Posted by Lethality | 2 Comments

Dr. Greg Updates Community On Queues

BioWare Co-founder Dr. Gren Zeschuk just took to the official forums in a post which should ease the concerns of players about what’s being done about the queue times.

Obviously, BioWare is well aware of things and are absolutely on-the-case when it comes to dialing them in for the long term:

Hey folks, as you may likely have seen in the last 24 hours, we’ve been redoubling our efforts in optimally managing the time it takes to get into Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The BioWare Live Team has been carefully watching the influx of players into the game and is addressing with surgical precision the longer wait times on the small number of servers that were having longer wait times previously. We’ve also being doing our best to get every little bit of possible performance on our servers to increase capacity: we’ve “turned them up to 11” to do our very best to get you in and playing as quickly as possible. As a result – you should now be seeing significant improvement versus waiting times at the end of last week. 

We’re also addressing the concerns about losing your place in line if you happen to disconnect for some reason before getting into the game. We’ve been working very hard on this and are performing final testing on potential solutions.

Thanks for your patience and we really appreciate your enthusiasm for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We’re absolutely dedicated to ensuring you have a great experience both inside and outside the game.

greg

You can’t ask any more than that. An update straight from the Chief of Surgery :)

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Posted by Momus | 15 Comments

Yellow Posts: No Server Forums (For Now)

Happy TOR Launch Eve, everyone. Some might consider it coal, but BioWare gave us something on the day before Launch – Senior Community Coordinator Allison Berryman’s explanation of why there are no server-specific forums currently.

Hi everyone! We wanted to explain a little more about why there aren’t currently server forums:

While we absolutely agree that there are some useful threads and discussions that come from server forums, we have decided to not include them in our launch Forums lineup. Partially, this is because we do not feel we could currently provide the high standard of moderation, oversight, and maintenance in each of them that we aim to provide across the Forums.

Another factor is that, after observing server forums for other games, we feel that we can provide places on the Forums for the constructive content that typically comes from them while working to eliminate the extreme negativity of player callouts and other undesirable forum activity that can occur in them.

We now have several areas for guild recruitment and community discussion and organization, which we feel are excellent things that typically end up in server-specific forums. We encourage you to make use of all the Community Forums (especially the Server Event and Check-ins forums) as well as our expanded Guild Hall forums. Though the search feature is currently disabled, once it is restored it will be easy to search for guilds recruiting on your server (and we apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime).

Obviously, this is a decision we can re-evaluate as we receive community feedback, but we do encourage you to try out the sub-forums that we currently have to see if they meet your needs and desires for meeting other players. In the future, we may add additional sub-forums for various topics that require more space. We’re always reading feedback and evaluating the needs of the community, and will continue to do so, so please do let us know what suggestions you have to improve the Forums!

Obviously, this could be a hot topic for many community members – how do you all feel about this? Is BioWare making the right decision?

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Posted by Cormeister | 1 Comment

Yellow Posts: Early Game Access, Guild Leadership, and PvP XP Exploit?

Well, it’s here. By the time you read this, launch day will be about half a day away. I am super excited! Even though I got in for some Early Game Access, it will be really great when everyone logs in to play and we can really see how this game will truly shape up.

With that being said, everyone who pre-ordered and was supposed to have early game access has been invited to play by BioWare. Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manger, started this thread to explain and ask people to let him know if they were having any problems getting into the game. Have you not pre-ordered the game? Well, you are in luck! As long as you pre-order before the 20th and redeem your pre-order code on the website you will be granted early game access for the rest of the early access period:

Hey everyone,

I’m happy to announce that we have now invited everyone who has pre-ordered and redeemed their pre-order code forStar Wars: The Old Republic to Early Game Access. If you haven’t yet received an email, start the SWTOR Launcher and you should be able to get into the game.

If you still have issues, please reply in this thread and we’ll try to help you as soon as we can. We know there have been isolated issues with code redemption, and we want to help you get into the game. Please be patient as we deal with your issues as fast as possible.

Remember, you will not have been granted Early Game Access unless you have pre-ordered the game, received your pre-order code, and redeemed that code on your account.

If you have picked up a copy of the game already and did not pre-order (for example, from most European retailers), you will not be able to access the game until December 20th, but you will be able to redeem your product registration code now. This should have been explained by your retailer, and was noted on European packaging.

We’re not done with invites yet, however. There’s still time to pre-order, and if you do redeem a code before Early Game Access ends, you’ll still have time to play. After you redeem a pre-order code, we will invite you as soon as possible. We’ll be sending invites continuously from now until the end of Early Game Access.

We look forward to welcoming all of you to Star Wars: The Old Republic!

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Posted by Cormeister | 7 Comments

Yellow Posts: Canceled Pre-Orders, Achievements, And The Beta Client

Once again, there is little to report, dear readers. With the end of the beta, the devs are in final crunch-time mode to get every last bug squashed and every feature polished.

There have been reports that Walmart has been canceling the pre-orders for some people. BioWare doesn’t know why this has been happening and will be reaching out to Walmart on Monday to try and find a solution. First posted by ppglenn, Senior Online Community Manager Stephen Reid responded soon thereafter to say that they are looking into the issue.

Hello everyone,

We will investigate this issue ASAP, although we may not have further details to share before Monday.

I obviously cannot speak on behalf of any retailer, however I would like to let people know who have pre-ordered and redeemed their pre-order code, that their Early Game Access is still secured. You may apply any Game Code from any edition of The Old Republic to your account.

As I said, we’ll look into this ASAP and update you when we can.

A later report by a forum member confirmed that both Collectors and Standard Editions have been canceled by the worlds largest retailer. So, if you are in the unfortunate situation of having bee notified by Walmart that your pre-order was canceled, I would stay tuned to this thread for updates.

Forum poster Ironeyes heard like the rest of us that Achievements were going to be in the game at launch. Apparently however, he could not locate them in-game as of right now (and neither could I when I tried to go look). David Bass, Senior Community Coordinator, responded to let us all know that Achievements are located in the Codex:

Achievements are indeed in the game currently. You’ll receive achievements for things like killing certain “Epic Enemies,” unlocking titles, and accomplishing objectives in PvP. These are all kept in a special category in your Codex, so that you can view how you earned each one at any time.

Last up, forum poster Gordknight wanted to know if his beta test client that has been installed for a while would need to be uninstalled to make way for the retail client. Once again, David Bass responded to let us know that more information was forthcoming:

Don’t uninstall yet. We’ll have more info soon about the testing game client vs. the live client.

This was an interesting statement since we already have this from Stephen Reid that specifically says not to uninstall the beta client because it will patch up all the way to the retail version. I guess we will just have to wait for more info to be sure!

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Posted by Cormeister | 1 Comment

Yellow Posts: Keybinds, Lightsabers, And Community Updates

For those of you who did not get into the beta, you may be curious to know if you will be able to re-map key bindings to your desired configuration. Forum user Boozefish was curious and confused since he had heard that this feature was not available in the current beta build. He posted a thread titled, “Changing default keybinds,” to ask about it. However, Damion Schubert, Principal Lead Systems Designer, was able to step-in and let us know that key binds are able to be modified:

Keybinding is in, fear not.

Forum poster Aximand found a quote that Stephen Reid said at San Diego Comic Con when he was asked about lightsaber colors. In the thread titled “’Dozens and dozens’ of colors,” Aximand wanted to know of Mr. Reid’s quote about there being “dozens and dozens” of lightsaber color options was accurate. David Bass, Senior Community Coordinator, confirmed that yes, there are tons of colors that haven’t been discovered yet by data mining:

There are definitely still undiscovered colors out there.

Have you been planning on getting your guild into the Pre-Launch Guild Program? Well you better hurry, because sign-ups for the program end on December 2. As Associate Community Production Coordinator Courtney Woods, explains:

A few weeks ago weannounced that Phase 3 of our Pre-Launch Guild Program had begun. Phase 3: Deployment allows guild members to see whether or not their guild qualifies for transfer into the game. As we approach Early Game Access for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, we want to remind all of you in guilds that the Pre-Launch Guild Program will end on December 2nd, 11:59PM CST so that guilds can be assigned to servers for Early Game Access.

Lastly, a new associate community manager has just popped up on the scene. JovethGonzalez created his welcome post on Saturday during the crazyness of beta test weekend starting up. Since most of you were probably busy testing the game, be sure to head over to the forums and welcome our new community manager to the fray…err…community!

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Posted by Cormeister | 2 Comments

Yellow Posts: Legacy System & Story Spoilers

Sadly, this week there is very little report in Yellow Posts that hasn’t already been covered. The developers are undoubtedly busy polishing the game, but the community managers have been busing talking on the forums.

We’ve already spent some time discussing the recently announced Legacy System that has been longtime rumored. One of the more controversial items to come out of the whole announcement was the fact that your Legacy surname would apply to all characters across all servers. Given that this choice apply’s to all of your characters, it generated some backlash because of how universal it was. Allison Berryman, Senior Community Coordinator, clarified the situation to say that the Legacy surname would apply to all characters on a single server (not across all servers):

Hello everyone, we’ve updated James’ original post to add some clarification – your Legacy Last Name will affect all characters on a server, not across all servers. The line now says:

Once your character has completed their Chapter 1 storyline, they will be able to choose a Legacy Last Name. This Legacy Last Name must be unique and is shared across all characters on that server – so choose carefully!

Sorry for any confusion!

 The NDA being dropped is undoubtedly a great thing for the community. The only thing, in my mind, that could be argued to be a negative about the NDA drop are story spoilers being released. If you want to know the story, great! There will be tons of sites out there devoted to the story of SW:TOR. However, if you’re like me, you want to save the story for when you play the game. Spoiling the game for others is not desirable so Allison Berryman has laid out how the new official SW:TOR Spoilers forum works:

Is there anything I am not allowed to speak about?
While we want to hear about your SWTOR impressions, we would suggest you talk about certain topics only in certain places. On the official site, we ask you to post story spoilers in the Spoilers Forum, which was created to allow discussion of the game story (without including spoilers in your thread title). Additionally, any feedback and bug reports from your personal gameplay impressions should be left in the official Game Testing Forums where developers can monitor and respond to it directly. Beyond the official site, we ask that you are respectful of the Game Testing Agreement, and of those who may not want to have the game story spoiled, and label your impressions as having spoilers if necessary.

I want to reference a spoiler without discussing it in detail. How do I do that?
Generally, if your impressions are mostly focused around the game’s story, you should post in the Spoilers Forum to ensure you won’t spoil others. If you are posting elsewhere on the official Forums and mention something you think may be a spoiler, you can use the appropriate spoiler tags ([spoiler]Spoiler text goes here[/spoiler]) to hide the spoiler from other community members. This way someone who doesn’t want to have information of the story can avoid potential spoilers, while those who are interested can still access your content.

Any Forums thread that includes a story spoiler in the title will be edited to remove the spoiler, including those in the Spoilers Forum. If we believe that a community member is posting spoilers maliciously, their threads will be removed and they will potentially be given an infraction for violating Forums policy.

What if I don’t want the story spoiled?
On the official site, it would be wise to avoid the Spoiler Forum. Apart from that, spoilers that are part of general impressions or are otherwise posted outside of the Spoiler Forum will be marked with spoiler tags. 

What if I am unsure whether or not this is a spoiler?
On the official site, if you are unsure as to whether or not you are posting spoilers, use the spoiler tags. This will hide the potential spoiler from public view unless the reader makes the active decision to read the hidden text. 

What if the video contains story spoilers?
On the official site, please post any video links in the Spoiler Forum. Away from the official site, as a courtesy to other players, please label your video with the heading ‘Spoiler’.

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