Game Director for StarWars: The Old Republic, James Ohlen, recently sat down with the folks over at IGN to talk about the various difficulties associated with creating and maintaining a game with the scale that TOR has. He applauds the great job that the team at BioWare has done in creating such a massive game while still maintaining the type of gameplay that players have come to expect from BioWare, namely high level storytelling and character development.
Ohlen goes on to talk about how the team at BioWare has become even busier since the games launch, not yet having much of a chance to rest after making the game available to the public. They are constantly looking at both their own metric system and player feedback to see where they should implement improvements. As an example he attributes upcoming improvements to the Global Trade Network to the player feedback that BioWare has received.
The Zabrak are a popular race in Star Wars due in no small part to the species’ most famous member, Darth Maul. Their horned heads and tattooed faces cultivate an image of a fierce and intimidating race, and in truth they are a fiercely independent and tough species. Yet for all their harshness they carry with them a great sense of pride and self-determination, not unlike humans. Today we will take a closer look at the Zabrak and what sets them apart from the other numerous species in the Star Wars universe. Continue Reading »
Lead End-Game Designer Gabe Amatangelo sat down with Cynical Brit staff member John “Totalbiscut” Bain to talk about PvP, faction balance, mods, and other interesting topic that all fans of The Old Republic should find quite informative.
Anyone familiar with Cynical Brit knows that they don’t pull any punches when it comes to interviews and this interview is no different. Have a listen and soak up all the great information Gabe drops on us.
As promised BioWare’s recent server maintenance included a patch to fix the ability delay issues that people had been complaining of. Players have already reported seeing a massive improvement in the combat because of the fix, but BioWare is not done working on improving the combat system.
According to a Developer Post by Georg Zoeller we can expect some continued improvements involving combat sometime in the near future. He mentions that there are already some fixes on the Public Test Server that will be rolled out to the general public once BioWare is satisfied with the results. They also plan on working on improving the readability of the cooldown animations included in Rise of the Rakghouls that players have been complaining of, and are also looking to improve the accuracy of the cast bars, something that already saw some work in today’s patch.
The final issue Zoeller mentions, and possibly the most important one when it comes to faction balance, is that BioWare is working on improvements to the responsiveness of individual ability animations, including, but not limited to, faction specific timing differences on mirrored abilities. Many players on the Republic side have pointed out that their abilities seem to have longer activation times or animations than their Imperial counterparts. It sounds like this issue has been noticed by BioWare as well and they are working on fixing the issue as we speak.
You can read the patch notes from last nights update here, and the developer post from Zoeller here.
Ever since 1.1 rolled out last week BioWare seems to be racing to put out fires. Starting with the fiasco on Ilum, and moving right into ability issues, log in problems, and we even saw a server (The Exile Crystal) go down yesterday. Now there is no evidence that links every single one of these problems to the 1.1 update, with the exception of Ilum, but it seems that ever since the update was released BioWare has been in crisis mode.
But there is a silver lining to all these issues in the fact that BioWare has shown the player base just how fast it is able to deal with these problems when they arise. They rolled out a fix for Ilum the very next day after the problem became apparent, players unable to log into their accounts were able to do so on the same day the issue was reported, and The Exile Crystal was up and ready to go just over an hour after if went down. Of course there are players that will complain that even these response times were not fast enough, but it is the consensus of most players that BioWare has done a great job at identifying and fixing these problems almost as soon as they were brought up.
But there remains one group of problems that still have not been resolved, the ability delay problems. As we reported on earlier, players have been experiencing a plethora of issues when it comes to their ability’s cooldown and activation times. Georg Zoeller promised players that they would be including fixes for a couple of these problems in tomorrows patch, but have yet promise a fix for the delay between player’s imputing commands and seeing the abilities activate.
With any luck we will see all these problems fixed, or at least improved, during the weekly maintenance that will be taking place tonight. As a reminder the maintenance is scheduled to occur at 2 AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) and will continue until 8AM CST (6AM PST/9AM EST/2PM GMT/3PM CET). As always the start and end times are subject to change if the need arises.
Within Hutt controlled space is the Las Vegas of Star Wars. It is also referred to as “Smuggler’s Moon,” and is best known for one thing: anything can be bought here if you have the credits, or the trade. This is a world of gangsters, pirates, slavers, and of course the Hutts and the Hutt Cartel.
Players who try and log into their accounts today could be met with an unfortunate surprise. There have been reports of players being unable to log into their accounts, seeing the “No Active Subscription” message when they attempt to log on.
Right now there is no word on what is causing the problem. On player I spoke to informed me that after confirming that all his account info was correct, which it was, he noticed that his account was showing the amount of days they have remaining and even the next billing period (2/20/12). Despite this he is still unable to log into his account, and attempting to delete his subscription and set it up again provided no fix. He did state that no charges had yet to show up in his payment history, but other players on the forums are claiming that they have been charged and still cannot log in.Customer support lines are tasked to capacity at the moment so be sure to remain patient if you are attempting to contact them regarding this issue.
BioWare has yet to make any sort of public statements about the issue but we will be watching the official site and will give you an update as soon as we are able.
Update: Players who were unable to log in are now reporting that they are able to access their accounts once again. Still no word on what was causing the issue, but for now everything seems to be fixed at least temporarily.
Update:At 1:50 pm central standard time Allison Berryman had this to say about players being unable to log in; “Hi everyone – we are currently investigating your reports and will work to resolve any issues as quickly as possible for those who continue to experience a problem. Thank you for your patience!”
Update: BioWare is now announcing that the issue has been resolved for “many” individuals and they are continuing their investigation into the potential cause of this issue. They promise more updates as the situation unfolds but it seems as though it is still possible that players could see a temporary lockout.
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Georg Zoeller spoke to SWTOR players today about various Ability issues that player have been reporting lately.
Players have been reporting recently that they are experiencing a glitch where abilities that are on a global cooldown and appear available for use, which result in unresponsive or ignored player input. They are are reporting a glitch that is causing certain instant abilities to fail in combat, causing massive amounts of frustration. Zoeller assured players that they have identified fixes for these issues and they can expect these patches in the next game update, currently scheduled for January 24th at 2am central standard time.
Zoller also addressed an issue which introduced a delay between between player input and ability execution in certain situations, apparently being most prominent in fast paced PvP combat. There are a variety of influencing factors, but the delay is a very perceivable slow down in the responsiveness of the game. BioWare is currently in the later stages of a fix for the problem. They hope, but do not promise, that they will be able to include it in the upcoming patch.
BioWare is still in the process of testing these and other issues. They encourage players to hop on the test server and help them test these fixes as well as help them identify any other bugs and glitches in the game. It is great to see that player who are devoting their time on the Test Server helping to improve the game. Hopefully BioWare continues their speedy response on issues as they arise.
Jeff Hickman spoke out today on the actions BioWare plans to take against players who were taking advantage of an exploit on Ilum when their recent update went live on Wednesday.
Instead of just doing a mass Valor rollback they plan on looking at player’s actions and dealing with them individually. Players who were deemed to be taking advantage of the exploit could possibly be seeing their Valor rolled back or may even have actions taken against their account, depending on the severity of their behavior.
The reason BioWare has decided to to enact a mass rollback is because they do not want to unfairly punish any player who may not have even been present during the event. They claim the metric system they have in place was effective in reporting where players were during that time, and whether or not they gained an unfair advantage. They did encourage players to continue giving them feedback so they can continue to improve the open world PvP on Ilum.
In an effort to continue improving the community BioWare has implemented a couple new forum features that went live today.
The first feature is a Server Group Forums. While players have been calling for server specific forums from day one this is the closest BioWare has made available to players at this time. Servers are sorted by region (North America or Europe), type (PvE, PvP, RP, and RP-PvP), and then sorted alphabetically. BioWare also configured the Server Group Forums to require you to select a forum name tag for each thread, you just select your server name from the drop-down menu when creating a new thread. Players can use these forums to bring server specific issues to the developers attention as well as socialize with those players inhabiting their server.
The second feature BioWare made live today is a suggestion box. This forum can be found as a sub-forum in the General Discussion thread. Players can use this forum to discuss suggestions players have for the game, just keep in mind that your suggestion will carry much more weight if you present it in a calm and constructive manner.
