Yellow Posts: Early Game Access, Guild Leadership, and PvP XP Exploit?

Well, it’s here. By the time you read this, launch day will be about half a day away. I am super excited! Even though I got in for some Early Game Access, it will be really great when everyone logs in to play and we can really see how this game will truly shape up.

With that being said, everyone who pre-ordered and was supposed to have early game access has been invited to play by BioWare. Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manger, started this thread to explain and ask people to let him know if they were having any problems getting into the game. Have you not pre-ordered the game? Well, you are in luck! As long as you pre-order before the 20th and redeem your pre-order code on the website you will be granted early game access for the rest of the early access period:

Hey everyone,

I’m happy to announce that we have now invited everyone who has pre-ordered and redeemed their pre-order code forStar Wars: The Old Republic to Early Game Access. If you haven’t yet received an email, start the SWTOR Launcher and you should be able to get into the game.

If you still have issues, please reply in this thread and we’ll try to help you as soon as we can. We know there have been isolated issues with code redemption, and we want to help you get into the game. Please be patient as we deal with your issues as fast as possible.

Remember, you will not have been granted Early Game Access unless you have pre-ordered the game, received your pre-order code, and redeemed that code on your account.

If you have picked up a copy of the game already and did not pre-order (for example, from most European retailers), you will not be able to access the game until December 20th, but you will be able to redeem your product registration code now. This should have been explained by your retailer, and was noted on European packaging.

We’re not done with invites yet, however. There’s still time to pre-order, and if you do redeem a code before Early Game Access ends, you’ll still have time to play. After you redeem a pre-order code, we will invite you as soon as possible. We’ll be sending invites continuously from now until the end of Early Game Access.

We look forward to welcoming all of you to Star Wars: The Old Republic!

Apparently the planet Taris is causing some people a lot of grief when they try to go there. Symptoms include intense graphics lag of around 1 FPS for a few seconds and then the game crashes. One of the larger threads about this was started by Smagu and was commented on by David Bass, Senior Community Coordinator, who basically said that they know about the issue with Taris, and if your character is stuck on that planet, please contact customer service right away to get moved off planet.

Hi everyone,

Thanks again for your patience while we gathered more information for you. At this time, Customer Service is going to help move you off of Taris so your characters are no longer stuck. While this won’t fix the core issue on Taris (which is still under investigation), it will allow you to once again use those characters.

If you haven’t already, please submit a ticket to Customer Service with all the details about your character (Name and Server). If you aren’t able to do so in-game, you can do it from our website here. Please only submit one ticket, and then hang tight until CS is able to respond and assist you. This may take some time, so in the meantime either take the night off or play with a different character.

Thanks again for all the information! I’ll update you all when I can regarding the state of Taris.

Did you create a guild during the pre-launch guild program? Well, if you are the guild master, be very careful when creating the character that you want to be the actual guild master in game. If you delete that character before handing guild leadership off to another person, basically that guild will become leaderless for up to two-weeks. Customer service’s hands are tied in situations like this so be VERY CAREFUL when creating your character that you want to be the guild master; don’t delete that character without first making someone else the leader! Here is more info from David Bass:

We’ve been seeing an increased number of guild leaders deleting themselves immediately after accepting their auto-invite from the Guild Headquarters. This is not good, because auto-invites sent via the website may only be accepted ONCE per account.

Guild leaders should be very careful to only accept the auto-invite if they intend to keep the character they are accepting the invite with. If you are not sure about your character, decline the invite instead, which will allow you to create future characters and receive the auto-invite again. By accepting your invite and then immediately deleting your character, the guild will then be in a state where it will be leaderless for up to two weeks.

Guilds that have been put into this state are not stuck, however. While the guild will be leaderless for up to two weeks, around January 3rd the system will automatically promote an officer to the rank of Guild Leader. At that time, the new Guild Leader would be able to “abdicate” his leadership to another guild member.

We ask that guild leaders be VERY careful with their characters, as Customer Service will be unable to assist in situations where guild members are unwilling to promote/demote other members of their guild.

There are been a few rumors that people are being power leveled via PvP Warzone leveling. The rumor, as I understand it, is that a warzone doesn’t properly end when it is supposed to and thus continues generating XP for people. However, Steven Reid was able to comment that this is just a rumor and they aren’t seeing any metrics out of the ordinary. However, he was going to try and track down Gabe Amatangelo to get further information, but there has been no update as of this writing.

This is not the full update, yet – I’d like Gabe Amatangelo to weigh in. There is one important thing to note, however.

No-one is ‘exploiting’ this aspect of the game. We have looked at the metrics across every server, and no-one is earning an unusual amount of experience from PvP Warzones. In fact, when looking at the top-level players in the entire game, they are gaining XP fastest from completing quests. Also as of this morning, our top player on all servers was not in the 30-40 level range. They probably are now, but then they’ve been playing a lot – and gaining the bulk of their XP from normal quests.

In other words, whoever started this rumor was either confused or deliberately trying to start confusion.

Like I said, I’m tracking down Gabe to talk more about how Warzone XP is allocated and the design decisions behind it. Right now, however, we do not see this as an exploit. In simple terms, a player can gain more XP in the same period of time from normal play than from doing this.

More when I track down Gabe and nail him to a keyboard.

If you are itching for a response on this issue, give the devs a break. It is launch week and they are about as busy as they ever will be; they’ll respond when they can!

Until next week, enjoy the game!