Yellow Posts: Legacy System & Story Spoilers

Sadly, this week there is very little report in Yellow Posts that hasn’t already been covered. The developers are undoubtedly busy polishing the game, but the community managers have been busing talking on the forums.

We’ve already spent some time discussing the recently announced Legacy System that has been longtime rumored. One of the more controversial items to come out of the whole announcement was the fact that your Legacy surname would apply to all characters across all servers. Given that this choice apply’s to all of your characters, it generated some backlash because of how universal it was. Allison Berryman, Senior Community Coordinator, clarified the situation to say that the Legacy surname would apply to all characters on a single server (not across all servers):

Hello everyone, we’ve updated James’ original post to add some clarification – your Legacy Last Name will affect all characters on a server, not across all servers. The line now says:

Once your character has completed their Chapter 1 storyline, they will be able to choose a Legacy Last Name. This Legacy Last Name must be unique and is shared across all characters on that server – so choose carefully!

Sorry for any confusion!

 The NDA being dropped is undoubtedly a great thing for the community. The only thing, in my mind, that could be argued to be a negative about the NDA drop are story spoilers being released. If you want to know the story, great! There will be tons of sites out there devoted to the story of SW:TOR. However, if you’re like me, you want to save the story for when you play the game. Spoiling the game for others is not desirable so Allison Berryman has laid out how the new official SW:TOR Spoilers forum works:

Is there anything I am not allowed to speak about?
While we want to hear about your SWTOR impressions, we would suggest you talk about certain topics only in certain places. On the official site, we ask you to post story spoilers in the Spoilers Forum, which was created to allow discussion of the game story (without including spoilers in your thread title). Additionally, any feedback and bug reports from your personal gameplay impressions should be left in the official Game Testing Forums where developers can monitor and respond to it directly. Beyond the official site, we ask that you are respectful of the Game Testing Agreement, and of those who may not want to have the game story spoiled, and label your impressions as having spoilers if necessary.

I want to reference a spoiler without discussing it in detail. How do I do that?
Generally, if your impressions are mostly focused around the game’s story, you should post in the Spoilers Forum to ensure you won’t spoil others. If you are posting elsewhere on the official Forums and mention something you think may be a spoiler, you can use the appropriate spoiler tags ([spoiler]Spoiler text goes here[/spoiler]) to hide the spoiler from other community members. This way someone who doesn’t want to have information of the story can avoid potential spoilers, while those who are interested can still access your content.

Any Forums thread that includes a story spoiler in the title will be edited to remove the spoiler, including those in the Spoilers Forum. If we believe that a community member is posting spoilers maliciously, their threads will be removed and they will potentially be given an infraction for violating Forums policy.

What if I don’t want the story spoiled?
On the official site, it would be wise to avoid the Spoiler Forum. Apart from that, spoilers that are part of general impressions or are otherwise posted outside of the Spoiler Forum will be marked with spoiler tags. 

What if I am unsure whether or not this is a spoiler?
On the official site, if you are unsure as to whether or not you are posting spoilers, use the spoiler tags. This will hide the potential spoiler from public view unless the reader makes the active decision to read the hidden text. 

What if the video contains story spoilers?
On the official site, please post any video links in the Spoiler Forum. Away from the official site, as a courtesy to other players, please label your video with the heading ‘Spoiler’.