Yellow Posts: Group Stealth, The NDA, International Update And More

Hello again fellow forum followers! The week began with Stephen Reid giving us a little more information on why SW:TOR is going to have a limited launch and debunking the international region locking rumor that has been going around. Here is an excerpt from the thread titled “For those outside North America and Europe“:

I realize many of you are hoping for a definitive ‘answer’ to the question of “Why are we limiting the initial launch for The Old Republic”. I’m afraid you already have your answer in the very first post of this thread. It was a decision made to ensure the highest quality of game service.

There have been other key questions, and we’ve tried to answer them for you. There are no plans to ‘region lock’ or ‘IP block’ players from the game. You may experience some latency issues if you’re not playing in a launch region. In addition, we’ll accept credit card payments for subscriptions. These seem to be the key questions for those who choose to potentially import the game, and hopefully we’ve answered those.

Next up, there is a new conductor…err…community manager in town! Specifically the new European Community Manager, Chris Collins. In his inagural post, Mr. Collins explains what his job actually entails (here is an excerpt):

As the European Community Manager, it’s my job to work closely with TonyMoreno and the rest of the EU community team, to ensure every last bit of feedback from the European community is understood and given to the right people here at BioWare. Being based at the BioWare Ireland office in Galway, I’ll be working directly with Stephen and the rest of the community team, but with the advantage of being closer to the centre of the action…

He also talked about his (over the top) love for Star Wars:

Having been a Star Wars fanatic for years (yes, I own my own movie quality replica Darth Vader costume), words can’t describe how eager I’ve been to say hello.

As expected, the forums exploded with requests for pictures of the new CM in his Darth Vader costume and Mr. Collins was only too happy to oblige (albeit soon™):

I’ve had a lot of requests for this. Once I’m back from visiting Austin and GamesCom, I’ll try and get one posted 

We welcome Mr. Collins to the community team and look forward to hearing from him in the future…and, of course, when those pictures get posted, Ask A Jedi will be there!

Next on tap, forum goer Pax_Delere doesn’t think that the Smuggler class is getting enough developer love. In response, Georg Zoeller gave him just that with this post:

As a non force user class, the smuggler is definitely a bit of a renegade / rogue – something a lot of players won’t try for a while as they explore their Force & Lightsaber wielding Star Wars fantasy.

That said, it’s one of the most versatile classes… and that was before we gave the Smuggler the ability to ‘Smuggle’ (… their entire group behind enemy lines using that pretty rad stealth field generator they pieced together from some parts that fell off the back of some Imperial shuttle).

Group stealth for the Smuggler? Yes, please!

Up next is possibly the only post on the forums where a dev has made a comment and no one in the thread seems to have noticed. Rising_Dawn wanted to know how fast the servers will fill up on launch day and if there will be a server population cap. The post, titled “Server population cap?”, Georg Zoeller, gives us our (not entirely specific) answer:

It is a good assumption that we are going to limit the population of each server in order to ensure quality of service. Allowing unlimited users on a server would be a recipe for unlimited unhappy users.

Since he didn’t give us an exact number, I would guess that BioWare doesn’t exactly know what the total number of players per server will be. They probably have an idea of what their server hardware can handle, but won’t know for sure until the beta test weekends (i.e. stress tests) in September are over.

Finally, as you are all keenly aware, we are getting closer and closer to an eventual release. Beta testing is still ongoing and all beta testers are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) so that they are legally obligated not to openly discuss anything about the game until BioWare lifts the agreement. Forum poster ctwoz wants to know when the NDA will be lifted so that we can all start seeing footage from the beta and commentary from the testers. Stephen Reid explained to us why the NDA hasn’t been lifted yet and when it is going to be lifted (spoiler: closer to launch):

Yes, we want to know – which is why we have a Game Testing program in the first place, and gather an enormous amount of feedback from there.

Dropping the NDA at this point would do little other than fuel massive amounts of speculation around the game when it’s still being refined, with most of that speculation coming from people who have not actually tested the game. We all know what one misconstrued comment can cause around here….

All that said, we’re absolutely aware that people are anxious to talk about their Game Testing experiences, and we’re working on ways to make that happen… without breaking the NDA.

Closer to launch, we’ll revisit the subject.

Obviously, the game is still in flux at this point and as Mr. Reid says, things are changing constantly. SW:TOR will probably have some very drastic differences between where the game is right now and the actual release. Given that, do you all still want the NDA to drop so that we can really dig into the meat of the game? Let us know in the comments!

Until next week, take care.