SWTOR NA Server Cloud Transfers Announced! September 20th, 2023

The last of the server transfers over to AWS has finally been announced! Just behind recent transfers of the EU servers to the Cloud, Star Forge and Satele Shan have been readied for the transfer in a quick update from Jackie below:

Hello everyone!

We are moving into the final stage of migrating the last two servers over to the cloud! Details below.

Date: September 20th
Time: 7am CT / 12pm UTC
Expected downtime: 6 hours

For this rollout, players should expect for all servers to remain offline for the duration of the maintenance window. This is to account for additional testing on every server to ensure that all servers behave and perform cohesively and there are no interruptions to the player experience.

As always, we will be posting in relevant threads with updates on when the servers will be taken down and when they are brought back up.

Thanks!

For more info on the move to the cloud, check out:

Benefits of Cloud Servers

While none of these are guaranteed and we’ll still of course depend on your own connection, physical location, and your computer, some of the things that the cloud servers may bring include:

Technology that allows the devs to improve the overall player experience such as connectivity, ping, faster start up, and better in-game performance
Backend updates that are crucial to the continued health and stability of the game can be streamlined more efficiently
Be able to leverage and integrate updated tech such as newer hardware and software. Through cloud modernization, we can update numerous tools and automation workflows which will help us maintain the game for long term.
Once finalized, SWTOR may be capable to extend its servers capabilities to reach new players (APAC servers? Language servers? Fresh Start servers?)
The resources required to maintain current systems can be reallocated to focusing on enhancing the game experience – basically they won’t have to keep duct taping their current servers back together.

(note: patch 7.3.1a, although streamlined, ran into some “unexpected issues that required additional investigation and testing”, and ran longer than the estimated time.)

I can shed a little light on this. So yes, moving over to the cloud definitely helps streamline quite a bit overall! For this patch specifically, there are other technical pieces we are updating that are not player facing. Taking into consideration the combination of these updates, the fixes that were published in the patch notes, and testing everything before bringing servers back up, we landed on 4 hours as a safe window of time to allocate for this patch. And Star Forge and Satele Shan are not yet migrated over to the cloud, but we’ll post more details about that soon!

Questions or comments? Feel free to send me a message on Twitter @swtorista, Reddit /u/swtorista, Youtube Swtorista channel or by e-mail at the same name with gmail.com at the end. Have fun out there and may the Force be with you. ~ Swtorista