Thought I'd share a visualization of how the SWTOR server migrations have shaped realm populations. Here I'm just taking a look at realm status (1 for light, 2 for medium) over time, by region and type. Short story: origin servers are ghost towns, destination servers are hopping (but that much was clear already).*
Slightly cooler story: even before the migrations, as far back as April, destination servers had higher populations than the other servers in their zone / type. There is one exception. Until just days before the migration, The Swiftsure averaged a higher population than The Bastion (which ultimately became the destination server for West Coast PvP servers). Makes me wonder why Bastion got destination status. Rounding errors between status and true population numbers? Server hardware?
I also went ahead and re-collected data on posting volume on the PvP forums. Activity - in both posts and views - is definitely down from earlier in the year. Curiously, while 1.2 saw a remarkable increase in activity on the pvp forums, the 1.3 release had almost no effect. It looks like a focus on the server migration drew posters away from the forums around the roll-out of that feature.**
*The gap in data from the start of April comes from my failure to backup a week's worth of data and then getting a drive failure.
**The white band around May 5th is a day of data I'm missing.
Wow, I'm really impressed by all the data you've gathered, that's amazing! I love the visualization of the server merges. Says much more than just people's feeling of how busy servers are.
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