Darth Hater

The amount of yellow posts from BioWare are staggering, but this week’s DevTracker Highlights will give you a breakdown of the important parts, straight from the mouths of the developers themselves. Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller covers the illusive magenta crystal, Galactic Trade Network kiosks, moddable end-game gear, and a bug with the Smuggler’s Accomplished Sawbones ability. European Community Manager Chris Collins address concerns that patches are happening too often. Associate Lead Designer Emmanuel Lusinchi updates the community about character responsiveness issues. Lead Systems Designer Damion Schubert discusses mission discovery items, a looking for group system, and the economic concerns of slicing. Senior Community Coordinator David Bass seeks feedback about Star Wars: The Old Republic events through the year 2012. Lead Writer Daniel Erickson confirms that there is no HK companion currently available in the game. Hit the jump to dig in and see all the highlights.

Georg Zoeller gives a hint on how to obtain a magenta crystal.

BlackMinkThat said, I don't understand why bioware has to make something so simple, so frustratingly difficult. You've known darn well that character appearance is a high priority for a lot of people. You've known all along that there are tons of us out there who want to have a purple or magenta lightsaber.

Georg Zoeller

It's actually not difficult at all. There is no RNG element involved, nor do you need to be running around in endgame gear to obtain it, nor do you need an Operation to do so.

You may need a bit of time, but not a crazy amount either. All classes are capable of obtaining it. Think of it as something like a datacron.

Of course you also need to find an Artifice capable crafter with the recipe to turn the raw crystal it into a Lightsaber crystal, but for the right price, I'm sure they'll help you out.

Honestly, I was a bit amazed to find out that it is possible to have a mystery like this in an MMO. It's been in the game for a few months now (since beta).

Why the mystery? Why not serve it on a platter to those who want the color?

Well, for the same reason there aren't vendors at the start of the game with all the outfits, colors, colors, weapon appearances, etc. Because this is an RPG - some things are earned, not just handed to you on a silver platter. If you want them, you have to play the game.

Yes, we know character appearance is important for people. Hence many of the choices we made in the game, hence us adjusting many features based on feedback from the community during beta. However, the acquisition of appearance options is still a part of the game. You earn appearance past character creation, in various ways.

As said, the magenta adegan crystal is available for everyone and eventually someone will figure out how to get it. It's rare because it's undiscovered, not rare because it's terribly hard to get.

And, because I'm such a nice person today, I'll throw in one hint to get you started:

273.15

Chris Collins quells concerns that patches are applied too frequent.

Chris Collins

While I can understand that there is frustration around the frequency of patches, as many have already mentioned in this thread, patches are both normal and extremely important to ensure the stability of the game. Some of the issues fixed yesterday and today were absolutely crucial.

Given the complexity of software like Star Wars:The Old Republic, what may appear as a simple fix can take hundreds, if not thousands of man hours to resolve. We have teams working around the clock to make sure that issues are fixed in a timely manner, while maintaining the quality that you've come to expect (read: doesn't break anything else ). The timing of these patches are not designed in ANY way to single any one out; they are, as I've mentioned before, done at the point in time where we have one of the lowest number of users connected globally.

No matter when we choose to bring the service down, we will impact someone's play time - this is simply unavoidable. However, again, it's important that these issues are fixed as soon as we can, to help ensure the long term stability of Star Wars:The Old Republic.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Zanathax

"EDIT: To be clearer, I am complaining about the servers being down for 8 or 10 hours a night, 3 nights in a row."

To be clear, the downtimes over the last few days have not been 8-10 hours per day, as you mention. While we announce downtime and give a time range, sometimes things do finish early (and of course, sometimes they run over). Over the last few days, we've totalled just over 7 hours of downtime. Again, we may have said the game may be offline for longer, but we actually achieved very short maintenance times each day.

Emmanuel Lusinchi gives an update about the character responsiveness issue.

Emmanuel Lusinchi

During the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic, we’ve been paying a lot of attention to the game’s responsiveness. As pointed out by some people on the Forum, a very responsive experience is one of the factors that separate the best MMOs from the others. This is something we are fully aware of and take extremely seriously.

Several of the issues brought forth by the community have already been dealt with and you should see the fixes integrated in coming patches, including those coming this month. Every lead mentioned on the forum is being investigated and I cannot stress enough how useful your feedback is – especially when coupled with the level of details found in some of the posts.

So I’d really like to thank the community for this very constructive feedback.

Thanks again and best regards,

Damion Schubert comments on the design of one-time use missions discovery items.

jaldaen

They are one time use (from my experience). However, they are worth it b/c they can give a lot of return for investment.

You just have to decide how much you'll pay for the missions. Some pay more others pay less.

Damion SchubertThey are one-time use by design. We are looking at making this fact more apparent to users in the near future, but as others have noted, they are still rather potent and worth the investment.

Georg Zoeller asks for feedback on where more Galactic Trade Network kiosks should be placed.

Georg ZoellerIf you could choose 3 places where to add a GTN for your faction, which would those be?

Georg Zoeller congratulates those who have discovered the magenta crystal.

Georg Zoeller

Congratulations guys, seems the one number was enough of a hint!

I have the feeling artifice crafters will be seeing increased business in the next little while.

It was great fun to watch this thread and the various investigations on Reddit over the course of the day. While the forums can sometimes be a bit of a inhospitable place, threads like this are really a beacon of light that show what this community can achieve when engaged and entertained.

You guys/gals are an amazing community and we're honored to have you with us.

Btw, please let us know if you enjoy these kind of exploration driven activities (or hate them). We intend to run this game for a long time and knowing what you guys like or dislike helps us better gauging the kind of content we should plan for

Congrats again!

-- Georg

Georg Zoeller addresses a bug concerning the Smuggler’s Accomplished Sawbones ability.

Georg Zoeller

Hi guys,

A little bit of an update on this.

The way it looks is that the 'Accomplished' ability issue is just a typo, the data underlying the abilities is identical. Scoundrel's Accomplished Sawbones is 5/10/15 in the tooltip, the IA's is 10/20/30 (both are actually 10/20/30 behind the scenes). We're obviously fixing the typo.

The flash grenade cooldown being unmirrored is a legitimate bug and rather embarrassing oversight (sorry about that guys) that is going to be fixed.

-- Georg

Georg Zoeller notes that end-game gear will become fully moddable.

AuxiliSo orange level 50 gear will be added?

Georg Zoeller

Custom gear (orange) has no level. Its level is derived from the modifications you slot into it.

So yes, you can make any gear in the game that fits your class level 50+ after the changes Emmanuel described happen.

A few notes:

When we reply to one post, we can't address all other questions that the community might come up with. Stuff like, hoods, adding more armor variation, etc. are all things we've taken note of and when we have something to announce, you will hear from us. We've always said we wanted to have customer demand driven development after launch and some of the things you've read about are just the first in a long list of things we want to do or are discussing right now.

Please also be mindful that we're not often going to give ETAs. An ETA, even though it's estimated, is essentially a promise - and that limits our ability to prioritize our development based on actual severity and impact and that is not a smart thing to do. They also create a lot of bad blood regarding broken promises if they aren't met. (In my experience, few people take notice of the E in ETA.)

David Bass asks for feedback on what players might want to see and the different events throughout 2012, such as PAX and E3.

David Bass

Hi everyone!

With 2012 finally here (and the launch of the game behind us), it’s now time for us to start planning events this year. While we’ve begun putting together plans for things we’d like to do at conventions and shows around the world, we wanted to reach out to you, the members of our community, to get your thoughts about what you’d want to see at these events.

Now bear in mind, we know many of you will want to see new content and game features showcased at events – and in some cases, you will. However, you don’t need to ask us for that as we already know it’s desired – and exactly what does and doesn’t get shown will be in the hands of the development team (and subject to the development schedule!).

While we haven’t announced the events we’re attending yet, we’ll be present at many of the shows we were at in 2011. We’re also planning on attending a bunch of additional events. What we do at these events will be varied, from having a full booth to doing Community meet-ups and panels, but our goal is to bring The Old Republic to a lot more people – and meet as many of our community as possible throughout the year!

With that in mind, we want to hear your thoughts. To get you started, here are some questions we’d love to get your feedback on.

• What would you want to see at a show this year? (Examples might include PvP tournaments, Q&As at the booth, photo opportunities)
• What topics would you like to see covered on panels? Specific areas of the game? General roundtables with the developer team? Voice actors?
• If a show is in your area, would you be likely to attend a Community Meet & Greet outside the show itself?

Thanks in advance for all your great feedback!

Damion Schubert mentions a looking for group system is currently being designed.

Damion Schubert

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

We've known we would need to revisit this feature for a while. In the level-up game, finding players isn't too rough because, with few exceptions, everyone in that level band is either on your planet or on the fleet. Once more and more players hit endgame, and are spending their time in more places, the need for this feature is going to increase. Note that right now, high level players have the opposite problem - there aren't enough other players up there to group with. This problem will dissipate as the game ages, and more players reach the later levels.

That being said, our design team doesn't philosophically believe that cross-server Flashpoints are good for the game at this stage in the game's lifespan. There is huge social pressure to not be a jerk that goes away when the odds that you will never see these people again is high. I'm not saying never - there may come a time in the future where we reevaluate this - but at least in the short term, we believe this will cause more damage to the community than good.

Damion Schubert discusses the economics of Slicing.

Damion Schubert

Let's get the obvious thing out of the way - slicing was giving too much money, and this needed to be corrected. A bug snuck through launch that resulted in some lockboxes giving out far more cash than our magic spreadsheets said they were supposed to give. The end result was that our economy was getting flooded with credits, which risks causing massive inflation in the economy. Players were abandoning other crafting skills for slicing which was causing the problem to feed on itself. Economic issues are tricky - once you let the horse out of the barn, it's pretty hard to coax it back in - and it's important that the dev team jump on these issues as quickly as we can.

Once we corrected the issue, the math started to fall into line, which is to say the metrics of our economy started to match what we expected slicers to have. It's important to note that, while slicing was always meant to be a little more casual, and less wedded to the other crafting skills than the other gathering skills, it was never meant to be a Magic Money Machine. Slicing is still profitable, I promise - the metrics are showing that slicers still do quite well - but it's no longer profitable to the degree where you were a moron if you chose any other Crew Skill.

Are we done balancing? This being an MMO, you're never done balancing, and we will continue to monitor Slicing and the other endgame skills to ensure they are fulfilling their stated purpose inside the game mechanics, useful to the players who choose them, and healthy contributors to the economy as a whole. It is not unlikely that all Crew Skills will get further adjustments once the game and economy has matured and metrics points out a strong need. Once this happens, I promise we'll make a better effort to let players know the rationale of the changes we're making as we're making them.

Daniel Erickson discloses that there is currently no HK companion available in the game.

Daniel Erickson

Hey folks,

I just wanted to clarify: There is no quest for an HK companion currently in the game. I have seen people claiming sightings but these are incorrect. The information you're seeing is from data mining sites that deep dive into files that - as many of you correctly pointed out - are often shells for future work or parts of the game that were removed. Always read any of these with a healthy degree of skepticism.

Hope that helps!

Daniel Erickson