Today marks the much anticipated day where The Old Republic officially brought servers online for the Oceanic regions. Though players in those areas could play during the US/EU launch they were forced to log onto servers located across the globe, forcing them to deal with all the latency problems one would expect from not having servers devoted specifically to their region. Now these players will finally get a chance to play SWTOR on localized servers. Three servers have opened up for these players; the Dalborra, the Gav Daragon, and the Master Dar’Nala, each being a PvE, RP, and PvP server respectively.

However there is some bittersweet news to go along with this story as well. Players have been told that they will be able to transfer their current characters to the Oceanic servers, as long as they meet a list of requirements that qualifies them for the transfer. But it turns out they will not be able to do so until sometime in late April, and any characters made on or after this day will not be transferred. Also, full guild transfers will not be possible,  forcing guilds to basically start from the ground up on these new servers. This is forcing players to choose between what they consider more important right now; playing their high level characters on their current server, or starting fresh on localized servers. To make matters worse some players are reporting a might higher latency rate on these new servers, making the decision to start over even more difficult.

despite these issues it is still a great day for players in the Asia Pacific Territories. BioWare has set up a handy FAQ thread for these servers to help answer any questions players might have. We here at SWTOR-Life and SWTOR-Spy would like to extend a warm welcome any new players from that region into the game, hopefully your Star Wars experience is a great one!

It’s Tuesday and you know what that means, time for some SWTOR server downtime. BioWare will be performing their weekly maintenance starting at  2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) on the 28th and hope to be done by 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET) of the same day. As usual they cannot guarantee that the servers will be back up by then, but there is also the chance that they will be back up before that.

No word on anything specific that will be patched this week but there is a good chance that most or all of the recent changes implemented on the Public Test Server will be included. If the maintenance start time is changed for any reason we will update this post with the new information.

It’s Friday and that means it is time for one of my favorite new things BioWare is doing these days, Community Q&A. They managed to go over 10 questions again this week, another trend I would like to see continued, and answered a range of questions from implementing a LFG tool, improving end game usefulness of crafting skills, and even touched briefly on the chance the players will be able to customize their current ships or get new ones. (Hint: Don’t expect it anytime soon.)

You can find all the questions answered this week after the jump. If you have a question you would like to ask the development team post it over at the official forums in this weeks Official Q&A Thread. Continue Reading »

The patch notes from the 1.1.4 update are now posted over at swtor.com. Amid the usual bug a glitch fixes are a few special updates that players should be pleased with.

The has been an update to some boss mechanics in both the Eternity Vault and Karagga’s Palace. When fighting Soa during the Eternity Vault players will notice that Soa no longer lost threat against his primary target when he casts a Mind trap, and the G4-B3 Heavy Fabricator now has fewer hit point in Karagga’s Palace normal mode. In warzones the queue interface exploit that allowed players to bring extra players into a warzone has been fixed. There is still a chance that imbalances can occur, but players will no longer be able to intentionally trigger the exploit. Also the bug that would cause the east turret in the Alderaan Civil War warzone to sometimes fire twice when captured by the Imperials has been fixed as well.

One of the biggest additions with this patch is the promised ability for players to control the appearance of their cooldown animations.. This of course comes as a welcome addition for most players after some displeasure was expressed with the last two cooldown animation updates. Players can now control if they would like their abilities to a flash when the finish a regular or global cooldown, change the art style of the cooldown animations, and chose to toggle cooldown time text on top of the ability icon in the quickbar.

For all the notes on this and previous patches make sure to visit the Patch Notes page over at swtor.com.

BioWare released a new video on Tuesday entitled “A Look At The Old Republic”. In it various SWTOR developers talk about their feelings on the day of launch and are even treated to a few clips of the crew as the opened the servers on the first day. We are also treated to the thoughts of a few players on what they think of the game so far, including a few in game experiences they have been a part of.

According to the video there have been over 2 million copies of the game sold, and over 14 million characters created by the players! Outside of that the video does not reveal much information, and most of it is old news to current players. It is still a nice little recap of the game from it’s launch to the present day, and a great video to show off to any of your friends who you are trying to convince to get in game with you.

It’s everybody’s favorite time of the week again, weekly maintenance time. Normally the maintenance is scheduled for Tuesdays, but this week it was pushed back until Wednesday for some reason. No word on exactly what  all will be patched this week but there is a good chance that all (or most) of the recent patch notes released for the Public Test Server will be implemented in the patch.

The maintenance is scheduled to start at 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) and is currently scheduled to last for 7 hours, or until 9AM CST (7AM PST/10AM EST/3PM GMT/4PM CET). No guarantee that the servers will be down for the entire 7 hours that the maintenance is scheduled for, though there is always the chance that the maintenance period could be extended if the developers deem it necessary. As usual all the servers will be down for the entirety of the maintenance period and will most likely require players to download a patch before being able to log back in.

If for some reason the time frame for the maintenance should change we will make sure to update this post with any new information that is made available to us.

Eric Musco, Social Media Coordinator for BioWare, gives players the run down on all the handy map features in BioWare’s second installment in their Quick Start Guide series, titled “Maps and Navigation”. The video goes over a whole slew of navigation related tips; such as bind points, speeders, how to tell if you’ve been to a taxi station before, map filters, the map magnifying glass, and other helpful items.

Veteran players might be quick to pass over the Quick Start guides, but even they may be able to learn a thing or two from these videos. For example, I still occasionally run across players who either don’t know about the Emergency Fleet Pass or don’t know where it is located (it’s in the general section of the abilities tab by the way). The Emergency Fleet Pass allows you quick travel straight to the fleet, though it carries a hefty cooldown time of 18 hours. You can buy other Fleet Passes from a Security Key Vendor (they have a far shorter cooldown period) but everybody gets the Emergency Pass once they hit level 10.

Another aspect of the maps that Mr. Musco covers is the ability to toggle different icons on your mini-map as well as your main map. This is something that I was not aware of and can really help cut down on the clutter players can get on their mini-map when in areas with a lot of vendors, such as the markets of Coruscant or Dromund Kass.

You can check out this video over at the Quick Start Video Guide page over at swtor.com.

Today marked the second installment of BioWare’s new weekly Q&A session with the players of SWTOR. Though BioWare has said they will limit the questions they answer to 10 a week they have been unable to limit themselves to that amount, answering a total of 12 questions this week. Topics this week included the possibility of a /roll option being implemented, endgame gear set bonuses being transferred with mods, and a lengthy post about healing during operations.

We will share some of the questions with you after the jump. Continue Reading »

BioWare fans were hit with some sad news today when Drew Karpyshyn announced on his blog that he will no longer be working with BioWare, or on any video games for that matter. Karpyshyn is well known for his work on Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, as well as several novels linked to those games.

Drew had this to say about his decision.

For the past twelve years I’ve had the privilege to work at one of the best companies in the video game industry, side by side with the most talented and incredible group of people I’ve ever had the good fortune to know. I’ve enjoyed my time at BioWare immensely, but it’s time for me to move on.

I’m leaving to focus more time and energy on my novels and other non-video game related projects. But even though I’ll no longer be working on games for BioWare, I’m not going to be severing all ties with them. Many of my closest friends still work at the company, and I’m also in the process of writing the next Star Wars: The Old Republic novel, though I can’t say too much about it yet……

Even if you are someone who is going to miss my contributions to the video game world, I hope you’ll be somewhat mollified by the fact that I’m going to have more time for novels, screenplays and other projects. I’ll always have fond memories of BioWare, and a great appreciation for everything it meant to me. But my future is wide open, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store.

Drew

Drew is one of the nicest, most laid back writers in the business who always made time to talk with his fans. Luckily we will have one more gem from him in the form of a new Old Republic novel before he rides off into the sunset. While it is truly sad to see Drew leaving BioWare we here at SWTOR-Life wish him all the best in his future endeavors.

BioWare announced recently that they will soon be officially launching Star Wars: The Old Republic in Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore on March 1st of this year. This means opening localized servers for those regions and making the game more available to players in those areas, who until now could only play the game by ordering online and playing on a European or North American server.

But what about those players who live in that area but are already in game you ask? Well BioWare will be offering these players a limited chance to transfer their characters to a localized server in order to mitigate some latency issues by player on a server in their region. Players who qualify for the character transfer will be contacted in early March with details on how to move their characters to the new servers. Some players are wondering if this is a sign that BioWare will allow all players to transfer characters between servers sometime in the future, but the developers have not commented on that matter at this time. We here at SWTOR-Life are happy to see the Asia Pacific region get some server love, and hope that both new and old players in this region enjoy all the benefits that having localized servers gives them.

You can read the original post about the upcoming release here.