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Wild Space: Patch 1.1 Roundup, Jedi Knight Armor, and “Pro Tips”

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!

Our first major content patch, Rise of the Rakghouls, is only days away! A ton of minor updates and changes are being made to the game in addition to a new Flashpoint and Operation. The good folks over on SWTOR Arena have a great roundup of all the changes in the forthcoming update. As you would expect from a round up, all of the interviews that James Ohlen, Game Director, gave to other major gaming publications as well as choice patch notes and RP “fluff text” are included. For anyone that is looking to find out exactly what is being added in the upcoming patch, definitely check out SWTOR Arena for the details.

On the official forums, a thread has popped up about the end-game PvP gear for Jedi Knights and how it looks. More specifically, the OP, Alexious, doesn’t like the look of the armor at all. Since the post has grown to 21 pages, SWTOR Face decided to weigh in and posted screenshots of the armor in question. To me, the armor looks similar to that worn by Obi-Wan in the 2003 Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series (sans cape, obviously) which is awesome! Is the armor flashy or avant garde? No, but neither are Jedi (at least, they aren’t “supposed” to be). To me, the armor perfectly describes the Jedi Knight from a story sense: someone who is supposed to get in quickly, get the job done with the least amount of violence possible, and get out. What do you guys think? Check out the article on SWTOR Face and let us know!

Lastly this week, I wanted to make you guys aware, if you weren’t already about an awesome recurring feature on Force Junkies. “FJ Pro-Tip” is a short feature where the Force Junkie crew offers up one tip that they feel the community can benefit from. Personally, I have learned some great tips from this column, including this one from January 11 about refreshing your crew skill missions:

Quick tip today for those who might get frustrated by not having the Crew Skill missions that you want. When you board and exit your ship, the missions available to you are reshuffled and different ones are available. So if you see missions you don’t want and don’t feel like waiting for them to shuffle back in, just walk in and out of your ship and.. Voila! You will have a new set of missions to choose from. 

I will definitely be doing that once I get back online! Check out Force Junkies for even more FJ Pro-Tips.

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Posted by Cormeister | 0 Comments

Ask A Jedi: Commendations, Reverse Engineering, And Game Settings

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!

To start us off this week, MammaGamer asks What has the best drop rate for Hutta Commendations? Well, unfortunately the game is too new to have definitive drop rates on items yet, but we do know that Hutta Commendations, and indeed all planetary commendations, have a chance to drop from most if not all mobs on a planet. It is probably safe to assume that commendations have a higher chance to drop from Strong or Elite mobs. So, get out there and get to “persuading” those mobs to give up their commendations!

R2-DB user Sakasa asks this question: Does reverse engineering have more then one path? For those that don’t know, when you reverse engineer a item, you have a chance to learn a new schematic of either higher quality (blue or purple) or learn a new schematic with a “prefix” that indicates the type of stats that the new item has. So the short answer is yes, there are many different schematics that you can learn through reverse engineering just a single item. For more information about reverse engineering (including what all of the prefix’s mean), check out this article from our very own Zlatto and this collaborative article from Slaign. They know way more about crafting and reverse engineering than I ever will!

Last up, ido-goldberg asked: Will SWTOR settings save for 2 PCs? Basically, he wants to know if SWTOR’s settings are saved on the server so that he can switch computers easily without having to re-enable a bunch of options. This is a tough questions because it seems that some settings are saved server-side while others are saved locally to your computer. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to (easily) copy those local settings from one computer to another.

The consensus is that keybindings are saved to the server, while UI options and graphics settings appear to be saved locally and saved per character. This means that you will have to set up those UI settings for each computer that you play SWTOR on as well as each character. I can testify that I have had to enable the extra quickslots for each character individually when I have created them and there is not a way to copy the setting from one character to another in game or to set a default layout for the UI on all my characters, newly created or not. Hopefully with the UI updates that BioWare is working on, we will see a some improvements for the ability to copy settings between characters and computers.

Remember, if you want your question answered, visit R2-DB’s question and answer web page to ask your question. If you get enough up-votes, I shall do my best to find an answer for you!

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Posted by Cormeister | 4 Comments

Yellow Posts: A Patching-We-Will-Go!

Lots of bugs are being discussed on the forums. It seems that this week, BioWare has been doing lots of information gathering and communication about bugs and what they are doing to fix them. For instance, if you find yourself in need of doing a Repair install on the TOR game files, you will probably notice that the launcher looks like it is downloading a huge amount of data (about 12GB). Forum poster BouncerPup noticed this and wanted to know why this happened on what should have been a minor repair install. Joveth Gonzalez, Associate Online Community Manager, got an unnamed developer to post about this, which turns out to be just a display problem with the launcher:

Hi everyone, I wanted to pass along this message from one of our developers:

Many of you have expressed concern that when performing a Repair the entire game is downloaded again. While the Launcher messaging does seem to indicate this, that’s not actually what is going on.

When the Launcher detects a corrupted file, it will attempt to restore that file from Version 1. In the Launcher it will appear that, for example, all of Main Assets 1 (12GB) is being downloaded, but in actuality, only the patch files which contain the corrupted file are being downloaded. Typically, this is a single patch file. Now, that said, those files can be very large (up to 2GB), but unless a large number of files are corrupted it will not download the entire 12GB (or in the case of English/French/German Assets 1, 7GB).

For those of you who are experiencing repeated corruption of files and are not having success with Repair, we urge you to try the Launcher Troubleshooting Guide. We’ve discovered new issues (CAS Latency and memory voltage settings) that when corrected have solved the corruption issue for several users. We recognize that this continues to be a vexing issue for some of you and we are continuing to investigate, but as of yet no common thread discovered. We will report any verifiable fixes to the forums.

Thank you

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Posted by Cormeister | 7 Comments

Wild Space: Immersion, “Digital Disappointment”, And Companion Gifts

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 Corellian Run Radio, they have posted an interesting column that deals with immersion in TOR with respect to pop-culture references. BioWare has mentioned in the past that they don’t want to include obvious pop-culture references in TOR because they feel it would break immersion. In contrast, World of Warcraft has made a living with all of the pop-culture references that can be found in their game. The author of the CRR article, Thom, describes a rather elaborate reference featuring the A-Team that can be found in World of Warcraft.

By now, you almost expect a new cultural reference in World of Warcraft whenever you play it, so much so that pop-culture references have become part of the experience of playing the game. It can almost be considered its own game feature. TOR, on the other hand, seems to be keeping references to a minimum. Thom has only seen pop-culture references appear as part of quests and they are often quite subtle. Personally, the only references I have found have been Star Wars related (check out Nem’ro’s cantina on Hutta, there are a few good ones in there) and those types of references only serve to enhance my immersion and pull on my nostalgic heartstrings.  What do you all think? Have you found any pop-culture references that are immersion breaking for you? Do you like or not like pop-culture or Star Wars references?

Be sure to make your opinion known on those questions below and check out the full article on Corellian Run Radio.

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Posted by Cormeister | 3 Comments

Yellow Posts: Speeder, Armor, And High Level Planets

Forum poster benefit was baffled as to why the cost to purchase the level two speeder upgrade (210,000 credits) is so high for what appears to be a small speed increase (only 10% more speed). However, he did not realize that you get one additional benefit for your money: your chance to be knocked off of your speeder by a mob is significantly reduced. This is what responder Nicely noticed and Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer, confirmed:

Originally Posted by Nicely
I don’t know if this counts for anything, but I’ve noticed that I can take more damage before I am knocked off with the higher level mounts.

Georg Zoeller
That is correct.

Forum poster nezroy started a thread because he wasn’t sure how the armor rating on orange (i.e. moddable) armor is calculated. In short, it is determind by the armoring mod that you add to the piece of armor. As explained by Georg Zoeller:

Orange Armor gets it’s armor value from the ‘armoring’ mod you slot in. If you exchange it for something better, the armor value increases along with the stats.

It’s always the first mod in the list that determines the intrinsic properties of the orange items (e.g. armoring on armor, barrel on guns, etc.)

Hope that helps.

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