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Highly populated servers can see waits of up to an hour, but servers are slowly freeing up space.

After 6 years in development and a budget that’s rumored to rival some major motion picture costs, BioWare has finally launched their ambitious new MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Our own Rob Ottone was lucky enough to attend the special launch event in New York, which you can read about here. However, any MMO launch is bound to have some hiccups and difficulties at first. TOR is no different, and the game has been reported to have serious waiting queues for some of the high population servers. Help is on the way, though, according to the SW:TOR official forums.

“As many of you know, we're experiencing high load and corresponding queues on some servers,” says Stephen Reid, the Senior Online Community Manager for The Old Republic. “We're monitoring all of our servers around the clock, and we're raising server population caps where required. However, to ensure our long-term goals of server stability and healthy populations, we do not want to raise population caps too rapidly. We want incoming players to populate lower population servers. At the same time, higher population servers will not be 'locked' because we want to allow people to join a server to play with their friends if they wish to.”

Servers are expected to be congested at the launch of an MMO, and even though BioWare attempted to roll out the early access for people that pre-ordered the game, many players have had to wait up to an hour for access to their game. In some cases, the actual website has even gotten bogged down, as Gamespot’s Kevin VanOrd discovered today.

Obviously, this isn’t a universal problem, as SW: TOR has lower population servers that don’t have a wait at all, or a much shorter one. With that being said, Reid highlights a few servers that players should avoid if they want to get into the game faster:

US-based servers

The Harbinger – US West Coast - PvE
The Swiftsure – US West Coast - PvP

The Fatman – US East Coast - PvP

EU-based servers

Bloodworthy – EU English - PvP
Frostclaw – EU English - PvE
Legions of Lettow – EU English - PvP
The Red Eclipse – EU English - PvE
Tomb of Freedom Nadd – EU English - PvP

Darth Revan's Mask – EU German - PvP
Darth Traya – EU German - PvP
Jar'Kai Sword - EU German - PvP

Hrakert Rift – EU French – PvP

If you are already on these servers and would like to move, Reid says that, while there is a server transfer option being worked on, there’s no ETA on when it will be available. In the meantime, players on those servers will unfortunately have to deal with the server queues for the time being, or start a new character on a less populated server.