The patch notes for 1.1.3 are now up. No major changes were made this week outside of the general fixing of bugs and tweaking of abilities., though PvP enthusiasts will be happy to know they will no longer not receive credit for winning a match when the first player to enter a Warzone leaves before the match is over. The Surge stat has also been rebalanced and  now reaches diminishing returns the same way as other damage ratings, and its per point damage contribution has been reduced by approximately 10%.

You can read the full list of notes here.

The application process for the upcoming Guild Summit has ended. All the guild leaders who applied for an invitation should expect to hear back from BioWare in a few days after they have the time to review everyone’s applications.

BioWare also announced that certain parts of the summit will be broadcast on a livestream, including presentations by developers and feedback discussions. This way even players and guild leaders who cannot attend are able to participate, great news for anyone who has ideas they want to share but are unable to secure an invitation or able to take time off work to head to Austin for the event. Even if you cannot catch the livestream BioWare will be posting videos of the event after it has ended.

BioWare will be revealing more details as we get closer to the event date. Keep watching SWTOR-Life as we bring you all the updates as they are announced.

Tomorrow is Tuesday and you know what that means, it’s time for some weekly SWTOR maintenance. As usual the servers are scheduled to go down starting at 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) and are scheduled to be back up again by 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET).

The current Public Server 1.1.3 patch is what we can expect to see updated during the maintenance time, but we will not know for sure until the official patch notes are posted. Keep in mind that the servers could always be back up sooner or later than the scheduled start up time depending on how the maintenance goes. If the time frame should change for any reason we shall let you know.

This week marked the first of BioWare’s promised “Community Q&A” blogs where the developers answer various questions posed to the by members of the SWTOR community. They orignally stated that they would be answering 10 questions a week but the players must have hit them with some good ones because they went ahead and answered 15 of the biggest questions concerning the community.

You can read some of the highlights after the jump. Continue Reading »

BioWare elaborated on their promise that global cooldown customization features will be coming soon in a recent developer blog by Stephen Reid. He had this to say on the matter:

This week several user interface changes were made as part of patch 1.1.2, including some that changed the look of the ‘global cooldown’ animations. ‘Global cooldown’ is the delay after an ability is used before other abilities can be used. As the global cooldown can affect many abilities at once, the animation is seen frequently and for some, the changes made were distracting.

Our UI team took this feedback to heart and worked up a solution which gives every player a lot more choices in how cooldown animations are displayed. If you’re happy with the way the game currently looks, you can ignore these changes – but we think some of these preferences will be welcomed by many players.

Currently, these new preferences are scheduled to be added to the game in patch 1.1.4, which should be available for preview on the Public Test Server next week and deploying to the live servers soon afterwards.

He went on to outline some of the features players will be able to customize such as turning the flash for when an ability finishes its cooldown on or off, different art styles for what abilities will look like when they are on a cooldown, the ability to change when the game will start showing tenths of a second on cooldown abilities, plus several more. They even included a video showing some of the customization options in action.

You can check out the video and read the blog in its entirety here.

That’s right, even after being updated in Tuesday’s patch there are more changes on the horizon for the global cooldown animation.

Ever since the cooldown animation was updated in 1.1.2 their has been a growing group of players who have been disappointed with the change. The white flash of the abilities as they enter the cooldown state has been visually unappealing to players, with some even reporting that the animation makes then nauseous and causes headaches. There have also been complaints that since using any ability causes all of your abilities to go grey it makes it difficult for classes that spam abilities every second (such as the Sentinel or Marauder) to know if their abilities are ready, if they are in the correct range, or even if they have enough resources to activate their abilities.

BioWare opened a poll earlier today to try and get a feel for what percentage of players were disappointed with the changes. By the time the poll was closed over 57% of players who responded voted that the thought the new animations were terrible. BioWare assured players that changes would be coming based on the feedback that they received, and elaborated that they would not have implemented these changes in the first place had they received this kind of feedback out it on the Public Test Server.

Getting players to participate on the Public Test Server has been somewhat of a challenge for BioWare, as most players do not want to roll and level a brand new character for the sole purpose of testing new content. In order to help alleviate this problem BioWare announced that they are working on changes that will allow players to freely transfer their characters to the Public Test Server in order to help test new content. No official word on when these changes will be coming, but we will be keeping an eye on the forums and will update you with a date once it is announced.

When Tuesday’s patch was downloaded some players quickly discovered that their PvP kills on Ilum were not counting towards their daily or weekly mission totals, and at times were not receiving the valor they should have for making a kill. Associate Online Community Manager Joveth Gonzalez posted earlier today that they will be rolling out an emergency patch in order to fix these issues. Starting at 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) BioWare will be bringing all servers down in order to fix these problems, and hope to have the servers back up and running by 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET).

Hopefully we will all be back to earning our promised rewards for our actions on Ilum soon.

This week’s patch notes are up and ready to be seen by the general public. The usual class ability tweeks and improvements to Operations and Flashpoints are present. But one note in general should have players jumping for joy.

If Sprint was active when a player died, it now remains active when the player is revived.

This may seem like a small thing but it is a great relief that players will no longer have to reactivate the Sprint ability after dying, especially in PvP warzones. You can read the full patch notes here.

It’s that time of the week again, maintenance time. Servers will be going down tonight starting at 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) and are scheduled to remain down until 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET).

As always the servers could come back online before the four hours are up, or they could stay down longer if need be. We shall keep you posted if the times change for any reason.

BioWare announced this weekend that they will be adding a few new features to SWTOR.com. The first being a series of videos entitled “Begin Your Journey’ which are designed to help new players learn the basics of Star Wars: The Old Republic. They also announced that they will be starting two new weekly blogs dsigned to give players an insight into the development process.

You can watch the new video and learn more after the jump. Continue Reading »