Best Swtor Server 2016 - Choices Matter in Server Selection

Which server you decide to play on is the first decision you make in SWTOR, but it may be one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

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When I was creating a character for the first time during the SWTOR beta I was a complete MMO novice. Most of my gaming experience was with consoles (I bought a cheap gaming PC for the sole purpose of playing SWTOR) and so a lot of decisions I made in those first few days were made blindly, with no context of what I was actually doing. As a new player, and possibly new to MMO’s in general, you might be feeling the same as you boot up SWTOR for the first time and decide what server you want to play on. On the surface, it may seem like something not worth much thought, but servers can have a sizeable impact on your game experience.

Servers are not one size fits all in The Old Republic and you should take care to consider your decision before rushing through it to create your first character.

The location of the server and the style of gameplay it highlights are both aspects players need to pay attention to in order to make a sound decision. Let’s begin with location.

The European SWTOR servers

Bioware has two server groups, one for Europe and one for North America. The European servers are classified by their language preference, along with the preferred gameplay style. You’re a bit more limited with your options in comparison to the North American servers, since you’re basing your selection first and foremost off of language and then gameplay style.

With North American servers however, location becomes a key factor in deciding which server will be best for you. Here, instead of being divided by language, servers are either east or west. The obvious path here is to choose a server appropriate to where you live — if you live west of the Rockies, you run with a west server, east of them obviously an east server. The reason for this is ping a.k.a. server lag, or the time it takes for your computer to communicate with the game servers. The lower the number the better. Truthfully, there are a ton of technical factors that will influence the quality of your ping that are way above my technical expertise, but the simplest factor is distance — the closer you are to the server, the better your ping.

For example, I live in Kansas. Here, you can see my server lag on Shadowlands, an East server, is 57 ms.

Server Lag

But my server lag on Begeren Colony, a West server, is almost twice that at 107 ms. Both of these are pretty good and neither number is large enough to have a significant impact on my play, but the higher the number the greater chance you will see lag in game or possibly have connection issues.

So the obvious solution is to simply pick the server closest to me and be done with it, right? Not necessarily. The other thing to consider is timezones and what your gameplay schedule will typically be. If it’s as simple as, “I live on the west coast and will usually play on nights and weekends,” then the decision may be as simple as that. However, if you’re a player with a nontraditional work schedule it may make sense for you to consider a different server. East servers have their peak times — the time of day where the most players are in game — during primetime hours for the eastern time zone, west is on pacific standard time. For a time after I first moved from the west coast to Kansas, my work schedule was such that it still made sense for me to play on a west server, since I wasn’t able to log in until much later at night my local time. If the same is true for you, consider what server is going to enable you to play during peak times the most, increasing your chances for quick group finder queues, pvp warzones, etc.