Surge of The Old Republic related news is starting along with the appearance of patch 1.3 on the Public Test Server. The most awaited piece of news is certainly how will Character Transfer Service work and when will it start. Answers to both of those questions can be found at the official blog post on swtor.com entitled “Character Transfer, Server Populations and You“. We find out that the Character Transfer Service will start on June 12th 2012. – even before patch 1.3 is deployed. Character transfer will only be allowed between certain source servers to certain destination serves (which servers exactly will be offered to move where exactly remains to be announced). The intention here is to try and improve the population on certain servers. Albait limited, this service might get extended later on with a paid option where you can move to wherever you want for a fee.  
It seems that a certain level of manual labor will be involved in character transfer so this process will not be instantaneous and you can even expect to see long transfer times in certain situations where there is a huge number of characters to be transferred. They are hoping to do it in hours, but it might take much longer than that if there is a huge rush.  
Here are some more details that will be covered in more detail in an upcoming FAQ:  

Legacy will be transferred to your new server and your unlocks will be available there too. If you have already unlocked your Legacy on your destination server, the higher level Legacy will take precedence. For guild members and masters, you will not be able to transfer your guild as a whole to your new server; instead you will need to reform it. If you have a guild bank, it will be re-granted to your new guild on your destination server by Customer Service. This is not an automatic process and you will have to contact Customer Service directly. If your transferred character’s name conflicts with an existing name on a destination server, you will be asked to rename your character. In the case of Legacy names, unless you have unlocked your Legacy on your origin server, you will need to rename your Legacy upon transfer (although you may pick the same Legacy name as on your origin server, if available).

  
We wish everyone at Bioware good luck with this new Character Transfer Service and may it be the first step towards complete recovery of this great game.  

Tags: character transfers