Mar 5, 2012

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Guild Summit Day 1 Summary

We know many of you will be excited to see the livestream of the first-ever Guild Summit for Star Wars: The Old Republic™. However, yesterday was the start of the first official Guild Summit in Austin, Texas. Over the weekend people have been checking in to the DoubleTree Hotel. Towards the late afternoon the lounge was filled with hundreds of excited fans waiting to see what the BioWare team have planned for them.

The official event started at a local cinema called the Alamo Drafthouse where Stephen Reid started the introduction speech with an anecdote about the first time he saw Episode 1: The Phantom Menace back in 1999, after which it was clear that he was one of the more dedicated Star Wars fans in the room.

Following his speech we received a visit from the 501st Legion showing off Revan, Stormtroopers, and R2-D2 himself. We were also able to witness a proposal up on the stage by Brian and Amanda from the guild No Sleep Till Kessel (she said yes!).

During the introduction speech and before the main movie they had one of the coolest fan-made projects that has ever been made from the Star Wars fans playing in the background, Star Wars Uncut. If you haven’t watched it yet, do that right now!


Sadly, we didn’t get to see the whole Star Wars Uncut but we got the next best thing: Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, in 3d. It was a very incredible experince, especially with so high concentration of Star Wars fans in the same room. There were more than one quote relating to The Old Republic shouted during the movie. My favourite (and probably others’ as well) was when someone yelled “SPACEBAR!” during one of Jar Jar Binks’ conversations.

The evening ended with a combined podcast featuring Corellian Run, Darth Hater, Mos Eisley Radio, Massively, Old Republic Dads and our very own Lady Republic; additionally, as a special guest on the podcast, David Bass stopped in as well. Give it a listen when you can!

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Feb 21, 2012

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Halls Of Healing: Bringing Balance to the Force

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

Last week’s patch started some heavy complaints on the official forums and elsewhere in the blogosphere when they announced the nerf to Surge Rating. I was, maybe to your surprise, quite delighted at these changes. Why you may ask? I currently play a Scoundrel, and as you might know Critical Rating and Surge Rating are a very important part of the mechanics due to talents such as Accomplished Sawbones and Prognosis: Critical. So why would I be delighted at these changes? Currently the state of the Scoundrel/Operative healing is quite poor. I’m not talking in terms of numbers or how to be competitive, but how the actual mechanics and toolbox of the class. We are heavily dependant on our critical hits to be able to put out good numbers and if you ask me this is where the fault in the design is. While it is particularly so for Scoundrel/Operative healers the way Critical Strikes is designed in the game, it has a major effect on other healers as well.

A Nerf eating some delicious grass

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Feb 14, 2012

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Halls Of Healing: Building A Healing Team, Part 3 – Motivation!

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

We have now covered ways you can find and recruit healers and how to build up a good base of communications in your team, but something we haven’t covered is motivation. As far as raiding goes motivation is probably the most important factor of them all when you’re aiming to make progress. If your fellow players don’t have any desire to be around, you will come across problems such as people not showing up, poor performance, attitude issues and general burnout. Issues for players who aren’t new to the raiding scene are probably all too familiar with.

How to actually go about this is very different for each and every Operation team, as every team and member has his or her own ways of gaining motivation. However, since all your members are in your Operation team you can assume that they are either interested in progression and loot, tactical challenges or they are just interested in doing something fun with their friends. I’d say that every team needs a little bit of each of these to be successful, and if you make sure you have all these things you will keep the majority of your players interested and motivated.

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Jan 17, 2012

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Halls Of Healing: Building A Healing Team – Part 2

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

Last week we took a look at how to find new players for your healing team. This week we will have a look at what you can do when your healing team is assembled to build on the relationships between players in your team, and to improve cooperation and performance in Operations.

I’m sure a lot of you have been in a situation with a poorly communicating raid member, sometimes even a hostile group entirely. The leader is screaming at people in a desperate attempt to get people in line, the Damage Dealers have no eye for anything but their own performance on the meters, the Tanks keep pulling and can’t be bothered waiting for the group to be ready, and the people who truly cared about the group have long since gave up hope.

Even if a group as bad as this one are uncommon, it is not uncommon to see at least some of these things in most groups. Things may not be as elevated but there are always going to be some people that do less, and some who do more. Sometimes it’s the same person consecutively, other times it might be a different person. Regardless there is one thing that is true: we need to cover for each other’s mistakes all the time when playing with other people.

Now, what does this have to do with building a healing team? While all the roles have the need to continuously work together with each other, the healers are entirely dependent on coordination to achieve success.

C'mon... c'mon... Yahtzee!

C'mon... c'mon... Yahtzee!

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Jan 10, 2012

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Halls Of Healing: Building A Healing Team – Part 1

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

Right now in that galaxy far far away, it’s a really interesting time to be recruiting. If you’re the healing team leader, depending on your guild’s situation it can both be a time of pleasure and a time of pain. What we know for sure is that the launch period is a unique situation during the lifecycle of an MMO, and as the leader of your healing team you need to adapt accordingly.

What am I talking about? For starters, the server communities are completely fresh. There aren’t many people who know each other yet and even the guilds that have been around for some time have to in some way adapt to new roles and new faces. There is also a large absence of max-level players, bigger than there ever will be in the game again. Another thing that there’s already been a lot of discussion about is the large amount of not-so-experienced MMO players – players that can be excellent, but are not used to the way online games work, both in terms of gameplay and socially.

While all of this makes a difficult environment to build a good healing team in it does create a great opportunity that can, if you seize it, make things a lot easier down the road.

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