Posted by Cormeister | 7 Comments

Yellow Posts: Game Update 1.2 Dev Post Roundup

This week has been super busy on the forums. The devs (Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer in particular), responded to tons of posts about the information that came out of the Guild Summit. Here are some choice posts I found most interesting:

There was a little confusion on the forums about the future of Ilum and open-world PvP in general. Some people thought that it was being thrown out entirely because of how bad it has been. However, the exact phrase the Devs used during the PvP presentation at the Guild Summit was that they are taking Ilum “back to the drawing board”. Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager has a lot of further information to give about Ilum:

Ilum is being deprecated in Game Update 1.2. The Open World PvP area on Ilum will still be present in 1.2, but rewards previously gained in Ilum will be available in Warzones and that’s where we expect the bulk of PvP to take place for now.

As we said during the Guild Summit, the PvP team is ‘going back to the drawing board’ with Ilum. That means they want to rework it to be fun and engaging. We accept there are issues with the current design and want to ensure that what we end up with is enjoyable for PvP fans. We have no ETA on when a redesigned Ilum might be available, but when we do have more news, we’ll share it.

The PvP team definitely monitors these Forums and would love to see constructive feedback on Open World PvP and how you feel it could be improved. They have their own ideas, of course, and they’ve read many of the posts here but more feedback is always welcome.

Anyone want a Mac version of SWTOR? Pencilvania sure does. The short answer is: don’t hold your breath. Mr. Reid has a slightly longer answer and does not completely rule it out, but a Mac client is also not being actively worked on:

There are no current development efforts to create a Mac OS client for Star Wars: The Old Republic (or indeed, for any other operating system or platform).

No-one here hates Macs (in fact, many of us quite like them ) but development efforts are currently focused on expanding and improving the game for PC/Windows.

Ranked Warzones are coming in Game Update 1.2 and with that, the ability to queue with a pre-made 8-man Operation group is also coming. Stephen Reid clarifies some information about this from the PvP presentation:

David [Bass, Senior Community Coordinator] was trying to clarify the ‘Future of Warzones’ section of the PvP presentation, but that’s caused a bit more confusion; apologies. I huddled with Gabe Amatangelo about this question and got a definitive answer.

You can queue as an eight-man Operations group in Game Update 1.2, for ranked Warzones only.

In the future, whenever cross-server Warzone queuing is possible, the plan is to allow people to create teams of eight which can be named, etc.

The PvP team is aware of the importance of ranked Warzones and PvP rankings in general, hence allowing eight-man queuing. Apologies again for the confusion. We hope everyone’s going to enjoy the feature!

Here is some really good information about the future of Macros in TOR. If you really want to be able to use Macros, it sounds like the developers want to make changes to the default interface that would remove the necessity for most Macros, and they are downright opposed to Macros that automate combat. Here is what Georg Zoeller had to say about Macros:

If you’re invoking the Guild Summit, let’s be a bit more precise about what we’ve said:

A) Macros are a possibility in the future. We don’t hate them.

B) I am opposed to macros that automate combat (shouldn’t be a surprise). I’d rather take tedious things (such as sprint turning off after death) and modify the design than to rely on people to create macros to deal with these things – which creates unnecessary barriers of entry in my opinion.

C) We don’t consider interface improvements and quality of life features (e.g. mouse over healing) to be macros (so 2 does not apply)

D) Macros for social behaviors, etc are definitely a possibility too.

Finally, just to clarify, only a small subset of Legacy abilities are going to be able to be used on other classes (i.e. Flame Thrower on a Sith Warrior) and you won’t be able to pick and choose which abilities to take from other classes. As Stephen Reid says, that would be pretty game breaking:

The Heroic Ability Legacy unlock doesn’t allow you to pick any ability you like; that would indeed lead to some balancing nightmares.

There was very careful consideration over which abilities to allow as unlocks. With the limitations of the ability only being usable during your Heroic Moment (requiring an active Companion) and the cooldown on that, you shouldn’t see too much ‘Heroic Ability spam’. We see the unlock as a fun, limited ability that many players will enjoy. It wasn’t designed to unbalance the game. 

Read More

Posted by Cormeister | 0 Comments

Yellow Posts: Inter-Faction Mail and Asia/Australia Server Transfer Information

Ever wanted to send an in-game mail to a member of the opposing faction? Even if you have two characters, one Republic and one Empire, you still couldn’t  send a mail between those two characters. Geeluc wanted to know why this restriction exists in his post “No Interfactional Emails”. Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller answered to tell us that this restriction is being removed in the future:

It’s a restriction we’re working to lift soon. 

Hopefully this will allow us to also send credits and items to members of the opposing faction. If that functionality is just limited to characters on the same account, that would be fine too.

A rather large post popped up from melsione titled “Australian server transfer in LATE April!” the purpose being to complain that free server transfers from US/Europe servers to the new Asia/Australia servers are going live in late April, almost two months after the launch of the Asia/Australia servers themselves. While it’s awesome that BioWare is providing free character transfers for these customers, it sucks that it wasn’t ready in time for launch. However, creating a character transfer system is not easy and Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager, responded with a lengthy post to try and explain what the devs are doing and why it is taking so long:

Hello everyone. I can absolutely understand the frustrations expressed here, and I appreciate that for the most part, you’re being constructive in your comments. Here’s a little more insight into the situation.

The character transfer system is being actively worked on by the development team. It’s a large, complex project, made more complicated by the Legacy System – and it has to work perfectly. As always, it is not the only task the team as a whole is undertaking, but it’s a priority. It has not been deliberately delayed, nor is it being ‘held back’ for any reason. As you know, the first stage of the system will be a one-off, optional transfer for those who are based in the regions defined in our FAQ. At some point after that, we’ll bring a more fully-featured character transfer system online for all to use.

I can understand the frustration of those of you who have been playing on the US servers and waiting for transfers. We know your enthusiasm and excitement for the game – you wouldn’t have taken the steps you did to get the game earlier than the official launch if you weren’t enthusiastic. We’re working as hard as we can to get the system in place. If we could have brought it online earlier, we would have. However, priorities post-launch had to be directed towards the game itself. The team’s been working flat-out to improve the game, including bug fixes and additional content.

When we announced our launch territories last year we knew many more fans were excited to play The Old Republic. That’s why we moved quickly to launch in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore, with more territories being lined up for future launches. Our primary focus when launching in any new territory has to be to reach more players. Ultimately, that’s best for the continuing success of the game. We want everyone who wishes to play on the new servers to be able to do so, hence character transfer being offered. With that said, in this case we felt it was important to get the game into the hands of new players as soon as possible. That, combined with our post-launch development priorities, meant that character transfer did not make our launch date for these territories.

The development team remains committed to delivering a robust character transfer system for all, with our first priority being for Asia-Pacific players. If we can bring the system to you earlier than expected, we will, but for now we’re aiming towards late April.

The final, and long, dev post of the week also comes from Stephen Reid, responding to the thread “What happens to my legacy levels if I character transfer?” created by jakedamus and expanded upon by Palathas. Basically, these players want to know what happens to their Legacy points and levels if they character transfer to an Asia/Australia server. Unfortunately, the devs haven’t quite worked out that part yet, but it sounds like their goal is to keep the Legacy points intact, they just aren’t making any promises yet. Stephen Reid explains further and answers a couple more questions about character transfers:

Originally Posted by Palathas 1) As above about legacy levels. 2) Is it just the one character or is it a server full of characters? 3) Are all items carried over from the characters personal hold and what they are wearing? (More of a confirmation) I’m not creating any Asia-Pacific characters at the moment due to the uncertainty of what’s exactly happening with the transfers.

We’ll have more information about Legacy levels and experience a little closer to the window for character transfer. The system is still in development, and I don’t want to promise anything that may not happen for whatever reason.

With that said, the development team is being very careful to ensure that the experience is as smooth as possible. We don’t want to penalize anyone’s progression just because they transferred their character.

On question (2), you will be able to transfer multiple characters, although there will be some limitations (eg available slots on a server). Again, more details will come closer to the time, but you will not be limited to one character.

On question (3) the only current restrictions are listed in the FAQ. After transfer:

The character will no longer be a part of its guild – Guilds and guild membership will not be transferred to your new server. You will need to create or join a new guild on your new server.

Your Friends list will be reset – Friend lists are server specific, so you will need to repopulate your list with players from your new server.

Before you transfer your character, it is important to ensure the following:

The character has no items listed on the Galactic Trade Network (auction house) – active Galactic Trade Network listings will not be transferred to your new server.

The character has no items or credits in their mailbox – In-game mail will not be transferred to your new server. Make sure you have removed everything in your mailbox before initiating the transfer. Otherwise, the contents will be lost.

Hope that helps clarify a little!

Read More

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. 

Read More

Posted by Cormeister | 0 Comments

Yellow Posts: Guild Summit, More on PvP Gear, And BioChem Changes

Well, BioWare tried to put me out of a job this week, but little do they know that if they strike me down I shall become more powerful than…no, I’m not going to do it. First up this week is a post by Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager, about the upcoming Guild Summit. Unfortunately, BioWare does not have unlimited space for the event so not all guilds who applied will receive invites. This inevitably leads to controversy as some people think that they were unfairly or even intentionally left out. Here is and excerpt of what Mr. Reid has to say on the selection criteria:

Guilds were selected with the ultimate aim of ensuring we had a broad representative mixture of guild sizes, playstyles and geographical locations at the summit (with the assumption that no-one might turn up of their own accord). We have guilds from all types of playstyles, large guilds (2,000+ members), small guilds (20 members) and guilds from across North America and Europe. (Note: many guilds are multi-national; our invites were for guild leaders, who were mostly located in NA/EU.) Guilds were also selected because of their constructive and critical feedback during testing of The Old Republic, both pre-launch and post-launch.

If you read Wild Space this week, then you know that PvP rewards are getting some changes in the near future. They are doing this in order to correct a perceived over-gearing of some lucky players who got a lot of good loot in PvP reward bags. Some have thought that to fix this imbalance BioWare should retroactively reduce the stats on that gear. That isn’t the current plan according to Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer. Check out this excerpt:

To spell it out: We currently have no intention to modify the stats on existing PvP gear downwards (which I assume you mean by ‘nerf’). Nobody has talked about eliminating the gap between old level 50s and new level 50s either.

Last up this week, another major change coming in the 1.1.2 patch is that BioChem is getting some more changes. Specifically the requirement that you have to have the BioChem skill to use Energized and Exotech BioChem products. This change was put in place for the following reasons, per Georg Zoeller:

This was done to (a) remove pressure of players to pick up BioChem for optimal combat performance and (b) to open up the sale of BioChem products to a larger audience on the Galactic Trade Network.

To me, it sounds like BioWare is really trying to keep BioChem from being a “required” crew skill for end game players. They really want all skills to be viable at the end game. Here’s more from Georg Zoeller:

It is our intention to gradually, over multiple patches, reduce the impact of situational consumables on endgame combat resolution and shift the factors which determine the outcome of combat more towards personal skill.

Check out the full article for interesting insights into the future of BioChem.

Read More

Posted by Cormeister | 11 Comments

Yellow Posts: High Rez Update, LFG System, Crew Skills, And The GTN

Hopefully this week will be much more informative than the last, especially since the devs have been crazy active on the forums this week. By now, you’ve probably heard about the “high resolution texture problem” in SWTOR. Basically, high resolution textures are only available for in-conversation cutscenes and when you are playing out in the game normally the texture quality is lowered. One of the responses that Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Coordinator, posted in the official thread actually states in which update we will see more graphics options: 1.2.

…The first major changes will be in our next major Game Update, which will have the version number of 1.2. Those changes will bring greater visual fidelity to your character and those around you, but will still allow for good performance in situations where a lot of characters are on-screen at once. In other words, for those screenshots of your character in their best gear, you should see a marked improvement…

The game has been officially out for less than a month and we are getting our first major content patch. Hopefully, it will only take about another month to see these changes implemented!

Responding to a post by Obi-Wun, Damion Schubert, Principal Lead Systems Designer, talks a little bit about BioWare’s plans for a “looking for group” tool. What it boils down to is that, at this moment in time, most players are still confined to a few areas in the game, the fleet, mid-to-low-level planets, etc…and an official tool to automatically find groups for flashpoints and heroic quests is not needed currently. However, Mr. Schubert and the whole BioWare staff are quite aware that as players continue to reach the end game and more content becomes available a true LFG tool will become necessary. Given that, they are going to be implementing a true LFG tool soon™:

Improving our LFG system is high on the list of features that Systems Design wants to add to the game. We want this to be good not just for helping people find Flashpoints and Operations to run, but also other multiplayer content like heroic missions. A key emphasis will be on advertising for specific role needs (healer, tank, DPS). This feature is currently in the design stage, and once this feature has moved beyond this to a development stage and has a firm ETA, I’ll be coming back to you guys to give more details.

Read More