This week’s Q&A tackles a ton of questions regarding patch 1.3. We’ve taken one question out regarding the upcoming LFG tool and Daniels reiteration of it being only server only right now.

Mallorik: What is your philosophy on cross server LFG tools? Are we getting a same server tool just to hold us over while you work on cross server tech or is this just a test to see if a same server tool will do the job?

Daniel: Although we’re certainly willing to entertain the idea of cross-server LFG tools if the need arises, it’s a last resort for us. We firmly believe for cooperative play it is important to have a community and social responsibility that you simply can’t have with players appearing and disappearing from your reality. Instead we are pushing hard on servers that are massive compared to the ones we launched with. Early tests show we’ll be able to raise the peak concurrent user cap above what it was at launch. Combining that with server transfers to enable players to move to these new servers and fill them to the brim, we should see some fantastic, vibrant communities develop where Group Finder will always be able to find someone for your content.

Read the rest of the Q&A over at SWTOR’s community blog.

In a recent Massively interview with Daniel Erickson, Erickson briefly discussed BioWare’s vision for the group finder tool and the company’s reasoning behind the same-server limitation.

This is what he said, according to Massively’s follow-up article:

When asked if the new group finder would be cross-server, Erickson replied that it would be single-server because “we are coming up on a huge move to servers with massively higher population caps than we have today.”

Now, this could mean a couple of things. Click “continue reading” to find out more.

As those in the United States get ready to take a break and head into a holiday weekend that kicks off the summer season, let’s also take a break from SWTOR to interject some interesting moments where Star Wars interjects itself into real life! The following story comes from JP Aerospace, an independent space program. They build rockets, airships, ion engines and high altitude balloon platforms. They conduct high altitude research as part of our Airship To Orbit (ATO) program.

Keep reading to find out more about their project.

On Tuesday, we received news that BioWare was bidding farewell to some of its members from the original SWTOR team. Here’s part of the announcement:

Originally posted by GregZeschuk (Source)

---

Hey folks, since you’re reading this you may likely have heard that we’ve done some restructuring here on the SWTOR team. Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality. Impacting people’s lives this way is always very hard, but we’re ensuring the affected people are treated with dignity, fairness and respect.

Development team layoffs aren’t exactly anything out of the ordinary for most MMOs, since it takes more people to development an MMO than to maintain it, but many SWTOR fans were surprised this time because of a statement made around the time the game launched.

Yesterday, BioWare released a video detailing some of the features being added to Game Update 1.3, which is being called Allies:

The video doesn’t contain either an estimated release date or any type of announcement regarding its arrival on the PTS. It is nice, however, to finally be able to view some of the in-game images of features in development, like the group finder UI and the server transfer window.

With update 1.3 looming over our heads, the biggest feature people are looking forward to is the LFG feature. In a recent interview conducted by Darth Hater we get the following quote:

DH: One of 1.3′s biggest features is the Looking For Group tool. Can you explain how it will work and what areas of the game players can use it (i.e. Flashpoints, Heroic Quests, Operations, etc.)? If not initially in 1.3, will a future release make it cross-server too?

Damion Schubert, Lead Systems Designer: At the launch of this feature (Game Update 1.3), we will not be doing cross-server flashpoints. There are a couple of reasons – first off, it’s a significant technical achievement, and we felt that pursuing it would not allow us to get the feature to you guys as quickly as it needs to happen. Secondly, most of the design team thinks that it’s not necessarily good for the community. When the odds are very low that you will never group with another player again, there is very little social pressure to not be a complete jerk to that person, which is not a particularly positive game experience. We may revisit this decision in the future if our metrics show that flashpoint queues are not firing enough, but in general, queue firing should be more about distribution of key roles (tank, healer, DPS) than about overall population.

For us, this is a big failure in the system. If Bioware’s main reason for not launching a full cross-server LFG system is technical, we can understand that since the systems needed are quiet complicated. However, Damion’s second reason, emphasized above, is a pretty ignorant of the genre as a whole. With SWTOR losing subscriptions and now after a round of layoffs, they need all the positive gameplay elements they can get.

Every so often, we’re going to be using this space to highlight some of the other awesome Star Wars: The Old Republic fan and community sites out there. This week, we’re showcasing a fantastic site brought to you by Dulfy, creator of Dulfy’s Healing Corner and Zoopercat, creator of Ask Mr. Robot: TOR Fashion!

TOR Fashion is a site dedicated to helping SWTOR players plan and pick out the perfect set of orange gear. Ever wanted to know what the various outfits look like when paired together? Now’s your chance. TOR Fashion contains over 191 unique armor sets and 2100 images, and it’s only been around for a couple weeks now. That means there’s a whole lot more to come.

Developers have been quiet on the SWTOR official forums these last couple of weeks. Besides the weekly scheduled Q&A sessions and a few augment questions that were addressed, BioWare’s Dev Tracker has remained fairly empty.

Players have been awaiting more details about Game Update 1.3, especially information regarding the two features that are considered extremely needed by most of the community– a group finder tool and server transfers. Simply put, many of SWTOR’s servers are becoming rather threadbare due to the absence of both features. Instead of being rewarded with a detailed blog post, video, or a new PTS update, the community has been left with a handful of vague “coming soon” and “in the process of” statements, along with a very noticeable lack of forum updates.

With game update 1.2 now in the past, the community is already looking forward to 1.3. IGN brings us a preview of the update along with an interview with James Ohlen. Here are a few highlights of that interview:

IGN: The group finder has been a requested feature since The Old Republic’s launch, though there seemed to be some initial resistance against the idea because it would disrupt the flow of exploration. Why is now the right time to implement it? And does it support cross-server play?

Daniel Erickson: In the early days post-launch we wanted players to be discovering the game for the first time and forming natural social groups. A huge wave of players come in all at once in the beginning and finding a group is never really a problem for the bulk of players. Now players have spread all across the leveling curve and the Legacy system is causing players to roll new characters like never before which means we need a simple, flexible system to put players together with other players in their level band. We still want to respect the communities that have developed on servers so it does not support cross-server play.

While I think many players would disagree with Daniel’s statement for waiting on a dungeon finder, it is a most welcome addition to the game. From my point of view, I couldn’t find one dungeon group easily while leveling up at launch. Hopefully this helps new and old players alike.

Read the rest of the interview over at IGN and watch the included video. One of the other major features of the game update is crafting and augment slots.

By now, we all are probably familiar with the rumors spreading mass amounts of doom and gloom about SWTOR across the MMORPG community. Practically every forum and review site has at least a handful of negative opinions regarding the game. The term “TOR-tanic” is often used, comparing SWTOR to both a legendary disaster and a sinking ship. And then there’s this article, and others like it that seem to support these disastrous claims.

As if all the sinking ship images aren’t enough, EA has to throw us this iceberg. Now folks out there are really spreading doom and gloom about SWTOR, and it’s difficult to even avoid it over on the official forums. And I know– you’re wondering why I’m wasting my time discussing the negativity here, where actual fans of the game want to read about cool stuff, and not leaky framework hulls and wildfire-filled articles. Sometimes, I think it’s important to embrace a portion of negativity– a bit of the storm– because it lets us look at our games objectively, and discover what really matters to us in an MMO.