Star Wars: The Old Republic Asia Pacific servers to close

BioWare announced its plans to shut down Asia Pacific servers for its MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, then transfer local users onto North America servers.

After consulting with the game's users via the forums, BioWare finally made the decision to merge these APAC servers with high population North American servers. BioWare Austin community manager Eric Musco took to the forums in a post explaining the decision and what will be necessary before this merge can happen.

"Getting to the point of being able to merge the servers is going to be a multistep process," he writes. "First off we need to update our Free Character Transfer System to include the game changes that we have made recently along with the upcoming changes in Game Update 2.0 and the Digital Expansion: Rise of the Hutt Cartel. We will then offer Free Character Transfers to anyone currently playing on an APAC server to a North American server of the same gameplay type."

In addition, BioWare must update its server merge technology before ultimately merging and moving APAC servers.

The server merges are as follows:

Mastar Dar'Nala (PvP) will transfer to The Bastion (PvP)
Gav Daragon (RP-PvE) will transfer to Begeren Colony (RP-PvE)
Dalborra (PvE) will transfer to The Harbinger (PvE)

There is no clear timeframe for the eventual transition between servers; However, Musco states "it will take some time."