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Bounty Hunter Class Trailer

Published by under Bounty Hunter, Class, video on Mar. 07. 2011.

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.

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Bounty Hunter Class Video

Published by under Bounty Hunter, video on Mar. 03. 2011.

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:


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Screenshots, Wallpapers and Pure Awesome

Published by under community news, Image Gallery on Mar. 03. 2011.

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.

Facebook image 1 - Concept Art Facebook image 2 - Zabrak Facebook image 3 - Warzone Fan Trooper Wallpaper

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Blaine Christine MeMe

Published by under humor on Feb. 28. 2011.

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.

Amidala source 1 Amidala source 2 Amidala source 3 Blaine source 1 Blaine source 2
Blaine final Blaine final 2 Gungan jar jar

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How can a guild best support their crafters in Star Wars The Old Republic, part two

Published by under SwtorCrafter on Feb. 25. 2011.

 

Swtorcrafter Bounty Hunter!

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.

Read on!

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Numbers Analysis – SWTOR vs Rift vs WoW

Published by under Editorial on Feb. 24. 2011.

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.

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Fan Made Run/Walk Animations Video Compilation

Published by under video on Feb. 23. 2011.

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.

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How can a guild best support their crafters in Star Wars The Old Republic MMO?

Published by under SwtorCrafter on Feb. 22. 2011.

 

Swtorcrafter Bounty Hunter!

(A topic suggested by my loyal blog reader Daelda, thanks!)

The question I want to pose to you today is:

How can a guild best support their crafters in SWTOR?

 

One of the things I absolutely hate to see in a guild group is a lack of optimization of equipment.  When I see guild groups in game and I mouse over their equipment and they are wearing shoddy, mismatched gear that is tiers below the optimization that I as a crafter know is available, it makes me sad.

It could be this way for many reasons, either they don’t know any better, or possibly their guild crafters are failing in gearing up the guild.  If it is the latter then possibly it stems from a lack of support from the people they need to be gearing up.

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Compilation of last week’s developer answers

Published by under news on Feb. 21. 2011.

Despite being a Fan Friday, this Friday update also brought us another Q&A with the developers section. Along with that, the developers have been very active on the forums lately and they have been answering various questions from the fans. Here’s a compilation of the most interesting Q&A from all of these sources.

Q: I would like to see an option to merchant sell all gray loot items in your inventory at once. Going a step further, if there was a way to mark items in your bag as you loot them so that when you sell them off everything that was marked is sold.

A: In TOR, you indeed have the option to command your faithful (or scornful) companion to make a trip to the nearest market to lighten your backpack and fatten your wallet by selling objects of purely monetary value.
Answered by: Georg Zöller, Principal Lead Combat Designer
Source

Q: I really hope they give us access to on-ship storage. Our personal vault should be there rather than some imaginary bank system for items that we access from everywhere in the universe.

A: Your ship’s cargo hold is, indeed, your bank.
Answered by: Damion Schubert, Lead Combat Designer
Source

Q: I hope Bioware has a Beta test just for PvP, I’m worried about balance…

A: Have no doubt, we aim to ensure every Advanced Class has at least one spec that has its place in competitive PvP. The PvP team is already diligently tuning classes based on testing results and will continue to do so as new functions come online. By functions, I mean things like enabling Smugglers in cover to be immune to ‘charge’ and ‘pull’ abilities.
Answered by: Gabe Amatangelo, Lead PvP Designer
Source

Q: Will armor be HP based? wich means you can loose your armor due to wear and tear?

A: Armor takes damage during gameplay, but still offers full benefits until such time that it is completely broken. Armor can be repaired for credits. No, we are not looking at permanently destroying items.
Answered by: Damion Schubert, Lead Combat Designer
Source

Q: In this game, we know the reasons why the Jedi hate the Sith so much. And most of us recognize that the Jedi are a pretty “good” organization. But what hasn’t been talked about a huge amount is why the Sith hate the Jedi. How do the Sith view the Jedi? Why do they think they would make better rulers? Do the Sith actually think that the Sith themselves are “evil”? Do they believe that Force has two sides, a dark side and a light?

A: Sith are evil.

The Sith philosophy is evil and encourages evil in its participants. We can get into endless philosophical discussions about whether anything is actually evil or actually good but if we are speaking from our modern, western view on the concept of evil then the Sith clearly qualify. They are encouraged to put the personal over the group, power over compassion and to judge everything’s worthiness to survive on its ability to fight for that survival. Mercy, sympathy, generosity, these are seen as weaknesses. Anger and rage are seen as strengths. These are not people most of us want to work with or have as neighbors.

That does not mean, however, that the Sith see themselves as evil.

In the Star Wars universe, followers of the Sith philosophy genuinely believe that these things we deem evil, are actually in the best interests of a society. They look at the disorder, corruption and infighting of the Republic and they scoff. “What those people lack,” an Imperial thinks, “is strong leadership.”

It’s equally important to remember that you don’t have to believe in any of this to play on the Empire’s side in The Old Republic. You can be the exception to the rule. You are merely making a choice to be someone who was born on that side of the fence. Or, in the case of the Bounty Hunter, someone who tends to work in that part of space. The light side Sith who works tirelessly to make his Empire a better place is a deeply compelling character.
Answered by: Daniel Erickson, Master of the Universe
Source
Editor Note: I highly recommend you go and read all of Daniel’s answer because, as always, he was very detailed in his explanation.

You can read the full Q&A from last Friday update by following this link

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Overview of Instance Mechanics in SWTOR

Published by under Falshpoint, Game Mechanics on Feb. 16. 2011.

Past two official Friday updates concentrated on the group content in the Old Republic. Bioware decided to call its small group content Flashpoints, but if you hear people saying instances or dungeons they are talking about the same thing. Here is all the information I could gather up about this game mechanic so you, our readers, can know what to expect.

We first were introduced to flashpoint content back in 2009 at E3 and Gamescom. The next big group content was revealed last year as a multiplayer demo that was played by Bioware staff (at E3) and fansite members at Pax. At Pax 2010 we also saw a video called “Mysteries of Knights of the Old Republic” showcasing a late game flashpoint/dungeon that hints at an old enemy – Darth Malak – known as the villain in the KOTOR game. With the addition of the two Friday updates solely dedicated to the flashpoint mechanic we now have enough information on what to expect from small group content in SWTOR.

Important Flashpoint Information

  • Maximum number of players that can enter is four (plus companions).
  • Flashpoints are repeatable.
  • Flashpoints are much more challenging than single-player missions, but they offer valuable loot and rewards.
  • There might be choices associated with a flashpoint (save the captain/kill the captain). When running multiple runs of a flashpoint it is still not 100% clear whether the last choice you made counts, or the first choice you made counts. This feature is being fine tuned in the game testing.
  • Based on your dialog choices and bonus objectives you perform, the flashpoint can change so that you get access to more bosses or more ways of beating the dungeon.
  • Types of enemies, AI and mob abilities are connected to the story the flashpoint is trying to tell.
  • You will be able to take companions into the flashpoint, which means that if your group has no healer you can have 4 healing companions to compensate.
  • There will be heroic versions of Flashpoints

Flashpoints that are known to be in the game so far

  • The Esseles – Republic Only, early level
  • The Black Talon – Empire Only, early level
  • Taral V – Republic Only, mid game, ~90 to 120mins for completion, Level 32+
  • Boarding Party – Empire Only, mid game
  • Directive 7 – Both, late game
  • (unofficial) Darth Revan’s Complex – higher level flashpoint

Important Links

Flashpoint gallery

Taral V The Esseles The Black Talon A Sith Inquisitor and Imperial Agent battle mutinous Droids, seeking the source of their mass malfun Sith Warrior launches himself at a group of ill-prepared Republic defenders
Directive 7 Boarding Party An elite Imperial strike team defends the Black Talon from a Republic assault.

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