Grace Period To End Following Scheduled Maintenance Period Tonight

In case you haven’t entered your product registration code yet, now might be a good time to do so.

The Star Wars: The Old Republic game servers will come offline at 2AM Austin Time (Central Standard Time) and are expected to be down for about three hours. After that, players will need to have a valid product registration code attached to their account in order to log in and continue playing.

Wait, What Code Now?

It’s worth pointing out, since there has been confusion in the past, that this is different than your pre-order code. The pre-order code is what you received from the retailer where you pre-ordered that allowed you early access to the game. The product registration code (or CD Key) comes with the game itself, and is what unlocks the game license for you to play. If you ordered a digital edition from Origin, this code would have been emailed to you after December 15th. If you ordered a physical copy from any retailer (including Origin) you must retrieve the code from inside the packaging. Stephen Reid has it outlined very thoroughly in this post.

As a side effect to all of this, BioWare is expecting a large rush of players entering their codes, causing a heavy load on servers. The forums will be temporary casualties of this expected load:

When we bring SWTOR.com back up after maintenance, we’re expecting to see very high load as users complete their ‘ready to play’ steps as outlined above. As having everyone complete these steps and getting them back into the game is our highest priority, we have decided to keep the official Forums in ‘read only mode’, hopefully just for a few hours, until load subsides. (In other words, you will be able to read the Forums, but not make posts.)

After the close call I had with Origin’s shipping schedule, I’d agree with BioWare that there are many players yet to enter their code for one reason or another. If you can, head over to your SWTOR.com account and do it now to avoid the rush!