Classes and Combat
General
•The Guard ability can now be reapplied if the player dies with it activated. Previously, players sometimes received an error indicating that their target was already guarded.
Sith Inquisitor
General
•Lightsaber Charge's audio effects no longer loop indefinitely.
So, you've downloaded and/or installed Diablo III. You've got your Red Bull, your comfy slippers and track pants on and you're all set for a marathon first sitting of the game ... but what's this? The night is shattered when you load up the game and get an error:
"Unsupported graphics card error"
Why?
This rather generic error signals that your video card isn't powerful enough to play Diablo III very well. It might run it, but the performance won't be great. This isn't Blizzard's fault, it's your finances - time to upgrade if you can dude. But there is hope.
Classes and Combat General •The Guard ability can now be reapplied if the player dies with it activated. Previously, players sometimes received an error indicating that their target was already guarded. Sith Inquisitor General •Lightsaber Charge's audio effects no longer loop indefinitely.
Companion Characters
Xalek •Xalek now receives the correct amount of Shield Absorption from equipped gear. Crew Skills Crafting Skills •French and German tooltips now indicate the percentage chance for reverse engineering.
Flashpoints and Operations
General •Players who advance from level 49 to 50 while near an Operation phase gate now see the gate color change to indicate their eligibility to enter. Flashpoints Directive 7 •Players can no longer obtain the missions for Story and Hard Mode for this Flashpoint at the same time. Lost Island •LR-5 Sentinel Droid now reliably activates his Plasma Coils during the encounter. The Battle of Ilum •Players can no longer obtain the missions for Story and Hard Mode for this Flashpoint at the same time. The Black Talon •An audio effect from the fusion cutter in this Flashpoint no longer loops indefinitely. The False Emperor •Players can no longer obtain the missions for Story and Hard Mode for this Flashpoint at the same time.
Operations
Explosive Conflict •General Vorgath's speech now features the correct voice modulation. Items General •Rebreather head slot items now appear on Sith Pureblood characters. •Equipping a hooded robe in combination with certain head slot items no longer causes baldness. •Players can no longer add color crystals to some items that did not appear to have color crystal slots, causing the crystals to become irretrievable. Missions and NPCs Missions
World Missions
Belsavis •Breakthrough: All members of the group now receive credit for completed of this mission. Ilum •World Story missions on Ilum can no longer be abandoned. Taris •No Escape: Republic Astromech Droids are no longer attacked by nearby friendly forces. Voss •Players can no longer complete The Dark Hollow without first completing Primary Target. Completing these missions out of order could prevent players from completing Primary Target.
Class Missions
Jedi Knight •Fate of the Jedi: The cinematic with the Jedi Council no longer takes much longer than intended to begin playing. Jedi Consular •Automated Defense: Euphony Guard Droids now count towards this mission objective. •Vivicar Awaits: This mission can no longer become blocked if a player logs out during the “Defeat the Ambush” step. Sith Inquisitor •Into the Pit: The final conversation with Major Bessiker can no longer be repeated. Imperial Agent •Shadow of the Dark Lord: Darth Zhorrid now follows through with her threat to torture a character in one of the dialogue paths in this mission. •The Star Chamber: Players who destroy the codex and fight the Sith Lords aboard the station are now able to enter the Tenebrous to complete the mission. Players who were previously blocked from completing it must reset the mission. Trooper •The Battle of Corellia: The Striker One Uplink can now be used from the mission tracker.
PvP
General •Mini-pets can no longer be summoned inside Warzones. •A fix for some causes of players becoming stuck dead in Warzones has been implemented, though the issue may still rarely occur. Warzones Voidstar •Characters that exit the protected spawn area before the match begins are now killed.
UI
Guild Bank •Crafted items stored in the Guild Bank now display their tooltips correctly. Social •Closing the Add Friend dialogue no longer makes the Add Friend button on the friends list unusable. Miscellaneous Bug Fixes •Actions in the UI layout editor, chat window, and crafting window now prevent a player from being labeled as AFK.
Many bothans have died to bring us this crucial data. Attached is all the information you will need on your companions. Use this information to bribe, persuade and intimidate them as you see fit. This information has been updated to our latest database and provides images and everything right down to their favorite gifts and estimated time of arrival.
"Good morning and welcome to another episode of SWTORFace. This morning we're going to be talking to one of our dependable comandos out in the Balmorra section, fighting to gain some awesome military technology for the Republic. We've John Sunrider on the line right now. Good morning John, how are you?"
"I'M GOOD SWTORFACE HOW ARE YOU?"
"We're all fine here thanks John. Things sound kind of loud there."
"YEAH, THAT'S CAUSE I'M BLOWING UP SOME IMPS!"
"You told us that you wanted to talk to us about something today John. What can we help you with?"
"WELL SINCE PATCH 1.2 I'VE BEEN HAVING A LOT OF TROUBLE HEARING MY COMPANIONS. I KNOW ARIC IS SAYING SOMETHING CONSTANTLY BEHIND MY BACK BUT IT'S ALL MUFFLED AND I'VE GOT NO IDEA WHAT HE'S ACTUALLY SAYING. I THINK USING ALL THESE EXPLOSIVES HAS WRECKED MY HEARING!"
"Well John, you might remember that the powers that be implemented a fix that prevented your ship droid from being so annoying. So rather than hearing your droid tell you that he's adjusted the food dispensers because he thinks you're all getting fat, it will now be muffled out whenever you turn your back to him."
"IS THIS THE REASON WHY I CAN'T HEAR MY OTHER COMPANIONS AS WELL, NOT TO MENTION MY SPEEDER FROM TIME TO TIME? EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE MY COMMANDER IS EVEN TRYING TO GIVE ME ORDERS AND I CAN SEE HER LIPS MOVING BUT I CAN'T HEAR HER."
"Yes John. The "fix" for the droid sounds might be the cause of your problems. Unfortunately we've been unable to find any official comments about this issue. It's got so bad that even some of our raiders are having problems during specific boss fights as the bosses aren't talking to us, we're having to read their mind to work out what they're doing. We've found that sometimes restarting your PC can fix this issue, but it seems to be completely random."
"WELL THAT SUCKS! LET'S HOPE THEY FIX IT SOON! I'M GLAD IT'S NOT THESE EXPLOSIONS THAT ARE MAKING ME HARD OF HEARING THOUGH!"
Have you been experiencing audio issues? Have you found a fix that might help others? please let us know in the comments below.
With this change, daily Warzone missions now require "6 played matches," however any win in a Warzone counts as 2 "played matches". This still provides a solid incentive for you to win, but also allows players who lose matches to progress their daily mission by participating.
I have to do some testing to see what this dose to AFK players do you get credit for no medals? We will see how it works out! I for one will go back to doing daily's on my republic avatars!
I'm listening to this right now some nice tidbits in this MP3 but no real big news yet enjoy!
Hello everyone! My name is Eric Musco and I, along with Brooks Guthrie are happy to bring you episode one of the official Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ podcast, “Rocket Boots”. You can listen by using the embedded player, by downloading and listening on your preferred MP3 player, or check it out on our YouTube channel.
In this episode, we sit down with Daniel Erickson and Damion Schubert to talk about what we saw in Game Update 1.2 and what we can expect as we look forward to Game Update 1.3. Also, David Bass stops by to tell us about how things went at PAX East and share some of our convention plans for the rest of the year. If you have any questions or comments about the show, feel free to let us know in this forum thread.
Brooks: Hello everyone. Welcome to the official Star Wars™: the Old Republic™ Podcast. I'm Brooks Guthrie
Eric: And I am Eric Musco and on today's episode we sit down with Damion Schubert and Daniel Erickson to talk about Game Update 1.2 and some of the exciting things coming Game Update 1.3 and we also talked to David Bass about PAX East and all the exciting conventions we are going to be going to later this year.
All right and we are joined today by two awesome gentlemen right here at BioWare, Austin. I am just going to let you guys introduce yourself and what your title is and if you could tell us a little bit about what you do here at the studio
.
Damion: I'm Damion Schubert a Dark Warlord Systems Design.
Daniel: This is Daniel Erickson coming at you at Lead Designer and I'm dedicated to doing radio voice for the whole interview
Brooks: Excellent.
Eric: I am going to be really impressed if you pull that off
Daniel: I will be too
Eric: Because I have no radio voice. We often talk about this. I just speak normally and Brooks goes into his radio voice and it is really impressive and I am just like I can talk into a microphone.
Daniel: I was actually told numerous times when I was doing theatre in the university that I had a great voice for cartoons or radio and I believe the implication was a face for radio as well.
Brooks: And that remains today.
Eric: Yeah, so as you know 1.2 came out a little bit ago. Why don't you guys talk about some of the big changes that came in 1.2? What is some of your philosophies were going into making some of those big changes?
Damion: Well the cool thing about how we did this particular patch 1.2 is that we really experimented more with letting the teams own the features a lot more and not being as top down and like for example the GUI customization team take that ball and run with it and I think there you see an excellent example how that philosophy came to life and they did way more than we expected. They thought of lots of things that weren't in the original design document. I think the quality of that feature really speaks for itself and you know that is a philosophy we really want to sort of spread out through all of the teams in the future so all of the features are just taken to the hilt and are as good as they possibly can be.
Daniel: One of the things about 1.2 sorry no, I probably can't hold that up for 15 minutes. The Legacy was obviously the big piece for 1.2 that we are excited about and Legacy had been in the works forever. I went back and looked at original design docs, you know, when we had 8 pages with the entire really high level design pitch and it has got my really, really bad little family tree. One of the things that was already hard for us was that it involved so many of our systems coming together and working together and playing nicely that it took a lot more work we thought in the very last minute to pull it all together but it was beautiful to see it actually come out.
Eric: So one of the things you actually said Damion I think is really interesting is that you know in 1.2 you ended up with some maybe additions to features but maybe new features but additions to features that weren't originally planned. Can you give me an example of what that might have looked like?
Damion: A good example is the guild banks where we started with a fairly cut and dry implementation of guild banks going to the system and when we looked at it, for example, we looked at it and realized, "Hey, you know what logging all of the cash events at separate log entries just really sucks for a lot of reasons." It pushes out all of the events of somebody looting your guild bank because we can restore so many messages.
Eric: Right.
Damion: It is also impossible for you to tell how much people are actually contributing because you can't get every possible log message and so the team took it upon themselves to add the guild ledger, which is a simple idea but also you know one of the small ideas that just makes the whole system so much easier and so much better to use and it is so much easier for guild masters to observe what is going on inside of the guild and to figure out who the dead beats are and so, you know, it is little things like that that you see-
Daniel: Some good things to know, yeah.
Damion: It is little things like that that you see throughout the systems that were implementing in 1.2, where they got a lot of love.
Daniel: Yeah I think the one that I got the whole time was so we had a Legacy strike team and we are working really hard on that stuff and they just added a bunch of stuff that basically if you heard giggling from over there, especially if you heard some very distinctly William Wallace giggling then you know you would go over there and you go, "Hey what have you got going on?” “Look, look, rocket boots!"
Damion: Ah, the rocket boots.
Daniel: I am like, "What are you doing with rocket boots?" "We’re going to put in rocket boots!" and I am like, "I don't remember anything in the design-” and they’re like, "Rocket boots!" And I’m like, “Alright, alright.”
Brooks: Oh my god.
Eric: That was a William Wallace special?
Daniel: Yeah the rocket boots.
Eric: We would like to personally thank William Wallace then for the rocket boots because they are awesome.
Daniel: Well I am not sure, hold on - that is the great thing about strike teams. I m not sure where that originated on that team, but that definitely came out of Will's team as did the unarmed brawling game, which was another one that I showed up one day and they said, "Look what we can do?" and I am like, "Okay, are we doing it?" And they’re like, "Yeah!" Alright, we are going to brawl.
And once I actually sat down and played with it I was like, "Okay, this is pretty fun." And then the role playing stuff literally I'd asked, "Just go through the whole game and just try to find everything that you could find for emotes that we don't have access to." And yeah, just watching stuff develop there, where it's really people's passion going out and saying, "Hey, this is what I'd like to add to this feature."
Damion: Design is most fun when people are building stuff that they like and people are building features that they could love and put a bit of themselves into and so we started to design documents that are very level and have a charter but again you know really what we want to do is most of our team plays the game, most of our team loves the game, and they have ideas of how to make the game better and some extent being me and Daniel our job is to keep them in between the lines. Make sure they don't go off reservation.
Eric: Rocket boots, rocket boots.
Daniel: Damion and I having different lines.
Damion: Well, you know, I personally liked the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine Speeder Bike but-
Daniel: I didn't like it. I know, I know.
There will be no Scooby Doo Mystery Machine Speeder Bike.
Brooks: So obviously 1.2 is out and, you know, people are enjoying at this point, but we still have a lot of stuff coming up next. One of the things that we pulled from 1.2 was ranked warzones and expect those to be coming in soon again. Can you guys talk a little bit about that decision and, you know, what the process is going to be for getting that back in to players?
Damion: That is pretty easy I mean we have very high standards for how good the feature needs to be and it was clear that this feature in that implementation wasn't good enough to be in a BioWare game. Right? And it is important to people because it’s how people interact with each other. We want to be sure that people weren't doing cheesy things that made other people feel like the system wasn't capturing it properly. It needs a little bit more time to cook and so we put the feature and we would do it again. We have a pretty high commitment to making sure you guys get the best as soon as possible.
Daniel: Yeah and one of the things about PTS, the public test server that is incredibly important to understand is we put stuff up there because we want fan feedback. We want the players to get in there and play with it and they did get to play the ranked warzones and they looked at the way stuff worked especially some of the stuff, the queuing system and they are very subtly and in a very polite way said, "You're dumb. This is dumb." And at that point, deciding that it is more important to have a date, deciding that you are going to put stuff up, tell the communities to test it and then ignore their feedback and push it out anyway. It is just not doing good service. All it lets you to do is check a box and say, "Hey, we have this feature." But it is not something that we can be proud off.
Ranked Warzones are coming back and they are coming back soon and they are coming back in a design that has been vetted and tested and that we feel really good about it.
Damion: One of the things about systems like ranked warzones, there is a certain category of systems that is really hard for us to test internally and we could test the mechanics of how they work, but, you know, we really need to get them in front of a lot of people playing naturally to be able to see whether or not they are actually good, fair, balanced and all that stuff. All of the operations testing we can sort of test how good an operation is internally, but it is not until people get in to their real characters and what not they get genuine feedback in terms of-
Daniel: Well a lot of that testing, a lot of that playing naturally is playing in ways that there is no way to predict because you have got some crazy idea of what are you going to try to accomplish, right? It is very had to put a tester in front of something and say, "Try to really cheat." "Well what, cheat how?" "I don't know be creative and just try to break all of this."
Damion: Especially when a system like ranked warzones requires dozens or hundreds of people to test and an operation takes 8 or 16 people in order to do one iteration of fight. I mean really the PTS is there and it is where we get most of our valuable qualitative feedback about systems like that and it is really valuable for us to get people on to that server so we can get that feedback.
Daniel: Right our primary job when you are talking about really big systems like that is to make sure that it gets to PTS without bugs.
Damion: Yeah.
Daniel: Right so it gets in there without big obvious things that are breaking in there. That it is working as designed, but now we actually have to vet the design. One of those things that I know sometimes designers don't like to admit is-
Damion: We’re full of it about half the time?
Daniel: I was going to say it’s a very iterative process. There’s a lot of times-
Eric: You can see where those lines are drawn right now.
Brooks: That would be a very nice way of saying it.
Daniel: There is a lot of times that you have got a great theory especially if you are trying to do anything new, if you trying to do anything that is not exactly pulled from somewhere else then you are just doing guess work until humans take a look at what you have built and say, "Hah, you have developed something well" or "Hmmm."
Damion: I think, if you look at the long view this project over the entire time we’ve developed it, I think that there are certainly some things in the background or the history of this project that people would be astonished that we tried to get in and we looked at - said, "Yeah, that is not going to fly." There are a lot of ideas that are good in your head or good on paper then you put it in and it is like, "Oh wait this is too simple, this is too complicated, this is not a right fit for the systems in the game.” It actually happens an awful lot and one of the things that we have tried to focus on doing is try to get the systems to a point where we can iterate on them as fast as possible.
Eric: Speaking of systems that we are going to be able to iterate on, why don’t we talk a little about 1.3? 1.3 is our next content patch that is coming out, why don’t you guys talk a little bit about what players can expect to see in 1.3?
Damion: 1.3 is, well, it is the group finder patch. That’s not the official name, but really that is our top priority. We have some other features that we are going to go and put inside of it but really this is us really getting a group finder to you guys as fast as humanly possible.
Brooks: I am super excited about group finder because that is one of the biggest things that I have run into in lower game is finding groups and actually being able to run those flashpoints that I get. For players who have maybe never used a group finder before, and I know we have plenty of those, what is that actually going to look like in the game?
Damion: It is fairly simple and basically what we want to do is to give you a really simple front end that you can use as well as those give you the ability to fine tune your choices a little more so the really simple approach is you open a group finder you choose what role - tank, heal or DPS - that you are willing to fulfill and you can choose multiple if your class can fill multiple and then you choose what kind of content that you want to do and that content is going to be flashpoints, heroic flashpoints, operations although story mode operations only for now and then world content, the planetary content where you basically say I want a quest on Belsavis.
Then if you hit select from there, then it will try to find people who want to do that stuff. Now if there is a particular dungeon or particular planet that you want to do by default what it does it gets you to the level of appropriate flashpoints for you. If you really want to the quest in the Mandalorian Raiders flashpoint for example you can go and unselect everything else and just say, "Hey, I just want to sign up for that." And the group finder will try to find other people who are looking for that content as well so that is a great way for you to target certain quests that you want to accomplish. We felt that was important in our game because of where the game is right now where people are trying to clear out their quest logs and accomplish certain goals in certain places.
However, if you play the random game, especially for flashpoints and heroic flashpoints, and you just set yourself purely random then like yeah we are going to throw a cookie at you. We are going to give you, I forgot what the itemization guys ended up offering, but you are going to want to try to do a random dungeon day I believe. The patch is also mostly going to be a features patch. It’s going to have a slightly shorter development time than the last patch and it is going to be content light, but it is going to have a heavy focus on a couple of key features that we felt were really important to be giving to you guys.
Daniel: You are also getting the next part of Legacy, which we had a little in-game advert going for that beforehand, which are your character perks, which is that is all about the uniqueness of your character how you want to play each individual character. Hey, you know what I want to actually get my speeder early. I want to get more XP from PvP. I want to really sort of shape how I am going to play this guy. I have already played another character maybe I want to see different content but I want to be able to just mostly do that content and still get my character up at the same rate which brings a lot of exciting stuff and although Legacy will keep going after that and we will continue to expand it, those are really the two biggest thematic concepts that will be there for the players.
Damion: And then we have two key itemization features that are coming to you guys that I think will be really good for the end game players in particular. The first is augment tables and what this is going to allow you to do is to allow you to add an augment slot which is the slot that crafters get for free whenever they get a critical hit crafting item. It will allow you to use item modification table anywhere in the game to add an augment slot to any piece of wearable gear armor and get that augment slot so that will pretty much allow all of our gear at the end game to be equivalent to each other, which will solve a lot of the itemization problems that we have had in the past.
The other thing that personally I am excited about is adaptive gear. Adaptive gear is the ability for some gear, in particular social gear, to morph its armor rating based on the skill of the wearer the short form is that, yes, you can now tank in a bikini. I know that is important to some people. It also means that things like the - was it the pilot outfit - the sand trooper, the sand person outfit all of those things in particular on the social vendors as well as the armor on the collector's edition vendors and the security vendors all that stuff will be able to be worn at end game, especially when you combine it with the augment table technology.
Brooks: So how does one exactly role play a body type four Sith Warrior Juggernaut tanking in explosive content? Anyone know how that goes?
Eric: I think he just explained it.
Daniel: Did you just refer to the bikini as explosive content?
Brooks: I may have! And I think that I how he explained it.
Eric: I think it is self explanatory.
Brooks: Yeah.
Eric: So basically it seems like you are making the changes towards basically allowing a player to look however they want to accomplish any goal they want to, I mean, if someone wants to tank in a bikini. You know, some people want to tank and look like they are Darth Vader fantasy have just being in tons of armor and being able to take a lot of hits. Whereas other people, for some reason, want to tank in bikini.
Daniel: Well a lot of it is about giving people goals and a lot of those goals tend to be being able to make yourself an individual. Being able to do something that is a little above and beyond so it is never going to be as easy as it is to just go get your end game gear cause you are still going to need your mods, you are going to have to do that stuff, right, but if you want to take the extra step to say, "Hey, I am not just going to be the guy who got this stuff. I am going to be the guy who is going to go in and show off in the raid" or "I am going to be the guy who is going to go in and punk you in the warzone wearing this ridiculous outfit." There is definitely a player base that is a great goal to set up for.
Damion: And it has always been the goal of the itemization team that the mod system eventually become the ability for you to preserve and keep whatever appearance you wanted really and these two pieces of technology are really the two largest remaining steps that we needed to get to that place or I think there are still a couple of more things they want to do but I think with this piece of technology they are are pretty much almost there.
Eric: So if you are that guy who has an entire bank bay filled with orange gear… like me. 1.3 is made for you?
Damion: Correct.
Eric: Awesome, awesome, well do you guys have anything else to add before we wrap it up.
Damion: Not yet, not yet. 1.4 is shaping up to be quite an impressive patch as well. I can't wait to talk about it, but that is not this particular podcast so…
Daniel: No, I would say I had a ton and ton of fun playing with all of you as Rakghouls and I can't wait for more of that.
Eric: That was a really, really awesome event, for sure. Damion, Daniel, thanks for joining us on today's podcast.
Daniel: Thank you.
Eric: And then we are going to take a quick break and then we will be back to talk with David Bass about Star Wars: the Old Republic's presence at PAX East.
Eric: And we are back and joined by Senior Tauntaun Manager David Bass. I am kidding. That is the title he wanted, so David introduce yourself.
David: We had a Junior Tauntaun Manager, but unfortunately we ran into some complications on Hoth.
Eric: So why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about what you actually do?
David: I’m one of the senior community coordinators here mostly I focus on what we call external community so fan sites, guilds, any websites that really cover our stuff is mostly where you will find me typically and then I also run a lot of the events that we do around the world each year.
Eric: And that is a perfect transition as to why you are here today. Tell us a little bit about what we brought to PAX East this year?
David: PAX East was actually a lot of fun. This was our first show post-launch. What was our last show? New York Comic Con last year right? So it has been a long time since we did a show. This was our first convention since we launched and there is a big, big difference between a launched event at a convention versus a pre-launch event. I think you both are at PAX East last year before you worked for us right?
Brooks: That is correct.
David: And PAX East last year was absolutely insane.
Brooks: Nuts.
Eric: That was what? 9 hours lines to play the game?
Brooks: Yeah.
David: Yeah, last year within the first 30 seconds of the show…
Brooks: Exactly, yeah it was crazy.
David: We were showing off Taral V so we had like a nice, long 40 minute demo with like tutorial before that and everything. Big, big epic experience lots of people excited. Now that the game is launched it calms down a little bit more. We still get a lot of foot traffic at the booth, we still get a ton of people coming, but now these guys are actually players. They are not people who are like, "Oh man I am so excited I can't wait till this game comes out." It is like, "Oh man the game is out I am having a great time here I got tons of questions. I got like a lot of things to say about the game and I want to come and hang out." So the booth kind of shifted this year for more of like a presentation crazy like, "Oh man we are awesome epic thing" to like, "Hey let's have a community style booth. Let's have everyone come hangout. Let's have everyone just chill out with us."
We basically had a part of the booth that was showing off game update 1.2 because it was about a week before the update came out so people could just walk up and play, but the other half of the booth we call the community lounge, which was basically a bunch of chairs and sofas where anyone could just come and hang out, plop down, drop their stuff, sit and talk. And then we had a lot of developers just hanging out there the whole weekend. So at any one point you can just come on the booth and Damion Schubert will be sitting there and just go talk to him or Cameron, one of our combat designers, people will just approach and be like, "Yo, you nerf my class" and then he would be happy to explain that why exactly, why he nerfed your class or why in fact that nerf was actually a buff.
Eric: Right and so one of the big appeals of course, Senior Tauntaun Manager, this year was our Taun Fawn Pet we were giving out at the booth. Why don't you tell everybody about the Taun Fawn and if they’ll be able to get it anywhere else this year?
David: A Taun Fawn is a event exclusive item. It is a special baby Tauntaun. There is a couple other baby Tauntauns in the game right now that you can get through a variety of different methods, but he is a little black and white speckled Tauntaun.
Eric: Who is adorable.
Brooks: He is adorable.
David: And we gave out a bunch of codes at PAX for anyone who stops by the booth to grab one, but we will also have that Taun Fawn with us at all the other events this year so you can just any show anywhere check our events page.
Brooks: I mean speaking of events. Go to the website, but obviously David I am sure you know exactly where we are going to be this year. What is coming up next in terms of big events for Star Wars™?
David: We announced a couple of the events for the year so far. I don't know if that is all of them for the year but we will be at E3 in June. We will have more details on that when the time comes. After that our next public show is going to be San Diego Comic Con which is in San Diego if you weren't aware. But we will be there like we were like last year and then after that is GamesCom which is in Cologne, Germany and then after that is Star Wars Celebration, which I am so excited about.
Brooks: Star Wars Celebration is going to be awesome, for sure.
David: I have never been. Most of us haven't been I don't think. It is a convention that happens once every 2 years and it is just all things Star Wars. It is an actual Lucas Film convention and just Star Wars fans from around the world come together in Orlando to just hang out and talk about their love of Star Wars for a couple of days so we are really excited and we are planning to do some really cool stuff there.
Brooks: I am actually looking at a board of ideas right now. It is pretty awesome.
David: Oh yeah. I forgot to erase that. Yeah, but we got a lot of cool ideas in mind for things we want to do at Celebration. I know they still have tickets left so if anyone wants to go you should definitely drop by the Celebration website and pick up some tickets because we are going to be really doing some real fun stuff there.
Eric: Sure. And I know a lot of people have had a ton of questions about the Taun Fawn post PAX East about it there is there any other ways to get it. Now you know, just stop by any of our shows we will be all over the country in various places and make sure to stop by the booth and we will happily hand you your very own Taun Fawn.
David: Yeah we got codes and just find a BioWare employee and we will have codes for you.
Brooks: Now I heard a rumor at PAX East that there was some kind of dance contest that occurred.
David: Okay that was true. Well once you kind of run on a very little sleep after a couple of days you start trying to entertain yourselves by making people do silly things for rewards. I think Alyson Bridge… was it the first day or the second day?
Eric: Every day, actually.
David: It was every day?
Eric: Yeah.
David: She just decided we were going to do a baby Tauntaun dance off party so we scheduled it a couple of times a day and we had people get up on stage and show us their best Tauntaun dance and then we give them prizes based on who won each time and it was amazing.
Brooks: I think that should be a tradition this year.
Eric: But by far the best was I think there was a 7 year old… I think his name was Zack if I remember. But it was like a 7-year-old that did it on the last day and he just tore it up the whole crowd just went crazy.
David: And as soon as a 7 year old walks up on stage, you are like well I know who is going to win this one.
Eric: Right.
David: Yeah, but he just went all out crazy with the Tuantaun dance.
Brooks: So moral of the story if you are planning on coming to an event for us this year make sure to practice your Tauntaun dance.
David: Don't be surprised if we make you do things for a code.
Brooks: Yeah.
David: Yes.
Eric: All right David thank you for joining us. Do you have anything else you would like to add?
David: We are just really excited to see all the players in all these events this year so come on out to any of the cities like I said check the events page and we will be happy to meet up with you and chat and buy you a drink.
Eric: And hand you a Tauntuan.
David: And hand you a Tauntaun or three.
Eric: All right thank you David.
David: Thank you.
Brooks: All right so big thanks to Damion, Daniel and David for taking time out for the work day to join us. I am really excited about what is coming up and the game and one thing what Daniel mentioned very quickly that we didn't spend a lot of time on was the Rakghoul event.
Eric: Yeah the Rakghoul event was just an absolute giant pile of fun. What did you love most about the event?
Brooks: My favorite thing is just seeing disease spread and I know like is like really dark and gloomy to say, but it was just so cool to be just like in a warzone be it Alderaan or whatever and everyone is duking it out the middle someone dies and then just like the plague explodes everywhere and coats everyone.
Eric: Yeah it was pretty amusing. I loved when I was doing the scavenger hunt quest to work on getting the little red Rakghoul and it was just me and three of my friends and I am on a PvP server and it was amusing just seeing four level 50's roaming around on Tatooine and all of a sudden you would come across level 20 and I am like, "Uh their name is in red I have to hit them," but it was just I really, really enjoyed the world PvP that kind of just spawned from the other band ,and I spent a lot of time in my Tatooine during the event. It was a lot of fun.
Brooks: Yeah, yeah and I mean who doesn't love a little crimson rakling like that is the most adorable thing.
Eric: It is strangely adorable. I mean you wouldn't think that a little tiny Rakghoul will be a cute pet but man that thing is cute.
Brooks: You would think so and completely unique. So yeah, I think that is going to be it for episode 1 and I really enjoyed this first episode. If you missed our pilot episode you can go back and listen to that we talked to Cameron and Austin from the combat team about combat things naturally. Musco, why don't you tell everyone how they can get the show?
Eric: All right so as you already know you might be listening to the show right now on StarWarstheOldRepublic.com so you can listen to it there. Just like our pilot we will have this available on YouTube as well so make sure you subscribe to our channel. Unfortunately, it is taking a little bit longer than we expected so we don't have the RSS available yet for this episode so you won't be able to get it on iTunes quite yet but we hope to have that very, very soon along with our own Podcast page right here on StarWarstheOldRepublic.com. So make sure as always just stay tuned to the website for updates and as always you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter and you can find us through all of those and we will give you announcements there when our next Podcast is available as well.
Brooks: Yeah, yeah and feel free to give us feedback you know I really enjoyed reading through the thread last time and you know obviously the biggest thing was RSS feed for the show and it is coming but until next time.
Eric: Yup and fun fact for the episode, Brooks.
Brooks: Oh yeah.
Eric: Everyone who is on this show aside from you and I their name starts with "D."
Brooks: Wow! How about that.
Eric: I think like the next we should get Dallas Dickenson on here or something else just to continue that trend.
Brooks: Yes, all the D's, all the D's.
Eric: Or maybe we should move to E next time so we continue along on the alphabet and then I will win.
Corrected an issue that prevented Smugglers and Imperial Agents from taking cover in place while moving
Channeled abilities now fully complete if a buff providing an Alacrity bonus wears off while the ability is being channeled.
Flashpoints and Operations
Flashpoints
Boarding Party
This Flashpoint's Hard Mode no longer has a daily limitation.
Operations
General
Players now receive a "Timed Run" buff when attempting Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace in Nightmare Mode. Killing Soa or Karagga before this buff expires grants the Infernal or Unyielding title, respectively.
Explosive Conflict
Zorn's "Fearful" debuff is now correctly restricted to 30 meters.
The Demolition Probe Droid no longer attempts to move to the player in the scout tower, which could result in the Droid evading.
Minefield turrets no longer occasionally reactivate after the group has engaged Vorgath.
Kephess's Gift of the Masters ability now uses the correct (smaller) radius.
Items
General
Custom (orange) moddable items that have no modifications installed can now be reverse engineered.
Legacy
All characters in a Legacy now appear in the Family Tree, even if the character has not logged in since patch 1.2.
Missions and NPCs
Missions
General
Implemented changes to ensure that mission encounters reset (and related enemies respawn) correctly. A small number of missions had encounters that did not properly reset.
World Missions
Ilum
Daily missions on Ilum no longer require the player to complete the Ilum World Mission Arc.
Class Missions
Sith Inquisitor
The Fallen Dreadnought: Corrected an issue that blocked progression on this mission if the player skipped a mission step.
NPCs
The Nightmare Pilgrim's (World Boss on Voss) totem no longer enters a state that prevents players from interacting with it.
Some issues that could cause incorrect NPC pathfinding on Corellia have been addressed.
UI
General
Corrected an issue that could prevent the interface editor from being opened by the "+" button on the hotbar.
Galactic Trade Network
An issue that prevented some item category searches from functioning unless an item name or price range was also specified has been corrected.
The default value for the Rarity field is now Standard instead of Any. This allows players to search for most items without requiring that they select an option in the Rarity field.
When claiming items or credits attached to mail, players will no longer encounter a rare error stating that the message cannot be sent.
Miscellaneous Bug Fixes
Players that completed the steps required to unlock the "Containment Officer" title during the Rakghoul Plague event but did not receive the title have been granted it.
Corrected an issue that prevented damage shields (such as Force Armor) from re-applying properly when activated before the current damage shield expired has been addressed.
Trooper
Commando
Plasma Cell now correctly deals its damage 3 times per application.
Companion Characters
General
Corrected an issue that caused companion stat bonuses from equipped items to be miscalculated when the companion was resummoned.
Crew Skills
General
Corrected some performance issues related to opening the crafting window if it contained a very large number of schematics.
Crafting Skills
Some gear that could be reverse engineered but erroneously displayed the "No Research Available" tooltip has been corrected.
Gathering Skills
Slicing
Premium Slicing lockboxes now yield the correct amount of credits.
Flashpoints and Operations
General
An issue that prevented Hard Mode Flashpoints from dropping loot based on group composition has been addressed. Drops usable by a person in the group are not 100% guaranteed, but the system now properly takes composition into account.
The "Exit Area" button in Flashpoints and Operations is now disabled during combat.
Corrected an issue that prevented Operation Group leaders from being added to the Operation Officer Chat channel.
Operations
Explosive Conflict
Pulsar Droids in the Warlord Kephess encounter now have the correct amount of health in 16-player Hard Mode.
Kephess now uses the Gift of the Masters ability during 16-player Hard Mode.
Items
General
Mysterious, Unusual, and Wondrous Eggs can now be sold on the Galactic Trade Network.
An issue that could prevent hair from showing on Jedi Knights while wearing certain visors has been addressed.
Missions and NPCs
General
The weekly Nightmare Pilgrim mission now rewards 4 Black Hole Commendations.
If a player logout causes a mission to fail, the player is now transported outside of that mission's phase when logging back in.
Missions
World Missions
Corellia
Black Hole Area
The previous mission requirements for The End of Torvix (Imperial) and Chasing the Shadow (Republic) have been removed. Players can now accept these missions at any time within the daily restrictions.
Players not on the mission The End of Torvix (Imperial) or Chasing the Shadow (Republic) can now use the elevators inside the phase to assist group members with the mission.
Taris
No Escape: Corrected an issue that could prevent an encounter associated with this mission from resetting if the group was defeated and re-entered the phase.
Class Missions
Jedi Consular
Marked: Corrected an issue that prevented the player from speaking to Lord Shendan if they exited the phase before speaking with him.
Smuggler
Heist of the Millennium: The map now indicates the correct elevator on the step “Return to the Shuttle.” Several map note issues have been addressed.
Trooper
Stay Frosty: This bonus mission no longer occasionally fails to end even after the player completes the primary mission.
PvP
Warzones
General
Corrected an issue that could cause multiple sounds to play on top of each other when receiving multiple medals at once.
Huttball
A rare issue that could grant players rewards for two Huttball wins at the end of a match has been corrected.
Voidstar
Corrected an issue that occasionally caused both teams in the Voidstar to receive less rewards than intended.
Space Combat
General
Corrected a UI issue that could prevent players from firing their ship's weapons.
Female characters' companions now play the proper voice-over during Space Combat Missions.
UI
General
Pressing the Enter key on the prompt that displays when purchasing an expensive item now cancels the window instead of accepting the cost.
Corrected an issue that could cause completed missions to reappear in the mission log and tracker.
Pressing the R key to reply after receiving multiple tells now correctly displays the name of the player that will receive the reply.
Moving items in the inventory no longer affects their display in hotbars or in the mission tracker. This also corrects an issue that could prevent items in hotbars or the mission trackers from being used from those locations.
Galactic Trade Network
The Search button is now correctly disabled for categories that do not have a subcategory when there are no search results.
Groups and Targeting
The "Always Show Class Symbol" preference is now disabled by default.
Target Markers can now be bound to keys in the preferences menu.
Guilds
Guild Banks now display on the map even if the player is not in a guild or the player's guild does not currently have a Guild Bank.
Miscellaneous Bug Fixes
Corrected a rare client crash that could occur for characters with full banks, inventories, and a full ability list.
Some text errors in the French and German clients have been corrected.
An issue that could cause display errors in fullscreen windowed mode has been corrected.
Corrected an issue that could cause the primary graphics to display to not be selected as the startup monitor when running the game for the first time on machines with multiple graphics devices.
This post is a bit of an update on what I'm doing in SWTOR at the moment, including information on using bonus XP and low level gifts to boost up a new companions affection quickly.
With the server transfers opening up last week I finally managed to get two of my other characters over to my main server. The characters I have right now are: Level 50 Miraluka Jedi Consular Shadow who is blind and cannot be seen Level 50 Jedi Guardian who looks just like me, or a fitter version of me Level 40 Smuggler gun-slinger with a cyborg eye-patch for the win Level 20 Miraluka Sith Warrior, and I'm sick of people asking me where I got my helmet from that looks like glasses Level 22 Trooper Comando, and why does anybody like to heal? I am finding this character almost painful ... and a couple of level 1s.
They are all on the same server (now). What I'm planning on doing is having one of each style spec. So my Jedi Knight is a Guardian and my Sith Warrior is a Marauder. My Jedi Consular is Shadow and my Sith Inquisitor will be a Sorcerer. That's the plan. So in the end I will have played every style of advanced class.
PvP vs PvE
Pre-patch 1.2 I leveled my Shadow up to 50 mainly through PvP. But post-1.2 I'm finding the going is a bit slow. I am having a blast on my Sith Warrior and it's real fun to PvP with but the PvP rewards have been nerfed to the extent that it's a lot faster to PvE level, especially if you're stacking your bonus XP like I am.
Stacking bonus XP
What I mean by stacking bonus XP is that I'll let a character sit and max out their bonus XP for a few days whilst I play with another character. With five characters on the go it's really easy to spend 100% of your game time leveling with bonus XP. PvP is way slower than this.
Note to self: remove the Ratghoul customization if you plan on making out with your companion
Maxing affection with new companions
The other thing I'm doing with all my alts is maxing out affection with a companion as soon as I get them. Using the Companion Items Vendor on my fleet station, I start by purchasing 50 or 60 level 1 gifts which that particular companion loves. (Check what they like in our Companion Lists) These cost 200 each. I pop that gift in the number 1 spot and turn on a repeating macro on my G19 keyboard, so that every four seconds a gift is presented to the companion. So in four minutes they get 60 gifts they like. As soon as they reach around 3000 affection they stop liking the level 1 gifts and then require the level 2s. Another 40 or so level 2s will take your companion to just over 5000 affection.
What I found after leveling 3 level 50s (2 in live and 1 on beta) is that at the end of all your mission lines, most companions are sitting on 4000 - 5000 affection. By starting them off with the cheap gifts from the vendor and getting them to the 5000 mark before you even start using them on missions, means that at the end when you do reach level 50 they will be maxed or close to it.
Every companion costs about 60-70 000 to get started in this way. So this is impractical for a new player. But anybody who has got level 50 alts knows how easy it is to make 60-70K. To try and bump them up once they have reached 6-7000 affection with gifts ends up costing a lot more because the higher level gifts cost more. Best case scenario, if you're getting your gifts through missions, you're looking at 2-2.5K each. After you have topped up your companion to about 5000 affection, then take them to the cantina or ship and start their missions. You will see your affection go up approximately an extra 1000 just from the first group of missions.
