Originally Posted by SWTOR
Howdy everyone,
I'm jumping into here to give a little more insight on what happened here. First off, I wanted to apologize for the lack of the patch note at release - that was an oversight on my part.
Now I wanted to address why this change was made, and how it will be changing in the near term. Since we have launched, we have continued to add many more items to the game. As we have added more items, there are more items the GTN needs to search against whenever you enter a search team. What we had been seeing is very broad searches were causing enormous performance problems with the GTN. These performance problems would impact everyone using the GTN and not only the person conducting the search. This actually made the GTN unusable for some players.
For example, if I searched the GTN for "a b" then I would end up causing a performance issues for everyone else using the GTN at the same time. In our efforts to provide a solution and address this, we inadvertently impacted y'all pretty severely and created a wretched inconvenience. This is unacceptable for us.
To that point, we have a possible solution that will solve everyone's needs without crushing the GTN performance. This change will go into a future patch (not tonight’s unscheduled maintenance). However, we feel that this will be a solution that will work for all parties.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and annoyance this has caused everyone. The last thing we want to see is us adding frustration to your experience in-game. I hope this little peek behind the curtain helps explain our rationale and lets you know just how serious we are about fixing this!