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.

During June 22nd’s community Q&A we got some interesting behind-the-scenes answers, and one of BioWare’s famous Soon™ replies to a question often seen on the forums these days. Here is the community response thread on the official forums, where the community responses are taken from.

Yesterday, BioWare posted a community blog article detailing some of the behind-the-scenes plans and goals for Team Ranked Warzones, which will hopefully reach live servers when Game Update 1.3 hits. You can check out the article here.

Here’s one of the most important bits of the article:

Before Season One begins with official rankings, we intend to rank and post the players and guilds with top Pre-Season ratings. Season One will begin with completely new ratings. Additionally, we do intend to have a Solo Queue Ranked Warzone option in the future.

We will not be pushing Team Ranked Warzones to the live game until we have significant PTS testing of the feature. Fortunately, those of you on the Public Test Server can now queue up for Team Ranked Warzones and test this feature out now. Be sure to submit any feedback to our PTS forum here.

Check out the community response to this community blog here, and keep reading to find out some responses straight from the community!

With Game Update 1.3 just over the horizon, Bioware gives us a sneak peak and a guide into what to expect from the Group Finder tool.

Group Finder and Operations
We don’t just limit the Group Finder to Flashpoints. We also allow players to attempt to put together Operation groups with the tool. At the outset this is going to be limited to the 8-Man ‘Story Mode’ Operations because if balanced right, most Hard Mode and Nightmare Mode Operations should be far too challenging for a random pick-up group to complete. We’re open to your feedback, however, and if there is enough demand for it we may reconsider.

We also allow players to sign up for ‘planetary destinations’. This allows players to queue up in order to try to conquer Heroic Missions or other challenges on a specific planet. We felt that this was important because our leveling content has a lot of group content to be done. Nearly every planet has a World Boss as well as a variety of Heroic Group Missions to be done, and we know we have a large population who enjoys doing them. The Group Finder should make it much easier for them to find each other.

If you want to read the full guide please follow this link.

Yesterday, a community news blog was released with some important details about the upcoming SWTOR server transfers. The community has been these awaiting details for quite some time now, and some very good information was revealed in this update.

Originally posted by GeorgZoeller (Source)

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Hi everyone,

Massively Multiplayer Online games are built around living, breathing worlds that are always evolving, and Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is no different. In our upcoming Game Update 1.2, we’ll be introducing a wide assortment of new features and content, while also introducing a number of improvements and changes to the in-game economy.

As we work to create a more player-driven economy, you can expect significant improvements to Crew skills, and an extension of Crew skill gameplay, such as item creation and research, into the Elder-Game content. You’ll also see new items brought into the game, including new schematics, Legacy items, a new tier of Player vs Player and Player vs Environment weapons and armor, Legacy items, new schematics, and the ability to extract base-mods from purple items, as well as many other changes and improvements.

For the first week we got a fantastic amount of new information on what’s to come in the near future including Medium and Heavy Social Armor. Dual specs is in the works and coming soon and with update 1.2, we’ll see the old “match to chest” feature everyone loved in beta. There are many other updates on SWTOR future. Keep reading after the break for the full breadth of the Q&A.

Hi everyone; I wanted to give you all an update on the ability delay situation.

Thanks to constructive feedback from the community, including some great videos, we were able to identify an issue that could cause abilities on global cooldown to appear available to the player, resulting in unresponsive/ignored player input. A fix for the issue is currently scheduled to go to the public test server with our next update.

Additionally, we have located an issue that would cause player input for certain instant abilities to fail in frantic combat situations, resulting in unpredictable and frustrating gameplay issues for the affected player. A fix for the issue is currently scheduled to go to the public test server with our next update.

Finally, our engineers have identified an issue introducing a significant delay between player input and ability execution in certain game situations, most notably (but not limited to) fast paced PvP. The magnitude of the delay varies with a number of factors, including processor hardware, but can, especially on dual core CPUs, result in a very perceivable reduction in game responsiveness. We are in the later stages of testing a fix for the problem and hope to be able to roll it out to the servers very soon.

We’re still investigating a number of additional issues, along with some usability and quality of life improvements for responsiveness regarding player input, but the above mentioned developments should provide a very measurable improvement in combat responsiveness.

Thanks again for your patience and support and we hope to see you on the public test server to help us validate these improvements before pushing them to the live servers.

Georg Zoeller
Principal Lead Combat Designer

Originally posted by Gabe Amatangelo (Source)

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Fellow PvPers, thank you for taking on the challenge of player vs player combat in The Old Republic!

In the first week after launch there were over a million Warzone matches played, with nearly half of all players participating in Warzones. Bad news for Republic players, though – the Empire currently leads overall, having won 53% of all Alderaan Civil War and Voidstar matches (across all servers). Huttball has been played the most, accounting for 39% of all matches – and yes, we’ll be adding a new same faction vs. same faction enabled Warzone in the future.

We are all really excited at the tremendous volume of participation we’ve seen in PvP thus far. Your interest and demand dictates what we’ll be delivering in the near future. I wanted to give you some insight into where we are with PvP development and where we are going.

First and foremost here is what we are addressing as a top priority:

Keep reading to find out what Gabe has to say regarding the future of level 50 pvp, new warzones and the completion of Ilum.

Originally posted by James Ohlen (Source)

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In my last two posts, I talked about how we will be adding new game systems and content in future patches. I also mentioned that we will be continuing to put effort toward bug fixing, balance changes and exploit proofing. But I didn’t give too much information on what we’re doing in that regard. So here are some more details on the topic.

Almost every week we will be releasing a new patch. These weekly patches are almost entirely focused on bug fixes, minor balance changes and fixing any exploits in the game. These issues are the highest priority items at the studio. They are reviewed by senior leadership on a daily basis. Bug fixes usually take longer than a week to get into the game because we need to fix the issue and then test the fix. Some bugs take longer than that because of the complexity of the issue.

There are issues that we will fix immediately. These are rare and not every issue can be fixed in this manner. We usually reserve these “emergency fixes” for bugs that are stopping players from playing the game or to exploits that could unbalance the entire game if not corrected.

Any game as big and as complex as The Old Republic will have bugs. We’re working as hard as we can to find, fix, test and patch the game to eliminate as many of them as possible.

James Ohlen
Game Director

James Ohlen wrote a new Community Blog entry today that mentions, like he did previously, that they are already working on new content. Today he tells us that a new flashpoint is already in the works and will be released next month! That’s some pretty quick work.

Next month we’re going to be releasing a new Flashpoint and an expanded Operation. The new Flashpoint involves a plague that could have significant repercussions across the galaxy. It takes place on a brand new world and involves some pretty epic battles. I can’t go into much detail, but be prepared for something different. The expanded Operation takes the existing Karagga’s palace scenario and more than triples it in size. It includes three new boss monsters and some pretty epic set pieces. You won’t believe the last boss, so we’ve provided an image as a tease.

It also appears that the Operation is expanding from one boss to four? And most people aren’t even level 50 yet! The picture above is a sneak peak at the last boss.