I am very happy to announce that SWTORCrafter, known for his excellent articles on crafting in The Old Republic ( http://swtorcrafter.wordpress.com/ ) has joined forces with SWTOR Life. After a very short period of negotiation we became aware that our love for the upcoming Star Wars The Old Republic MMO is only matched by our wish to create content for its community and that was all that was needed to begin this partnership. You can expect to see his insightful articles at http://www.swtor-life.com/swtorcrafter/ in the future.
Here is a short bit about him,
Swtorcrafter is a crafter at heart, dating back to the start of the Ultima Online beta. It was there that he developed his love of massively multiplayer online game crafting systems and economies in online games and fansite creation. It was there that he was first introduced to what it was like to actually play online with other people.
It was a grand six years. The longest he has been in any one MMO since.
He has searched countless realms since trying to recapture that feeling, sometimes finding satisfaction, sometimes not.
Now as he grows older he decides it is time to go all in, one last bold attempt at finding that perfect anvil, the crafting system of his dreams, and the community to share his insights with.
Enter stage right…..
The game, Star Wars The Old Republic” MMO by Bioware
The Community, www.swtor-life.com
*Fingers crossed*
Welcome aboard Derek!
Comments Off on SWTOR Life and SWTOR Crafter Join Forces
Published by BorukBH under Class on Mar. 08. 2011.
In regards to knowing PAX is upon us and a great mamy things will more than likely come from that, I still am left wondering this subject. Officially there isn’t any marketing machine running to promote the game. So where is the Marketing for Swtor?
I look at it from a time constraint. It has been put out by Bioware that we have until the end of the year (December 31, 2011) for Swtor to release. 9 months in essence. In game development that is a short window to get a lot of information out, that isn’t marketing media. It is a small window to bring hype and start to cull a following or potiential players to meet that 500,000 suscriber base that was said to be needed to make a profit. So what is the hold up?
There is no official trailer to make people go “ooh” and “ahh”. Nothing to stir the geeks in us up and make us brush the dust off our lightsabers stuck away in the closet. Heck, that full set of Stormtrooper gear doesn’t even need to be polished yet, as nothing is giving us the feelng of “I need to hurry up and get ready! The game of games is arriving shortly!”.
Maybe Bioware has decided not to do any Marketing. It’s also possible they they have something up their sleeves and are prepping to assault all our senses with something great. Maybe, just maybe, Darth Malgus is preparring a bid for his 2012 run for the White House. Who knows…I just wonder when the Marketing Department is going to join the game.
Only a few days are left before Boston hosts the 2011 Penny Arcade Expo – East coast edition. This is a big deal in the SWTOR community because Bioware seems to love PAX and always does something special at these events. This event is also special because for the first time there will be an organized gathering of SWTOR fansites and fans at two community events. Here’s a list of important things you can expect from PAX East this year.
The Old Republic booth is 912 and that is where visitors will be able to sit down and play the game. For the first time the general public will be able to experience flashpoint content. Taral V, the flashpoint we’ve seen footage of several weeks ago, is what people will be able to play through at the show. Those that lean towards the dark side can avoid playing this Republic only instance and choose to play one of the Sith Empire classes and their starting planets. Never fear my Jedi friends, you get a treat as well because for the first time the general public will be able to play on Tython and try Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular. Just to make things even more awesome James Ohlen (Lead Designer) and Daniel Erickson (Lead Writer) will be hanging at the booth all throughout the event and will be available for Q&A sessions.
The things I hate missing out on are two community gatherings that will happen at PAX. There is the Star Wars: The Old Republic Community Cantina organized by SWTOR fansites (I think the main sponsor is Darth Hater). Here are the details: Date & Time: Friday March 11th, 2011, 7PM Location: The Times Irish Pub & Restaurant, 112 Broad St. (Between High st & Wendell St.) Boston, MA 02110 Confirmed Participants: Ask A Jedi Corellian Run Radio Curse Darth Hater Massively Mos Eisley Radio TORSyndicate
The second event is officially organized by Bioware and it is by invitation only. You can get your invitations at the SWTOR booth and if you do you will be able to attend the Community Meet and Greet hosted by SWTOR community team. The details are as follows:
Date & Time: March 12th, 2011 Location: Westin Boston Waterfront hotel Confirmed Participants:
SWTOR Community team (meaning Stephen Reid, David Bass and Allison Berryman to name a few)
Developers (depending on how tired they are we might see James Ohlen and Daniel Erickson)
Remember that you can queue for the event up to an hour early so make sure you arrive there on time because the capacity is limited!
So here we are. The Bounty Hunter trailer we have all been waiting for. I don’t have to talk about it to explain it, it speaks for it self. Watch and see.
So yeah, I’m a convert. It wasn’t hard to hang up the big guns of the Trooper and find my way here. Good side Bad side, it doesn’t matter to me. all that really counts, is that I get paid. I find the Bounty Hunter appealing, but the fact that I can be a Healer as one is what really draws me to the class. I don’t expect many will play the BH as one, but I will. It will be interesting if I shoot darts at everyone or send out medic Droids to do all the work. I can’t wait.
IGN got another exclusive coverage of The Old Republic by releasing a video for the Bounty Hunter class on a Thursday, one day before the official site releases the information. Just like all the previous class videos this one does not dissapoint and we can see some cool action and voiceover work. Some abilities we never saw before can be seen as well and that scene where the Bounty Hunter is delivering a carbonite frozen victim is just too cool. I am seeing a lot of AoE action and stuns, but in short – explosions, explosions , explosions. You can check out the video bellow:
Official SWTOR page on Facebook got 250.000 “likes” several weeks ago. In celebration of this milestone Bioware decided to start releasing “Image of the week”, Facebook exclusive screenshots and concept art from the game. The first three images were of Ord Mantell’s volcanic mountain ranges, a Zabrak Inquisitor and a screenshot from a warfront clash. You can see these images in the gallery bellow or by visiting the official SWTOR Facebook page.
At the same time, in celebration of the upcoming PAX East, fansite The Galactic Struggle released first in their series of class wallpapers. This one is dedicated to the Republic Trooper and really looks awesome and you can view it in our gallery bellow or visit The Galactic Struggle (aka KOTORMMO.net) by clicking here.
For the pure awesome section of this post we would like to recommend reading an article by Torocast’s Eric Musco entitled “Pick Me, I’m Viable!”. It discusses the recent official forum discussion about a DPS spec for Jedi Knight that had several posts from Georg Zöller, Principal Lead Combat Designer. Eric wrote a great article about how a proper implementation of DPS spec could be handled and after trying to find holes in his logic I must say that his solution is the most awesome one. I just hope Bioware is thinking along the same lines. Go ahead and read the article by following this link here.
February 25. brought a special Friday update to the official SWTOR site. It is a dev blog by The Old Republic’s Live Producer Blaine Christine. He is also well known as host of several SWTOR presentations and a generally funny guy. In his dev blog he talks about what he does as Live Producer and also shares some insight into what the game testers are saying about the game so far. There is one thing in his article that I just couldn’t get out of my head.
… I’m happy to report that all of the mental images you have of us working at a world class RPG development studio are true. Yes, we have rivers of chocolate running down the hallway, yes, a live animatronic ogre lives in the basement and of course, yes, we have LARPing parties from 5PM to midnight every weeknight. (I usually dress up as Princess Amidala and practice my diplomacy skills on Daniel Erickson, who pulls off a very convincing Gungan ambassador.) …
I had to expel the mental images this quote created in my head, so, in spirit of the Daniel Erickson MeMe I did a few months back here are the demotivational posters dedicated to Blaine Christine and his dev blog entry.
Daniel Erickson is not amused
Argument Invalid
Gift of gab - he haz it
Hurrr Durrr
Amidala vs Blaine
In the gallery below you will find all the original images I used to make these, just in case you have some inspiration of your own. You can send me your finished work and I will publish it on the site.
How can a guild best support their crafters in SWTOR, part 2
With the small amount of material available on the crew skills system it is really hard to speculate on what I think will be important for a guild to focus on when trying to support their crafting efforts. I am going to speculate anyway though because it can’t hurt to guess at this stage.
My main motivation behind this post is the fact that very soon official swtor.com forums will be hitting 1 million registered users. At the moment of this article being written the number of users is 999296 (you can check this by entering http://www.swtor.com/community/member.php?u=999296 and incrementing the number at the end until you get the message “Invalid User specified”). This made me wonder how does The Old Republic fair against the market leader, World of Warcraft, and a popular newcomer that is about to be released this week, Rift. Please note that all of these numbers do not necessarily mean anything, because we are looking at three products in different stages of their lifecycle and the numbers come from “unreliable” sources. They are unreliable because they depend on how active a company is on a certain social network. There are however some trends showing up that I just couldn’t look away from. NOTE 1: The number of forum members is a bit tricky because just having a WoW account makes you a forum member. SWTOR forum member number is based on reading the URL and it is actually a number of created accounts and not active accounts. Rift is about to be released and I think their current forum number is based on preorders and not all of the people that purchased the game. I will revisit this in a month or so to see how the numbers changed. NOTE 2: Included are alexa.com traffic rank stats as well. There is a problem with World of Warcraft traffic rank because prior to the release of Cataclysm expansion they moved their main community site from www.worldofwarcraft.com domain to battle.net domain. I am providing a graph of both these domains traffic ranks where you can clearly see the change in traffic rank for worldofwarcraft.com and battle.net. At the same time battle.net traffic rank also includes rank for other Blizzard games. That is why I chose WoW’s traffic rank prior to Cataclysm which was around 1000. Rift’s traffic rank drastically rose around beta time. Prior to that it was at around ~40.000.
World of Warcraf
Rift
Star Wars The old Republic
Facebook Likes
1,145,267
138,228
253,228
Twitter Followers
113,224
15,244
28,473
No. Forum Users
Unknown
179,055
999296 (estimate)
Alexa.com traffic rank
~1000
6,450
12,494
alexa.com traffic rank 6 month comparison
I wouldn’t want to draw any solid conclusion from this but The Old Republic is doing very good for a game that hasn’t even entered pure beta stage. It is already approximately two times as popular as Rift, which can be contributed to the awesome promotion Bioware has been doing and I think mostly thanks to the Deceived and Hope trailers. We’ll revisit these numbers in three weeks when Rift should be at its peak to see if choosing this particular moment had an effect on Rift’s numbers. I welcome all your comments on the subject and suggestions and interpretations.
LogunOne – remember that name – He is a fan of the Old Republic and creates awesome videos on Youtube. He uses all the released videos and screenshots to examine how far the game has progressed. His video compilations of certain game mechanics are awesome looking with great editing skill and insightful comments. His latest video is a fun little compilation of run/walk animations he gathered from all the material released so far. He has that great ability to make something so common, as run animation, seem very cool. Check out his YouTube channel here and make sure you subscribe and you can watch his latest video bellow.
Swtorcrafter is a crafter at heart, dating back to the start of the Ultima Online beta. It was there that he developed his love of massively multiplayer online game crafting systems and economies in online games and fansite creation. It was there that he was first introduced to what it was like to actually play online with other people.
