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Tonight at 12:01AM EST we are officially launching Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.

This is a huge moment for everyone – both the fans and those who created the game. Thanks for being part of the experience so far, and we look forward to running the best game service we can for years to come.

Tonight, we are bringing the servers down for maintenance as we prepare for launch, as previously mentioned. Both the game servers and SWTOR.com will be offline from 6PM CST (4PM PST/7PM EST/12AM GMT/1AM CET) to 11PM CST (8PM PST/12AM EST/5AM GMT/6AM CET).

As well as bringing the existing game servers back online, from 11PM CST onwards we’ll be bringing up a large number of new servers, spread across all three of our server locations (US West Coast, US East Coast and Europe). As always, every server is open and available to anyone playing – just select your preferred location (US / Europe) from the tab at the bottom of the server select screen.

Even with these additional servers we are expecting queues on the most popular servers, and these queues are likely to persist for a while yet. We are monitoring them closely and raising population caps where necessary, however this is a careful process that is ongoing. Our servers do not have unlimited populations and we want every server to have a healthy population during and after launch.

If you are joining the game for the first time during this launch period, or if you are looking for a lower population server to play on, now is the best time to create a character on a new server. We would strongly advise anyone joining the game to not attempt to create a new character on a server that is listed as ‘Full’, unless you are comfortable with the potential for queues to enter the server.

Finally, don’t forget that after tonight’s downtime, you are entering a ‘grace period’ in which you will need to enter your final product registration code (AKA ‘game code’) from your copy of the game (or your email from Origin), along with your preferred payment method, to activate your 30 days of game time. You can redeem your game code here.

As another reminder, we’ll be taking down the game servers and SWTOR.com at the end of that ‘grace period’ at 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET), the early hours of December 22nd. When the servers come back up at that time, you will need a product registration code redeemed on your account to continue playing. To ensure you can continue to play, make sure you redeem your code as soon as possible.

We’re getting ready for launch – we hope you are too. We look forward to seeing you online!