Patch Notes

[Kageru]

As the only major issue is in l50 pvp, which I suspect a large majority of players haven't touched and don't care about, I expect their numbers are just fine.

That's not their major issue. The question is whether they can hold subscriptions when players reach the end of their character's leveling story (which could be quite a while for the alt enthusiasts).

[eldaec]

I agree that is an issue - and my own view is that they'll only fix it with a daytime soap approach to content generation. But it certainly isn't an issue for first month retention, which various posts on the last page seemed to suggest would be disasterous.

[Kitsune]

I logged in to check the pants textures, they're unchanged on my end.  But the AA made things less jaggy, so I guess that's something.

[Velorath]

Just to add my experience with Ilum pvp on Shien, I'd have to say that valor gain felt fairly comparable to Warzones.  Certainly my experience was far from the "all the Imps got free valor 60 today" crying going on in that one thread.  For context, Shien seems in the 60/40 ratio for population, favoring Imperials, but the Republic seems to have a pretty good number of healers which are pretty hard to isolate and bring down in unorganized world pvp groups.  As a result, kills weren't coming all that quickly.  Also, throughout most of the big fights, other people were capping nodes, meaning no side ever had the full bonus.

Once deminishing returns quickly kicked in, on average I was making 70 valor a kill, and after each skirmish, the losers would fall back and regroup which took more downtime.  I don't doubt there were servers where one side managed to spawn camp the enemy base and get some easy valor, but I'd be surprised if it were more than a small handful with massive pop imbalances.  People are just going to be using this as an excuse everytime they lose, regardless of whether or not it happened on my server, just like when I was playing a warzone earlier and people on the other team were complaining that they were fighting a premade group despite the fact that it was actually a completely random one.

[Samprimary]

I don't doubt there were servers where one side managed to spawn camp the enemy base and get some easy valor

Many many servers had spawn camping nightmares. And "some easy valor" is the understatement of the year. What just happened was, when you get right down to it, unimaginably bad.

Information from my friend: the top PVP guru in his guild, prior to patch 1.1, got to valor 65 and just stopped. It was a stupid grind and worse than any before. They looked at hours. The time it took to complete valor ranks 51-60 were about the same as 1-50. Being at valor 65 before 1.1 is absolute crazytown. Total poopsock territory. It represents an insane amount of time committed to continual PvP from launch onward, so as to allow an understanding of what Valor ranks represent — especially 50-60.

1.1 hit. People were grinding valor ranks flat-out from nothing up to 50+ in a matter of minutes. If your faction controlled all of Ilum you got a multiplier on Valor gained. And with the various spawn exploits you could gain ranks 51-60 in a matter of hours, not weeks. Rumormill / forums have it that there exist max valor rank players now and I would believe it. PVP broke and broke badly.

Worst part is that this was usually a one-sided deal, which (rightfully) aggravates. If my main had been a character of the appropriate imbalance steamroll faction for my server (99% ~EMPIRE ONLY~ SORRY REPUBLIC) and I had been playing today, I would have just been handing myself a free broken PvP ride to valor 60, borne on the corpses of the other faction which is, necessarily, denied this wonderful opportunity and instead get to have their necks stepped on by unescapable spawn camping in a grievous lagpit. And if I wasn't playing while this window was open, oops, too bad for you, that means it was just a benefit for people who were playing during the right window of terrible design.

I can honestly say (and this is divorced from the pit of fury that the forums have to be right now) that this is one of those times in MMO history where a rollback seems like a legitimately needed response, probably unavoidable. That the situation might be so bad that they will be forced to roll back valor. And there exists a chance that their system legitimately can't do that, in which case an entire faction just got dicked on every server, and the other side just got an impossibly huge free ride to valor heaven.

I already had some doubts with the pvp design in this game, but this kind of cinches it; there needs to be a bit of a shakeup. The system is broken somewhere and/or one or more very important people in very important positions can't handle their jobs!

[Velorath]

I've seen a lot of posts about people getting to 60 or 65 in a matter of hours, but very little to actually back that up and from my personal experience, it seems to me like there would have to be very extreme circumstances for that to be the case (huge pop imbalance so the campers could survive the enemy players and the turret, no stragglers capping nodes and lowering the bonus valor, and the people being camped would have to not just log off after the first few times they're spawn killed).  All I've seen so far is the one screenshot that people keep posting that shows one minute on one server.

[DraconianOne]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to be clear and let you all know that we’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary.

Source

[jakonovski]

The pvp clownshoes have pretty much buried everything else, but another issue is that AA doesn't seem to be working on (some or all?) AMD cards. The button does nothing on my 4890. Shadow performance wasn't fixed either, but I'm not sure if that ever was in the patch.

[Surlyboi]

Yeah, but the PvP QQs are just so tasty... 

[Kageru]

I think the outcome is less important than the perception. As part of their "great things coming!" patch they managed to burn a lot of good-will, lose credibility and inflame the issue of faction/PvP imbalance. Someone is getting caned over that far more than whether acceptable valor per hour gains were broken.

I'd love to see their subscription curve, though I realize we never will...

[ajax34i]

rollback

How many people at high level and PVP'ing in Illum on the exploiting side?
vs.
How many people NOT playing this game for PVP, or NOT in Illum, or on the losing side?

I'm not going to pull ratios out of my ass, but why should what I believe is the majority of uncaring players be inconvenienced by a rollback because of what happened in a high level battleground?  Keep your valor and congrats for the ill-gotten epeen and the equipment you can now get, big deal.  Bioware seem to have chosen to manually track and ban the exploiters individually, which is more work for them and a better outcome for the unaffected masses.

The official forums are full of rampant over-drama and lies; I noticed this in the discussion about Biochem.  The core of the issue, that the top medpack was too good and did NOT require biochem, allowing you to get it, perma use it, and drop the skill, was carefully omitted from all the rage posts.  When digging down to the issue, the Biochem nerf was very much needed, but if you just read the official forums, Bioware is out of its mind and behaving like clueless idiots.  And posters on the official forums expect everything to be coded instantly and without flaws:  "Bioware, why don't you add a whole new, neutral faction!  Yeah, by tomorrow.  It'll fix the Emp/Rep imbalance, I promise!  Why don't you do it?"

Stay away from the official forums.  They are worse than WoW's.  WoW just has trolls on the forums, and they know the realities of development speed and what's in the realm of possible.  SWTOR's forum posters don't live in the real world.

[apocrypha]

What ajax said ^^

If every. single. one. of those over-entitled, whiny, forum-humping bullshit merchants were to cancel their subs today over this problem - a problem that they're attempting to patch today and that they've said they intend to take action over - the game would be better off in every single way.

How long was Tol Barad broken for? Months? How many fucked up fixes did they try before they got it halfway decent? What was the effect on overall subs of people ragequitting because of it? Fuck all? Yeah I thought so.

[Zetor]

I think it was posted before, but the SWTOR forums are like a melting pot of the worst WOW trolls, DAOC/WAR VNboard psychos, SWG 'visionaries' and the generic 'lol internet' crowd. I don't envy their moderators.  

[Lucas]

Usual MMOG over-reaction. Yes, they made a mistake, as paying customers there is a right to complain but being so over-dramatic for a game is stupid, and anyone who complains like that is a stupid person, sorry.

I admit it, I'm not really a competitive person, so I probably don't get it why you should be angry because a portion of the playerbase got instantly ahead of you in a game. Probably my fault, ok.

Sure, developers would continue to make mistakes in other areas of the game, but this especially happens when MMOG stop being virtual worlds and become some e-sport shit where people feel the desperate need of being on top of an incredibly important (?) gaming ladder.

[apocrypha]

I think slicing got a stealth buff.

Can't prove it yet, but I'm noticing a dramatic increase in credits at the top levels.

Haven't noticed this myself, still getting about the same from the missions I've run this morning. Hard to tell without actually logging them though since the variation is significant.

Overall 1.1 is a bit of a mixed bag for me. I love the antialiasing, but my framerate has crashed badly, even if I turn AA off (GTX560ti).

I love that items now stack automatically when you put them in your bank etc.

I love the seperation of 50s into their own warzone bracket but the queue times do seem to have got a lot longer as a result.

I don't like the change to the abilities cooldown display, makes it almost impossible to tell when any ability with a cooldown longer than about 15s is available.

[Fabricated]

I have no idea what they did to the client on the performance end tbh. I'm getting better framerates than I did before even with AA on, RAM usage is down a bit (nevermind I had plenty to spare), and loadtimes are down a bit. Other people have gotten serious whacks to their FPS like apocrypha.

Graphic card related tweaks? I'm running an ass-old AMD 5770.

[disKret]

Since yesterday I experience a lot of splashscreens when running through imperial fleet station - sometimes 2 splashes in 3 sec run. Annoying as hell.

[Falconeer]

I admit it, I'm not really a competitive person, so I probably don't get it why you should be angry because a portion of the playerbase got instantly ahead of you in a game. Probably my fault, ok.

You don't even have to be competitive. It only takes for you to participate in a few PvP battles, Warfronts, Warzones, Battlegrounds, whatever you want to call it. As of now, if you are a Republic player you are already facing an usually unfair fight as the Empire players somehow managed, on average, to equip themselves much better than the Reps on most servers. They probably just played more, sure, and there's nothing unfair about it, but in randomly created battlegrounds, no matter your personal skill level what makes the difference is the equipment. Which means you are for the most part joining a battle you can't win or worse, a battle where you can't do anything other than watch your character being stunned and killed in a matter of seconds every time you leave the spawn point.

Now, of course, with time those differences would level themselves up, as everyone reaches the cap in both equipment and levels. But considering we are far from that cap (except for those who got there yesterday in an instant), and considering that the majority of players with awesome and gamewinninng pvp items were already mostly on one side, what happened yesterday only made that gap larger, WAY larger.

Before, as a Republic player, PvP was:

- join random Warzone: win 1 out 5. Some of them are balanced (but you lose, and eventually win one), lots of them are pure steamrolling.
- go to Ilum fishing for random loners. Given the difference in numbers and equipment it was very hard not to die a lot, but it was manageable if you played guerrilla. Also, getting your fair share of "tokens" towards the level cap and the best equipment was easy to do, although stupid and that's why they changed it, even with the population imbalance.

Regardless of all the losing, this was _mostly_ fair (although awarding more commendations to the winning team is by design only going to make the gap wider, but that cannot be helped). I didn't have a problem with that.

Now, as a Republic player, PvP is:

- join a random Warzone: lose constantly and get stomped all the time. It's like the winning faction was using tanks against your horses, and now they upgraded to battlemechs (the Rank 50 *edit: 60 Battlemaster gear) as the patch made the population imbalance even more important than it was before. Even more rewarding.
- Go to Ilum to try and make the daily and weekly quests necessary to try and get that golden super pvp items, and get stomped by a SEA of Imperial players, all wearing better equipment than you or simply being so many that you usually get stormed by 5 of them mere seconds after you started a solo fight.

Needless to say, a couple of days of this shit means less and less Republic players will expose themselves to it, so the gap keeps growing beyond proportions.

I don't think it's really about being competitive. It's just wanting to use one of the features the game offer and finding out it's rigged. It's like playing the PvE part of the game and find out that every day the mobs are harder and harder to kill until they destroy you every time you enter a dungeon. And then you find out it's like that by design: either you leveled faster than the mobs, which were poopsocking since they are automated, or sorry, now you have to face the hardest PvE ever.  And the only way to get out of that rut is to keep getting killed and stomped by that mobs cause eventually, even through that, you get a little XP which over a few months will get you to the same level cap the mobs reached in the first 10 days after launch.

Regardless of what you all people think of PvP, for many of us it's not about winning and losing. It's about having a chance. The current conditions, population imbalance above all and the way equipment is earned, are removing the chances.

Removing the unfairly earned valor from yesterday is a good starting point, but as per last patch, I can't see how a Republic player (same is true for Empire if your server has the opposite problem) will be able to set foot on Ilum for the next few months.

[Threash]

I don't doubt there were servers where one side managed to spawn camp the enemy base and get some easy valor

Many many servers had spawn camping nightmares. And "some easy valor" is the understatement of the year. What just happened was, when you get right down to it, unimaginably bad.

Information from my friend: the top PVP guru in his guild, prior to patch 1.1, got to valor 65 and just stopped. It was a stupid grind and worse than any before. They looked at hours. The time it took to complete valor ranks 51-60 were about the same as 1-50. Being at valor 65 before 1.1 is absolute crazytown. Total poopsock territory. It represents an insane amount of time committed to continual PvP from launch onward, so as to allow an understanding of what Valor ranks represent — especially 50-60.

1.1 hit. People were grinding valor ranks flat-out from nothing up to 50+ in a matter of minutes. If your faction controlled all of Ilum you got a multiplier on Valor gained. And with the various spawn exploits you could gain ranks 51-60 in a matter of hours, not weeks. Rumormill / forums have it that there exist max valor rank players now and I would believe it. PVP broke and broke badly.

Worst part is that this was usually a one-sided deal, which (rightfully) aggravates. If my main had been a character of the appropriate imbalance steamroll faction for my server (99% ~EMPIRE ONLY~ SORRY REPUBLIC) and I had been playing today, I would have just been handing myself a free broken PvP ride to valor 60, borne on the corpses of the other faction which is, necessarily, denied this wonderful opportunity and instead get to have their necks stepped on by unescapable spawn camping in a grievous lagpit. And if I wasn't playing while this window was open, oops, too bad for you, that means it was just a benefit for people who were playing during the right window of terrible design.

I can honestly say (and this is divorced from the pit of fury that the forums have to be right now) that this is one of those times in MMO history where a rollback seems like a legitimately needed response, probably unavoidable. That the situation might be so bad that they will be forced to roll back valor. And there exists a chance that their system legitimately can't do that, in which case an entire faction just got dicked on every server, and the other side just got an impossibly huge free ride to valor heaven.

I already had some doubts with the pvp design in this game, but this kind of cinches it; there needs to be a bit of a shakeup. The system is broken somewhere and/or one or more very important people in very important positions can't handle their jobs!

Pure bs, I'm sure some people cross faction exploited to get a lot of valor but it is nowhere near the levels you claim and rollbacks are not even remotely necessary.   I spent about three hours in ilum pvping yesterday,  the valor gain while spawn camping the repubs was at best slightly higher than warzone grinding, and once diminishing returns got high it was less.  Most people didn't get jack shit because you needed to do dmg and your raid needed the killing blow for it to count.  Once the numbers got high enough to camp those turrets you might get one in five kills as long as there was repubs who didn't log out in disgust.  The idea that  large groups of people were grinding  50+ levels in a few hours is ridiculous, I went from 27 to 30 in a couple hours.  What you are reading on the forums is all made up.

[apocrypha]

Good post Falconeer, and if 1/10th of the posts about it on the official forums were as well written and sane then I think the perception of people unaffected by the Ilum cock-up would be greatly improved.

It seems clear to me that BW are genuine about wanting PvP to me worthwhile in SWTOR. 1 month in it is in a far better state than PvP in WoW was for instance. Given that, and given that they've clearly stated that they're aware of and are monitoring the imbalance caused surely it's only reasonable to see what they do in response?

The main feeling coming from the official forum posters (and others, that Kotaku article, a couple of pvp/SWTOR blogs, etc) is that all the PvP'ers just assume that this situation is permanent and irrevocable, which strikes me as just overly pessimistic. That many of these people form an extremely vocal minority on the forums gives, IMO, too much weight to an issue that's only affecting a very small proportion of players currently.

Yes, it needs to be addressed. No, we don't know exactly what BW are going to do about it. No, the sky isn't falling and the legions of "OMG I'm unsubbing" responses seems like a gross overreaction.

[Mrbloodworth]

What you are reading on the forums is all made up.

If not intentionally incorrect. I have seen about 4 issues now that are completely fabricated on the OF, yet go on and are replicated on other sites. The JOY in trashing a game they supposedly like is shocking.

The main feeling coming from the official forum posters (and others, that Kotaku article, a couple of pvp/SWTOR blogs, etc)

Exactly.  

[eldaec]

There seem to be a lot of posts around about *other people* getting crazy valour, I've yet to see any primary evidence. I suspect spawn camping is being sustained more by republic tears than by actual rewards.

EA are in a bind though. they don't have any trusted voices who cam explain wtf is going on to the playerbase. They urgently need a Sanya figure. That Stephen Reid fellow seems to trying to take the role, but unfortunately he seems unable to call bullshit when told transparent nonsense by devs, and he guesses what is going on entirely too often.

[eldaec]

Also, given they don't know how to run a forum, it is probably about time they closed them down.

[jakonovski]

If there are any who have gained a lot of valor through this, I think they're laying low in hopes of avoiding the banhammer. I love the drama though.

[Mattemeo]

It's like playing the PvE part of the game and find out that every day the mobs are harder and harder to kill until they destroy you every time you enter a dungeon. And then you find out it's like that by design: either you leveled faster than the mobs, which were poopsocking since they are automated, or sorry, now you have to face the hardest PvE ever.  And the only way to get out of that rut is to keep getting killed and stomped by that mobs cause eventually, even through that, you get a little XP which over a few months will get you to the same level cap the mobs reached in the first 10 days after launch.

Setting aside the issue of broken PvP/faction imbalance, that's pretty much what levelling a Sentinel is like... 

[Sky]

- Much improved LOD handling; the ground tiles are now blurry beyond where the grass grows, and atmospheric effects get reduced in the distance too (dust haze on Tatooine for example).  

One could say they were degraded. I think the game took a step backward and I hate this trend of shitting up streamlining the graphics post-release. My JC hit Coruscant last night and there is a big statue surrounded by lights. I could watch the lights draw in about thirty feet in front of my in a hard plane (turn and a diagonal clipping line was visible).

For the love of religious icons, PUT IN A GODDAMNED SLIDER.

I get that some people are struggling with performance. SOME ARE NOT. Hell, make it a hidden ini setting (and comment the damned ini).

See, I can bitch about stuff, too!

On the pvp performance issue, I wonder how many are expecting to pvp with pve graphics settings. Another thing they need to poach from EQ2: import/export graphics profiles. Go to Ilum, load pvp graphics profile tweaked for pvp performance.

[Nebu]

1) Remove battlemaster gear from the game.

2) Give titles and unique mounts for pvp valor ranks.

3) Make appearance gear (orange) available for players at high pvp rank.

I'd be happy with this.  Alternatively, they could reset everyone's valor to zero and I'd be fine with it.  My main is valor rank 51 and I'd gladly start over to have a level playing field.

[Mrbloodworth]

RE: AA Bitching:

Hi folks,

Just in case you missed it, we added the following to the Known Issues thread earlier today:

• Anti-aliasing is currently disabled for ATI 6900 series graphics cards.
• Holograms will disappear during conversations if players modify their preferences to turn off bloom while anti-aliasing is on.

To give you all some more insight, the ATI issue is due to a severe graphical glitch and we are in discussions with ATI to resolve this. Thank you for your patience.

[Threash]

1) Remove battlemaster gear from the game.

2) Give titles and unique mounts for pvp valor ranks.

3) Make appearance gear (orange) available for players at high pvp rank.

I'd be happy with this.  Alternatively, they could reset everyone's valor to zero and I'd be fine with it.  My main is valor rank 51 and I'd gladly start over to have a level playing field.

How about they simply ban the insignificantly small number of people who exploited and leave the rest of us alone?

[Nebu]

How about they simply ban the insignificantly small number of people who exploited and leave the rest of us alone?

I'm not sure you can really call it an 'exploit' so much as players taking advantage of some TERRIBAD implementation.  Implementation compounded by horrible faction balance.

[Threash]

How about they simply ban the insignificantly small number of people who exploited and leave the rest of us alone?

I'm not sure you can really call it an 'exploit' so much as players taking advantage of some TERRIBAD implementation.  Implementation compounded by horrible faction balance.

No, anyone who shot up a huge amount of valor ranks did it by cross faction exploiting.  Camping repubs at the turrets was barely above warzone farming in returns.

[murdoc]

RE: AA Bitching:

Hi folks,

Just in case you missed it, we added the following to the Known Issues thread earlier today:

• Anti-aliasing is currently disabled for ATI 6900 series graphics cards.
• Holograms will disappear during conversations if players modify their preferences to turn off bloom while anti-aliasing is on.

To give you all some more insight, the ATI issue is due to a severe graphical glitch and we are in discussions with ATI to resolve this. Thank you for your patience.

ARGH.

[Mrbloodworth]

ATI.

[Nebu]

How about they simply ban the insignificantly small number of people who exploited and leave the rest of us alone?

1) I'd be happy if they reset all of their valor to 0 and took their pvp gear.  

2) It's a much larger number of players than you think.  When I went to Ilum on my server, the raid frames took 5 minutes to load for a guild member that joined in the fun.  Ilum was so overcrowded with Empire players that the lag caused horrible framerates.  I expect this was the same on other servers as well.  

There are a LOT of level 50 players on servers that had headstart.  Many of them have been playing alts because the endgame is terrible.  Events like this brought them out of the woodwork in droves.

[jakonovski]

ATI.

Naw, I don't buy that. 99% of all games work just fine with AMD cards. It's just a convenient excuse for sloppy coding. Doubly so here because the engine doesn't actually have any new technology in it.