In an interview with PC Gamer, Lead Game Designer for Star Wars: The Old Republic Daniel Erickson, replied to a question about the group finder and whether or not it will support cross-server searching at launch. Daniel replied stating, “They will not be cross-server as we are coming up on a huge move to servers with massively higher population caps than we have today.”

Now this is not the first MMO game to merge all their servers into a few. DC Universe Online did this last year when they merged all their servers into four massive ones as the player population fell. So it seems BioWare has the same idea. This is all good and fine, but are mega-servers really anything to be excited about?

Mega-servers do sound like they’d be awesome, ten of thousands of more players all on the same server, I mean, that sounds awesome to me, right? However looking at it logistically, there’ really won’t be any noticeable impact to players.  Illum is not all of a sudden going to be able to support thousands of PvP players at the same time. Hell when I was playing, my frames per second dropped to single digits once there were more than 50 players there.

Dungeons in SWTOR are also mainly instanced, so again this has no greater benefit than a cross-server group finder would have. The only conceivable difference I can think of would be that the auction house would have more activity in it and people wouldn’t have to worry about server-transfers to join friends.

On top of that SWTOR is basically an co-op MMORPG at best, so more players really doesn’t make a difference. I soloed the entire game, grouping maybe three times total. For a game like SWTOR that is very single-player oriented, it just doesn’t seem like Mega-Servers would matter at all. But then again, it’ll save BioWare some time from constantly having to merge servers.

The first stage of grief is denial, which seems to be where EA is headed after it released its financial report yesterday revealing that subscription numbers for Star Wars: The Old Republic dropped 23.5% from its peak last quarter.

Active subscribers dropped from 1.7 million to 1.3 million, to which President of EA Labels, Frank Gibeau, responded saying this was due to casual gamers leaving the game.

We brought in a lot of users, and with a brand like Star Wars, it reaches out much past the hardcore MMO fan base into the broader market. And as the service evolves from here, what we’re seeing is that some of the initial casual customers have gone through a billing cycle and decided not to subscribe to the game.

Mr. Gibeau goes on to counter, saying that it’s core is actually growing,

the percentage of paying subscribers from our peak until now has actually gone up, and the folks that we have are as engaged as they were when they first bought the product.

Make no mistake, BioWare intends to grow subscribers.

I don’t believe that Gibeau mentioned to shareholders that EA gave every single player players with a level 50 character a free month of game-time only a few weeks ago. Hmm, I wonder if this 1.3 million number is at all deceptively inflated? I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the real number is already under 1 million.

Also mentioned during the conference call was that SWTOR was in EA’s top 10 franchises in terms of profitability, but was less profitable than the following franchises: Medal of Honor, Battlefield, FIFA, Madden, The Sims, and SimCity. However, it did beat Tiger Woods Golf. This places SWTOR somewhere between 7-9 on the list.

EA is doing what all companies do when they have bad news, put on a happy face and try to explain it away, but casual gamers? I won’t consider anyone that uses Xfire to be casual and from their stats, SWTOR is in serious decline.

It’s been another great week here at LoreHound. More PAX interviews have appeared, we’ve had a few exclusives, and there’s even been some game industry mudslinging. I was terribly excited to see news about Torchlight 2, and I’m sure there’s even more excitement about Diablo 3. I won’t be playing either game as I’ve got weekend plans, but I’m sure between TERA and Diablo 3 there’ll be lots of beta testing going on this weekend.

This week seems to have flown by so quickly! Maybe it’s because I’ve been sleeping through a nasty flu, or wasting lots of time on The Secret War. Actually, given that I’m ranked #2 for my state on the leaderboards, I’d say I’ve been wasting entirely too much time on The Secret War. What can I say, I’ve got not-so-hidden dreams of world conquest, although I’ve been contenting myself with doing my best to keep Brasil and China in the hands of the Dragons. In any event, I feel like no time has passed at all since I wrote last week’s rundown. But enough about me, I’m sure the week’s news is much more interesting!

• PAX East Interview with Jared Gerritzen of Zombie Studios, who discussed Blacklight: Retribution with iTZKooPA. New maps, game modes, heroes and more!
• PAX East Interview with Chris Rippy of Robot Entertainment where iTZKooPA gets the scoop on lots of gameplay footage for Orcs Must Die 2.
• PAX East Interview with Tor Egil Andersen and Erling Ellingsen of Funcom, talking about character progression in The Secret World. Part Two is where iTZKooPA asks tougher questions, like when will we see more ARGs.
• itZKooPA talked about the new content patch in Champions Online, and how it put the game back on his radar.
• PAX East Interview with Victor Kislyi , CEO of Wargaming.net about the upcoming flying MMO World of Warplanes. If you want to take to the skies, there’ll be a public beta in June!
• Mike told us about Yet Another Free SWTOR Weekend. How many of these do they plan on having? I agree with Mike, they should just get it over with and open up a fulltime free trial.
• I was excited to see the launch of The Secret War, the Facebook app that’s paired with The Secret World, and discussed the unexpected success that shut it down for a few hours. My wild speculations turned me into a laughingstock – I honestly expected the app would be down for days or weeks instead of hours!
• The first beta weekend for Guild Wars 2 was announced!
• TERA‘s open beta weekend kicked of yesterday. Everyone can play this weekend, even if you’ve not purchased the game.
• SWTOR‘s subscription numbers may be declining, according to analyst group Cowen and Company.
• Bluehole Studios called NCSoft a corporate bully, and said they won’t back down. TERA will be released, even if they have to fearlessly stomp through the grist of rumors and lawsuits.
• PAX Interview with Stefan Ramirez of Bluehole Studios. iTZKoopa got the scoop on how the “holy trinity” will play out in TERA, as well as more details about the lauded political system.
• The Diablo 3 open beta stress test weekend is underway, allowing anyone to get their hands on the game. I haven’t had much interest in this, but I’ll admit to being slightly disappointed it’s this weekend when I won’t be at home to play.
• PARTY!! It’s the five-year anniversary of Lord of the Rings Online, and iTZKooPA spoke with Aaron Campbell, Senior Producer of LotRO, about the exciting events happening within the game to celebrate. Fireworks, mounts and costumes are just a few of the goodies available during the festivities.
• PAX Interview with Max Schaefer of Runic Games about co-op, quest sharing and other exciting tidbits in Torchlight 2.

Since announcing the free Weekend Pass five weeks ago, BioWare has hosted three free weekends and has just announced the fourth, making this 4 out of the last 6 weekends. Actually calling them free “weekends” isn’t very accurate since each event lasts for three and a half days, so really they should be called “free half-weeks”, but I’m getting side-tracked.

It seems lately that EA and BioWare are throwing out a lot of free game-time. Aside from these free weekends, players also recently received 30 free days of game-time and additional friend passes to give out.  That’s a lot of free time and one wonders why they just aren’t making it a permanent free-trial instead of multiple free promotions that only last a few days.  I guess it’s a marketing thing, maybe some statistic shows you get more players by limiting the free trials instead, who knows.

Anyway the next Star Wars: The Old Republic free Weekend Pass  begin on Thursday, April 19th at 12:01AM CDT / 5:01AM GDT and run until Monday, April 23rd at 2:00AM CDT / 7:00AM GDT.