Satele Shan, one of two North American Star Wars: The Old Republic servers, is far less populated than the other, Star Forge, and Broadsword must step up in fixing the significant problems this causes.
The problem is more complicated to solve given SWTOR’s heavy emphasis on solo content. Regardless, letting Satele Shan rot is unacceptable.
The Population Discrepancy
Before we get into the problem, the rationale, or the solutions, let’s look at some nice, hard data on server populations using a pair of Reddit polls from around January and October of 2025 that asked the question “Which server do you play on the most?” | “Which server do you mainly play on?”
Of course, this data only represents which server Redditors play on, but both polls show similar results that are in line with popular sentiment and have hundreds of respondents.
It’s clear that Star Forge and Darth Malgus have the lion’s share of the players, with Star Forge having triple the number of players as Satele Shan.
I’m not going to get into any sort of statistical significance, error, or confidence intervals, but I find it noteworthy that we might be seeing some sort of regional population movement in action with Darth Malgus (▼1%) to Tulak Hord (▲1%) and Satele Shan (▼4%) to Star Forge (▲5%).
To be clear, 2 data points isn’t enough to establish a pattern, but those numbers do roughly add up.
The Problems with Empty Servers
There’s a significant population disparity between the servers, particularly in North America (NA). So what?
Queue times are longer both because there aren’t enough people in queue to make a match, or the matchmaker is delaying the start of a game because it is trying to avoid sticking premades with solo queuers.
Match quality is subsequently worse as premades get matched against solos and timely backfills are not guaranteed. In an unmoderated environment like SWTOR’s PvP, this means you’re more likely to run into bad actors over and over again.
On the PvE side, raid teams are harder to make because of scheduling constraints. Too many of the people you could recruit are trapped in a spaghetti of the same teams.
Adjusting times one direction might enable one person to be available but cut you off from two others, and if someone leaves, that has ramifications for multiple teams. In more technical terms, the network has insufficient plasticity.
Smaller talent pools also result in a more toxic environment that’s harder to moderate. You don’t have to be nice if you can’t be replaced. Some of this is inevitable at the top of the food chain, but it’s not good to reward or necessitate ruthlessness in guild leadership.
On the economic front, the GTN has a lot more stuff on the healthy servers, at more competitive and consistent prices, with rarer items likely being available more often. After spending just a few minutes, I can see that items tend to go by 10-25% cheaper on Star Forge than on Satele Shan.
The cost of transferring a whole legacy is prohibitively expensive. As someone who has been playing actively since launch, I have 30-some-odd toons. If I were to spend money to transfer my entire legacy, it would cost over $300 in Cartel Coins; I’d lose my guilds; and even though they’d remain unlocked, I’d have to redecorate all my SHs.
You end up with a vicious cycle where the population plummets as players leave this server or this game because of low population.
Broadsword’s Potential Reasoning
Many players care far more about their toon’s name than the MMO aspects of SWTOR. In fact, some go out of their way to play on lower population servers just so they don’t have to interact with others.
Names are precious to many players. The last time there were server merges, back in 2017, there was a lot of controversy around players needing to give up their names.
BioWare handled it as fairly as they could by letting the toon with more play time keep the name, but it’s not perfect solution.
Naming conflicts are most likely to occur with the most common names where there are already multiple players on the same server who want it. I’m talking about names with ridiculous variations like Revan vs Rëván vs Revann.
SWTOR is now 14 years old, and it’s been almost 8 years since the last server merge. If you have two players who have both been active for most of that time, it’s hard to justify making either of them give up their name, especially if they don’t want the servers to merge.
I can’t imagine that too many players will be put in such a difficult position with truly unique names, but it’s an impasse, nonetheless, and the devs have hard data on the economic fallout from their last merge.
Lasting for 14 years is a strong metric of SWTOR’s continued profitability, but it’s clear from the introduction of things like KOTOR-style cutscenes to the main story that Broadsword doesn’t have a big pile of cash sitting around somewhere.
Going 18 months without any story content resulting from the global voice actors surely didn’t help their financials either.
Resource costs are a serious consideration in their own right. The last time there was a server merge, it took multiple updates to set things up, so it’s unlikely that cost for doing another merge is inconsequential, and that’s before you factor in the aforementioned economic fallout.
When the devs already cater so heavily to solo players, it’s hard to justify allocating resources to such a project that some of them won’t like and many won’t care about.
Possible Solutions
Before you ask, just playing on multiple servers is not a valid solution. Numerous progression systems are linked to individual servers, like Reputation, Seasons, Decorating, and Achievements.
The clearest solution to these problems is merge Star Forge with Satele Shan, and merge The Leviathan and Tulak Hord with Darth Malgus, assuming EU players want that.
There is a population disparity among the English and non-English EU servers, but that language difference certainly changes the calculus. The NA servers are the main focus of this discussion and source of my experience.
From a marketing standpoint, it would certainly look better to merge the EU servers alongside NA ones because then Broadsword could call it regional megaservers and even claim it’s enabled by last year’s move to the AWS cloud.
This is important because it avoids sending such a strong signal of population decline like it would if they were to only merge the two NA servers.
Whole Legacy Server Migration
Why doesn’t Broadsword just offer whole legacy server migration at a low, flat rate? The thinking here is that it would be cheaper or easier to transfer all toons from one server to another, instead of transferring toons one by one.
Broadsword should have offered such a service for Shae Vizla. Forcing APAC players to start over for the novelty of offering a fresh start for non-APAC players has definitely contributed to the server’s relative desolation.
They did partially reverse course after a few months, offering 16 free transfers to subscribers and 50% off additional transfers for a few months, but there was a credit limit in place to combat inflation and if you have 30 toons, you’re still looking at USD$80-100 if you wanted to transfer the rest.
The fact that their eventual offering was focused so heavily on individual toons makes me wonder if there are technical limitations preventing whole legacy migration from being offered.
The cost of migration would be tricky to nail down because it has to be cheaper than the cost of individual transfers after a few toons, but it can’t be so cheap that players will just migrate legacies rather than transfer several toons.
The only way I could see it working out is if they hitched the migration to a huge bundle of some sort, like Master the Fight bundles, where you’re getting a bunch of subscription time and Cartel Coins to offset the cost.
Of course, you can’t make it too valuable or people feel like they’re getting left out if they don’t want to transfer.
Furthermore, if most players who can afford it would buy the migration bundle (as in Broadsword is developing a product for which there is sufficient demand), they’d hasten the demise of Satele Shan, leaving behind the wretched poors to fester in their squalor. Merging the servers becomes the equitable and efficient thing to do.
Cross-Server Queueing
Cross-server queueing is another alternative that lets solo players keep their Malgussy toon names, but it doesn’t solve the problem for progression raiders and queueing is not one of SWTOR’s stronger features to begin with.
Given that they chose to get rid of Ranked PvP and stopped moderating the attraction a while back, it’s safe to say that cross-server queueing is effectively impossible.
That being said, I would think an implementation that separates PvP entirely from other game systems like gearing and customization shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
This sort of approach would transform it into something more like other PvP games like shooters and MOBAs that just have a queue interface, no world to explore.
Server Merge + Naming Revamp
Merging the servers without making any changes to character naming or planetary instances probably isn’t in the cards.
The number of players who want merges is likely dwarfed by the number who don’t want it or don’t care because they never interact with others anyway.
In order to make a server merge possible, the game’s naming system would likely need to be inverted, where legacy surnames are unique and toon names could be generic. Most large platforms that don’t require you to use your real identity do it this way.
Democratizing access to toon names so people can play through the Jedi Knight storyline while being named Revan will probably encourage some players to resubscribe. It would also eliminate the headaches associated with running out of available toon names.
Combining such a name change with regional megaservers would make the game better for all.
