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.

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)

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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.

Originally posted by Stephen Reid (Source)

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We have a dedicated team within the larger development team that’s working on in-game events. Our definition of ‘events’ are time-limited, game-wide events that hopefully many of you will get to see.

The team has been hard at work putting an event together that will… manifest after Game Update 1.2 reaches the live servers. The event will be quite widespread and should be hard to miss.

There are already plans for events in the future as well, but details on those will have to wait. We want there to be an element of surprise.

Keep reading for a follow up post where Stephen Reid replies to a few of your questions.

Originally posted by StephenReid (Source)

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That screenshot is from a cinematic in-game. As stated, cinematic scenes use high resolution textures because we have control over how many characters are rendered on-screen at once. This is how the game was always intended to look in cinematics. We did not ‘remove’ high resolution textures – they were always in the game for use in cinematics.

With that said, thank you for all of your responses. We understand everyone’s desires around this issue, and although it’s not going to be an overnight fix, as mentioned we’re working on addressing this. Many of the suggestions you have made are similar to potential changes the development team is investigating.

I rounded up the development team once more and had another discussion, and wanted to update you with a better timeline and some more precise details on what we’re doing right now.

The first major changes will be in our next major Game Update, which will have the version number of 1.2. Those changes will bring greater visual fidelity to your character and those around you, but will still allow for good performance in situations where a lot of characters are on-screen at once. In other words, for those screenshots of your character in their best gear, you should see a marked improvement.

Other potential changes are being discussed right now – as I said, many of which are similar to changes suggested by many of you. As usual, you’ll see these sorts of changes on our Public Test Server before they make it into the live game. Right now we cannot commit to a live date for the 1.2 Game Update, but it will be within Q1 2012.

An issue that has been talked about a lot on the official forums and around the community is the difference character model textures between normal gameplay and cut scenes. In a thread started by SWTOR Official Forum Member Tiron_Raptor, we see some very good reasoning and some technical explanation behind what is going on behind the scenes.

The issue goes on to discuss how there are two executable files that play on how objects are rendered in-game. The whole discussion is speculation, but there might be a nugget of truth in it. Here’s the fruit of the discussion:

During the discussion about the high-res texture problems, someone discovered that a dll in the retailclient folder appeared to contain instructions to deliberately reduce the quality of textures. Further investigation revealed that the dll in question appeared to relate to a remote rendering system, specified as being for copy protection of 3D models. An honest to god research paper on the subject can be found here. Another thread, on the subject of swtor needing administrator privileges, seems to indicate that the mysterious second swtor.exe process is not the launcher but in fact relates to the remote rendering system. [Theron_Raptor Edit: it has been stated further on, but not confirmed, that the 'RemoteRenderer' is just part of the normal rendering system, and may be a renaming of or replacement for an original Hero Engine Component: The name may just be a coincidence. Hard data needed.]

Stephen Reid shot over to Reddit today for an Ask Me Anything and he was answering questions like crazy. Topics from dual spec, same sex romances to combat responsiveness and UI customization (coming soon!).

Hey Reddit people, ask me some questions! I’m the Senior Community Manager for Star Wars: The Old Republic, based at BioWare in Austin. I manage the entire Community team, working on everything from Forums to social media, fansites to guild outreach, events to website content.

A few caveats:

• I’m not in charge of any design decisions on the game – if you are looking to get something changed, ask nicely on the official Forums
• I’m not aware of every single bug in the game, or the status of their resolution – although I am happy to hear about them
• I am British and likely to use dry humor (but note: I spell things American now)
• I am going into a meeting titled ” “THE AWESOME ATTACK OF RAINBOWS AND NARWHALS AND BACON THAT WE’RE GOING TO HIT THE BLOG WITH” right now, so I’ll be 30 minutes or more late before I start answering stuff…

That said… go for it.

Keep reading for the full transcript.

Reddit is hosting a AMA session with Stephen Reid tomorrow, so get your questions ready. With SWTOR being two weeks old and already posting 1 Million users now is a perfect time to attempt to get those answers you’re looking for. Are you going to be asking about the new Flashpoint James Ohlen hinted at last week? Or maybe you’re curious about when Bioware might improve the UI. Or is it bug squashing that you’re look out for?

For the full Reddit announcement with times, dates and details, keep reading after the break.

Originally posted by StephenReid (Source)

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As many of you know, we’re experiencing high load and corresponding queues on some servers. This is to be expected during launch, as a high number of people want to play the game, and for long stretches at a time.

We’re monitoring all of our servers around the clock, and we’re raising server population caps where required. However, to ensure our long-term goals of server stability and healthy populations, we do not want to raise population caps too rapidly. We want incoming players to populate lower population servers. At the same time, higher population servers will not be ‘locked’ because we want to allow people to join a server to play with their friends if they wish to.

With this in mind, we wanted to notify everyone of some consistently high population servers. These servers are closing in on their absolute population cap (the maximum amount of players who can be on the server at any given time) and will likely have a queue to enter even at off-peak play times.

In response to someone asking about where the Android security app may be, Stephen Reid gives us an update:

Originally posted by StephenReid (Source)

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Both Android and Blackberry versions of the Mobile Security Key are coming very, very soon. Real soon! (I’d give you an ETA, but there are too many moving parts.)

In addition, physical security keys for Europe will also be along very soon. We had a few shipping / supply issues, but they’re inbound.

Originally posted by Stephen Reid (Source)

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The following is a brief statement from Jeff Hickman, Executive Producer, Live Services:

“We know there have been questions about the queues on the servers, so we wanted to take a moment to give you some insight.

In order to ensure that the service would be smooth and stable, we staged how we brought people into the Early Game Access program, adding people in waves. As you know, there are a lot of folks who want to play the game right now and we want to make sure they have lots of people to play with. Balancing this with figuring out when to bring new servers online to help alleviate the size of the queues is part art and part science. On one hand, you do not want people to wait too long on the other hand, you want to make sure that people have a dynamic, engaging community to play with for long after launch. Either way, we have one clear objective to make sure folks have fun.

While we cant promise that there wont ever be queues, we can promise you that we are taking this matter seriously and constantly reviewing them to make sure that they are manageable and reasonable.”