Dec 8, 2011

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Blue Milk & Cereal: Will You Enable The Public Test Server?

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 may be gleefully aware, yesterday BioWare announced that Early Game Access will start for players on December 13th (that’s next Tuesday!) and that the full retail game client is now available for download!

One additional bit of information that was revealed/confirmed is the eventual availability of a public test server. There is an option in the settings panel of the launcher user interface that allows players to “Enable Public Test Server Access.”

Now, we don’t yet know when such a server would be available or how it would work, but it’s nice to know that players are going to have the option to preview and test upcoming content on a regular basis in order to help make the game better for everyone.

All of this brings us to today’s question: will you enable access to the public test server? As mentioned, it gives you a preview of upcoming content and a chance to give your input, but the down side may be that some of the story, art or other content is spoiled for you before it’s in it’s final state – just like any other phase of Game Testing.

So let us know if you’ll be enabling access to the public test server, and why or why not!

Will you play on the public test server when it's available?

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Dec 5, 2011

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End Of Game Testing: Photo Gallery

And so, it has ended. The servers are down and Game Testing for Star Wars: The Old Republic is over.

There was an impromptu dance party on the capital worlds to commemorate the events, and just as the prophecy predicted there were naked Jedi and gyrating Troopers everywhere. There really aren’t any words to describe this, so I’ll just let the pictures do the talking.

Head on over to Flickr for the photo stream of the end-of-beta TOR party!

Enjoy!

Yes, this is just a taste of what's in the gallery. Excited?

Yes, this is just a taste of what's in the gallery. Excited?

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Dec 4, 2011

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Wild Space: Choice, Item Mods, And Gameplay

It’s a big galaxy our 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!

TORWars

Our good buddies over on TORWars turned me on to the fansite SWTORFace.com, where the crew has been churning out several great video guides for how to do different things in TOR. The most recent video describes how the item modification system works.

BioWare has stated that you could use your first lightsaber from when you get it, all the way up to level 50 just by swapping out item modifications to improve it’s stats. Check out this helpful video that explains how this process works from SWTORFace, as well as their many other guide videos on their YouTube page.

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Dec 4, 2011

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Blue Milk & Cereal: Will You Be There For The End Of (Beta) Times?

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!

If you’re reading this, you’re likely quite aware that the official launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic is just over 2 weeks away on December 20,  and even less than that if you count Early Game Access!

With that in mind, BioWare is winding down not only the current Game Testing weekend, but the entire Game Testing program as of 11:59PM BT (BioWare Time, otherwise known as Central Standard Time!) Time is needed to focus on the tasks associated with preparing for what is likely to be the largest MMO launch to date, and honestly, did you really expect to be able to just keep on playing beta until launch?

Back in 2004, World of Warcraft ended its beta with a bang. Blizzard launched a game-wide attack by the Burning Legion (not to mention a few Raid bosses), leaving capital cities (and players) laying in waste. If you were there, you know it was quite a blast! The mood was both festive and deadly. It was the end of times.

With the closure of TOR’s beta program tonight, I’m wondering if we’ll see some of the same things. Or heck, even something totally different! I haven’t seen an official announcement one way or the other, but I think a special event of some kind to commemorate the commercial launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic is warranted, and hope to see one.

I’m lucky enough to be one of the general Game Testing participants, so I plan on being there until the last bit flows from the server. I plan to capture screenshots and movies, so 10 years from now we can all look back and say “I remember that! Vanilla TOR was the best! ;)

So, I just wanted the AAJ faithful to check in – will you be there for the end of beta tonight? Do you expect anything special to go down? Vote and let us know your thoughts about it!

Will you participate in the end of beta testing tonight?

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Dec 1, 2011

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Zlatto’s Bazaar: Reverse Engineering Theorycrafting

Zlatto’s Bazaar is the one-third Wall Street, one-third criminal empire and one-half gossip rag. You need to keep up on the Bazaar if for no other reason than to keep an eye on your competitors. Don’t be a Ho-tah and visit often.  Your comments are encouraged, especially if they make me credits…

Hello, all you GTN moguls-in-training! I’m glad you decided to stop by so we can talk about the exciting math of Reverse Engineering! With the NDA gone, I wanted to get into some of the exciting non-combat mechanics of the game. No spoilers to worry about here, it’s all about crafting and Reverse Engineering in mass quantities to enable us to look a bit behind the curtain of ‘random’ as defined by BioWare.

You can toggle Reverse Engineering on in your Inventory panel, which will allow you to select certain items to... Reverse Engineer and perhaps learn to make a better version of that item!

I am not a statistics guru, but because I am skilled in short-changing purchases in any monetary unit of the known galaxy, I figured it would be best for me to share my accumulated numbers with you, and then together we could decide what they mean. I expect there is a closeted math geek or two that might read the column, so lets hope they decide to chime in and give us some deeper analysis.

This article will assume that you are all up to speed on the process, risk, and rewards of Reverse Engineering. If you are not yet a guru on the topic, take a quick moment and read Momus’ informative article on the subject found over here in Blasters, Beggars and Credits. For now, I’ve decided not to dive into the itemization gain seen at each level of Premium (green), Prototype (blue) and Artifact (purple.) That discussion could barely be covered with a 12-part series and would require more time than I can spend at the moment.

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