Lots of The Old Republic news today! Bioware’s Gabe Amatangelo (Principal Lead PvP, Operations & Flashpoints Designer) has updated the official blog with information on what to expect from future PVP updates.
In the first week after launch there were over a million Warzone matches played, with nearly half of all players participating in Warzones. Bad news for Republic players, though – the Empire currently leads overall, having won 53% of all Alderaan Civil War and Voidstar matches (across all servers). Huttball has been played the most, accounting for 39% of all matches – and yes, we’ll be adding a new same faction vs. same faction enabled Warzone in the future.
First and foremost here is what we are addressing as a top priority:
You can read what’s in-store, here:
http://www.swtor.com/blog/new-year%E2%80%99s-pvp-update
Game Director James Ohlen has just updated the official blog with a bit more information regarding bugs and the process of fixing them.
In my last two posts, I talked about how we will be adding new game systems and content in future patches. I also mentioned that we will be continuing to put effort toward bug fixing, balance changes and exploit proofing. But I didn’t give too much information on what we’re doing in that regard. So here are some more details on the topic.
Read the entire thing here:
http://www.swtor.com/blog/word-bugs-james-ohlen.
Biowares’ Stephen Reid addresses why certain users where banned. (Several of the users posted on the official forums, as well as Reddit, that they’d been unfairly banned/suspended.)
Stephen Reid starts his post with this:
Our Terms of Service team recently took action against some accounts playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, and we wanted to give you some insight into what happened and why.
You can read the entire topic here:
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=120099
Here’s the URL:
http://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/nty9d/im_stephen_reid_senior_community_manager_for_star/
Started 25 minutes ago so you’ve still got time to throw some questions in.
Update
The Q&A session is now over. Reddit user Chossi_lah has rounded everything up into one neat little package (highly recommended reading for any TOR player) which can be found here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/nty9d/im_stephen_reid_senior_community_manager_for_star/c3bxds9
Big thanks to Stephen Reid for taking the time to do this. (And to Chossi_lah for making everything easier to access.)
If any more event sessions/events like this pop-up in the future I’ll be sure to let you all know.
The first patch of The Old Republic comes on 12/27, and with it comes a lot of bug fixes and a nerf to slicing’s rewards. The performance issues for some people on Taris has been addressed and stated to be resolved, as well as other notable issues such as harvest-able nodes being unable to be clicked and flashpoint/operation bugs. Below is the official notes (which can be located on SWTOR.com’s website here).
1.0.1 Patch Notes 12/27/2011
Classes and Combat
- Combat Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug that could cause the global cooldown to display incorrectly in the UI.
- Abilities that require Companion Characters now always correctly require a companion.
- NPCs no longer attempt to engage vanity pets in combat.
- Imperial Agent
- Operative - The tooltip for Acid Blade now displays the correct information.
- Companion Characters
- Kira Carson - Fixed an issue that could cause Kira’s affection progression to become blocked.
- Bug Fixes
- Companion Character dialogue now plays at the correct volume.
Crew Skills
- Gathering Skills
- Slicing
- Rewards from Slicing have been reduced to bring them into balance with other skills.
- Adjusted incorrect values for medium slicing boxes.
- Bug Fixes
- Corrected an issue that could cause some gathering nodes to appear as unharvestable.
Flashpoints and Operations
- Flashpoints
- Mandalorian Raiders - Crowd control immunity has been removed from several members of the Enemy Boarding Party.
- Colicoid War Game - An issue that prevented some players from mounting turrets in this Flashpoint has been corrected.
- The Red Reaper - Darth Ikoral now uses his abilities correctly.
- Directive 7 - Mentor now resets correctly if he defeats the player group.
- Bug Fixes
- All players in a group who have a daily Flashpoint mission now get credit for completing that Flashpoint.
- Operations
- Eternity Vault
- Fixed an issue that could cause players to instantly die when affected by Soa’s knockback.
- Turrets in Normal Mode no longer behave as turrets from Hard Mode.
- Players are now able to properly obtain loot from chests.
- The Ancient Pylons now spawn enemies at the correct intervals.
- Karagga’s Palace
- Players no longer need to reset this Operation if they do not defeat Bonethrasher.
- Corrected an issue that caused some players to become stuck at the throne room door.
Items
- Bug Fixes
- PvP lockboxes can no longer be sold for credits.
- Fixed incorrect item rewards from PvP leveling lockboxes.
Missions and NPCs
- Missions
- Imperial
- A New Master: Defeating Teeno no longer causes him to surrender on top of Phyne, making him difficult to interact with.
- General Faraire: All of Khourlet’s Elite Guards are now accessible by the player.
- Bug Fixes
- Fixed a mission-related issue that could cause poor performance and client crashes on Taris for some players.
- NPCs
- Bug Fixes
- Corrected several instances of non-interactive NPCs appearing and disappearing from the player’s view.
PvP
- Warzones
- General
- Rewards for winning Warzones have been increased.
- Warzone completion rewards have been decreased.
- Bug Fixes
- Voidstar
- Corrected an issue that could prevent some players from entering the Voidstar.
- Made adjustments to prevent attacking players from reaching the doors in the reactor core before bridges are extended.
UI
- Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug that could prevent players from accepting pending mission rewards.
- Targeting a friendly player no longer occasionally displays incorrect text for the character’s name.
- Corrected an issue that could cause some auction expirations to behave incorrectly.
- The splash screen no longer displays longer than the “accept changes” dialogue when changing resolutions on some computers.
- Master Looter now works correctly for items being looted from chests.
- The server select screen no longer displays over the character select after being disconnected for being away.
- Corrected an issue that could cause mission mapnotes to disappear when a new mission is obtained.
Miscellaneous Bug Fixes
- Special characters no longer display incorrectly in the French credits.
- Remaining baby names have been added to the credits.
- Corrected a link that displayed in French and German versions when the servers are unavailable.
In my “Experiences with The Old Republic beta” article; I briefly mentioned that I couldn’t find a combat-log of any sort. I figured I’d simply over-looked it or it wasn’t yet complete but would be in the retail version of the game. Turns out I was close, in an interview/Q&A session with Fansite Summit; lead combat designer Georg Zoeller revealed this:
Interviewer: So we talk about analytics and what you guys do on the developer side. Players like to do their own analytics and how to improve their characters. What tools in the game help you do that? Will you be able to export a combat log or anything like that?
Georg Zoeller: Not at this point, but it’s something very high on our priority list
Interviewer: What’s the pro and con of having something like that in? What’s your approach to players min-maxing?
Georg Zoeller: I have no problem with players min-maxing. I’m min-maxing myself. We do have pretty good… the tooltips are pretty good. The information on the items I think is pretty good. We’re right now lacking a bit is in the evaluating your performance or your group’s performance. Umm what I can tell you is there’s no conspiracy where we’re like we’re hiding this so people aren’t discriminating against other players. If you want to, you know, run a very competitive operations group and you wanna improve, having this data is certainly interesting. Umm and we’re not against it, it’s just right now not in. Will it make it in for launch? We don’t know at this point but it’s very high priority.
So hopefully we’ll have more information soon. At the moment, the lack of a combat-log makes it difficult to put together the best-possible rotation for your character but it’s nice to see that the devs are quickly finding and addressing concerns from their community.
Source: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=66910 – First post contains a link to mp3 should you wish to listen to the interview yourself.
AzurewynD over on Reddit has posted about game-breaking bug that’s gotten his character locked onboard his ship, unable to leave and unable to interact with his companions.
Give him your Upboats and read all about it here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/ninme/alert_major_game_breaking_bug_dont_let_this/.
Make sure to check out the comments below his post too because other people are also running into similar bugs in other areas.
With the game due to launch tomorrow, I expect Bioware will fix these issues pretty quickly.
As with any popular MMO or expansion pack, queues are a bit of a problem.
Jeff Hickman, Executive Producer of Live Services for The Old Republic has spoken up on the official forums regarding the queues and has this to say:
“We know there have been questions about the queues on the servers, so we wanted to take a moment to give you some insight.
In order to ensure that the service would be smooth and stable, we staged how we brought people into the Early Game Access program, adding people in waves. As you know, there are a lot of folks who want to play the game right now and we want to make sure they have lots of people to play with. Balancing this with figuring out when to bring new servers online to help alleviate the size of the queues is part art and part science. On one hand, you do not want people to wait too long – on the other hand, you want to make sure that people have a dynamic, engaging community to play with for long after launch. Either way, we have one clear objective – to make sure folks have fun.
While we can’t promise that there won’t ever be queues, we can promise you that we are taking this matter seriously and constantly reviewing them to make sure that they are manageable and reasonable.”
The developers are continuing to do an excellent job assisting the community and their concerns. It’s early days yet, but the game is off to an excellent start.
Keeping your account secure is obviously very important, so I thought I’d remind players that they have multiple options when it comes to authenticators (or security key as Bioware and EA are calling them).
Got an iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone? You can get the security key app free of charge here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-wars-the-old-republic/id488420452?mt=8
Rather have physical security key? This page has everything you need to purchase it:
http://www.swtor.com/info/security-key
(Coming soon for European players.)
An Android version is also on it’s way says @Rockjaw (Stephen Reid – Community Manager) on his Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/#!/Rockjaw/status/147685106184761344
“Hopefully by December 20th.”
Stay safe Padawans’, see you on Coruscant.
The word over on Twitter is that Bioware will be providing a 48 hour grace period.
Here’s the quote from the forums:
Hello everyone,
While we’ve worked closely with our retailers in the launch territories to ensure copies of Star Wars: The Old Republic are available from our launch date of December 20th, we understand that for those of you who’ve pre-ordered, there may be a concern about getting your copy on time. We’ve heard you want a ‘grace period’ where you can continue to play without having to enter a final product registration code (AKA ‘game code’).
We’ve been listening, and after doing another deep review of our platform infrastructure, we’re taking action. Today, we’re announcing a two day grace period for Star Wars: The Old Republic customers.
This means that everyone who pre-ordered and is in the Early Game Access program has forty-eight hours from launch in which to enter their product registration code, which will be found inside the physical Standard and Collector’s Editions of the game; for digital editions of the game from Origin.com, the registration code will have been emailed to you after December 16th and will arrive before December 19th at 11:59PM EST. After December 22nd 12:01AM EST, you will be required to have a valid payment method and a product registration code registered to your account to continue to play. We strongly recommend that you register your product code as soon as you are able to do so (rather than waiting until the last minute) to ensure a seamless entry into the game, a smooth experience on the account website and to collect any special gifts and items you may be entitled to based on the version of the game you purchased.
We understand that for some, your copy of the game may still arrive on or after December 22nd. Unfortunately, we cannot extend the grace period any further. We suggest you contact your retailer to discuss shipping options, if this is a concern.
You may be wondering if your 30 days of game time (included with your purchase of the game) will be affected by the grace period. The answer is no. If you redeem your product registration code during the grace period, and add a valid payment method to your account, you will begin your billing cycle from then, and you will be entitled to 30 days of game time. If you redeem your product registration code before December 20th, your billing cycle will begin on December 20th at 12:01AM EST (the official launch date and time of the game).
We know this has been an issue for some of you, and we apologize for the concerns. We’re looking forward to welcoming all of you to the official launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic!
Thanks,
Ray and Greg
Nice to see Bioware paying attention to their customers.
