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 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 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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Posted by Lethality | 51 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Are You Rolling An Alt?

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!

Today marks exactly 2 months since Early Game Access for Star Wars: The Old Republic opened up. If you began playing on that very day, playing just a couple hours several days a week, it’s been enough time that you could have a character at level 50 by now. So for those of you who are level 50, and I’m guessing many in the AAJ Army have at least one, did you decide to level an alt?

There are some complaints on the forums that people are “bored,” but a quick study shows that these players generally raced to level 50 for the most part, and expected unlimited gameplay options once they got there. It’s just not going to happen in a brand new MMO. Especially when BioWare made it clear they were betting big on the level-up game. With individual stories for each class, and the Legacy system in place to support exactly that, it shouldn’t be a big surprise they want players to play many characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Damion Schubert: We really want to put in systems to encourage replay. The Legacy System, which we hope to get in, will hopefully be in that venue. I am not ready to talk about what exactly it is and how we do that, but we are really betting heavily on the level up game. We are really betting heavily on the story aspects of the game, and we really want people to enjoy that journey, and to feel like that journey is interesting and exciting. We actually want to incentivize people to try the different classes so that they experience those other stories, and they play the game again. So that really put a lot of pressure on us to make sure that leveling up your second character and your third character is not grinding, and that it still feels like a fresh and interesting experience. We’re less interested in doing a Dark Age of Camelot “hey bypass all the content” in order to get to max level to do the endgame content because of what we think is important about our game and is our unique selling point: we want you to try that content. Maybe there is a way in the future, but that isn’t even a sparkle in our eye at this point. 

Now, I’m a fan of sticking to one character whenever possible… and due to my play time, that’s all I can usually do anyway. But I have dabbled in some other characters especially during Game Testing. Oddly, I find leveling an alt in TOR to be somehow more repetitive than leveling an alt in previous games. I can’t put by finger on it… the class quests are all different, but they make up only a small part of the content. If you pick the class that shares your main’s starter world, then nearly everything else you do is a duplicate of what you’ve already done, right from the start.

So I’m just curious how many of you guys are out there rolling alts, and what prompted you to do it. Are you simply bored at level 50 waiting for everyone else to get there, or are you genuinely interested in seeing the story for multiple classes? What is your experience of rolling an alt so far… different enough?

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