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Having read say, 90 or 100 reviews of SWTOR, I believe I’m qualified to say the one below is by far the funniest one of them all. It’s not a glowing review given the humour of the reviewer (Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw), but that’s what makes for a good review: honest opinions. It just happens that Ben’s honest opinions are likely to make you laugh – hard.
Enjoy:
I still can’t pick a favourite line here, there’s just too many of them.
We’re very pleased to announce that we’ll be recording an interview with BioWare’s Senior Community Manager, Stephen Reid, on Episode 26 of our Flash Point podcast. We’ll be recording on the 11th February, but in the lead up we’d love YOUR questions for Stephen Reid on anything SWTOR-related.
How to have your question asked
BioWare haven’t placed any rules on what can be asked, but I do know they won’t be able to talk about the Oceanic launch as details aren’t finalised as yet. Aside from that, the sky’s the limit. So here’s what to do to be on with a chance to get your question asked:
1. Ask something that a lot of your fellow players may be interested in.
2. Ask something that hasn’t been answered 33 times before.
3. Ask it constructively – if you’ve got a gripe that you think a lot of people have, then put it forward but do it nicely. We of course reserve the right to not ask anything that’s obvious trolling, contains inappropriate language or defamatory comments.
4. Post your question in comments on this post only, INCLUDING the name you’d like attributed to you when we ask the question of Stephen. A rough location (state, territory or Island in Oz / NZ would be fine if you don’t want to get more specific). And yes we will ask questions from outside the Oceanic area if they’re good ones.
5. We ideally need your questions by midnight Monday 6th February AEDT / 9PM AWST / 2am Tuesday the 7th NZDT, as we’ll be shooting of some of the more in-depth questions to BioWare so they can ask the devs to clarify anything needed prior to the podcast.
6. That’s it!
Obviously we can’t ask every question but we’ll put forward as many as possible. We’ll aggregate common questions to save time as well. The podcast will be up for listening by midday on the 11th February AEDT, around 90 minutes after the podcast is recorded. Later that day there’ll also be a transcript available for dissection.
So get posting in comments!
Some more downtime unfortunately tonight 7pm-9pm AEDT, 4pm-6pm AWST and 9pm-11pm NZDT:
Since the latest patch (1.1.1), we’ve been seeing reports about players dealing with hitching and freezing issues. As an effort to alleviate these issues for affected players, we will be performing maintenance tonight starting at 2AM CST, but we don’t expect it to go beyond two hours. We apologize for any inconvenience, but we hope that this will resolve these issues for those players affected by them. This is a server-side only update and will not require a download.
Maintenance
Date: Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Time: 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 4AM CST (2AM PST/5AM EST/10AM GMT/11AMPM CET)
All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than two hours.
Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.
Patch 1.1.2 for SWTOR is now up on the public test server, and there’s a bunch of fixes in there as expected. The key ones for a lot of people are further improvements to ability delays and general system responsiveness. There’s also a bunch of class fixes / changes so read on for the full kahuna:Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ – 1.1.2 Patch NotesClasses and Combat
General
- Improved response time for ability activation requests in low-framerate situations.
- Implemented further improvements to ability responsiveness and client-side anticipation of ability executions.
- The activation bar now appears at the correct time (when the activation of an ability begins) and disappears when activation is complete.
- If Sprint was active when a player died, it now remains active when the player is revived.
- Abilities on cooldown are now more easily distinguished from abilities that can be used.
Jedi Knight
Sentinel
- Pacify: This ability can no longer be used on Operation Boss enemies.
Watchman
- Plasma Blades: Now increases damage dealt by burn effects by 5% per point.
- Searing Saber: Now correctly modifies the critical damage dealt by burn effects.
- Changes to Searing Saber and Plasma Blades result in an overall increase in Damage Per Second.
Sith Warrior
Marauder
- Obfuscate: This ability can no longer be used on Operation Boss enemies.
Annihilation
- Hemorrhage: Now increases damage dealt by bleed effects by 5% per point.
- Bleedout: Now correctly modifies critical damage dealt by bleed effects.
- Changes to Hemorrhage and Bleedout result in an overall increase in Damage Per Second.
Jedi Consular
General
- Unity: Now properly provides damage reduction when used.
Shadow
- All Techniques now cost 100 Force.
- Force Technique’s Force Breach now also deals damage when applied. Overall damage dealt by this ability has not changed.
Kinetic Combat
- Technique Mastery: No longer increases the duration of Force Technique’s Breach effect. It now increases the damage dealt by Force Technique.
- Particle Acceleration: This skill now also triggers from Spinning Strike. It now triggers from damage dealt (rather than ability use) such that each hit of Spinning Strike, Double Strike, and Whirling blow have an individual chance to yield the Particle Acceleration buff. The chance to trigger has been reduced to 30% per hit, and it now properly increases the critical damage dealt by Project when a Force Potency charge is consumed.
- Harnessed Shadows: Stacks of Harnessed Shadows now last 30 seconds. Using Slow Time now yields a stack of Harnessed Shadows.
Infiltration
- Circling Shadows: Now requires the purchase of the Shadow Technique skill. Shadow Technique must be active in order to trigger the Circling Shadows buff. This skill now also triggers from Spinning Strike.
Balance (Shared Tree)
- Force Focus: Now additionally lowers the cooldown of Force Breach while Force Technique is active.
- Force Strike: Now triggers from activating melee attacks that hit a target affected by Force Technique’s Breach effect. This effect now triggers more easily but cannot trigger as frequently.
- Force in Balance: Heals the caster for 1% of maximum health for each target struck. This healing effect can no longer crit and no longer consumes Force Potency charges.
- Psychic Absorption: Now doubles the amount of healing generated by Force in Balance and Focused Insight.
Sith Inquisitor
Assassin
- All Saber Charges now cost 100 Force.
- Lightning Charge’s Discharge now also deals damage when applied. Overall damage dealt by this ability has not changed.
Darkness
- Charge Mastery: No longer increases the duration of Lightning Charge’s Discharge effect. It now increases the damage dealt by Lightning Charge.
- Energize: This skill now also triggers from Assassinate. It now triggers from damage dealt (rather than ability use) such that each hit of Assassinate, Thrash, and Lacerate have an individual chance to yield the Energize buff. The chance to trigger has been reduced to 30% per hit.
- Harnessed Darkness: Stacks of Harnessed Darkness now last 30 seconds. Using Wither now yields a stack of Harnessed Darkness.
Deception
- Induction: Now requires the Surging Charge skill to be purchased and requires that Surging Charge is active in order to trigger the Induction buff. This skill now also triggers from Assassinate.
Madness (Shared Tree)
- Crackling Charge: Now additionally lowers the cooldown of Discharge while Lightning Charge is active.
- Raze: Now triggers from activating melee attacks that hit a target affected by Lightning Charge’s Discharge effect. This effect now triggers more easily but cannot trigger as frequently.
- Death Field: Heals the caster for 1% of maximum health for each target struck. This healing effect can no longer crit and no longer consumes Recklessness charges.
- Devour: Now doubles the amount of healing generated by Death Field and Parasitism.
Smuggler
Gunslinger
Sharpshooter
- Diversion: This ability can no longer be used on Operation Boss enemies.
Imperial Agent
Sniper
Marksmanship
- Diversion: This ability can no longer be used on Operation Boss enemies.
Bounty Hunter
Powertech
Advanced Prototype
- Hydraulic Overrides: Visual and sound effects are now easier to recognize.
Trooper
General
- Troopers can now access their ship after leaving and returning to Corellia within 30 minutes.
Vanguard
Tactics
- Hold the Line: Visual and sound effects are now easier to recognize.
Companion Characters
General
- Companion Characters no longer occasionally appear unclothed when summoned.
Companions
Doc
- Crazy Talk (mission): Male characters can now complete the conversation related to this mission.
Crew Skills
Crafting Skills
- Crafting skills no longer inform the player that no missions are defined for the Crew Skill.
Biochem
- Energized and Exotech stims and adrenals no longer require Biochem to use.
- Energized and Exotech stims and adrenals are no longer bound, allowing them to be traded or sold to other players.
- Rakata reusable stims and adrenals have been reduced in power, providing buffs equal to Energized stims and adrenals.
- The Exotech Med Unit schematic obtained from the Eternity Vault Operation now functions properly and can be learned.
Gathering Skills
- Slightly lowered the amount of resources gathered from harvested droids and creatures.
Flashpoints and Operations
General
- Players are now able to obtain destined loot from chests when Master Looter is enabled and they are not the Master Looter.
Flashpoints
The False Emperor
- Jindo Krey’s ship no longer occasionally enters a state that prevents it from taking damage.
Kaon Under Siege
- Infected Mercenaries can no longer permanently stun players.
Operations
Eternity Vault
- Soa no longer resets if he uses Mind Trap on the main tank.
Karagga’s Palace
- The chest that is awarded for defeating Karagga on Nightmare Mode no longer appears partially inside a wall and now properly spawns.
- Foreman Crusher’s Perforating Rend now correctly applies itself to targets caught within the conical attack.
- Jarg & Sorno: The Carbonizer Probe no longer disappears if all of the players who attacked it died before the Carbonizer Probe was destroyed.
- Karagga no longer appears above portions of the walls during the fight.
Items
General
- Rakata weapons are now correctly rating 140 and are fitted with mark 25 modifications. These items were previously less powerful than intended.
- Battlemaster Bags now contain more Champion Commendations.
Vendors
- It is no longer possible to purchase items while holding down the Shift, Alt, or Ctrl keys.
Legacy
General
- The Legacy Experience required to advance to Legacy Levels beyond 20 has been increased.
Missions and NPCs
General
- Commendation rewards for Hard Mode Flashpoint daily and weekly missions and Operation weekly missions have been increased.
Missions
Imperial
- General Faraire: Khourlet’s Elite Guards no longer hide behind a door, preventing progression in this mission.
- Last Stand: Players are now able to complete this mission as long as the Voss Scholars are inside the prison cell.
- The Big Show: Using Force Cloak, dying, or leaving the phase while on the step “Defeat the Screaming Blade Cultists” can no longer cause the necessary NPCs to disappear and prevent mission progress.
Republic
- Leave Nothing Behind: The Frozen Biomass Container now remains lootable if the loot window is closed.
- Most Wanted: A mission item can no longer be rolled on if it is looted while the player is in a group.
- Need to Impress: Players can now speak to Ambassador Jannik if they have already completed the mission Gormak Country.
- The Lightspring: The toughness of Vaverone Zare and Nariel Pridence has been decreased. This mission can no longer be failed.
- The Shadow Fist: Mission progress for players who are on this mission has been reset to the first step. Players can no longer become locked out of the stealth generator room.
Bug Fixes
- Bonus Series missions on Tatooine can now be abandoned.
PvP
World PvPIlum
- Particle Cannons can no longer be permanently disabled.
- Players now receive notification when they kill a target that is not worth Valor due to being killed too recently.
Space Combat
General
- The speed of enemy Ion Cannons has been reduced to improve balance in high-level Space Combat Missions.
UI
General
- The reverse engineering button no longer occasionally disappears after a crafting skill is initially learned.
Miscellaneous Bug Fixes
- Loading screens no longer appear in low resolution if the player selects the low-resolution texture option in preferences.
- Facial animations no longer fail to play correctly in some instances.
- During brief teleports, the splash screen does not appear incorrectly over loading screens.
- Players will no longer experience limited audio, black portraits, or the inability to initiation conversations when they reconnect after being disconnected.
The 2012 Game Developers Conference program is starting to take shape, and I noticed one very relevant pair of speakers to those following SWTOR, who’ll be presenting a session called “There is Another… Darth Vader SWTOR – Creating A True Competitor in the AAA MMO Space”:
SPEAKER/S: Richard Vogel (Bioware) and Dallas Dickinson (Bioware)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: TBD
TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Production , Business and Marketing and Management / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
DESCRIPTION:A discussion of how SWTOR has managed to get into a position to shake up a space that has been dominated for 7+ years by one game.
– Ensure a smooth launch at scale
– Broaden the market and bring in non-MMO gamers
– Innovate carefully
– Triage – always
– Build enough content so that there is no obvious “Content Horizon” where your high-quality content disappears.
– Test early and often
– Scale a team to meet those challenges.
We will discuss all of this with reference to SWTOR, WoW and major other MMO launches of the past 7 years.
TAKEAWAY: Audience will come out with an understanding of what it has taken (and will take in the future) for developers to create MMO experiences on par with the current top games. There will be some broader discussion of the Online space (beyond MMO, beyond Subscription MMO, etc) as well.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Anyone interested in MMO development or publishing, as well as people interested in the spectrum of Online games (from Subscription MMO all the way to F2P online game).
What are your thoughts on the claims being made in the outline of the talk: are the BioWare team being modest or over-reaching in their claims of success to date? All I know is I’d like to be there!
BioWare have announced a guild summit to be held in Austin Texas between the 4th and 6th of March this year i.e. in just under 9 weeks time. It’s an invite-only event but they have some places left if you can get yourself over to the US at your own expense in March.
Read on for the full details:
Today, we are pleased to announce the first ever Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Guild Summit, being hosted in Austin, TX in March. Over the course of a few days, guild leaders from around the world will gather together to discuss the state of the game with the developers from BioWare Austin. Guild leaders (or a designated officer in the event of a guild leader being unable to attend) will participate in Q&A sessions with developers, roundtable feedback discussions, and will get a preview of some upcoming game features.
The goal of the summit is to facilitate an open discussion between guild leaders and the game design team. This event will provide an opportunity for attendees to voice their feedback directly to the teams responsible for the design of Star Wars: The Old Republic, hear the team’s thoughts and reasons behind design decisions, and discuss the current direction of the game.
The Guild Summit will be hosted from March 4th – 6th, 2012 at the DoubleTree Hotel Austin. Due to space limitations, the event will be invite-only. We’ve already invited guilds of various backgrounds and sizes to the Summit, from Endgame to Role-playing to PvP guilds, but we’ve got some space left for additional guild leaders who wish to attend. We ask that interested leaders submit an application, which can be found at this link.* Guild leaders will be evaluated based on the information provided in their application.
While we welcome applications from guild leaders from anywhere in the world, please be advised that the Summit will be conducted entirely in English. Applications will be accepted until 11:59PM CST (GMT -6) on February 10th. If you have any questions regarding the event, send us an email at guilds@swtor.com!
*Must be 21 or older to attend. Guild leaders selected to attend are responsible for all of their travel, food, and lodging expenses.
Over to you: has your guild been invited? If it has, we’d love to hear from you and discuss you covering the event on behalf of other Oceanic guilds. Drop us a line if you’re interested in doing that.
It's not a bug but you get the drift!
As you’ll read below, Vogel is pretty emphatic about what the development team’s priority is: fixing bugs, with everything else being “secondary”. There’s a lot of fairly basic information in the post, but there’s also some gems. One that tickled my fancy was this one:
Fixing bugs in a game as massive as The Old Republic is a little trickier! The PC is a very complicated platform to develop for and getting the game to work flawlessly on every PC ever made is unlikely, but we want to fix as many bugs that affect players as we can.
I’m not sure merging the issue of bugs versus PC configurations is anything but a little disingenuous – sure some configs will affect gameplay but they’re not bugs as such unless they occur within the range of the acceptable system specs for the game.
A second issue is: surely the complexity of the system was taken into account with the development process, so I’m not sure that really clarifies a lot either.
Finally, I’m going to make a cheap shot at you BioWare: aside from the obvious expense of developing for the Mac side-by-side, its configurations are markedly simpler so perhaps that might’ve been a route to explore?
Anyway, if you’re not that aware of how bug hunting goes on in an MMO, read on for the detailed overview and we’d love your comments on whether the post from Rich Vogel clarifies things for you?
As one of the original members of the development team and having helped create the studio that brought you Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, I’m privileged to have been on this incredible journey that culminated in launching the game. Now that we are through launch I felt this was a great opportunity to talk about how we balance our efforts when it comes to fixing bugs and developing new content.
The good news is that we have a large team dedicated to the game, which gives us the flexibility to both fix bugs and develop new content. I want to make it very clear here that the live game service comes first though, and fixing bugs is our team’s first priority. Everything else is secondary.
Let me start by explaining how we go about determining when to fix an issue in the live game, whether it is a bug or an exploit. Let’s begin with exploits – those cases when we determine that a bug in the code can give an unfair advantage to a player. (Remember, not all bugs are exploits!)
If an exploit is discovered that threatens players’ experience in the game or the in-game economy, we will usually try to create an Emergency Patch to fix that exploit. Before we declare something an emergency though, we have to validate the issue with our internal Quality Assurance, or QA team. They gather data working with our Customer Service, analytics, and development teams to determine the extent of the exploit and the steps needed to reproduce it. Once we have the steps, we work on a plan to fix the issue. Depending how long the issue will take to fix and how risky it is, we will decide if we need to temporarily disable the cause of the exploit in the game.
Generally speaking, we can fix these types of issues pretty quickly once they are detected in the game. Our turn-around time is really good in this area and we’ve dealt with some recent exploits quite quickly. That’s because we have a dedicated Live Support team that handles these issues, made up of on-call engineers, designers, artists, and producers, who are available around the clock. Our extensive in-game metric tools are also always monitoring the game and generating reports – meaning that if anyone is exploiting, we are going to find out about it. Our main goal is to ensure you have a fun, balanced and fair gameplay experience in The Old Republic. We won’t stop looking for exploits and taking steps to correct them to maintain a fair game.
Fixing bugs in a game as massive as The Old Republic is a little trickier! The PC is a very complicated platform to develop for and getting the game to work flawlessly on every PC ever made is unlikely, but we want to fix as many bugs that affect players as we can.
Not every bug is created equal. Some bugs – even ones that might look simple – take a long time to deal with and some might not be able to be reproduced (as they may be random occurrences under special circumstances). With that in mind, we use a triage process to prioritize our bug lists. This helps us determine which bugs we fix first based on the bug’s severity (which is how many people it affects). We estimate the severity of bugs by looking at volume of tickets sent to our Customer Service team, Forum posts, and using our telemetry data from the game, amongst other things.
The first thing the development team does every day is triage incoming bugs. Team leaders from different groups within BioWare Austin meet to review the incoming bugs, which are pulled from our bug tracking software (managed by the QA team). QA gathers these bugs from several sources (player reports, internal QA, Customer Service tickets, and Community). Before any bug is tracked, we need to verify whether it is a real, reproducible bug by trying to reproduce it ourselves. Sometimes that cannot be done either because we don’t have enough information on the bug (so give us plenty of detail in bug reports, please!) or because there are special circumstances that cause this bug to occur which are not found through normal play patterns. If that is the case we reach out to the community or contact the player to help us reproduce. We have done this many times with great success. Thanks to all of you who have helped us track down these types of bugs.
Let’s get back to our triage process. Every day we review incoming bugs as well as existing bugs to determine the order in which we fix these bugs. The highest priority bugs are what we call ‘blocker bugs’. These are any type of bugs that block a player’s progression through the game, and they’re important enough that they may be fixed via an emergency patch. Whether a bug is fixed in an emergency patch or not depends on the complexity of the bug (which dictates how risky it is to implement) and whether or not there is a workaround available to allow a player to progress. If there is a workaround available, we will usually wait to push that bug into the next publish and ensure players know about the workaround. This allows any players affected to continue to progress, while giving us time to ensure the correct fix won’t unduly affect the rest of the game.
The balancing act of fixing bugs while ensuring we maintain a stable game is always tricky. We have to make sure that when we publish a fix to the live game it doesn’t alter the game code in a way that can make things worse. This is a normal part of complex software development, but it means we have to assess the risk on what we publish to the live game very carefully. The more bugs we fix with each publish, the higher the risk of breaking things, as we’ve changed more game code. That is why we try to limit the number of bugs and types of bugs we address with each patch. If we can fix a lot of low risk bugs we will push more out. Our most important goal is remove as many annoying bugs as fast as we can; currently we aim to push out patches which help fix bugs weekly but that can change depending on the severity of the bugs.
Please remember, if we don’t respond publicly to a bug that does not mean we are not going to fix it. We want to make sure we provide a good playing experience to our players. That is why we have a large team of people working every day to bug fix and remove exploits from the game.
In terms of developing new content I wanted to let everyone know that we are committed to publishing new features and content on a regular basis. It is important to make sure the game is always changing. We have several strike teams working on future game additions. We have a huge list of features and content we want to put into the game and we are constantly adding to it based on feedback we get from the community and from playing the game ourselves. Every single one of us on the development team plays the game, and we see the same issues you do and where we need to expand.
Our most important goal is to make sure you continue to have fun playing our game and we will do everything in our power to make you feel that you are getting your money’s worth every month. Thank you very much for playing!
Over to you: do you think BioWare are wearing down the onslaught of bugs?
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