Posted by Lethality | 3 Comments

TOR Launching In Australia & New Zealand Spring 2012 – Local Data Center

Listen! Do you hear that? It’s the sounds of thousands of Oceanic players rejoicing to the appearance of yellow text!

Senior Community Manager Stephen Reid just posted an update indicating that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be available to Oceania this coming spring:

We can confirm that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be launching in Australia and New Zealand in the spring of 2012.

Right now we are targeting March 1st, but that could change as our number one priority is making sure that customers have a great service to play on. 

For those of you who may have already imported the game, we will be investigating solutions to allow you to continue to play on a local server once they come online in March.

Perhaps most interesting is the comment about the ability to continue to play on a “local server” once they come online, indicating there will indeed be a regional data center serving Oceania and that players may not have to lose all of their progress to that point!

Stay tuned for more on this breaking story!

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Posted by Lethality | 2 Comments

Update On Queues, Transfers And Disconnect Grace Periods

BioWare is well aware they have a hot MMO on their hands. With news that as many as 1.5 million gamers were playing even before the game launched, it goes down as one of the largest MMO launches ever.

Unfortuantely, with that popularity also comes some downsides. While avoiding many of the pitfalls and stumbling blocks of past MMOs, BioWare has been hit with the common server queue syndrome. Not uncommon or unexpected, but there have been cases of extreme wait times. Live Producer Jeff Hickman acknowledged their awareness of the issue and vowed to stay on top of it.

Today, Senior Community Manager Stephen Reid gave an update for players who are affected or frustrated by the queuing issue:

Many of you who are already playing on these servers are asking for solutions, and we understand your frustration. At this time we can only ask for your patience. Population caps are being gradually raised on these servers, but raising them too fast will create an influx of new players and perpetuate the problem. We do not expect the queues to alleviate on these servers for the foreseeable future. If you do not want to queue, you should consider playing on another server, many of which have very low or no queues.

Character transfer is a common request for these servers. The ability to transfer your characters is being worked on, but there is no ETA on when it will be available.

Finally, we are also aware of the issues some have experienced where they have been disconnected during a queue due to internet issues, and had to restart their queue once more. This is a high priority for our server team and we’ll be deploying a fix as soon as possible.

Getting new players to roll on different servers is a good step, it’s also nice to hear they are working on character transfers as well as the ability to regain your place in line, should you drop from a queue.

Head over to SWTOR.com to read the full official post.

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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 Lethality | 1 Comment

New Servers Incoming – Early Access Update

Community Master Stephen Reid gave players who are eagerly awaiting their Early Game Access invites a few little tidbits to get them through the long cold night ahead, in hopes that tomorrow is their day. Tomorrow, not only will new batches of invites be going out beginning in the morning, but additional servers are being added to the mix – including more of the popular RP-PvP servers, which represent some of the highest volume servers so far!

Today, we invited people who had pre-ordered up to the very beginning of October (roughly). Tomorrow, we’re going to be inviting the same number of people again; that will take us up to the last week or so of November. On Friday, we’ll be inviting even more, and we’ll give you an update on that tomorrow.

Reid was quick to point out that though there are many new servers listed on the server status page, they won’t necessarily ALL be online for tomorrow. But at least we have some names to work off of!

New Servers:

Zaalbar – PvE
Prelemian Trade Route – PvE
Whitebeam Run – PvE
Infinite Empire – PvP
Wall of Light – PvE
Anturi Reach – PvE
Kathol Rift – PvE
Kath Hound – RP-PvP
Ven Zallow – RP-PvP
Kaiburr Crystal – PvE
Veeboo Lunx – PvE
Darth Sion – PvE
Infinity Gate – PvP
Amulet of Rin Shuuir – RP-PvP
Lord Ieldis – RP-PvE
Fa’athra – PvE
Khoonda Militia – PvE
Firkrann Crystal – PvP
Cho Mai – PvP
The Courageous – PvE
The Corsair – PvE
The Constant – PvE
The Bastion – PvP
Thana Vesh – PvE
Krayiss Obelisk – PvE
Krath – PvE

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Posted by Lethality | 11 Comments

The Ten Commandments (Or Suggestions) Of Stephen Reid

Senior Community Manager Stephen Reid took to the Twitterverse this evening to offer some “preparation” for tomorrow’s kick-off of Early Game Access for Star Wars: The Old Republic. While Stephen’s account is his personal account, he does a nice job of getting stuff out to fans that way when necessary.

Since the forums are down, Stephen put Twitter to work. You can check out Rockjaw’s tweets right here, but if you’re not a Twitter user or just don’t wanna click, we thought we’d share Stephen Reid’s Ten Commandments for Early Game Access! They’re fun to read it an English accent if you can muster it:

First: Early Game Access officially starts at 4AM PST / 6AM CST / 7AM EST / 12PM GMT / 1PM CET tomorrow. Emails will be sent around then.

Second: emails will go out after that point in in waves. Yes, we’ll tell you when the emails will get sent via Forums/Twitter.

Third: No, not *everyone* will get in tomorrow. We are strictly allowing people admittance by when they redeemed pre-order code.

Fourth: All server types will be live tomorrow (PvP, PvE, RP-PvE, RP-PvP). All servers available to all (no EU-US or guild restrictions).

Fifth: If you’re in a pre-imported guild, no, that doesn’t get you priority access- but your guild server will be there when you get in.

Sixth: No, don’t ask when you get in. We will let in a *lot* of people tomorrow – but not everyone. If you’re not in Day One, don’t explode.

Seventh: The Forums will be back up for all who have redeemed a pre-order code just before 7AM EST (AKA, Early Game Access start).

Eighth: Servers you’ll see up tomorrow are NOT the final list. We’ll be adding more during Early Game Access.

Ninth: I’m afraid I have no further updates on retailers and shipping, but it’s moving about at very high levels. More tomorrow on that.

Tenth: As a community, you’re the craziest, most passionate, most devoted people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work for. Thanks.

And I think we as the community just want to say thank YOU too Stephen, for the hard work, dedication and no-nonsense support you give to us!

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