Jan 29, 2012

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Wild Space: Improve Your FPS, Matrix Shards, And Content Locusts

It’s a big galaxy out there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

Over on Red Rancor, they have been posting a ‘Video Tip of the Day’ series for some time now, but the tip they posted on the 26th really caught my eye. It’s titled, “Improve Game FPS and Performance,” and offers three suggestions to do just that. The three tips are as follows:

1. Update your graphics drivers
2. (If using Windows Visa or 7) Run TOR in compatibility mode
3. Disable GPU scaling (Nvidia graphics cards only)

I highly encourage you all to check out the video to get the full instructions on how to complete each of these steps.  Curious to see if these settings would make a difference, I tried them on both my desktop and laptop computer. My desktop has some pretty decent hardware so it didn’t really see any improvement. However, my laptop definitely saw a 10fps increase as a result of turning on compatibility mode (it has an ATI video card so I couldn’t try the GPU scaling). I call that a success!


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Jan 23, 2012

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Yellow Posts: Ability Delay, Companion Crafting, And Bugs

You may have already heard about the ability delay problems with the game and what BioWare is doing about it. What you may not have realized (like I didn’t) is when those fixes are getting applied: soon. Like, really soon. Like, next patch? Per Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer, and messenger of ability delay problems:

Correct. Nobody said 1.2. The improvements mentioned in the blog post are urgent and there is no reason for us to wait for a major content release to roll them out.

Please note that we are very deliberate and careful when using the words ‘soon’ or ‘very soon’. We don’t use them lightly.

Honestly, when the noise about the ability delay problem started gaining traction a couple of weeks ago, I had a hunch that this problem would be nearly impossible to resolve. But thanks to lots of player feedback and hard work by BioWare, my intuition is once again proven moot. It’s really nice to see BioWare deal with issues like this in such a short amount of time, especially when these issues deal with such a core gameplay feature and affect such a large amount of players. I probably sound like such a fan boy, but it sure makes it easier to pay that monthly subscription fee when stuff gets improved this quickly.

Did you think that affection points just got you a couple of extra quests and conversations with your companion? Well, think again! Forum poster Sendotux wanted to know how affection affects crew skill efficiency and crit rating. Systems Designer David Hunt explains that affection points actually improve your crafting crit chance and efficiency. Pretty cool, huh?

Companion affection improves your crafting efficiency and crit chance.

Forum poster SunwindIon noticed that after the most recent patch, the cooldown animation for ability icons on the quickslot bar has been changed. Most notably, icons are not greyed out (or are only sometimes greyed out) when they go on cooldown. This makes it quite hard to determine when an ability is on or off cooldown. Thankfully, Georg Zoeller and the whole team are aware of the issue and are investigating:

We hear your feedback and are working on adjustments to increase the readability of the cooldown UI in an upcoming patch.

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Jan 22, 2012

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Wild Space: Attributes, Interview, And Flashpoint Loot Info

It’s a big galaxy out there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

Are you new to MMOs? To the uninitiated, the deluge of different statistics and acronyms may seem quite daunting. Fortunately, the folks over on Force Junkies have got you covered. As part of a new column called “SWTOR Mechanics 101”, they go over, in detail, all of the attributes in TOR as well as some of the common abbreviations that are helpful to know when playing an MMO.

The information on the secondary attributes (Power, Defense Rating, Critical Rating, etc…) is particularly helpful since it may not be immediately apparent what some of those attributes do. I didn’t even know what “Alacrity” attribute was (or even how to pronounce it) until I read this article. For those that want to understand what attribute they need to focus on for their class and role, I would really encourage you to check out this helpful article on Force Junkies.

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Jan 19, 2012

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Ask A Jedi: Legacy System, Magenta Crystals, And Operatives

Stand aside Master Gnost-Dural! The Ask A Jedi crew is here to answer all of your burning questions about Star Wars: The Old Republic! Powered by R2-Db’s question and answer feature, we will answer the highest rated questions each and every week. So sit back, relax, and let us drop some knowledge on you, Ask A Jedi-style!

The most popular question over on R2-DB this week was posed by Ajamison. He asks, “Is there any more information on when the Legacy system will be fully implemented instead of just allowing a Legacy name and Legacy leveling which currently does nothing?”. Indeed, this week got us our first update from a developer about the upcoming plans for the Legacy system. James Ohlen (Game Director) gave an interview to Gamespot about the Legacy system and other game features. Very generally, here is Mr. Ohlen’s vision for the Legacy system:

We wanted to have a system that encouraged players to create alts and to play the game through the different story paths. So the legacy system is meant to do that.

More specifically, here are some details from the Gamespot interview about the Legacy system:

…and then you gain legacy experience points and legacy levels, and with legacy experience points and levels, that gives you–that allows you to unlock abilities, perks, a whole slew of different advantages, essentially, that all the members of your legacy tree will be able to enjoy.

[…]

…and it’s something we want to push towards players who enjoy the level-up game. It’ll also be beneficial to the end game, but it really is going to have a lot of abilities that make leveling up even more enjoyable and allow you to customize your leveling experience.

TOR has really made me an “alt-aholic” so the idea of more perks as you level more and more characters really appeals to me. Like a lot of people, I plan on making at least one character of each class and I suspect I will be utilizing the Legacy system perks rather extensively.

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Jan 16, 2012

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Yellow Posts: High Rez Update, LFG System, Crew Skills, And The GTN

Hopefully this week will be much more informative than the last, especially since the devs have been crazy active on the forums this week. By now, you’ve probably heard about the “high resolution texture problem” in SWTOR. Basically, high resolution textures are only available for in-conversation cutscenes and when you are playing out in the game normally the texture quality is lowered. One of the responses that Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Coordinator, posted in the official thread actually states in which update we will see more graphics options: 1.2.

…The first major changes will be in our next major Game Update, which will have the version number of 1.2. Those changes will bring greater visual fidelity to your character and those around you, but will still allow for good performance in situations where a lot of characters are on-screen at once. In other words, for those screenshots of your character in their best gear, you should see a marked improvement…

The game has been officially out for less than a month and we are getting our first major content patch. Hopefully, it will only take about another month to see these changes implemented!

Responding to a post by Obi-Wun, Damion Schubert, Principal Lead Systems Designer, talks a little bit about BioWare’s plans for a “looking for group” tool. What it boils down to is that, at this moment in time, most players are still confined to a few areas in the game, the fleet, mid-to-low-level planets, etc…and an official tool to automatically find groups for flashpoints and heroic quests is not needed currently. However, Mr. Schubert and the whole BioWare staff are quite aware that as players continue to reach the end game and more content becomes available a true LFG tool will become necessary. Given that, they are going to be implementing a true LFG tool soon™:

Improving our LFG system is high on the list of features that Systems Design wants to add to the game. We want this to be good not just for helping people find Flashpoints and Operations to run, but also other multiplayer content like heroic missions. A key emphasis will be on advertising for specific role needs (healer, tank, DPS). This feature is currently in the design stage, and once this feature has moved beyond this to a development stage and has a firm ETA, I’ll be coming back to you guys to give more details.

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