Yellow Posts: Community Questions, In-Game Purchasing, Future Content, And Respecing

Forum user Spankyjnco posted a list of eight questions (expanded to ten) about various things in the game that probably a lot of players would like answered from BioWare. Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager, took the time to respond to all of the questions and let us know where they stand on the issues. Here are a couple highlights:

Q: Is there a plan to fix the graphic settings? Right now there is no real difference between medium/high graphics and it’s apparent that we are all stuck with the medium textures. What’s the reasoning for this, and do you guys have a fix planned?

A: It’s a bug, and we are working on rolling out a fix.

Q: A easier way to find groups. Having to spam in /1 is quite annoying to everyone in the zone, let alone those looking for a group. And noobdy seems to use that actual “Flag yourself for group” option because it’s not very successful. I would like to do flashpoints, but I’m not going to waste 30 minutes sitting in the fleet spamming /1 that I am looking for a group. Some kind of way to have a global search/group finder would be nice.

A: We’re aware of this desire, but we actually believe that finding others on the same planet as you encourages social interaction a bit more than a general ‘group finder’. We’re not saying it’ll never, ever happen but again, not high priority right now.

The post is pretty extensive, so I would encourage all of you to check it out for some valuable information.

Have you purchased an in-game item that you didn’t mean to? Did you Shift or Ctrl click the item to link/preview it only to find that you accidentally purchased it from the vendor? Well, if this is you (and it is definitely me) and you don’t like losing several thousand credits on stuff you didn’t mean to buy, check out this thread by DrSleak. This is the scenario happened to him and he was hoping BioWare could make it so that if someone Shift or Ctrl clicks on a vendor item, it is not purchased.

Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer, agrees and the team is going to take a look at this feedback and (hopefully) institute a fix:

Hey – this is a very reasonable request and we’re going to look at this topic. Thanks for your feedback.

One of the big concerns with a game like TOR is the future content with respect to voice acting. What I mean by that is when BioWare starts creating new content (a new planet lets say), the developers will have to create all new voice acting content for all of the eight class stories (assuming the new content will be part of the character’s class story) as well as numerous general quest and ambient conversations. Forum poster MissTwilight asks how BioWare is going to handle the future content creation with respect to voice acting and Senior Writer Alexander Freed gave us an answer:

For obvious reasons, I can’t give out details of our contracts with the voice actors! However, I can offer a few assurances:

We’ve known since the start that we would need to have major characters (Players, companions, certain NPCs) returning to record new content for many, many years. From a business end, yes, this is planned for. We have no desire to change voice actors for existing characters, nor any intention of “writing out” a character because the actor becomes unavailable.

From a practical standpoint, of course, unexpected occurrences do happen. This is where a bit of foresight helps–we’re writing dialogue long before that dialogue ever shows up in-game, so we’ve usually got a pretty good window during which we can do VO recording. In other words, if a voice actor is unavailable for six months due to an emergency (or something planned!), well… if we’re ahead far enough, we can still make that work. We’ll adjust the schedule, record everything else we need and bring that actor in toward the end.

It’s also worth noting that voice recording doesn’t necessarily add much time to the content creation process. Recording is done in parallel with other tasks–while artists are art-ing and designers are building quests, we’ve got voice actors simultaneously coming into recording studios.

Hope that helps!

For more information, also check out this interview with Stephen Reid by Totalbiscuit where they discuss (among other things) the challenges of producing future voice content and what BioWare is already doing to prepare for future content.

Lastly, forum poster Skaarrj has to switch back an forth between a healing and DPS specs in order to participate in certain flashpoints. As a result, his respec costs have gotten up to the 35,000 credit range, a rather large sum. To put that in perspective, the first speeder (i.e. mount) training that you purchase is 40,000 credits. He would like the cost to be lowered so that he doesn’t have to pay such exorbitant sums every time he needs to respec.

Georg Zoeller responded to say that he does not think respec costs should be absurdly high, but still wants a cost to be in the game so that players aren’t respecing too often:

Hey,

Been a while since I posted, as you can imagine, we’re a bit busy right now.

However, we’re still actively monitoring the forums and venues of player feedback, collecting information helpful to prioritize the feature development, issues, etc.

On the topic of skill respecs, we are aware that it is a popular request to have more versatility in how and when to respec (which includes questions of cost) and we’ve already decided to pursue the idea of more readily available respecs for players. Pricing changes are also very much under consideration.

Just so you understand my position on the topic: I don’t think skill respec should be rare or handled very restrictively. I’m actually all for players experimenting with different skill sets once they have a good grip of their character. 

I don’t want people to respec in the middle of combat or in between defeats in a Warzone or Operation, but other than that, I think respec is a positive thing for the game. If we find that the current pricing is too prohibitive for somewhat experienced players, we’ll make adjustments.

regards
— Georg