Darth Hater

BioWare's Gabe Amatangelo took to the public test server forums today to clarify some upcoming changes for PvP bag rewards.  He also hinted at further changes when a ranked Warzone system debuts, slated for Game Update 1.2.

Gabe Amatangelo

Champion Bags now always contain 15 Centurion Commendations AND 7 Champion Commendations. Battlemaster Bags now always contain 15 Champion Commendations. So Centurion gearing up progression for new level 50s is increased significantly and Champion gearing up progression will be steady.

That being said, the current interim 'gearing up' system will change significantly when we introduce Ranked Warzones (aiming for Game Update 1.2). Stay tuned for more details on that.

 For the full text of Gabe's quote, read 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

 

Many good changes went into patch 1.1, Rise of the Rakghouls. The patch added a new flashpoint, implemented anti-aliasing, and expanded Karagga’s Palace to a full-size Operation. However, as the title of this article implies, Ilum is still a hell of a mess.

Lead PvP, Operations & Flashpoints Designer Gabe Amatangelo posted on update concerning Ilum issues and the resolution. An emergency patch will be pushed to servers tomorrow, January 19, at 5AM CST. The patch will prevent players from entering the opposite faction's base and prevent them from leaving. Population caps on Ilum will also be descresed to help improve client performance. You can read the update in full below.

Gabe Amatangelo

Hello everyone; I wanted to update you on the issues we’ve been seeing today on the live servers, specifically within the Open World PvP area on Ilum. We’re aware that on some servers, either Republic or Empire groups have been capturing the Ilum control points, entering the enemy’s base and ‘camping’ the medcenters, preventing the opposite faction from leaving their base to recapture control points. This is not a fair or balanced gameplay experience and can also severely affect client performance, so we’re taking steps to address this.

Our intended design for Ilum Open World PvP is that players are instantly killed when entering the enemy’s base safe area, just like in Warzones, and that the defending faction can take taxis to other points within the zone. As of Game Update 1.1, this is not working as intended. We have found the issue preventing this from happening under server load and will be publishing an Emergency Patch to address the issue. We’re aiming to have this patch published early tomorrow morning (January 19th, 5 AM US CST).

In addition to these changes, we’ll be reducing the population cap on Ilum. This should help increase performance by requiring your client to render fewer characters on-screen at once.

Regarding Valor gains, with the 1.1 update, players now receive a base reward of 20 Valor per unique enemy player defeated in a short time, and this base reward is modified by the number of objectives that the player’s faction owns. The gains are rate limited per player killed, encouraging players to attack unique players, not to pursue vendettas. The Valor gains players can see over time will vary greatly depending on the activity level in the zone. This is expected.

To dispel a couple of rumors that have been seen today – there is no Valor gain from destroying turrets within enemy bases, and none from killing NPCs.

We encourage players to avoid Ilum until our patch is deployed. As a temporary measure we will be disabling taxi services which would normally take players into the Open World PvP area. However, players will still be able to taxi out of the area.

We will continue to monitor Ilum across all servers and will make further changes to gameplay if required. We welcome your feedback here on the Forums, but please ensure your feedback is constructive and specific. Feedback based on rumor does not help us isolate potential issues.

UPDATE: Associate Online Community Manager Joveth Gonzalez added to the thread noting they will be evaluating and tracking individuals taking advantage of the Ilum situation.

Joveth Gonzalez

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to be clear and let you all know that we’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary.

 

In an exclusive interview at Massively, Larry Everett sat down with Lead Game Designer Gabe Amatangelo to discuss the new level 50 flashpoint for the upcoming 1.1 patch release – Rise of the Rakghouls. Included as part of the interview are screenshots and a video trailer of the flashpoint along with details regarding its denizens. As a side converstion, Gabe also went into detail on Ilum, BioWare's plans for Open World PVP for future releases and the release date for patch 1.1 as January 17th.

Massively"The objectives on Ilum were supposed to be on timers, and the timers were supposed to be locked down," says Amatangelo. "But in the 11th hour, the timers weren't working. So we knew what kind of behavior was going to evolve there. It's not like we were going to delay launch to fix that. But with 1.1, we are going to be handling a lot of those issue with a bunch of improvements there, like focusing on killing players. The objectives give you buffs, but ultimately you have to kill the players to get the rewards. We've included new spawn points as well as some optimization with the turrets.

"We do have longer-term plans for open-world PvP. It is open-world PvP; it's not an RvR system. I kept trying to throw that out there. I'm not saying that it's not something we don't want to do."

Due to the spoiler territory nature of the information, we hid the pull quote and trailer after the jump. For the interview and screenshots in full, visit Massively.

Update: In an interview with GameSpot, Creative Director James Ohlen revealed some interesting options about what the Legacy system will enable in the future, including the ability to add relationships between alternate characters on the same server, such as brother and sister, or father and son.

James Ohlen

So the legacy system, it's kind of inspired by the fact that the family dynamic is so important in the Star Wars movies. You have Luke being Anakin's son, the most famous father-son relationship in movies. We wanted to have a system that encouraged players to create alts and to play the game through the different story paths. So the legacy system is meant to do that. It essentially allows you to, instead of just having a bunch of alts that have no relation to each other, you can actually create a family tree where your alts can be related to your main character, either as, you know, a sibling, a son, a father, a family friend, or a husband and wife.

You can actually choose the relationship your characters will have with each other. And then you gain legacy experience points and legacy levels, and with legacy experience points and levels, that gives you--that allows you to unlock abilities, perks, a whole slew of different advantages, essentially, that all the members of your legacy tree will be able to enjoy.

So it's pretty tight, I think people are going to really like it, and it's something we want to push towards players who enjoy the level-up game. It'll also be beneficial to the end game, but it really is going to have a lot of abilities that make leveling up even more enjoyable and allow you to customize your leveling experience.

Principal Lead PvP, Operations & Flashpoints Designer Gabe Amatangelo posted a new community blog on the official Star Wars: The Old Republic noting some changes coming to Player vs. Player combat. Specifically, he mentions the introduction of a level 50 bracket for Warzones, ranked PvP Warzone matches, stat tracking, and additional medals for objectives in Warzones. You can read the blog in whole below.

Gabe Amatangelo

Fellow PvPers, thank you for taking on the challenge of player vs player combat in The Old Republic!

In the first week after launch there were over a million Warzone matches played, with nearly half of all players participating in Warzones. Bad news for Republic players, though - the Empire currently leads overall, having won 53% of all Alderaan Civil War and Voidstar matches (across all servers). Huttball has been played the most, accounting for 39% of all matches – and yes, we’ll be adding a new same faction vs. same faction enabled Warzone in the future.

We are all really excited at the tremendous volume of participation we’ve seen in PvP thus far. Your interest and demand dictates what we’ll be delivering in the near future. I wanted to give you some insight into where we are with PvP development and where we are going.

First and foremost here is what we are addressing as a top priority:

Level 50 Bracket Warzones: Level 50 players will have a bracket of their own, playing in separate Warzone matches to lower level players. This is something we have wanted to do for some time and now that there is an increasing number of level 50 players we will be implementing the feature in January.

Open World PvP on Ilum: The planet of Ilum currently allows for open world PvP even on a PvE server, but the mechanics and incentives of the planet are not in as intended yet. We’re working on longer term goals for the planet and for other PvP areas, but expect to see some interim adjustments in January - such as more respawn points to focus conflicts, restricting Companion Characters from the area, and revisions to rewards. Ilum will also become a major source of Valor. Valor buffs will increase and decrease based on the objectives your faction owns. These buffs increase the amount of Valor you receive per player kill. However they do not give anything in and of themselves, so players will still need to defeat other players for significant Valor rewards. Additionally, daily and weekly missions will require player kills to complete. Player kills for quests and Valor credit will have diminishing returns per player killed. So, the more players that are fighting other players, the better it is for everyone.

Combat Gameplay: You’ll see several optimizations come online in January, and we are going to continue to tune this as time goes on.

We also have other exciting features coming in the near future including Ranked Warzone Matches, PvP Stat Tracking, Open World PvP Loot Drops, more Warzone medals for different objectives, Guard Optimizations and Target Optimizations.

Additionally we’re looking at ways to enable team vs. team, more level brackets and the ability to choose which Warzone you want to play in.

This is not a complete list of everything we’re working on that’s PvP related, but we have to keep some surprises for later! Thanks again for all your feedback and please keep it coming. We read as much as we can then cross reference with metrics to take action on features and tuning the game to ensure an enjoyable and competitive PvP community.

Gabe Amatangelo Principal Lead PvP, Operations & Flashpoints Designer

 

If you were in general game testing for any length of time, then you probably heard of the clear of Eternity Vault by Republic Justice, or encountered them in Star Wars: The Old Republic's Warzones. Known as Shards of Alderaan (guild site) for release, the Republic guild originally formed in Star Wars Galaxies and today's membership comprises of various MMO backgrounds. Darth Hater continues its Guild Interview Series (Ensidia, Afterlife) with Republic Justice / Shards of Alderaan members Air, CJ, Rookie, and Nyan to disccuss their overall impressions of testing endgame, and PVP class balance.

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The massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG as you may know it, is a sub-genre of role-playing games. Set in a persistent virtual world, MMORPGs allow a large number of players to interact with one another simultaneously. Star Wars: The Old Republic, or SWTOR, is an upcoming MMORPG from BioWare, but you already knew that. What you may not know is that it took more than five years of development to get SWTOR to where it is today. SWTOR is part of a family tree of video games that traces its lineage back almost 40 years. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at all the games that paved the way for SWTOR, then take a quick glimpse at what is coming next.

During Gabe Amatangelo’s presentation at the Fan Site Summit, BioWare revealed a new Open World PVP area. Normally this would not be huge news, but what Outlaw’s Den entails is news indeed. Outlaw’s Den is Star Wars: The Old Republic’s first Guild versus Guild, Free for All, Open World PVP area. To find out everything you need to know about this exciting and altogether new area, hit the jump. 

Arguably the greatest rift in the Star Wars: The Old Republic community came from the possibility, now reality, of four of the eight classes as force users. This discussion spawned shortly after the Sith Warrior was released and described as a melee focused class, and only grew in intensity. Having nearly a month to think about this design choice, we felt it was important to weigh in with our opinion.

Companion characters have always been a trademark of Biowares games. From KOTOR to Mass Effect, companion characters have given players someone to give them support, loyalty, and romance (for all you lonely guys and gals out there). After Petes interview with Leo, we definitely know that companion characters will be in SWTOR. This formula has worked throughout Biowares long history of single-player RPGs, but how will this transfer to the MMO stage?

In a typical MMO there is a progression of quest difficulty, which ranges from simple solo-able quests, to harder group quests, to raid quests, which are generally the most difficult. Companion characters would be a massive help in solo quests, but when you get in a group situation is when things get tricky. In a group that would mean double the people to heal, and more micromanaging for players. If anyone has ever done a simple instance you know that if one thing goes wrong in a pull everyone can get screwed. The same goes for raids: the more people and NPCs the harder it is to coordinate during a big boss fight.

Companion characters could not only have an effect on PvE but on PvP as well. If each companion is different with different abilities, it seems that Bioware would have a lot more work on balancing.

Bringing in companion characters isnt all a bad thing; they bring a whole new level of depth and meaning to your story. If you kill the captain, not only will his family hate you, but your companion could be horrified at your actions and leave you forever.

So whats your view on companion characters? Should they be there for the whole game, or only for leveling? Or they should be there for PvE, and not for PvP?

The question that boggles the mind of casuals and hardcore alike, "What do I wish to do once I am max level?"

[poll id="4"]

It seems from what we are told, is that the PvE (Player Vs Environment) content will be stuffed full of shiney exploding goodness, but we have not been told much about the PvP (Player Vs Player). Will the raiding be enough to keep the hardcore players playing the content weekly, or are they looking to push them to do the, GASP, WoW thing, where you roll an alt when you get to bored. But I am not afraid to roll an alt, knowing that we are being given 200+ hours of story per class, but I do want some end game raiding And with the recent information given to us at Comic-Con, it appears classes will be able to get alignment towards the Light Side, and the Dark Side, for new abilities and what not, which could add more bulk and time to the story.

The the PvP comes in, "What if I want to PvP and not reroll? Will I be forced to reroll due to lack of people or objectives to complete?"

I do not think we need to worry, as interviews have stated, "This is Star WARS" So I am comfortable with myself knowing that BioWare is working on giving us a great PvP experience, the real question is, "What depth of conflict?" Many questions are out there and we are waiting for them to be answered, will there be PvP Planets? Objectives? Quests? Special Abilities? Titles gained through PvP? Vehicles? Spac---, nope, won't be opening that Pandora's Box. Time will tell, time will also answer these questions. I am sure BioWare will show us all these in due time, and we will all be happy.