SWTOR Quietly Moved Its Data Centers To The East Coast Ahead Of Merges Next Month

Experiencing some unexpectedly bad lag in Star Wars: The Old Republic? That might be because your West Coast server was changed to an East Coast server in the dead of night.

On Tuesday, SWTOR Game Director Keith Kanneg explained that the game's West Coast data centers had been moved and merged with a single East Coast location. Kanneg admitted that there might be higher ping for some players and that they should report those experiences to customer service.

Lo and behold, some players experienced higher ping and reported it to customer service -- or gnashed their teeth about it on the forums. The unexpected and unannounced nature of the change also rubbed some the wrong way, coming as it was just a few weeks before the planned server merges coming as part of the United Forces update on Nov. 8.

In response to all that, Community Manager Eric Musco posted a brief FAQ today to explain that the move had occurred in secret "because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience." It seems like that could have happened even if players had known about the move ahead of time, but OK.

Musco reiterates that players who feel like their ping is too high should continue to contact customer service so the BioWare team can improve matters. He also explains why all NA servers aren't located in a central U.S. data center and why there isn't just one server overall. tl;dr: It ain't that simple, but at least they're open and communicating about it, unlike the issue that brought all this to the forefront.