Here is this week’s Q&A Community Response, where we take some of last Friday’s questions and corresponding answers, and provide some of the feedback straight from the community. Make sure and check out the full Q&A posts for all of the questions, because we’re only going to be covering some of the highlights.
Last Friday’s Q&A, which can be found here, surprisingly, only consisted of five questions. Nonetheless, a couple of the questions generated some interesting community feedback, including one about future races perhaps coming to SWTOR, and one about Voidstar. Keep reading to find out more, and make sure and check out the complete community thread where this feedback is taken from.
First up, the subject of Voidstar tie-breakers:
Nyrdbyrd: “People are always disappointed when they lose the tie breaker in a Voidstar match, as though it was incorrectly judged. Any chance you could clarify the tiebreaker rules for us?”
Rob Hinkle (Senior PvP Designer): “Excellent question! We’ve actually gone through a series of adjustments to improve this very system. As of 1.3, here is how a winner is determined in Voidstar: There are 6 checkpoints inside the Warzone – the 3 sets of blast doors, the bridge in the reactor room, the forcefields in the cargo room, and the datacore itself. The team that gets the furthest wins the Warzone. If both teams get to the same checkpoint, then whichever team gets to that point the quickest wins.
When the Warzone figures out that one team has already won the match (since they are the 2nd team on the attack and have exceeded their opponents’ progress, or have gotten to the same spot faster), the match will end immediately instead of playing out the rest of the game to a known ending.
Unrelated to the tiebreaker changes (but also exciting), we’ve made a change to the Hangar inside Voidstar to help prevent stalemates inside the first room. We’ve added a broken fence down a portion of the middle of the room, which obstructs movement but not vision. The intended result is that the defenders have to commit to defend one side or the other, and can’t float between both doors quite so easily.”
This is an interesting answer that doesn’t quite seem to hit on the original question until the last paragraph. A few players responded quite negatively to this response, stating that the question was side-stepped:
“It’s very frustrating to see the confusion of voidstar tie breakers completely ignored. He just started talking about something else entirely and didn’t mention anything about what happens when neither team makes it past the first door.”
Another player responded with this:
“I think he addressed it by mentioning this: ‘Unrelated to the tiebreaker changes (but also exciting), we’ve made a change to the Hangar inside Voidstar to help prevent stalemates inside the first room. We’ve added a broken fence down a portion of the middle of the room, which obstructs movement but not vision. The intended result is that the defenders have to commit to defend one side or the other, and can’t float between both doors quite so easily.’”
That’s my guess, too. BioWare has a habit of sometimes addressing concerns by tidying up the issue into a shiny package totally different from the original version– but with a careful re-reading, the actual answer will generally surface.
Next up, chat bubbles?
Lesai: “When it comes to planning content and game direction, how much of it is based on the developers’ plan for the game, and how much of it is based on community suggestion and feedback?”
Daniel Erickson (Lead Game Designer): “As we come to the end of our big must-have features (like Group Finder), updates are driven more and more by the community. Expect to see far more of the smaller quality of life requested features (color matching for companions, chat bubbles, etc.) start to get real traction under them in the near future.”
Chat bubbles! This should make some players very happy:
“Wonderful! Although I’d classify chat bubbles as a must-have feature myself, it’s great to see that they are coming in the near future. It may just bring many roleplayers that have left the game due to the lack of chat bubbles back.
Now, which patch can we expect them to be in? Is it reasonable to assume that we’ll see them in Game Update 1.4 if nothing unexpected happens?”
Good question, and it’s very good to see they rank highly on BioWare’s list of features next in line for implementation. SWTOR’s roleplaying community could use some love.
And finally, the addition of the Cathar race, and what this means for the future:
CelCawdro: “What are your long-term plans for implementing playable species? Are Cathar merely the first of semi-regular species additions?”
Daniel: “Like all of our ongoing content updates, we’ll release Cathar into the wild and see how they perform. If new species are clearly popular we’ll keep them coming!”
I… don’t think this was the answer most folks were hoping for. Here is one player’s response:
“So am I to understand that if the Cathar don’t become popular then they will interpret it as races not being popular? Why wouldn’t they interpret it as Cathar not being popular? I don’t wanna be a friggin Cathar. I wanna be a wookie, or mon calamari, or rodian. But we won’t get the chance unless enough people go Cathar?”
Sure, the Cathar will most likely be popular anyway, but the addition of new races shouldn’t hinge on the popularity of one particular race. Every player will have different tastes, but the general consensus is– yes, players want additional races. One player said it pretty eloquently:
“Let me help, people want more races to play as. There, now you know what to do.”
Heck, players have wanted more races to choose from since the beginning. There have been multiple, long threads on the forums about which races players would like to see. Here is one such thread, with a very long and detailed summary. Yes, BioWare, people want more races. It’s Star Wars. It’s kind of a given at this point.
LET'S GET SOCIAL