During E3, Darth Hater hosted an interview with Daniel Erickson. Some questions on HK-51, the new companion droid coming sometime in the next year, were asked, and Erickson filled in some juicy details for us.

Here is one quote from the interview:

“HK-51 is actually part of the Legacy system. He is a very hard companion to get, and there is an incredible amount of work that you’ll have to do. I will say right now that if you do not have people on both sides of the war, you probably need to go roll somebody on the other side.”

The fact that HK-51 is part of the Legacy system isn’t too surprising. The fact that it will be very difficult to obtain him isn’t too surprising, either, especially given the nature of many of BioWare’s vanity pet requirements. But that last bit? Interesting information. It almost sounds like players will have to have characters on either side of the Empire/Republic coin in order to get HK-51. SWTOR is obviously a very alt-friendly game, but the community’s response to this is quite varied. Here’s the community feedback thread on it.

As more and more MMOs’ release, it is evident that World of Warcraft’s success has been an anomaly. Remember when SWTOR was strutted as the next “WoW killer?” But ultimately a large exodus occurred, and layoffs followed. Many have since begun questioning the success of any subscription based MMO to follow. If Bioware is struggling with a subscription model when they have the biggest IP you can attach to an MMO, what hope is there for any other MMO that follows the same model? Essentially, Bioware needs to convert to the Free-to-Play model if they want to increase their profit and player base.

Today we see the launch of Bioware’s official SWTOR podcast.

Hello everyone! My name is Eric Musco and I, along with Brooks Guthrie are happy to bring you episode one of the official Star Wars: The Old Republic podcast, “Rocket Boots”.

In this episode, we sit down with Daniel Erickson and Damion Schubert to talk about what we saw in Game Update 1.2 and what we can expect as we look forward to Game Update 1.3. Also, David Bass stops by to tell us about how things went at PAX East and some of our convention plans for the rest of the year. If you have any questions or comments about the show, feel free to let us know.

Thanks for listening!

For the full podcast, continue reading and check it out!

Star Wars: the Old Republic has two trade networks, The Galactic Trade Network (GTN) and The Hutt Trade Network (HTN). The former is a faction specific trading network, while the latter is a cross faction one that connects buyers and sellers throughout the galaxy. While the GTN is easily accessible at the faction Fleet, the HTN requires players to travel to Nar Shaddaa to access it.

Players can unlock an HTN terminal for all their characters’ ship by reaching Legacy Level 25 and paying 5 million credits. This has caused a lot of controversy, and many players on the forums are upset, because the legacy unlock is part of the Hutt Trade Network, which is rarely used. However, in an interview with Mos Eisley Radio, Lead Game Designer, Daniel Erickson revealed that very shortly the Hutts’ will buy out all the GTNs and convert them into neutral trading networks; creating one blanket economy between both factions. He added, “…with the legacy system players play on both sides and it doesn’t make since to artificially separate the economy.” With this change in mind, it stands to reason that the Galactic Market Kiosk for 5 million credits will be a worthwhile investment.

Daniel Erickson was recently interviewed by NOWGamer and the topic of server mergers and transfers came up. Here is a small clip of what they discussed. For the full article, follow the link below.

“One of the problems we’re running into right now is kind of a classic MMO problem, which is that our overall population of players has not changed, but our peak concurrent users has changed,” Erickson told NowGamer following last week’s 1.2 Legacy update.

“As the game goes on and people relax a little bit, not playing the game 7-8 hours a day, you see a lot less crowds especially in certain places. Right now we’ve got our character transfer stuff underway on this side. It hasn’t rolled out yet – it will soon, to allow people to move to servers that will be better to their liking, get communities together. Long term we actually have to look at servers as a whole. The nice part about it is we have doubled how many people we can put on each server since launch. The down side is that at launch, because people were upset at the long queues we aired on the side of opening up more space. What that has now done is separated our player-base into a larger group.”

Erickson said that current server merging would have resulted in large queues with the 1.2 update.

Source: SWTOR: BioWare Reponds To Criticism, Server Merges Still Possible

Originally posted by DanielErickson (Source)

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Hey folks,

There’s been a lot of discussion about the changes to the Warzone rewards system in Game Update 1.2 and the type of play style that it encourages. I wanted to help out a bit and point out a major change not all players may have noticed and share some of our plans.

First of all, rest assured we are keeping a close watch on the results of our reward changes to Warzones in 1.2 and we will continue to pull constant metrics to make sure they are going in the right direction as players get used to the new rules.

To refresh everyone’s memories, one of the most important aspects of the new changes is that your team’s performance inside the Warzone has a direct impact on a portion of the rewards you are given at the end of the Warzone. Even if your team is losing, the closer you can make the game the better your rewards will be – so don’t give up hope! Giving up and letting the other team ‘win faster’ is now the worst possible route you can take to rewards.

Secondly, one of the things we have already identified to fix is to reduce the minimum amount of medals a player must receive to gain any reward at all. Currently that value is three (3), and we are going to reduce that to only needing one (1) medal to gain rewards. This should make sure we cover that all important backfill player while still protecting against the freeloaders.

As we move forward, we will continue to meet and discuss other possible changes based on the feedback here on the Forums as well as the data coming in from the live servers. As always, we appreciate your comments and want to hear from you.

UPDATE: Keep reading for a follow up post from Daniel Erickson.

Originally posted in Community News (Source)

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Hey everybody,

It is with great reluctance that I have to announce Ranked Warzones are not going live with Game Update 1.2: Legacy. We had a fantastic run of testing on the Public Test Server and I can’t begin to thank the community enough for their tireless advocacy for this feature and the time people took to file bugs and voice their concerns.

After careful consideration, it is clear that to make Ranked Warzones the feature we all want it to be is going to take a bit more time. I apologize for any disappointment this may cause and ask for your patience as we work to make sure the Ranked Warzone Preseason launch is polished and fun. With Legacy, the new Warzone, Operation, and Flashpoint, as well as many other amazing features of Game Update 1.2 ready to go, we’re very excited for tomorrow’s additions.

In the future we’ll be rolling the Ranked Warzone Preseason out in phases, listening carefully to player feedback and making adjustments as we go. The first phase will be full team, eight-player queuing only and from there we’ll look at next steps as Preseason progresses. In the meantime we have provided an alternate purchase route for War Hero gear so you can start building your set while figuring out your teams.

Daniel Erickson
Lead Game Designer

Developers say things.  But sometimes they say things that make you stop and go, “WTF?!”  In recent interviews at the Guild Summit George Zoeller and Daniel Erickson said the following:

Georg Zoeller: (Source) We’re also hoping that by giving people access to the combat log, they actually get a better sense. Look at sithwarrior.com, for example. They say a lot of theories that are just plain wrong, and to be fair, how would you know better?

Daniel Erickson: (Source) They want to surface a huge amount of the information for the game. They want to be a place that you can trust the source, that they can feed stuff out so we have a standardization so people know where things are going there. I think the long term plan is sort of to be the one stop resource for all of your questions and anything that you actually want to know or need to find out how you’re going to figure out about The Old Republic.

There are some very interesting things you can take away from these quotes when looking at them together:

• Dev’s actively research and monitor player theory crafting of their game.
• They have plans to centralize the game community so players can come to them for game information.
• They are aware of respected sources having incorrect information and don’t always inform the player base.

Gamespy recently got a chance to talk to Daniel Erickson about a myriad of topics that include story elements, IP choices and dark side and light side choices. Here’s a quick blurb, but make sure you read the whole interview over at Gamespy.

GameSpy: When people are playing through, and I’m assuming you’re seeing a bunch of usage statistics at this point, are you seeing that people are sticking mostly to a light side path or a dark side path? Or are people mixing it up and going both ways?

Daniel Erickson: We see people mix it up a bit. People primarily settle down. You tend to see a little bit more experimentation in the first couple worlds. In fact, we have quests in there, the one on Hutta being probably the one people notice the most, but we have quests throughout the game, on the original worlds, that we call our “test and tempt” quests. Which are: Okay, if you’re going dark side, let’s see whether or not you can really do something brutally dark side. If you’re going light side, we’re going to keep throwing a few things at you to see what might break you off that. Are you still going to go light side if romance is dark side? Are you still going to go light side if there’s really good loot on the dark side? Are you still going to go light side if there’s something that sounds really fun on the dark side? It’s interesting to see, on both sides. We can pretty well guess, usually, if somebody is going one direction and then will stop, which quests will turn them.

Watch the New York Comic Con, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Q&A Panel with James Ohlen, Cory Butler, Daniel Erickson and Stephen Reid. Junkie Nation was there and we got a chance to listen for over an hour as the developers answered the questions from the fans. There was a whole range of questions from what they plan on doing about gold farmers and spammer to our very own Jason Dodge asking about what happens if you go Light Side as opposed to your character’s physical appearance when you go Dark Side.

Keep reading for parts 2 through 4.