Friday, oyu are indeed an amazing day. it’s the herald of the weekend, a day for fun with friends and family, and of course the day that the team over at BioWare takes the time to answer some of the community’s questions about SWTOR. This week the developers answer some questions about future game events, dual spec, a groupfinder, character transfers, crafting crit chances, and a whole slew of other topics.
As usual there is a bunch of great info that comes out of these weekly Q&A sessions that make it worth every SWTOR player’s time to check out the full article. Some of the future features are subject to change of course, but getting a little insight into what the team is working on for future content is always awesome. You can read all of this week’s questions and answers after the jump, and we would love to hear your thoughts on them in the comments below. Continue Reading »
You may recall that a few months ago SWTOR was officially released in the Asia-Pacific region. When the servers were brought up for the region it was announced that players who lived in that region and currently had characters on North American or European servers would be able to transfer their characters to the Asia-Pacific servers a few months down the line. Well that time is now.
This is a free service being offered only to players who live in that region, and while it is great news for these players the road has not necessarily been a smooth one so far. The process is largely a manual one for the time being, and due to this Mr. Stephen Reid is communicating quite frequently with players of that region to try and help make sure any problems with the transfers get handled smoothly. Check below for some of the quotes from Stephen Reid, and be sure to check out the Asia-Pacific FAQ if you have any questions about the transfer. Continue Reading »
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!
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.
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.
