Char_Ell
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Posts posted by Char_Ell
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My sympathy goes out to the SWTOR dev team. I'm sure this was not welcome news and they are trying to figure out what they need to do for the future (transition to Broadsword if given that option or start looking for new job inside or outside of EA).
I've wondered why they were taking so long to make the server transition to AWS. EA management did a convincing job of allowing BioWare to move forward with 64-bit client and planning for transition to AWS so that everyone, BioWare Austin included, would not suspect a significant change was being evaluated. But EA has obviously decided it's time to cut SWTOR loose and let Broadsword take over. I'll just have to wait and see how things develop to make determination if I feel it's worth it to continue paying to play SWTOR.
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I have to think the BioWare Austin folks are none too pleased about this news. I hope they did not learn of it from the media reports first. Trying to figure out if your position has a future or not is never fun.
As far as I'm concerned this does not bode well for SWTOR's future in terms of development and new content. At least SWTOR is not shutting down in the near term. I'll just wait and see what future brings with Broadsword but I certainly don't expect SWTOR will get more development resources with Broadsword than what the game currently gets.
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1 hour ago, Toraak said:
I've just completed my 5th GS weekly of the week, but for some reason all of the others are greyed out, and it says I've completed 7/7 weeklies. Has anyone else seen this bug?
I experience this issue at the beginning of every game week when I start completing Galactic Seasons weekly objectives on the first character I log into. It shows 1/7 or 2/7 completed for weekly before I even start doing GS weekly objectives. The count corrects when I log into another character.
I'm interested to know if logging out of your character and logging back in resolves your problem. I seem to recall someone claiming that relogging into the character once you've reached 7/7 on the weekly count even though you're really only 5/7 still did not correct the count and left the player unable to complete any additional GS weekly objectives. . I've never completed 5 GS weekly objectives on the first character I log into so I could not verify this claim.
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3 hours ago, xordevoreaux said:
1. Instant scalability. All Bioware has to do is throw money to rent more server capacity, AWS takes care of the rest.
2. Administrative overhead for servers is now AWS's problem, not Bioware's, meaning in the past, if a top-notch systems engineer walked out the door of Bioware, ouch. Replacing that person, who just left with a whole bunch of institutional knowledge of how Bioware systems need to be maintained, would have been expensive and time consuming. Now it's a non-issue for Bioware.
3. Location-specific service. When Bioware operated the Virginia servers, they were in... Virginia, limiting connection speeds for some players in the APAC region, South Africa, etc.. Now Bioware can take advantage of a worldwide system of AWS data centers, spanning 31 geographic regions with more planned.
This all sounds good and possibly more expensive than current server infrastructure BioWare has. As you say if the transition to AWS allows BioWare/EA to reduce or eliminate dedicated server infrastructure resources the funds for these resources can be reallocated to the AWS infrastructure. I think BioWare pretty much mentioned the same in their news post announcing the Shae Vizla server test. Like TrixieTriss, I have also tried reading up on AWS features and while I definitely agree AWS has a system of data centers that spans 6 of 7 continents and BioWare can add or reduce capacity as needed I'm just not sure how that really changes BioWare's options when it comes to server configuration. I think TrixieTriss did good job of summing up the issue as AWS having the infrastructure to support better access from across the world that current server infrastructure does but it may be limitations of the game itself that prevent BioWare from taking full advantage of AWS capabilities. From my perspective the game's current population does not support adding a new server period, even if it's in APAC region. But if, for example, Satele Shan could be configured in AWS such that the server could have instances running in APAC and NA regions so that both players in APAC and NA have low latency server connections instead of only one of the two enjoying low latency connections then this would be best of both worlds. Even if this scenario is feasible, I still can't envision how group play that included people from both regions (PvP, operations, flashpoints, uprisings, etc.) would be able to run on a Satele Shan server instance in APAC and an instance in NA. In these scenarios it doesn't seem like it would be possible for a multi-region group to be able to run on their closest server instance without game performance problems. I expect that the warzone or flashpoint instance of a multi-region group would have to be hosted on the same server instance which would increase latency for the group member(s) not in that region.
12 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:Can you please link where he stated this so I can understand the context of his statement better.
Hello TrixieTriss. If you click on the "right turn arrow" icon in the upper right corner of the Eric Musco text block I quoted that will take you to the post it came from.
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2 hours ago, Ramalina said:
Assuming they successfully transition to AWS as a server provider, then new "current client" instances should be very easy for them.
This is more along the lines of what I wonder. What can AWS provide in terms of features and options that BioWare's current server infrastructure can not? Does a new server need to be added to give APAC players the low latency they enjoyed during the Shae Vizla test? Or can AWS support server instances from one server in different regions? I've no idea since I've no experience with configuring applications for use in an AWS environment.
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15 minutes ago, WayOfTheWarriorx said:
With respect, I'm not sure if I'd jump to the conclusion that a 'fresh start server' means a server ah-la-launch.
Additionally, if they did choose a 'fresh start server' (whatever that actually means) over an APAC server, there'd be a lot of pissed off former APAC server players on the forums come to give Bioware a dressing down, and rightly so.
You will of course interpret what Eric Musco wrote in whatever way you wish. "Fresh start server" seems easy to define as a new server to the game so an APAC server would qualify as both a "fresh start server" and a server located in Asia-Pacific. Personally I don't see how it makes sense from a game population distribution perspective to add an APAC server to the game but that is for BioWare to "chew on before making a decision." I understand APAC players got their hopes up after experiencing the low latency performance on the Shae Vizla test server.
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1 hour ago, SteveTheCynic said:
Overall, I would say that, to answer the implied question in the thread title, "No chance at all, or maybe less than that."
Prior to May 9 I would have agreed with you. However since Eric Musco actually mentioned the possibility of a fresh start server it would seem the chance of this happening is not zero.
On 5/9/2023 at 1:04 PM, EricMusco said:Again, thank you all for your participation and feedback! We have a lot of data and commentary to chew on before making a decision on what comes next for a possible APAC or fresh start server.
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13 minutes ago, JerrichoGr said:
my reinstall is now done. and yes i can long in to the launcher but still cant get pass this https://imgur.com/a/vJrsMIy what in god's name is going on ? it is been 3 days like this since the last update.
What happens when you click on the Close button?
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8 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:
Dude, I’m not here to prove stuff to you or go looking for my old posts to link. You can just as easily go back and find them as I can.
But if you use some logic in you’re reasoning, you’ll realise my analysis is correct. It’s not that hard to put 1+1 together to = 2.
In other words, you can't be bothered to back up your own claims and won't respond to evidence I provided. Got it. Your theorycrafting may make perfect sense to you but does not to me. As I said your theory can be lumped into the same "conspiracy theory" category just as easily as the ones you place in that category.
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1 hour ago, TrixxieTriss said:
To sum up. Credit sellers are using the GTN & player to player sales to accumulate their credits by selling flipped CM & crafted items. That’s how they can offer such cheap credits. It is impossible to generate the those amounts of credits any other way. They also probably still have a treasure trove of free CM items they got from a cartel market dupe that happened 24-36 months ago (which BioWare kept suppressed for good reason).
I don't understand how you obtained intimate knowledge about how credit sellers obtain their credits and operate their business. If you want to link to your previous posts where you provide info on how you learned about credit seller business model that is fine with me. No need to repost. I mean seriously, the credits have to come from somewhere. You seem to think it's the credit sellers that are dominating the GTN and all they do is watch the GTN day and night to buy items that are low and repost them for higher prices.
1 hour ago, TrixxieTriss said:People don’t seem to realise there were so many excess credits generated during the 5.x-6.x period of the game. That’s where the excess credits came from & with the games best credit sink (GTN) not working properly & another one completely removed (amplifiers), those credits aren’t leaving the game like they used to, they are just being moved around which devalues them more.
Again, how do you know this? I was around for all of 5.x-6.x. Specifics please. BioWare removed the credit rewards from conquest quite a while ago.
In any event, you ignored my previous fact based observations as to the significant cost increase to purchase from credit sellers since mid-March and how that could be a big contributor to the drop in prices for the game's trade economy. I didn't ask you to explain the credit seller business model. I asked you: "What is your explanation for why the cost of credits has increased so much since mid March? Why does it seem like a conspiracy theory to think that because credit sellers have increased the cost of credits that players that buy from credit sellers have not been buying as much, reducing credit supply and thus without as many credits in the economy we've seen a corresponding drop in prices of the trade economy?"
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I can't log into Star Forge. Server shows as up but when I try to access it I get error message "You have been logged out due to inactivity..." I can log into Satele Shan without any problem.
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2 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:
This is just false. Please stop spreading conspiracy theories.
As far as I'm concerned this theory has just as much credibility as any you've offered. What the in-game credit economy debate has lacked is good data. We know BioWare has the data but of course does not share it with players. Here are the credit selling prices I observed and recorded from February thru April. I did not see any credit sellers advertising from mid-March until April 9. I concluded that credit sellers must have lost a bunch of their credits and so increased their sale rate. What is your explanation for why the cost of credits has increased so much since mid March? Why does it seem like a conspiracy theory to think that because credit sellers have increased the cost of credits that players that buy from credit sellers have not been buying as much, reducing credit supply and thus without as many credits in the economy we've seen a corresponding drop in prices of the trade economy?
Date Server Dollars Credits 2/8/2023 Satele Shan $1.60 1,000,000,000 2/12/2023 Satele Shan $1.60 1,000,000,000 2/15/2023 Star Forge $1.30 1,000,000,000 2/16/2023 Satele Shan $1.30 1,000,000,000 2/19/2023 Satele Shan $1.30 1,000,000,000 3/4/2023 Satele Shan $1.30 1,000,000,000 3/8/2023 Satele Shan $1.30 1,000,000,000 3/14/2023 Satele Shan $2.29 1,000,000,000 3/16/2023 Satele Shan $3.49 1,000,000,000 4/9/2023 Satele Shan $9.90 1,000,000,000 4/24/2023 Star Forge $7.99 1,000,000,000 4/25/2023 Satele Shan $7.99 1,000,000,000 4/27/2023 Satele Shan $7.99 1,000,000,000 -
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4 minutes ago, supertimtaf said:
Tbh, hoping for RP servers is silly at this point. Apart from WoW who's still outdated on this, no one does this anymore. However, there *should be* some tools to help peoples search for RP indeed. Thinking of another specific MMO that used a specific "RP tag" system, where something was displayed alongside your name (or changing your name color, maybe ?). Furthermore, the ability to do a /who and find said peoples with RP tags would help immensely more rather than having a separate rp server or rp instance, which would just isolate you all even more from the rest of the community.
The goal is to make RP easier to find, not to enclose it off completely into another bubble. We saw how well that worked with the PvP instance system. Let's *not* do that again.I'm honestly not expecting any changes on the RP front. We disagree on viability of RP instances (I don't think comparison to PvP instances is applicable) and I only brought it up because I think moving the game's servers to AWS opens that up as a possibility again. I certainly did not say anything about getting an actual RP server again as that was jedimasterjac who wanted a server to be designated for RP. But as I said, I expect BioWare's view on RP and assigning any resources in support of RP enhancement hasn't changed in 7 years. RP'ers got two emotes since 2016 and I think that has been it. I'm not seeing anything that makes me believe BioWare is even thinking about enhancing RP features of SWTOR. As it is BioWare has enough challenges just trying to add new content to the game.
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4 hours ago, jedimasterjac said:
It’s already difficult for newer or incoming players to know how/where to find RP, and further introducing more servers runs the risk of continuing to dilute the community and make it more niche if designations aren’t given for players interested in RP to know to concentrate.
Eric Musco addressed this in 2016. See my signature. I think you're hoping for a different answer but I expect the answer from 7 years ago hasn't changed. Would certainly be nice if things can change with the transition to AWS and possibility of RP instances.
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This just happened to me this morning. I started the SWTOR launcher (not Steam version) and it opened then closed after just a second or two. It repeated this several times before it finally stopped.
Core: Ver. 2.1.0, Lib: v1.0.0.0 is what the settings button on my launcher currently shows.
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19 minutes ago, microstyles said:
Bioware is planning a lot of changes that make trading with credits more costly and annoying. The biggest risk to these changes is players switching to a barter economy to avoid losing value. The item fees are intended to prevent this.
To be clear, in a barter trade only items are exchanged, not credits. So if Player A wants to trade 5 Ultimate Cartel Packs to Player B for an armor set or some other item how does that adversely impact the credit economy when no credits are exchanged? I honestly do not foresee much of a threat that barter trades will increase so much as to cause the GTN to become an insignificant marketplace just because people want to avoid the GTN tax. The chief reason players are avoiding the GTN tax at present is because they want to sell items for more than 1 billion credits per transaction and the GTN won't allow it, not because they are trying to "avoid losing value."
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1 hour ago, wombatjake said:
If I pay real money, which btw now comes with a real tax in my state, to buy something off the cartel market to sell in the GTN, or trade, for example, those credits earned are bought with real life money. It's a half step away from directly buying credits. EA is stealing our real life money with these taxes.
It has been this way since the Cartel Market was added to the game in 2012. The GTN has always assessed a fee for selling items, both in-game and cartel market. Why is this a concern now? Anytime someone purchases cartel coins using real money they are purchasing the right to acquire what EA refers to as "entitlements" (refer to EA Terms of Service section 3). When a player uses cartel coins (EA Virtual Currency) to acquire said entitlements (a.k.a. cartel market items) that is a second transaction. No "tax" is levied. If you choose to use the purchased entitlements on your own account for your own characters no additional "tax" is levied. However if you choose to sell the entitlement to other players for in-game credits then you are attempting to engage in a third transaction and EA/BioWare has chosen to assess a fee as a part of allowing this third transaction to occur between players.
1 hour ago, wombatjake said:Gold sellers, as we can clearly see in chat and around the internet, have not stopped farming SWTOR or advertising. The in game taxation doesn't prevent other expoits people may pull either. And the taxes wont ever be high enough to stop a scammer who cheats people via in game mail or trade, because obviously a 500 million dollar item FOR FREE from scamming someone will numb the pain of ANY tax, because it is pure profit. So there is literally no benefit to any one. Even EA so this makes no sense lol.
I don't get what you are saying here. You seem to be conflating "taxation" with credit exploits. Additionally you seem to be applying all the principles of a real world economy and governmental taxation systems with a virtual economy. While there are many similarities between real world and virtual economies they are not the same. BioWare is not a government that needs taxes from in-game credits to operate like a real world government does. BioWare needs real world money to operate its virtual economy. So any "taxes" in SWTOR's game economy are not the same as taxes a real world government assesses. Additionally it looks like BioWare refers to the in-game credits they deduct from GTN transactions, and in the future player-to-player transactions, as a fee (see recent post by BioWare dev regarding the studio's credit economy initiative).
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2 hours ago, JoeStramaglia said:
How do Item Transaction Fees work?
Some items initially will have a value associated with them, this is based on their average value on the GTN and some other conversions based on the current economy. Eventually, this will be completely driven by the GTN.
The primary reason we need to have items that have fees is to limit tax avoidance through the use of barter-only trades and prevent folks from moving off of credits entirely to facilitate transactions.
This is disappointing news to me though I'm somewhat hopeful that "some items" means cartel market items only. I do not understand what threat barter-only trades present to the Credit Economy Initiative for the credit economy since there are no credits being exchanged. By their very nature barter-only trades are more time consuming and difficult to set up and complete. Barter-only trades cannot be made by the GTN, unless item-for-item trading will be functionality added to GTN in the future. Maybe somebody can explain why they think adding credit fee for barter-only transactions makes sense.
P.S. I really enjoyed Joe Stramaglia's presentation in the 7.3 livestream. His extensive use of his hands during his presentation made me feel like he has a lot of passion about the work he is doing on SWTOR's credit economy.
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8 minutes ago, xxSHOONYxx said:
It's way beyond of what people like or don't like. You might not care about r4 nim, but they might promise and announce something you like, and when you ask about it years after when it never come on you are met with timeout bans and silence. This is far beyond an issue of "hard core players" and should be an issue of the entire player base, because the next promise they break and then silence will be something you like
I expect you don't like to be told that you're experiencing what is often referred to as an "emotional overreaction." I have these myself sometimes. Last time for me where SWTOR was concerned was when BioWare pushed back the announced release date for 7.0 from mid December 2021 to mid February 2022. I had renewed my subscription with the expectation that LoTS would release in December because in November 2021 BioWare had committed to an actual release date in December. Then three weeks later after the 7.0 announcement BioWare decided they couldn't make the December date and pushed the 7.0 release to February 2022. I let my subscription lapse in January and didn't renew again for 4 months, well past the 7.0 launch date. I didn't appreciate the bait-and-switch and I made sure BioWare lost more subscription revenue from me than they got from changing 7.0 launch date with such short notice. You know the adage "actions speak louder than words" right? Where SWTOR is concerned players have two impactful choices to make: 1) to play or not play SWTOR and 2) to pay or not pay to play SWTOR. I have spoken.
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20 minutes ago, Malornaros said:
Right now I'm just wondering when the end of development of new content on SWTOR will be announced. When you compare it to other MMOs like TESO, released only 3 years later, the difference is so striking...
Many people have been wondering about and/or predicting the demise of SWTOR since 2012. Nothing new here as 10+ years later it's a rather large crowd.
It is unfortunate that, to my knowledge, BioWare has said nothing about R-4 Anomaly Master Mode missing its "early 2022" release time frame. At this point my guess is BioWare just doesn't want to come out and say that the R-4 operation won't be getting a master mode after all. I watched the stream yesterday but I generally ignore the chat because I'm paying attention to the stream itself and Twich chat tends to have a fair amount of what I would consider to be spam. I've found the drama regarding censoring of R-4 MM questions eyebrow raising. My impression is the people that were asking about R-4 MM in chat were tolerated at first but then whoever was monitoring and moderating the stream's chat decided they were taking up too much chat bandwidth and started to ban. I get some of these people are passionate and BioWare's efforts to block R-4 MM inquiries in chat resulted in their "fighting back" against the censorship. Since I'm not invested in MM ops it's not a big deal to me but I understand it's a big deal to players that are passionate about high difficulty operations. I just look at BioWare's actions as well as words (or lack thereof) and this is what I see.
- Ranked PvP removal
- BioWare will no longer develop 16 player operations
- Still no master mode for R-4 Anomaly
- significant nerfing of veteran flashpoints and story mode operations in 7.0
My interpretation of these actions: BioWare is moving more focus to support of SWTOR's "casual player" segment and less support for "hard core" player segment.
Sure, one can express outrage over BioWare's failure to add announced R-4 master mode more than a year after 7.0 launch. I just feel that if one considers the broad view of the changes BioWare has made in 7.0 it seems pretty clear that BioWare is moving in a direction that most "hard core" players will not appreciate. Fight against it all you want but BioWare didn't bow to pressure for ranked PvP and I expect they're not going to bow to pressure from operations players either.
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11 hours ago, Lord-Xander said:
I just bought a brand new gaming PC to upgrade my old one from 2012. I was having lagging issues so I decided to upgrade. Lo and behold, after purchasing a new gaming PC running windows 10 pro
Congrats! I do think it's strange that you purchased a new PC with Windows 10 instead of Windows 11 though.
11 hours ago, Lord-Xander said:I shouldn't have to be a tech expert to play a game online! This should be as easy as plug and play.
That is not how PC gaming works. I think most of the time it is as simple as install the game on your PC and it works. Sometimes it doesn't though and if your requirement is for games to always work on the platform they are played on the closest you'll get to that is playing games on a console like Xbox or Playstation. PC gaming isn't for you.
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3 hours ago, sithBracer said:
Literally the post I replied to, learn to read.
Classic pot calling the kettle black. SMH
4 hours ago, sithBracer said:In the future they want to add a progressive tax, which means the more you sell something for the higher the tax becomes. So for example the tax on the first 10M is 5%, the next 50M is 10% and anything about that is 20%. If I want to sell something fo 100M, that means anything over 60M is going to be taxed at 20%. So the answer is to simply trade for 10M ten times (or 50M 2 times if I dont mind the extra 5%).
@CrazyScruffy already explained it to you. Basically your idea how this progressive tax will function does not match ours. I think your idea of how the progressive tax will function is too complicated but I guess we have to wait for BioWare to explain how the progressive tax will work in detail. Using your made up numbers (sort of) this is how I think it will work.
10M at 5% - any GTN items posted for 10 million credits or less will be taxed at 5%, e.g. 5 million credits sale will only send 4.75 million credits to the seller (not accounting for the deposit).
50M at 10% - any GTN items posted >10 million credits but less than or equal to 50 million credits will have the entire sale price taxed at 10%, e.g. 25 million credits sale will only send 22.5 million credits to the seller (not accounting for the deposit).
>50M at 20% - any GTN items posted > 50 million credits will have the entire sale price taxied at 20%, e.g. 100 million credits sale will only send 80 million credits to the seller (not accounting for the deposit).
Secure Trade (I think this means player-to-player ), COD, and Mail would have the entire transaction taxed at the highest rate on the GTN which for your numbers would be 20%. So if you initiate player-to-player trade for 1M 10 times or 10M 1 time the seller will be taxed at 20% of the entire amount each time, netting the seller 8M credits either way. However if you listed the item for 10M on the GTN you would only be taxed at the 10% rate and net 9M credits (not accounting for the deposit), 1M credits more than you would have received via player-to-player trade, thus achieving BioWare's goal to make the GTN the best place to conduct transactions.
If the future progressive tax for the GTN works how I think it will (TBD) then hopefully you can see that using player-to-player and COD mails to try and lower taxation rate would be an exercise in futility.
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21 minutes ago, sithBracer said:
If your goal is to get people to use GTN I would say don't implement the progressive tax as it will drive people to trade and pay in installments. So instead of gettin 1B credits in one trade, I would get it in 5 trades to avoid the progressive tax. I'm not a very smart person and if I can figure this out, I am sure the traders will as well.
Which part of the this Joe Stramaglia statement you quoted "the Transaction Fees implemented in Secure Trade, Mail, and COD are a flat tax meant to mirror the highest bracket in the GTN to encourage using the network" made you think you could trade with players and get a lower tax rate? Mr. Stramaglia specifically states Secure Trade, Mail, and COD will use the highest bracket on the GTN. So it's not possible to get a lower tax rate than the GTN when trading between players.
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8 hours ago, codydmaan said:
tax the items in a trade window individualy.
Example people now only trade in cartel packs because the credit inflation is so high.
Tax the amount per item in relation to their last traded value on the gtn.
I strongly object to this idea of taxing player-to-player non-credit transactions based on whatever perceived credit value the item(s) have. This is the credit economy initiative, not the barter economy initiative. I would not want to see scenarios like a generous player in an ops group getting taxed because they traded a stim and/or medpack at no charge to another ops group member that did not have one. If the ops group player sells the stim to the other ops group member then sure, tax the credits in the transaction. But if it's a "no credits exchanged" trade then no tax should be levied.
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SS just went down. kicked out of pvp and now have a lock out
in Satele Shan
Posted
Just waiting for BioWare to confirm unplanned outage of Satele Shan and give estimated time for return to service.