Star Wars: The Old Republic's Free to Play model is live. BioWare posted a new video on the official Star Wars: The Old Republic site providing some additional information. Cory Butler explains details regarding "Preferred" status, highlights several customization options available on the Cartel Market, and talks about limited time Life Day items.
In an onslaught of DevTracker activity, BioWare detailed a few of the changes coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic with the new expansion Rise of the Hutt Cartel. The developers discuss everything from the new skill points coming with the increased level cap, the story behind Makeb, and the size of the planet. For the responses in whole, hit the jump.
This morning, visitors to the Star Wars: The Old Republic Official Website found a new addition to the swtor.com/buy page, most notably, a pre-order section for the new expansion -- Rise of the Hutt Cartel. The page reveals details regarding price, content, and how to pre-order. For those that do not care to visit it themselves, here is what you need to know.
Included on the page is a new FAQ about the new expansion. In it, there is a pretty lengthy description of what players can expect.
Face off against a frightening new enemy on the brand new planet of Makeb as you battle the nefarious Hutt Cartel and its massive new creatures and weapons of destruction. The Hutt Cartel has emerged from the shadows to challenge the Galactic Republic and Sith Empire for control, unleashing never-before-seen Droids and monstrous battle stations to serve as powerful weapons of destruction. As a player, you will be forced to take a side as you earn new weapons, armor, abilities and more.
To pre-order the new expansion, head over to the announcement page.
After servers came back online this morning, a new patch became available for players of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Included in the patch are some changes and additions to the Cartel Market, a few bug fixes including PvP, and some corrections of mission text. For the patch notes in full and screenshots of the new armor, hit the jump.
This week's scheduled maintenance will take place on Tuesday and will last from 2AM to 6AM CST. In this case, Star Wars: The Old Republic will receive a patch deployment.
Hello everyone, we wanted to let you know that we will be performing scheduled maintenance for four hours on Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET/7PM AEDT) until 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET/11PM AEDT). All game servers and SWTOR.com will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than four hours, but could be extended.
When servers come back online, we'll have the patch notes available in full. For the original announcement, visit the official thread.
Game Update 1.6 introduced new Heroic Space Missions and Tier 7 ship parts to help players complete these challenging missions. The prices to obtain these new ship parts are hundreds of Daily and Fleet Commendations. To the surprise of many players, these parts were also made available for purchase on the Cartel Market. Players have discussed this approach and debated whether the large discreprancy in costs between the two ways of obtaining the items is truly a step towards "pay to win" for SWTOR. Community Manager Joveth Gonzalez has posted some feedback from Lead Systems Designer Damion Schubert indicating that BioWare is looking for solutions to reduce the gap between the two paths:
Unfortunately, there is, in fact, a great disparity between these two costs. We want to apologize for this, as there was a miscommunication internally on how valuable these upgrades were, how challenging they should be to earn, and how fast a player should be able to earn them.
We are currently looking at solutions that cause the least amount of frustration for all players affected, while keeping the integrity of both the Cartel Market and the game intact.
It is not our intent to make the Cartel Market the “way to play" the game—we want you to feel that both the Cartel Market and earning gear in game are viable options as far as value goes, neither being far more efficient or effective than the other.
We truly hope you enjoy the challenge of the new Heroic Space Missions and apologize again for what we hope is a small distraction.
I want to reiterate that we are actively looking at solutions and they will be communicated to you as soon as we have a solid plan.
Game Update 1.6’s most important addition is of course, the Ancient Hypergate Warzone. While we’ve seen video of it before, I thought it would be a good idea to jump into the Warzone on the live servers to get an initial feeling on the new addition. This preview serves as my first impression of the Warzone before any guides we happen to create.
We would love to hear your thoughts on the new Warzone.
Now that Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Game Update 1.6: Ancient Hypergate is in the wild, BioWare christened the launch with a new trailer showing off the new content. While it may not reveal anything big to the fans following the game here, it still serves as an advertisement for the update.
For all of our articles pertaining to Game Update 1.6, head over to our coverage guide.
Game Update 1.6: Ancient Hypergate is now on live servers and with it comes a new assortment of items for the Cartel Market. In order to show the community at large the items, we created this post to serve as a listing for them. Initially, this post will only contain brief summaries with images due to time constraints. As the day progresses, we will make a list in entirety. As with new Cartel Packs, items may take a while to find for some but when we come across them, we will add them here. For the current items, hit the gallery below.
Now that Game Update 1.6 is on the Live Servers, we've taken some time to aggregate all of our coverage into an easy-access compendium for your referencing pleasure. Below the jump you'll find a convenient table of contents linking to all of the related content and more we've produced here at Darth Hater. This guide will be continually updated as new content is added to the site, so take a second to bookmark it and tell your friends. You can also look for the handy link in the "Feature" box to the top right of your web browser for easy navigation in the future from our homepage. Keep reading to check it out!
Update: New additions to the Cartel Market added.
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