Darth Hater

A new Developer Blog entry has been posted on the official Star Wars: The Old Republic website. BioWare Executive Producer Rich Vogel gives a detailed look into how bugs and exploits are identified, triaged, prioritized, fixed, and patched to the live servers.

Rich VogelNot 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.

 Full post after the jump.

Executive Producer of Live Servers Jeff Hickman posted an update concerning the Ilum issues that have taken place over the last several days since patch 1.1, Rise of the Rakghouls. Hickman explains that contrary to the belief of many players, they will not be implemented a mass rollback for those who took advantage of the valor gains. Instead, they will be reviewing each case and take action if deemed necessary to those might have gained an unfair advantage. You can read the full blog post below.

Jeff Hickman

After Game Update 1.1 went live, we discovered that the Open World PvP area on Ilum was not working as our PvP design team intended. As many of you know, large groups of players began capturing the Ilum control points, then 'camping' at the enemy's base. This led to a very frustrating experience for a number of players who were unable to leave their base and fight back against their attackers. It was not a fair gameplay experience. In addition, some players on the attacking side gained more Valor points than designed for the time they spent in PvP.

The amount of Valor granted from these activities was significantly more than intended and we are now carefully investigating players who were on Ilum during this period, and present at some of these 'camping' events. I can reassure you that those who were involved and who gained an unfair advantage over other players inappropriately will be carefully reviewed and action will be taken to restore game balance. This could include Valor adjustments or account actions in accordance with the severity of the issue.

We have made the decision not to enact a mass 'rollback' of Valor points for all players in the game, or even on Ilum. This would unfairly penalize some players who may not have been present during this event. Rest assured though, anyone and everyone who is found to have exploited the situation to an unreasonable degree will be investigated and actions taken as needed. Our in-game metrics are able to give us precise details on where players were, what they were doing and what rewards they gained.

We take any sort of situation where one group of players gains an unexpected or unintended advantage over other players very seriously and will act to ensure that all players can have a fair and fun game experience.

Thanks for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue. Our team worked diligently to get a patch ready to address this and other issues, and we're already seeing the results in improved battles on Ilum. As always we welcome your feedback and will continue to improve moving forward!

Jeff Hickman,
Executive Producer – Live Services

Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller posted an update today about the character ability delay issue that players have experienced since the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic. In a blog post, Georg thanks the community for their feedback to help track down the cause of the issue, and notes that a fix is scheduled for the public test server in the next update. He also mentions other fixes that should help PvP combat with both player responsiveness and hardware configuration. You can read the full blog post below.

Georg Zoeller

Hi everyone; I wanted to give you all an update on the ability delay situation.

Thanks to constructive feedback from the community, including some great videos, we were able to identify an issue that could cause abilities on global cooldown to appear available to the player, resulting in unresponsive/ignored player input. A fix for the issue is currently scheduled to go to the public test server with our next update.

Additionally, we have located an issue that would cause player input for certain instant abilities to fail in frantic combat situations, resulting in unpredictable and frustrating gameplay issues for the affected player. A fix for the issue is currently scheduled to go to the public test server with our next update.

Finally, our engineers have identified an issue introducing a significant delay between player input and ability execution in certain game situations, most notably (but not limited to) fast paced PvP. The magnitude of the delay varies with a number of factors, including processor hardware, but can, especially on dual core CPUs, result in a very perceivable reduction in game responsiveness. We are in the later stages of testing a fix for the problem and hope to be able to roll it out to the servers very soon.

We're still investigating a number of additional issues, along with some usability and quality of life improvements for responsiveness regarding player input, but the above mentioned developments should provide a very measurable improvement in combat responsiveness.

Thanks again for your patience and support and we hope to see you on the public test server to help us validate these improvements before pushing them to the live servers.

Georg Zoeller
Principal Lead Combat Designer

Georg Zoeller
Jedi Shadow (Roles: Close - Mid Range Damage Dealing, Tanking)
Sith Assassin (Roles: Close - Mid Range Damage Dealing, Tanking)

Blaine Christine
I work with the development team to ensure that anything released to our fans (read you!) meets the quality standards that are so important to any BioWare product. That means any time a new build of the game makes it into our Game Testing Program, I need to ensure that any content or features that we specifically want to have tested meet the designers needs and don't contain any major bugs.

Stephen Reid
A little peek behind the curtain.

This week's blog was originally intended to be part of next Friday's update. We ran into some unexpected issues finalizing this Friday's originally scheduled content, and so chose to move that content out to next Friday. As a result, next week, you'll get an update-and-a-half... and then after that, you'll soon see the cool stuff we've all been hard at work on for PAX East.

Part of the reasoning for this blog was to give you a peek into some of the feedback we got from our Game Testers; on the whole, feedback has been very positive and we're excited to see the response. We also wanted to remind everyone about our Game Testing Program, as feedback from our community so far has been extremely valuable to the development of The Old Republic.

We realize we can't please 'all of the people, all of the time' but we remain committed to giving you regular updates on the development and features of The Old Republic.

Writer Joanna Berry brings to light some thoughts behind crafting the Jedi Consular

Writer Rebecca Harwick takes us down the path to the dark side as she composes the Sith Inquisitor

How to explain the Sith Inquisitor?

I could tell you that the Sith Inquisitor is the Emperor Palpatine to the Sith Warrior's Darth Vader, but that sells it short. The archetype is just inspiration. It's not the destination, or the road we take to get there, but the guide. The Sith Inquisitor is Raistlin. The Sith Inquisitor is Lucifer. The Sith Inquisitor is Julius Caesar. The Sith Inquisitor is what you make him." - RebeccaHarwick

Senior Writer Alexander Freed divulges some of the secrets of the life of the Imperial Agent

It all starts on Hutta, where THE EMPIRE is trying to GAIN the ALLEGIANCE of NEM'RO the Hutt. After THE HUTTA MISSION, the Imperial Agent IS SENT TO ASSASSINATE A PROMINENT SENATOR on behalf of Darth BARAS. Hell work alongside a genetically enhanced SOLDIER, encounter double-agents and triple-agents, betray HIS OWN ALLIES or perform atrocities in the name of the Empire. The Imperial Agent will need to determine his own loyalties and the loyalties of those around him, and survive the attentions of SADOW'S successor, the Sith Lord DARTH ANDEDDU.

...

For those of you giving it a try, one last word of advice: Whatever you do? Don't trust ANYONE.

date posted: Feb 23, 2009 10:59 PM

I don't really know if I can say anything else about who might be appearing in the novel, but I'm going to throw a couple names out just for kicks: Cognus, Set Harth, Andeddu.
Wow, I probably said way too much. Maybe I should delete that. But for some reason I've been very in touch with my own personal dark side lately, so let's leave it for now and see if I get in trouble.

Senior Writer Drew Karpyshyn offers his thoughts on writing the Jedi Knight class storyline.

Lets start this blog off with an introduction. My name is Drew Karpyshyn. I was the lead writer on the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game, as well as the author of several Star Wars novels. And I'm here to tell you about the Jedi Knight character class.

Now, anyone who's familiar with my novels Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, Darth Bane: Rule of Two and the upcoming Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil might be surprised to hear I'm working on the Jedi Knight class. But I was excited to step away from the dark side so I could embrace the challenge of writing the good guy. (Or girl, of course.)

What I should be talking about, however, is Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil. It hits shelves in less than 50 days, and it's already available for pre-orders. So starting in November I'm going to be doing more updates and pushing this novel HARD. I'll also be updating my SW Blog for the first time in months, and in November I'll be doing a post for BioWares Star Wars: The Old Republic developer blog.