Mar 13, 2012

Posted by in Yellow Posts | 7 Comments

Yellow Posts: Game Update 1.2 Dev Post Roundup

This week has been super busy on the forums. The devs (Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer in particular), responded to tons of posts about the information that came out of the Guild Summit. Here are some choice posts I found most interesting:

There was a little confusion on the forums about the future of Ilum and open-world PvP in general. Some people thought that it was being thrown out entirely because of how bad it has been. However, the exact phrase the Devs used during the PvP presentation at the Guild Summit was that they are taking Ilum “back to the drawing board”. Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager has a lot of further information to give about Ilum:

Ilum is being deprecated in Game Update 1.2. The Open World PvP area on Ilum will still be present in 1.2, but rewards previously gained in Ilum will be available in Warzones and that’s where we expect the bulk of PvP to take place for now.

As we said during the Guild Summit, the PvP team is ‘going back to the drawing board’ with Ilum. That means they want to rework it to be fun and engaging. We accept there are issues with the current design and want to ensure that what we end up with is enjoyable for PvP fans. We have no ETA on when a redesigned Ilum might be available, but when we do have more news, we’ll share it.

The PvP team definitely monitors these Forums and would love to see constructive feedback on Open World PvP and how you feel it could be improved. They have their own ideas, of course, and they’ve read many of the posts here but more feedback is always welcome.

Anyone want a Mac version of SWTOR? Pencilvania sure does. The short answer is: don’t hold your breath. Mr. Reid has a slightly longer answer and does not completely rule it out, but a Mac client is also not being actively worked on:

There are no current development efforts to create a Mac OS client for Star Wars: The Old Republic (or indeed, for any other operating system or platform).

No-one here hates Macs (in fact, many of us quite like them ) but development efforts are currently focused on expanding and improving the game for PC/Windows.

Ranked Warzones are coming in Game Update 1.2 and with that, the ability to queue with a pre-made 8-man Operation group is also coming. Stephen Reid clarifies some information about this from the PvP presentation:

David [Bass, Senior Community Coordinator] was trying to clarify the ‘Future of Warzones’ section of the PvP presentation, but that’s caused a bit more confusion; apologies. I huddled with Gabe Amatangelo about this question and got a definitive answer.

You can queue as an eight-man Operations group in Game Update 1.2, for ranked Warzones only.

In the future, whenever cross-server Warzone queuing is possible, the plan is to allow people to create teams of eight which can be named, etc.

The PvP team is aware of the importance of ranked Warzones and PvP rankings in general, hence allowing eight-man queuing. Apologies again for the confusion. We hope everyone’s going to enjoy the feature!

Here is some really good information about the future of Macros in TOR. If you really want to be able to use Macros, it sounds like the developers want to make changes to the default interface that would remove the necessity for most Macros, and they are downright opposed to Macros that automate combat. Here is what Georg Zoeller had to say about Macros:

If you’re invoking the Guild Summit, let’s be a bit more precise about what we’ve said:

A) Macros are a possibility in the future. We don’t hate them.

B) I am opposed to macros that automate combat (shouldn’t be a surprise). I’d rather take tedious things (such as sprint turning off after death) and modify the design than to rely on people to create macros to deal with these things – which creates unnecessary barriers of entry in my opinion.

C) We don’t consider interface improvements and quality of life features (e.g. mouse over healing) to be macros (so 2 does not apply)

D) Macros for social behaviors, etc are definitely a possibility too.

Finally, just to clarify, only a small subset of Legacy abilities are going to be able to be used on other classes (i.e. Flame Thrower on a Sith Warrior) and you won’t be able to pick and choose which abilities to take from other classes. As Stephen Reid says, that would be pretty game breaking:

The Heroic Ability Legacy unlock doesn’t allow you to pick any ability you like; that would indeed lead to some balancing nightmares.

There was very careful consideration over which abilities to allow as unlocks. With the limitations of the ability only being usable during your Heroic Moment (requiring an active Companion) and the cooldown on that, you shouldn’t see too much ‘Heroic Ability spam’. We see the unlock as a fun, limited ability that many players will enjoy. It wasn’t designed to unbalance the game. 


  1. The only reason world pvp worked in that other game is because you had to control the area to gain entry into the raid. And most of the time it was pretty one sided.

    • No, the world PvP in WoW prior to T-Bad was actually fun. I was still going to Wintergrasp regularly up until SWTOR launched and I stopped playing. I couldn’t care less about the raid that you unlock, I went 100% for the PvP because I enjoyed it.

      • LOL @ fun world PVP. In WoW it was one sided most of the time — even worse when faction transfer opened. Major guilds started switching sides as they would fall behind if they did not control the “raid area”.
        It was frustrating for the lower population faction and it is the same in SWTOR. Illum, prior to previous patch, was the only place to rack up kills/armaments for the dailies and as the lower population faction on my server it was almost always a game of cats and mouse where we would get camped in our base.
        Now it is “better” but I should say it is rather a dead planet. The only reason to get to Illum is to get valor buff (which you lose if you queue in same zone… kinda silly).
        Tol Barad was fun in WoW due to 1 for 1 ratio (for the most part) but sucked sometimes.

  2. World PvP has been a joke since instanced PvPing was introduced. I think in the effort to win over SAS console gamers to MMOs, companies have made all these fast paced short timed instances. People with that interest at the forefront will be found there most of the time, not so much in the open world.
    Seriously, losing of the sprint ability after death was an issue with people? I guess I shouldnt be suprised. Suck it up people, or we’ll end up watching games rather than playin them.

    • Mysterys says:

      Losing sprint was NOT the problem. Having to click it every single time after you die “was” the issue. No point what so ever in PVP situations to “NOT” have sprint “on”.
      It was just very annoying and silly.
      This was reported many times you know why? Because it is seemingly an “easy” bug to resolve.
      The above will be true for any “easy” bugs that could be fixed “faster”…. IMO.

  3. Moviemaster31 says:

    Bioware’s ideology on macros is a perfect example of why this game is so frustraiting. If you’re a casual this is the game for you. I am not, so I will not be around anymore.

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