Posted by Cormeister | 1 Comment

Wild Space: Companions, Lightsabers, and ATI Performance 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!

First up this week, is a really well done editorial from Darth Hater. Titled “Companions: The Good, The Bad and The Broken” the article goes on to describe the bad stuff about the companion system, the broken (i.e. bugged) stuff that needs fixing ASAP, and the good stuff that truly makes the companion system unique.

For starters: the bad. Tanking companions are the primary complaint here with the main problem being that they don’t…well…tank too effectively. They tend to need lots of healing after a battle or two or just flat out die during fights with Champion level mobs. Speaking from experience, tanking companions in flashpoints also don’t work too well. It would be nice to see tanking companions get a buff or two so that they can tank effectively in PvE content.

In “the broken” section, the author talks about the difficulty for some classes to actually get damage dealing companions to engage in combat:

…more than half of [Sniper and Gunslinger] attacks don’t cause their companions to engage the enemy. Players have to either remember to manually activate their companion each fight, or make the conscious decision to use an ability that activates their follower, usually at a substantial DPS loss. 

But overall, we love our companions, don’t we? As the author says, companions provide us with a really great crafting system that allows to fulfill our crafting needs without spending all of our characters time on it. But the most amazing thing that companions do is get us to care about them. Even if we hate the way a certain companion acts, *cough* 2V-R8 *cough*, we still feel something about all of them. And that is a feat worth celebrating.

Check out the full article over on Darth Hater.

Next up, do you like lightsabers? I know I do! SWTOR Strategies stumbled upon a really cool fan-made diagram showing many of the lightsaber hilts found in game and their corresponding icons. The idea being that you can see what that new lightsaber will look like since, you know, you can’t view weapons in the dressing room window in game (yet). Thanks to SWTOR Strategies for finding this cool image for us.

A couple weeks back, I posted some tips from the Red Rancor folks about improving your computers FPS. Unfortunately, those tips were only for those with Nvidia video cards. This week, I stumbled upon some (older) tips for our ATI/AMD bretheren over on the MMO-Junkie forums. You’ll definitely want to scroll to the bottom of the initial post and see how the author configured his Catalyst Control Center for maximum TOR performance. Check out all the tips here!

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Posted by TwinHits | 1 Comment

United We Stand: Stand Back, We’re Learning

Dear Parents, don’t worry. Your kids are going to be alright even if they are spending a ton of time playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s not antisocial, it’s not useless, and it’s not a waste of time. It’s learning, and according to James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, they are doing a better job than our schools are. “They operate with—that is, they build into their designs and encourage—good principles of learning, principles that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-they-drop schools.” (Gee, 205)

Check out that handsome book cover.

And he is absolutely right. In this book, he highlights thirty-six learning principles identified by learning and literacy studies and talks about how they are used in modern game design. An excellent example that he uses is the pattern teaching strategy that first person shooters use. They teach you have to move, how to shoot, and how to not die then they throw enemies at you. When fighting, you develop strategies and learn tactics that are effective against your enemies. Then, as the game progresses to more difficult enemies, the game forces you to use everything you have learned in new and different ways. Then, as the final boss nears, the game tears these strategies’ away from you and makes you look for solutions outside of the box, drawing on all the experiences you have had throughout the game.

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Posted by Lethality | 3 Comments

Patch Notes: 1.1.3 – Public Test Server

Well, you can’t fault ’em for consistency! As soon as a patch is deployed on the live servers, another one shows up on the Public Test Servers! BioWare just pushed 1.1.3 t the PTS and have posted the notes. See anything that sticks out as interesting? What about missing?

You can always find these notes and other PTS information over in BioWare’s Test Center. Let us know if you log on and check out the changes.

Classes and Combat

General

• Surge rating has been re-balanced. It now reaches diminishing returns the same way as other damage ratings, and its per point damage contribution has been reduced by approximately 10%.

 

Bounty Hunter

Mercenary

Arsenal

• Stabilizers: Correctly adds pushback resistance to Unload.

 

Trooper

Commando

Gunnery

• Steadied Aim: Correctly adds pushback resistance to Full Auto.

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Posted by Lady Republic | 2 Comments

Council Chambers: Take Me To Your Leader

Council Chambers is all about the ins and outs of guild leadership in Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Each week, we’ll look at running and managing a guild through good times, bad times and everything in between.  

Hello, and welcome to this week’s Council Chambers. We took January a bit “off” in terms of our primary purpose of guild leadership and advice, to spend some time focusing on new or prospective guild leaders and officers and cover some basics about how to start a guild and look for people to help you with that project. This week, it’s back to our core mission of working with guild leaders, officers, or members to help solve their guild challenges and dilemmas.

Chief of Staff

Since we ended our last entry talking about officers, I’ve decided to pick up again with an inquiry that concerns guild officers – and in particular, officer burnout. Overworked writes,

I’m having a blast playing SWTOR, but after just two weeks, I’m getting a little something like burn out due to my guild. This guild has been a labor of love for me, and was truly driven during the pre-game to create something special that would attract tons of members and be a really successful guild to last for years to come.

Even though I’m not the GM, I was the one in the forums trying to create energy for the guild, get members involved in creating the guidelines, decide how the guild would work and interact with the rest of the community. Now, the game has launched, and on top of all the work that goes into setting up the guild, I’ve discovered that no one was doing anything to recruit – so I’ve taken up that job as well, spamming in general to help grow our membership. I feel like I’m running the whole guild by myself, and even though it’s small right now, I feel like there’s a ton of work to be done if we want it to succeed.

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill here, or is there something I can do to encourage the others to step up? How do you cure officer apathy?

Officer apathy, officer burnout, officer inactivity – while these may all happens for different reasons, the end result is often the same. There’s still a ton of work that needs doing for the guild – recruitment, forums maintenance, scheduling, roster maintenance, member management, plus any other activities that the guild runs – but for whatever reason, there are fewer hands on deck working on it. This often results in those remaining officers shouldering more and more of the work to keep the guild afloat – and the frequent result of that is even more officer burnout, as those officers become overwhelmed and can no longer keep up.

So, what’s an overworked officer to do?

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Posted by Lethality | 15 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Did You Purchase A VIP Lounge Wristband?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

As you probably know, there is an area above the cantina in the respective faction fleets called the VIP Lounge. In this area you’ll find some entertainment, quiet corners to relax, and a few exclusive vendors. It’s basically a special place for your character to go and spend some down time, away from the general hubbub of the fleet!

Access to this area, however, requires that you either be a Collector’s Edition or Digital Deluxe Edition owner. However, BioWare saw fit to make one more option available to get access to this lounge. The cantina bartenders will sell you a VIP Lounge Wristband for the sum of just 1,000,000 credits!

Now, this will get you access to the area but still won’t allow you to purchase things from the Collector’s Edition vendor… so I am just curious – how many of you guys actually went out and bought a wristband, or plan to? Let us know!

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Posted by Lethality | 13 Comments

Patch Notes: 1.1.2 – Ability Delay, Combat Animations, Sprint & More

It’s maintenance day! That means the servers are down, but the patch notes are up!

BioWare is deploying patch 1.1.2 to the live servers this morning, and with it appears to bring some welcome changes. Further work on ability delay has been done, as well as improving any combat animations that were getting in the way of abilities executing properly. And Sprint will now automatically re-engage after you die. I could swear I didn’t have this problem, but some players must have!

You can find these and all patch notes on BioWare’s official Patch Notes page.

1.1.2 Patch Notes — 2/7/2012

Classes and Combat

Combat Ability Responsiveness

• Further improved response time for ability activation requests, especially in low-framerate situations.
• The activation bar now appears at the correct time (when the activation of an ability begins) and disappears when activation is complete.
• Instant combat abilities no longer occasionally start their combat animations twice, resulting in jerky behavior on the executing player’s client.
• The display of the floating text from instant healing abilities is no longer delayed by the animation on the client and now properly reflects the time the effect happens on the server.
• Abilities on cooldown are now more easily distinguished from abilities that can be used.

 

General

• If Sprint was active when a player died, it now remains active when the player is revived.

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