[Alderaan GSI daily (Big Red) possible issue]

I once saw a very faint spot extremely far up in the sky, almost untargetable because you can't look straight up, after visiting all positions. Maybe it just gets misplaced every so often?

 

That was at the spot in the far northwest of the map.

[Companions extremely buggy in [H4] The Shroud Revelaed]

A friend and I have been trying to run that H4 with our companions, and it turned out to be less than fun in several places.

 

During some fights, most notably the final boss on the barge chase, the companions appeared rather irritated; my HK-51 just stood by idly, reacting to nothing (tried passive, attack command).

 

Earlier, when opening the room with the electric zapper and the two electrostatic generators on the floor, both companions bugged into the emitter on the ceiling which almost broke the instance since the emitter didn't target the player characters anymore. Luckily, at some point we could dismiss the companions and things progressed as intended.

 

This seems to be a continuation of the general theme of NPCs having issues with multi-layered environments and the up/down axis in general, leading to companions failing to use elevators, stepping through some hallways, horrible performance issues in underground or "stepped" environments (Taris, Balmorra, Makeb, …) and other quirks.

[Bioware please make weekly polls]

I think the first and most important thing is that by us posting a poll, folks will assume that the winner is guaranteed to see action. If we say "What species would you like to see in SWTOR?" and Togruta wins, in your example. Everyone will assume we are definitely going to add Togruta to the game. Unfortunately, it just wouldn't work that way.

 

Why don't you have in-game surveys from time to time? A small "what do you think about X? (a, b, c, comment on the forum)" popping up as a help/support notification every now and then. It's not like you even had to exhibit the results in public, and it might give you a better or at least additional idea of general opinion than rifling through thousands of forum posts; it would also make some people feel better about things (hey, who doesn't like being asked about their opinion?), and with some small sweepstake tied in to the surveys (like a handful of cartel coins, companion gifts, ... for "randomly selected participants") I'd imagine a rather good participation.

 

It also gives you a glimpse into the heads of the people who are not trolling the forums regularly, who are probably the majority. Those people need to be heard outside of customer support tickets, and outside of aggregate statistics. It might also make those people look at the forum, which might not always be a good thing though.

[Its time to give the F2Ps a voice on the forum]

If a F2P player can just sign up for an account and begin posting, then anyone in theory could post on the forums fairly easily. The problem this creates is one of moderation. It would be very easy for someone to make an account and begin spamming the forums. If we ban that account, they just make another one immediately.

 

That could theoretically be solved through a basic proof of work, like requiring a Chapter 2 character.

 

And while you are busy creating a tighter game/forum integration, how about character pictures as avatars?

[Native support for Mumble positional audio]

Something that should be a rather easy feature, really: the game could supply information for positional audio through Mumble's Link plugin, which would enable people hearing roughly where their teammates are.

 

The impact would be low, since the game would only need to write the local character's position and some metadata (describing the location so people in different environments don't get positioned relative to each other), so this would not enable any kind of "radar" or other localisation hacks since players would only ever be voluntarily and selectively divulging their own location. Guild Wars 2 added the feature a few months back.

 

On a sidenote, the information can of course be used for other purposes, since the communication between the game and the voice client is done through a shared memory file with a well-defined format, so other applications, including other VoIP tools, would of course be free to use it.

[Facilities: Take a Virtual Tour]

Going a bit (System |Bio)shock? Looking forward to it

[Encrypted Datacube: Story content in the cartel market?]

I'm a bit sad to see it go, and frankly, I don't see the issue with having small snippets of paid content floating around the game.

 

Some of you people have a fetish for serious overreacting; as soon as you don't get everything shoved up your earholes for free, you start pulling the "omg pay2win" whiner card.

[Players of the opposite faction not flagged for PvP on PvP server. Intended?]

Hopefully not relevant anymore, but the incident on Ilum was during the second run of the event (so a long time ago) on Jar'Kai Sword, was some Republic character in the open PvP area around the dome.

[Revan's Chestplate; any word on a fix?]

Let me see if I can summarise a train of thought that seems a bit derailed.

 

<elaborate, logical explanation of the situation (please excuse me leaving this in Official-Yellow, but it is IMO needed to retain visual context) —Laurreth>

 

So you couldn't have changed the gear to look <completely different from what Revan is wearing if I actually stood beside Revan>?

 

Did I miss anything?

[Players of the opposite faction not flagged for PvP on PvP server. Intended?]

I've been talking to someone who was running around in the Ilum event unflagged, they said the flag hadn't returned when they released after death.

[An Update on the Summer of SWTOR]

They did. It was reported that it was said the there would be no more open-world PVP areas.

 

And, frankly, that's something we shouldn't be too sad about. Open PvP is very hard to get right (IMO DAoC is so far still the only "traditional" MMO to get it at least somewhat right), and the risk of failure is huge; so instead of focusing on something that might well turn out to be a fool's errant, I'd rather see BW work on the warzone system and the focused "incidental" PvP areas like the one on Ilum during the event.

[An Update on the Summer of SWTOR]

I would recommend checking the images from the flash drive about the bounty hunter event. It is probably safe to assume that at least some of the changes are somewhere in there.

 

I'd just like to see a bit of "we wanted to do X, and this is how it changes things, which we think is cool" with some correct information, non-divined perceived changes in random screenshots.

 

Graphics changes, especially when they're as global as this one sounds, tend to be highly contentious topics, and it might be a good thing to just make it public and see where the brown river flows, that's all. Or just throw us all into said river when the day comes.

 

Either way, I'm curious.

[An Update on the Summer of SWTOR]

Any update on the free character rename for subscribers?

 

The one you get when you transfer off an APAC server?

[An Update on the Summer of SWTOR]

• Game-wide color vibrancy improvement
  

 

I was tickled by the original idea of great, big graphics improvement, but the term "vibrancy improvement" makes my eyes itch. Please tell me it's not going to be a bloomy candyland with oversaturated colours. I was rather hoping for a touch-up like finally fixing the grass textures and some other ugly tiling stuff (nagnagnag!), improving AA, that kind of thing.

 

Would be nice to have a developer/artist blog teaser on that sometime soonish, like the one about the foliage shader improvements, with a few before/after shots

[Question of the Day 6/17/2013]

Just for the closing lines of the arc, I'll have to give that price to Aric Jorgan. Such a romantic! I gotta try that line on someone.

 

Apart from that, if it were possible, Nadia please. Sadly, my Consular is a rather stereotypical Twi'lek --- but at least we're both wearing proper clothes.

[E3 - Will Bioware announce a new SWTOR Expansion?]

Expect disapointments on E3, aka nothing about swtor.

 

Apart from the rest of your post coming along as the usual whining stupid (and why are you even here?), there's a fairly simple explanation for the game not being represented at E3:

 

E3 sucks, and it is EA policy to only take new and upcoming titles to trade shows.

[Scoundrel/Operative Roll]

OK, here's my take. Look at Huttball. The Rollers can get the ball while the rest of the team, or more importantly, everyone in the other team is just dropping down the first walkway. IMO that shows a certain clash between at least that warzone's design and the new feature, since it is a massive change in balance and reliance on group composition.

 

The rollers are also the only class that can bypass the fire traps with little or no damage, thereby negating that element's design purpose, namely, timing traversal of the walkways. Also, not a good thing design-wise.

 

IMO the ability should be slowed down, be it through careful application of a cooldown or some other means (application of a stacking slowdown?), to a point where it gives a momentary advantage that doesn't exceed a certain maximum. Roughly speaking in Huttball terms, even the most berserk roller shouldn't reach the dratted ball before other characters from a group with a single sentinel/mara group buff or a sorc/sage Flee can at least get into range of the CC skills.

 

(Huttball: litmus test for skill changes.)

[Real Gamers of Genius - Mr. Stealth in the Huttball Endzone]

As the common stealth in huttball, your teamplay utility is twofold:

 

 

1. Get yelled at for running to the enemy endzone.
   
2. Get yelled at for not running to the enemy endzone.
   

 

It's a tough life without pounce or pull skills

[Baron Deathmark stops speaking after multiple Huttball matches]

The warzone announcers seem to be generally wonky. After a while, I'm missing audio in Voidstar, and maybe others (I only really care in Voidstar or Huttball because the announcer is kinda essential there).

 

My gut feeling is that it's more likely to happen after a same-side match (reps vs. reps in my case) in Voidstar, which generally seems to be very, very buggy wrt the announcer.

[Properly reset characters when releasing after death]

Seriously, how hard can it be to do a hard reset when a character releases after death?

 

I'm not even talking about the recurring issue of people getting permanently stuck; it's small things like the burn effect in Huttball having another tick after release, some DoT effects persisting, and generally characters spawning with low health.

 

This is, IMO, a systemic issue that needs to be tackled instead of patching around single symptoms.

[Question of the Day 5/17/2013]

None yet, despite the low prices.

 

(A friend's Shadow has improved for the better though, what a spunky redhead that char has become!)

 

I guess my main may be in for some minor surgery to tighten up the area around the eyes. Apart from that I'll wait and check out the forthcoming customisation options in the next few market drops Until then I'm more keen on checking out more dye options.

[lol bolster]

The bug that players are experiencing in relation to augments in certain armor slots will be fixed in Game Update 2.1

 

And on that occasion, please ban all accounts of frequent abusers, and report their credit cards stolen.

 

What, one can dream!

[Question of the Day 4/29/2013]

Way. Too. Many. Packs. Seriously, those should be classified as a controlled substance, and you know it.

 

Apart from that, mostly unlocks like the "get your new character on a speeder" (which is actually pretty neat even for subscribers), experience perks, or account-wide storage.

[Storyline Reset Button]

I once asked support for the reset of a single mission step, and the answer pretty much reads like there's no way this will ever happen (too much depending on choices, etc.)

 

I'm somewhat happy with that kind of a "no resets" policy, but the ability to at least re-watch key moments of my career would be very welcome

[Bioware, do you know the PVP map cycling is an issue right now?]

We queried the data an examined the current streakiness of a random sample of players participating in Warzones currently and plotted the probability of certain streaks occurring against the random probabilistic model. The actual data is on par with basic random chance. Recent Warzone players have had a little over 15% chance of repeating the same Warzone compared to the assumed 20%, and subsequent streaks probabilities are also on par with random chance.

 

Did that include the occurrence of players getting streaks of, e.g., only two numbers or generally a low number of distinct warzones, over time? Some complaints were, e.g., "only Voidstar and Huttball with only rare occurrences of neither of those".

 

IMO the matchmaking system should take some care to generate "short-term" variance, since (pure guessing) the majority of players only play too small a number of warzones in sequence to really care for long-term fairness.