f13.net

Don't know much about it yet, myself, but looks like a scavenger hunt sort of thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUsLhGnYV-U&feature=youtu.be

Will we be scavenging tonight?

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5024300#edit5024300

Apparently hasn't started just yet, but soon? Post-maintenance seems like a good guess.

Good guess but there's no maintenance tonight apparently.

Hit midnight server time and I don't see anything going on yet - does look like they mailed out the transfer rewards though.

EDIT: From my little mini-survey of zones as I logged on to collect my commendation boxes from the mail, it looks like pop numbers are still healthy/stable, after midnight server time and hundreds of people on the fleet, 150+ on Dromund Kaas, 50+ in other leveling zones, etc. Probably a good sign for numbers to start to go back up with F2P.

There's some fairly involved threads on sever pops that I check often.   The game is still getting slight server growth actually.   The F2P announcement will likely stunt that sometime soon though when subs run out.

World event is now active, starts by interacting with News Terminals around the fleet.

Dulfy page on the event:

http://dulfy.net/2012/08/13/swtor-live-event-chevin-grand-acquisitions-race-coverage/

WHOA is that a bowcaster reward!?

http://i.imgur.com/dc0sJ.jpg

 :drill:

Yeah, six days ago Mr. Never-Logs-In.  :awesome_for_real:

I can't control when the Skyrim expansions happen.  :why_so_serious:

Pretty disappointed that the speeder is a piece of junk.  Hopefully they'll add more rewards as the event goes on or something.

Also if you are planning to buy the pet, wait until the end of the event to do so because I've read there's a small chance you'll get one just in the course of opening some of the crates during questing.

how long does it last? and is it for all levels or just 50s?

So far I think the hardest area it sends you to is the Nar Shaddaa bonus area, which is low 30s I think.

Also if you just want a bowcaster for one of your classes (they're bind on legacy, so you finally have a thing that can move crystals back and forth across factions), just do the main questline involved with the thing, which nets you 40 tokens by itself; enough for one of the level 35 bowcasters.

Yeah one thing that isn't evident from Amaron's screenshot is that those bowcasters (which are all sniper rifles or blaster rifles in game rules terms) are all customizable, despite not having orange names.

They're actually "legendary" color which apparently means absolutely nothing since they have the same stats as purples would I believe.

It's the barrel mods, and they're better than purples (of the same level) looks like. 130 rating on the level 50 bowcasters, which is better than you can get with just crafting or daily tokens.

So apparently you can do 6 items as of the first day and another "unlocked" today.   That's the one you get from the lead quest that comes in the mail.   The quests are a bit buggy but they are just hints on where to go and you don't need them.

Of interest:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5035803#edit5035803

Ooh, that's cool, then.

if it's bind on legacy does that mean it's available for all your alts?

nvm I googled it :p

More info:  The event ends tuesday.

Also I only now realized but the tokens are tradeable.  You can do the mission on alts for 40 and just send them to your main.


Even better than that.  It means you can put in mods from raid drops and send them to alts.   Say the boss drops something nobody needs.  You can pull the armoring/mods/etc out and send them to your alt.

At a bit of a premium of course, since you are paying to extract the mods from a piece of gear twice. Still, handy.

Is it just me or are a couple of the missions really tedious in the "wait for every other fucker to do it first and hope you get to click the object before the next guy does" department?

Not just you.

At least with this set you can just chose to use the set since it's social armor.

A lot of these missions were very poorly planned out, especially in light of the server merges. You can group for most of them, but it's still a pain. The "sniffer droid" from A Lead was probably the worst; the entire instance of Dromund Kaas can only have a single droid out and active at once, when you have 200 people trying to do it. Plus it's possible to "steal" someone else's droid by repairing it at the midway point before they can, leading to them having to steal the next group's, and so on. It's a mess.

Or just wait a day or two since you can't 'fall behind' on this event, as long as you get it done before Tuesday.

Here's my question: if they can make this event scale to the character's level, why can't they do that with all the other instances?

I massively UNDERestimated the population. There are multipe instances of a lot of these planets. 2 200 person Coruscants right now, there were 4 50 person Nar Shaddaas (and that's just Republic people), etc.

Well part of that is the event in those zones.  But yea in general they are definitely getting growth lately.  That's why I still feel the F2P is rather crazy.

We had 6 Nar Shadda's, 2 Dromund Kass, and 2 Imperial fleets the other night, it was pretty packed.

Got one of everything (minus the lower level bowcasters) although I wouldn't have the mount if Sjofn didn't have a bunch of leftover tokens she didn't need.

Fugly frog pet is fugly, but it runs like a gorilla which makes it cuter somehow.

That pet was simply too ugly for me to bother.  They need to bring back the mini droid pet they had for a bit in beta.

I liked the event overall. There were a couple of pretty obnoxious hiccups (waiting for the droid race on Republic side was awful), but the idea of a scavenger hunt was pulled off well enough and I enjoyed myself. It definitely helped that my current character was in the 20s, so I was able to quest normally through Nar Shadda and run into the puzzles naturally.

Wasn't able to really get any useful rewards. The pet was super ugly, the mount was slow and expensive, and the bowcasters could only be equipped by a few classes. My Smuggler picked up a level 34 and 50 bowcaster that he can't use, which I plan to just pull the mods from at those levels. The weapons are bound to Legacy so maybe some day I'll find a use for them.

Hopefully when they're done with their F2P conversion and they have some revenue coming in, they can turn out these events a little faster and with more polish.

Not sure what you mean about waiting for the droid race Republic-side - Nar Shaddaa promenade is a shared zone?

I use the bowcasters on a few companions for now. I may pull the aim barrel for my commando, not sure.

It kills me that my WOOKIEE COMPANION cannot equip a bowcaster.  :heartbreak:

That said, I bought two, one for SOME aim-based rifle user (haven't decided who yet) and one sniper rifle version to toss on Zenith.

The quest was annoying either way you slice it, but I wasn't sure if Imperials got something different.

When I first approached the race console there were 10-20 people all trying to race each other to click the console for quest credit. I ended up just logging in at an off-hour with a much shorter line, but I still ended up having to deal with people trying to sneak in and click the console before me.

Yeah, Imps use the same console. I never saw a crowd around it after that first day it opened up, but I got into the habit pretty early of switching to smaller zone instances to have less competition for crates.

Funny enough, my server (Shadowlands) was pretty nice about it, people forming orderly queues for the quests and grouping up where possible.

One night we found some little level 20 person on Coruscant and escorted her through all the level 30 Nar Shaddaa stuff. Of course if I had remembered she wouldn't have a speeder before I offered...

Whatever, we totally made her night. TOTALLY WORTH IT. I think she was secretly disappointed we aren't roleplayers, though.

Then you could have walked to all the objectives!

I found the placement of voice over quests bizarre though.   Why have 3 decent VO quests at the start then end it with a freaking email?   I can only think they rushed it for some reason.   I would of been far happier if it started with an email and ended with normal quests.

I ended up buying 3 pets - two for Republic chars and 1 for an Imperial. It is fugly, but that's part of the charm, I think. SWtOR doesn't try and smash you over the head with the OMGKAWAIIDESU as much as WoW does, it feels closer in spirit to Star Wars because of that - creatures in that universe are pretty weird looking.

I also bought a L50 cunning bowcaster for my babby Agent but god knows when he'll ever get to use it.

I would totally have bought a Speeder instead of another pet if only it was Rank II or III. I thought it was a real shame they didn't give us alternatives. Mind you I'll be pretty bloody annoyed if they go and make it run at whichever rank you're trained in now. I didn't like the Tuskan Raider suit at all.

Good event overall, it felt like you could participate in it as much or as little as you wanted, the entire quest line took maybe 2 hours total on any given character.
Though whoever designed the fight with the Smuggler and his Boss level Shield Droid can go fuck themselves. :uhrr: