During Wednesday’s launch of Game Update 1.4, one very interesting change made its way to SWTOR’s live servers without being documented in the original Patch Notes. With this change, players who are queued up for both a Flashpoint in the Group Finder and a Warzone will find themselves taken out of the Group Finder queue if they accept a Warzone invite. Here is Allison Berryman’s forum reply confirming the change:

Originally posted by AllisonBerryman (Source)

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Hey everyone, I wanted to post to clarify that this was an intentional change that unfortunately did not get documented in the patch notes. We’ve added the patch note (you can read the full patch notes here).

Here is the note:

Players who are queued for Group Finder content are now removed from the queue if they accept an invitation to a Warzone.

We apologize for the confusion about this change!

This change came as a surprise to many players who will routinely join both queues in order to play a couple Warzones while waiting for the Group Finder queue, which can sometimes take longer (especially for DPS players) to pop. On the flip side, this change was most likely done in order to cut back on players declining Group Finder queues due to being in a Warzone. Anyone who’s been in a Group Finder group knows that players repeatedly declining an invitation can get a bit frustrating. Still, it’s unfortunate that the change wasn’t correctly documented.

This change now correctly shows up in the official Patch Notes.

Last week, BioWare published a Community News article detailing some of the quality-of-life changes coming to SWTOR in Game Update 1.4. Quality-of-life details are important in any MMORPG, and SWTOR is no exception– they’re the little things that make us want to make a digital home within a game world, socialize, and just have a good time with our characters. With such a huge IP like Star Wars to work with, the expectations for quality-of-life features are rather high. We want to do more than just kill mobs in SWTOR– we want to live that Star Wars adventure.

Bit by bit, BioWare is slowly adding these important, small quality-of-life features:

On top of the major features that we work on and deliver to the fans, we also try to work in smaller features to improve the overall quality of life for our players. Game update 1.4 has several of these features, and it’s worth calling these out.

The article continues to give information about the different quality-of-life features coming in Game Update 1.4, including a Group Finder end teleport, mistake purchase two-hour “buyback” options for bound items, character moods, and matching companion customization options.

Now that SWTOR finally has its Group Finder tool for flashpoints, players of all levels are experiencing the, uh, joy that is otherwise known as pick-up groups. Some Group Finder groups are awesome, and it’s even possible to make new friends while using the tool, but other groups are… not awesome. Every MMO veteran by now has their fair share of group horror stories containing rude players, arrogant players, pushy players, players who refuse to listen when it comes to boss mechanics, and players that don’t listen to anything whatsoever. It’s a wide, wide galaxy out there, and all sorts of people in it.

But, back to SWTOR. Since the game’s Group Finder tool is still fairly young, I like to believe that sometimes a bit of education might help some of these not-quite-desirable players learn the ropes of how to experience awesome group content– how to act in group content, if you will. The old saying, “Treat others how you would like to be treated” goes a long way, I feel, but one player on the forums came up with 10 rules, or commandments of sorts, that players might want to consider when it comes to grouping with strangers. Definitely good stuff to keep in mind.

SWTOR’s Game Update was unleashed yesterday (and there was much rejoicing!), but just in case you’ve been experiencing some odd bugs, we thought we’d post a current list of some known issues and bugs. BioWare has most of this information available on the forums, but some of it’s not simple to find. We’re here to help you out. Keep reading for the list!

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.

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.

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.

Now that 1.2 has been released and we’re currently in the middle of uh, tossing around rakgoul infections, it’s time to gaze up at the horizon and wonder what BioWare has in store for its fans next. Some players were happy with game update 1.2, and others found it lacking, but both types of players know that SWTOR still needs a few major fixes and additional features. It’s a young game, and still has room to grow.

Everyone has their own personal list of what they feel the game needs to focus on. For many players, some kind of group finder feature (also known as looking for group, or LFG) is becoming increasingly important, and takes up that number one spot. This past week, James Ohlen, Game Director of SWTOR, asked for our player feedback regarding the group activities we’d most like to see such a system developed for. The poll on the official forums can be found here.