Posted by Lady Republic | 32 Comments

Council Chambers: Breaking and Fixing Things

AAJ Goes To Austin

A week or two ago, BioWare announced plans for an upcoming Guild Summit, to gather leaders from a number of the more famous guilds and the community as a whole to talk about the status of guilds in The Old Republic.  AAJ will have two members there – Reedyn, our Healing columnist, will be there on behalf of his guild, and I will be on site representing Ask A Jedi – so in lieu of this week’s advice, I would like to ask all of our readers out there what questions you have for the BioWare team that I can present on your behalf, or what information you are hoping to get out of the summit so I’ll know what to look and listen for.

Questions, Please!

Please post any questions or issues you want to know more about at the summit in the comments below, and I promise I will gather them all up and see what I can do about getting input.  We will be soaking and poking throughout as much of the information as we can while on site, bringing you as much news as possible about the plans BioWare has for guilds in TOR, and also asking any questions or raising any concerns you have about guilds as well.

From my perspective, I’m really looking forward to learning more about the overall plan and visions for guilds and communities within The Old Republic.  I am as excited as the next person about the possibility of guild banks and guild housing or ships, so I will definitely be on the lookout to learn more about these features.  I would also like to hear if they intend to implement a guild leveling system, as I have some fairly strong – and not favorable – opinions on these based on my experiences managing a guild elsewhere when these were rolled out. Allow me to say a bit more on that, as an example of a “good idea gone horribly awry”…

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Posted by Lethality | 10 Comments

Patch Notes: 1.1.4 – Public Test Server

BioWare has just pushed patch 1.1.4 to the Public Test Server! One of the most important changes listed in the notes below (so far) is the options for display of the Global Cool Down. For past patches, it hasn’t made much sense to get on the PTS because you needed a higher level character to test the changes. But in this case, you can see the GCD changes from the first time you set foot on to your origin world.

So, I IMPLORE all players to log on to the Public Test Server and try this out… and give BioWare the feedback they need to get this right!

 

Because development is ongoing during testing, it should be noted that all changes and updates listed in the patch notes should be considered incomplete and are subject to change or removal before release to the live servers. The Public Test Server patch notes will be provided in English. The final release notes will be provided in English, French, and German when the content is moved to live servers.

General

• The key formerly bound to /bug can now be mapped to any action and no longer opens the /bug window. The command is no longer able to be bound to a quickslot, but player can still type /bug in chat to open a new bug report.

Classes and Combat

General

• Using abilities with indirect targeting (such as area of effect abilities) will no longer cause players to be flagged for PvP if a PvP-flagged player from the opposing faction is within the ability’s range, and the ability will have no effect on the PvP-flagged player.

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Posted by Lethality | 3 Comments

Senior Writer Drew Karpyshyn Departs BioWare

In what can only be described as sad news, long-time BioWare writer and author in his own right Drew Karpyshyn has announced he is leaving BioWare and the video game business behind. Drew is the author that, among many things, brought us the original Knights of The Old Republic Story, created Darth Revan, and essentially planted the seeds for Star Wars: The Old Republic:

I’m leaving to focus more time and energy on my novels and other non-video game related projects. But even though I’ll no longer be working on games for BioWare, I’m not going to be severing all ties with them. Many of my closest friends still work at the company, and I’m also in the process of writing the next Star Wars: The Old Republic novel, though I can’t say too much about it yet.

On a personal note, I can say that Drew is one of the nicest and most down-to-earth developers I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. When Ask A Jedi was first starting out, one of the first conventions I attended was Star Wars Celebration here in Orlando in August of 2010. Drew was there in many capacities, including for TOR, and he spent at least an hour just hanging out with us in a casual atmosphere, sharing drinks and talking TOR. You can check out the video of part of our interview with him below.

Just wanted to say thanks to Drew for all he’s given myself and the entire video game world over the past 12 years, and wish him well in his next “chapter!”

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Posted by Lethality | 30 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Are You Playing Another MMO Besides TOR?

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!

MMORPGs are interesting beasts. They consume enormous amounts of resources over the course of many years to design, develop and produce. Likewise, they also consume huge amounts time from players, who gladly give it up to enjoy exploring their favorite stories and worlds. I’ve always said that MMOs are consumed more as a hobby than a video game, since the nature of the participation is more of a long-term commitment and investment in improving over time. Not a run-and-gun quickie like a simple 40-hour video game gives you.

Because of this, there’s a widely-held belief that you can only play one MMO at a time… and I tend to agree. There just isn’t a way to fully engage in more than one MMO when you consider what that investment means, coupled with real-life responsibilities. This is why there always seems to be a “war” that someone has to win when a new MMO comes out… because one must stop playing one to start playing the other.

None the less, there are those that maintain that you can play more than one MMO at a time. So that’s the question for today… do you guys play another MMO besides Star Wars: The Old Republic? And I’m not talking about dabbling in a free-to-play title here and there, or the demo of some other game. I am talking about full on commitment to character development and everything the game has to offer. Let’s hear it, hardcores!

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Posted by Lethality | 2 Comments

The Old Republic Releasing To Asia-Pacific Region March 1st – Character Transfers Will Be Available

BioWare just made it official: Star Wars: The Old Republic is launching in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore on March 1st! What’s more, players that have already started a character on European or NA servers will have an opportunity to move their existing characters to their new, regional servers so they don’t have to sacrifice all of the work they put in so far to gain better performance:

BioWare and LucasArts are excited to announce that Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ will officially launch in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore on March 1st, 2012! Fans in these regions who purchase the game will be able to experience their very own Star Wars™ saga on regional servers. Players who have already begun their journey will also have a limited-time opportunity to migrate their characters from their current servers to Asia Pacific servers after the launch on March 1st, giving them the chance to take advantage of the decreased network latency by playing on a regional server. All players who qualify for a character transfer will be notified in early March with more details.

This has been hinted at for some time, and with today’s announcement, players in the region can look forward to the best possible play experience. No word however on when scheduled maintenance will occur ;)

This will no doubt bring a strong surge of players into the game, and if you’re in the region you’ll want to check out BioWare’s complete press release for more details here.

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Posted by Reedyn | 0 Comments

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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Posted by Lethality | 12 Comments

Patch Notes: 1.1.3 – Surge Rating, Bug Fixes & More

 

Today, BioWare pushed patch 1.1.3 to the live servers and seems to catch a lot of little bug fixes. The biggest change seems to be in the re-balancing of surge rating, which seems to make more sense the way it’s now described. Being Valentine’s Day, I would have expected some sort of boost to companion affection, but that’s another issue ;)

You can view the full patch notes for 1.1.3 below, or you can check out BioWare’s official patch notes page for these as well as all previous patch notes!

1.1.3 Patch Notes — 2/14/2012

 

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 Lord Paladin | 15 Comments

Breakdown: The Cybertech Mods You Want!

Breakdown is designed to to fill that stressful void while Star Wars: The Old Republic is down for maintenance. Each Tuesday morning, we’ll look at a topic and try to break it down to the basics. In the end, we hope to educate, entertain, and prevent you from having your own Breakdown!

This week’s Breakdown is about Modifications! If you’re an avid customizable gear user  you know that keeping up with all of the different modifications for your gear can be dizzying. Every class, and every spec, has something different you want to focus on. On top of that, once you hit the 30s, the number of options you have grow considerably! If you haven’t already, go back and read my previous article on Enhancements (there were so many they needed their own article!) This week, we’re going to break down all the different types of Modification mods and Armoring mods available to you, so that you know which ones you want to slot into your favorite set of custom gear.

First, let’s start with some definitions:

When you’re a “lowbie” (below level 30) You’re going to use one of the “Basic” mods. These terms work for both Armoring and Modifications.

• Might = Strength (Jedi Knight & Sith Warrior)
• Reflex = Aim (Trooper & Bounty Hunter)
• Resolve = Will (Consular & Inquisitor)
• Skill = Cunning (Smuggler & Agent)

22 Series: Each time you go up a level range, the series of Enhancements, Modifications, Armoring, Hilts, Barrels, etc… will increase. The 22 series is the highest level that crafters can make (not to be confused with the different qualities such as prototype and artifact). Every time you increase in rating, you’re increasing in the level requirement and the magnitude of the stats that are on that particular item modification.

Rating: If you look carefully at the Armoring mods, they will have something that shows you the rating. In the above example, it says “Armor Rating 70.” This doesn’t really mean anything until you slot it into a piece of customizable armor, and that will depend on if it is heavy, medium, or light armor. The higher the rating, the higher the value of armor. Artifact pieces will have the same level requirement (such as level 31) but instead of being rating 70, they will be considerably higher, granting you a better bonus (and better stats) for the same level range.

Now without further ado, I give you Ask A Jedi’s newest Breakdown crafting modification chart:

This chart includes the previous one on Enhancements, as well as Modification mods and Armoring mods. The bonuses marked in here are for the basic prototype quality that anyone can make. Prior to level 31, you’ll want to use the “lowbie” ones I mentioned above. Also, the italicized and struck out Enhancements are the repeats (exact duplicate) of the one above it.

Hopefully this will help you next time you decide to peruse the Galactic Trade Market (and remember that the one on Nar Shaddaa is cross faction), or the next time you hit up your local crafter. As always, I hope I’ve helped educate you on more of the basics, and I hope you’ll join me next week when the servers are down for another Breakdown!

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Posted by Lethality | 0 Comments

Guild Summit Update: Live Streaming For The Masses!

A few weeks back, BioWare announced the upcoming Guild Summit to be held in Austin next month… guild leaders had the chance to apply to travel to Austin and interact directly with BioWare developers on the state of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Applications are now closed, but we learned some important info about the Guild Summit today: many of the events and sessions will be live-streamed on the Internet, so even if you’re unable to go, you can still be a part of the festivities!

For those who are unable to attend the Guild Summit for one reason or another, we’re very happy to announce that we will be providing a livestream of select events during the Guild Summit, including developer presentations and feedback discussions. These livestreams will allow players from around the world to observe and participate in some of the event discussions as well.

Hop on over to SWTOR.com for the full post!

 

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Posted by Cormeister | 2 Comments

Yellow Posts: Cooldown Animation and Reverse Engineering

Other than public test server updates, the dev tracker has been relatively quiet this week.

Easily the biggest thread of the week was started by Joveth Gonzalez, Associate Online Community Manager, titled “Poll: What do you think about the new changes made to global cooldown UI in 1.1.2?”. The poll has since been closed with 57% responding “They’re terrible!”, 31% responding “They’re good!”, and 12% responding “I don’t care”.

BioWare’s Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager, wants to stress that the developer’s have heard the feedback from the community and changes are coming. If you saw the community blog post on Friday, then you know that you are going to have a lot more flexibility with how your cooldown animations are displayed. So when exactly are these changes coming? According to Mr. Reid, sometime within the next couple of weeks:

…tentatively scheduled for deployment in the week beginning Monday 20th.

Personally, I am really excited for the cooldown text functionality. That was one of the first mods I installed when I played WoW so I can’t wait to have the same functionality as  a standard feature in TOR. It’s also really nice to see the devs respond so quickly to issues like this. The cooldown animation changes were not received very well by a lot of players, but the devs saw the feedback and are making quite a few changes to improve the animations.

This gives me a lot of hope for the future of TOR if the devs are willing to listen to feedback and make changes quickly.

User Priam created a thread to ask “Is RE [Reverse Engineering] Broken?” He reverse engineered quite a few items and never got  a blue upgrade schematic. So, he wanted to know if the “drop” rate was stealth-nerfed in the most recent patch. Turns out that it is just a bug and will soon be fixed. Here is Patrick Malott, Systems Designer, with the details:

The reverse engineering return rate is not currently working as intended. In an upcoming patch, we are improving the reverse engineering rates – especially for the higher-level items. 

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