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Quick patch incoming plus extended maintenance on the 31st January

January 28, 2012 By 9 Comments

If you’ve played SWTOR over the past week you’ve probably heard some murmurs of discontent around the game’s performance, if not experiencing it yourself. Actually murmurs have been shouts in some quarters and there’s not doubt BioWare is listening as they’re bringing down the servers sometime Saturday night Australian / New Zealand time – once we have a confirmation of an exact time we’ll post it.

Additionally, there’s an extended weekly maintenance of eight hours or so:

Scheduled Maintenance

Date: Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Time: 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET)

All game servers and swtor.com will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than eight hours.

So that’s:

- 7pm on Tuesday 31st until 3am Wednesday 1st Feb AEDT
- 4pm to midnight AWST
- 9pm to 5am NZDT

So tonight don’t plan on any extended playing time in SWTOR and Tuesday is out too. Never fear though, we’ll have plenty of SWTOR info for your to trawl through, including a brand new podcast being recorded Sunday night.

Filed Under: News, Servers Tagged With:

SWTOR Game Time Cards in Australia

January 27, 2012 By 3 Comments

This probably isn’t news to some but we still see people ask regularly where to buy game time cards locally. Today I wandered into an EB Games store and spied some of the blighters in the wild:

(Click here for the full-size version)

$30 for 60-days is certainly within the expected price range, and if EB Games have them, then I expect other retailers do too, so post away in comments if you’ve spotted any!

Filed Under: News Tagged With:

Suggestion Box: Douchebaggery

January 27, 2012 By 8 Comments

Over on the SWTOR Gamers of Oceania Facebook page, David K. asked the question on whether people had noticed a migration of what can be loosely termed as ‘WoW Douchebaggery’ – incivility toward lower level players, slagging gear etc etc. I haven’t seen a lot of it myself on my server, but I’ve certainly had other people mention it.

So over to you: if you’ve played WoW or another MMO, how’s the social scene in SWTOR appearing to you so far? Is there just the odd idiot, a wider culture of poor behaviour or have you found it a bed of roses?

Also, anyone wanting to start lobbying for Douchebaggery to be included in the Oxford dictionary should feel free!

Filed Under: News, Suggestion Box Tagged With:

C2-N2: the gift that keeps on giving

January 25, 2012 By 7 Comments

I’d argue that one of the biggest cult figures of SWTOR is the ever loving, cushion stuffing droid called C2-N2. Whether you love him or hate him, he’s hard to ignore, and BioWare’s Lead Combat Designer, Georg Zoeller, has joined the fun with this post:

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you in response to your complaint about our product, the C2-N2 droid. We regret that you are experiencing difficulties with this award winning, state of the art household droid.

Sadly, we have to inform you, that the C2-N2 droid, and its Imperial counterpart, the 2V-R8 autonomous ship maintenance unit, are not rated for combat at this time.

Several regrettable incidents, including the loss of a full squad of SIS operatives (apparently triggered by a malfunctioning speech unit voicing its congratulations to the undercover team during a deep cover infiltration mission), have lead the Republic Technical Support Corps to revoke the combat certification from these units and forced us to replace the ‘advanced weapon and martial training ROM’ from the programming of the unit.

These facts have been clearly disclosed to customers at time of sale, as well as in the programmatic introductory conversation program voiced upon owner transfer.

For this reason, we cannot take responsibility for your problems.

We are however pleased to announce that future updates to the unit’s artificial intelligence core will dramatically increase the efficiency of it’s emergency medical protocol features – and add some other, more questionable features.

The C2 Droid Corporation is also pleased to announce that we have started investigations into a new line of droid casings and cores, aimed at improving the efficiency of the unit’s assembly and construction features. No official release date for this line of top end equipment has been determined at this point.

We thank you for your interest in our product.

The Management

C2-N2 – The only thing that crits is his voice in your earchannel!

Questionable features eh? I’m intrigued, how about you? Feel free to suggest a new feature for C2-N2 in comments. Have a read through the full thread on the SWTOR forums as there’s a bucket of laughs in there.

Filed Under: Humour, News Tagged With: ,

Oceanic Guild Spotlight: Not Steamboat

January 24, 2012 By 8 Comments

If you’d like your guild spotlighted, just use our contact form to let us know. Or if you like, respond to the questions shown below and send them in – we love to profile guilds and the work they’re doing. The only requirement is that you’re an active oceanic guild. Please be patient if you don’t hear back from us immediately – we will only be spotlighting a guild every week or so.

Name of guild

Not Steamboat

Guild website 

www.notsteamboat.com

History of your guild’s name

NSB has been around since 2006 and was originally a WOW guild in which we became popular through multiple oceanic firsts and world top 20 kills in our prime.

SWTOR has become the chosen platform for NSB’s next chapter and many of our old school elite are back.

The name itself came about when a bunch of friends were going out for Chinese food. Upon entering the restaurant the waiter asked Yumchat (NSB founding member) if they would like steamboat or ala carte. Yumchat then replied with “Ahhhhhhh…… Not Steamboat”, to which we then laughed and decided to make a guild around it.

Cool story bro, but what does it mean? I’m not sure, maybe we wanted to be different; too many of today’s guilds base their guild names on some cool word or corny catch phrase which are generally quite boring and forgettable.

What sort of guild do you intend on being?

• Not a family guild
• Hardcore PvE focused (3-5 days a week)
• Players held to high standards in terms of skill, commitment and determination
• Operations run in a highly organized and time-efficient manner
• Small focused guild that focuses on quality over quantity

NSB is a hardcore PvE focused guild and our average member age is 25. We aim to be one of the stand-out guilds in oceanic progression..

We have high standards of all our members in terms of skill/commitment/gear and have a historically high member retention rate.

People who have been part of NSB hold the tag with honor as they know it wasn’t easy to earn. The road ahead is harsh but full of achievement. Bonds will form and you will soon notice the strong sense of camaraderie we have which gives us strength and presence.

Why did you choose to be a part of the Empire? 

It suits the personality of most of our guild members. However we will most likely switch to republic for a change if the game allows it at some point as we would prefer the difficulties of an under represented faction.

You have one minute to convince someone they should be in your guild – what would you say to them?

Right now is probably the best time to join NSB. Once we fill our roster, openings in the guild will be scarce.
Due to game limitations (no server transfers or faction transfers) we are recruiting from a restricted player base which means we are currently happy to take on less experienced players and build them up to an NSB level if they show potential in their application.
Additional RL skills such as web design, programming and mod-design are also a bonus.

• We push each other forward
• We drive one another to perfection
• The only excuse for failure is “I f****d up”
• We strictly follow a ‘no drama’ policy, any form of sabotage to the guild or operation is an instant gkick.
• We laugh and life-grip one another off cliffs.
• Raid times are currently 8pm-12am, Wed/Thurs and Sun/Mon.

If your mindset is similar to ours, I encourage you to send in an application for an opportunity to play amongst some of the best players in the oceanic community.

What are your predictions for the first 6 months of the guild’s existence post-launch?

We have been going through a lot of selection and recruitment and optimizing our roster over the last month or so. This has involved kicking players, recruiting players and getting some of our established members to re-roll classes. While all this has been going on we have been doing some ad-hoc 8 man raiding and have just recently started 16-mans on the 19th of January. Our primary focus will be 16-mans as there is and always will be more prestige in completing the larger raids. Currently we are just taking it easy and gearing up.

We will hopefully see a patch (In March I hope) which will have challenging end-game content that isn’t instantly farmable.

Filed Under: Guilds, News Tagged With: ,

Something new to listen to when playing SWTOR

January 24, 2012 By 3 Comments

TOROZ Reader Kuuzon has given us a heads-up on a nice little piece of Star Wars remixing. Star Wars – Duel Of The Fates (The Noisy Freaks & Dead C∆T Bounce remix) takes a hefty step away from the classical orientation of John Williams’ music and it works pretty damn well.

Have a listen for yourself:

So what do you think? Can you see this in your raiding music arsenal?

Filed Under: Community, News Tagged With:

SWTOR named game of the year for disabled gamers

January 23, 2012 By 1 Comment

The folks over at AbleGamers have given SWTOR a massive thumbs up, naming it their 2011 Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year Award. Their bouquets are numerous:

This game performed strongly against most of our accessibility tests while still maintaining a fun environment for those who enjoy solo or group play. Perhaps one of the most unintentionally accessibility features turned out to be the addition of companions. These NPC characters which accompany the player through most of the game provide support to those who need it without forcing them to request help from other players. Companions are an integral part of the crafting game as all crafting and some resource gathering is actually done by the companions themselves allowing those who wish to be more social and less lethal to still participate in this cutting into game.

Some good points there, but there’s even more aspects given the nod of approval:

SWTOR also features many accessibility options such as full subtitles, queue-able actions, multiple action bars, area looting, auto looting, and built-in mouse sensitivity. Other built-in features such as automatically turning to face the monster you are killing, mini map colors being colorblind friendly, full subtitles, and the ability to control the entire game from the keyboard or with the mouse, only increase the reasons to herald this game as a success for game accessibility.

It’s not all champagne and roses, with AbleGamers giving some tips for further improvement, including  close captioning and adding the ability to modify the UI or the size of text displayed. Overall though, they’re mightily impressed and Bioware should be feeling pretty proud of the wraps their getting from a sometimes overlooked quarter.

We’d love to hear from any disabled gamers playing SWTOR on their thoughts of the game – are you finding it a superior experience accessibility-wise compared to other games?

Filed Under: News Tagged With: ,
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