SWTOR: Griffon again

Yesterday, SWTOR's servers were down for a considerably long time, and what I didn't know until I checked the notes of that day, was that they were going to merge some of the previously known "destination servers", among which my own server, Nightmare Lands. This time it wasn't a 'voluntary' transfer, as was the case when they merged my old server Frostclaw with Nightmare Lands: now you just end up at a destination server with all your characters.

It baffles me myself how little I care about these server merges. Had it been LotRO, I would have expressed screams of terror at the prospect of losing the small but nice community of the Gilrain server. I guess I mostly feel connected to my guild mates in SWTOR, there isn't that much interaction between others. In other words, I don't sense a strong community in SWTOR - but that could also just be due to my own perception or playstyle, or it could differ per server. I do get the feeling that people are pretty indifferent to yesterday's merges compared to the initial ones of a month ago. Back then it was shocking news and nobody knew how it was going to turn out; today we know the drill and accept that it is a necessary evil for a company losing customers that does want to keep its game alive. That said, there were also a couple of positive notes about yesterday's merges, both general and personal:

• Everyone now has 12 character slots instead of 9

• Legacy names no longer need to be universal

Some people believe this is a bad thing, fearing confusion of identity. I myself think this will rarely be a problem. If you think about it, names in real life aren't unique either. I'm particularly happy myself that I got rid of Gryffin and am now called Griffon again!

• Nightmare Lands was merged with Red Eclipse

Back when SWTOR was launched, many players I knew from LotRO went to either Frostclaw or Red Eclipse. Although most of them have stopped playing, who knows who I'll find back on Red Eclipse!

My only victim of the merges was Yu'no, who's name was already taken on Red Eclipse. The poor thing will have to live on with a further encoded name as Y-u'no (a cookie if you get the reference).

As my guild was doing a late night Ops that we weren't able to attend due to early work/study the day after, we logged Imperial ('imp') side and created new characters. Tiger made a punk-like bounty hunter, I a chiss Imperial agent called Yuniper. I love her cute Leia-like knots, her nice-looking face - she is going to be the new Mata Hari! I might be wrong, though: when I asked the closest authority (Tiger) if Yuniper was indeed pretty, he answered that the red eyes turn him off. Being a chiss she'll have to live with that handicap, however, it was nice to explore the new (Imperial) world and storylines, and we logged out having achieved level 3.