The Snark Side is no longer on Juyo. In a flurry of activity, we moved yesterday. I have mixed emotions about this. Ultimately, I don’t care what my server name is; but I definitely think things could have been handled differently on Bioware’s end. For one thing, I think they should have provided a list in advance of what servers would be made origin servers and what the corresponding destination servers were going to be for all moves before any transfers started. That way, players on those servers could have mulled it over and prepared. It was not fun hearing transfers would hit some servers but not actually knowing if you were going to be affected until THE DAY it started. Complete panic mode happened. Should we move? Should we move now or wait until after our raid nights this weekend? If we wait, will we miss the window of opportunity? There was more chaos game-wide than there needed to be. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have had a list in advance.

Also, I lost my legacy name. I know a lot of people in the community did; but it really kicked me in the stomach when I realized it happened to me. I spent a long time coming up with the legacy name I wanted and I chose one that gave me an identity. There are players who just use funny names, or band names, or whatever and they probably didn’t mind having to pick a new one. But mine was a last name. One that I wanted my characters to be known by. I tried alternate spellings and those were unavailable too. Which made me realize even if I did come up with an unusual spelling, obviously several people were going to have essentially the same legacy name as me. Ugh. Stress. Rage. Sob.

I’m not going to complain this should have never happened. I understand the reason for filling up servers a bit more. It was nice to be somewhere where there is 10 times the activity there was on our old server. It should help with sales on the Global Trade Network and it will definitely help with finding someone to do a quick heroic with. There are good things about the whole process. But there was also some confusion, extra work guilds had to go through, etc. And again I will state I believe that all could have been alleviated with advance notice. Our server transfer was acted on quickly because we didn’t know what staying behind would mean. Would we be allowed to stay there for 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Would we have to pay to transfer later? No one knew. Some of our poor guildies came home from work to login and find the guild disbanded. Discussion threads on our forums were happening too fast to keep up.

But the good news is, we’re all together. We didn’t lose any guild bank items or money. So that is good. I’ll likely post more in-depth thoughts on some of the details and specific issues next week. For now, I’m just trying to relax from all the shock and surprise of yesterday.