to me. Since I'm playing so much and generating Conquest points, I've also set our PTS guild to invade a planet every week. Since there's no competition, we win every time. I know it's only temporary and doesn't mean anything, but I enjoy seeing "TSS PTS" being the conquerors of an increasing number of planets...