SWTOR: Catch-All

Well, had a *terrible* time getting the account set up and the game registered. Turns out your SWTOR account is different from your Origin account, but the login for both uses the same email (or can use it). Then the servers were not responding, etc, etc.

I finally got it sorted out and started a Trooper. So far, I like it, although I wish there was a way to turn down the mouse sensitivity in game. A few lag spikes but nothing that interferes yet. The quests are good and as noted the voice acting for just about everything adds to the immersion. Players seem nice enough.

So I'm having a good time. Thanks!

Level 10 brand spanking newly crowned sniper, queued up for a warzone, got second place damage. (111k damage lost to first place by 2k)
I had no idea what I was doing other than targeting things, lobbing grenades, firing off pot shots, firing off my dot and running in for a shiv on high armor or almost dead targets.

Most of the other players were in their 30's. I have to say if this keeps up, pvp will be a lot of fun.

TheHipGamer wrote:
ZaneRockfist wrote:
TheHipGamer wrote:

Not really. It plays much more like a detailed single player RPG, that happens to have some MMO-style systems. The ability to dictate dialog responses and affect your character is straight out of KOTOR/Mass Effect, and no other MMO does anything even similar to that.

How does the story compare to the game prequels? What about to other Bioware RPGs?

Ask me when I've seen more of it, and I can give a more complete response; so far it's about equal. For context. I found the plot of Mass Effect to be just OK, but significantly disliked (to the point of not finisihing, after 30+ hours) Mass Effect 2, so I'll say about equal here; KOTOR 1 (the only Bioware-made prequel, as Obsidian did the second game) was also about on par, and is probably the closest comparison. Story here is better than DA2, albeit with a similar feel, and entirely different from DA:O.

You're asking about plot quality in comparison to massive single-player RPGs, and we can give coherent answers. That alone is a pretty solid indication that this isn't a run of the mill MMO. :)

To me, that it has story content that I care about similar to what you'd get doesn't keep it from being not run of the mill, IMO. And I will grant that it absolutely has that. But from the point of view of mechanics, the trinity and how the game plays, it's very much an outgrowth of recent MMOs, from WoW to LotRO, and similar titles.

With that said, *none* of that is criticism, it's simply stated facts. Despite the fact that the game borrows heavily UI and mechanics wise from other MMOs which borrowed heavily from single player RPGs, the game is absolutely fantastic. It's not earth-shattering by any means from the 25 levels and two flashpoints(these are 4 man instances, not operations btw) that I played, but it is absolutely brilliant in how the UI feels, how the game plays, and how grouping while leveling works.

Robear wrote:

I finally got it sorted out and started a Trooper. So far, I like it, although I wish there was a way to turn down the mouse sensitivity in game.

You can turn down the mouse sensitivity, it is a slider in the preferences somewhere. Hopefully you guys are on Keller's Void and plan on going Gray Council if you haven't already.

Glad you are enjoying the game so far despite the registration hassles.

fangblackbone wrote:

I had no idea what I was doing other than targeting things, lobbing grenades, firing off pot shots, firing off my dot and running in for a shiv on high armor or almost dead targets.

Means you were on par with most of the other players in the warfronts, so, have fun.

I'd love to try some organized PvP, but with Huttball randomly scrambling players between teams, that's a bit hard.

*REs his 4,013th green implant and sighs when he fails to get a blue recipe, and goes back to farming Blue Goo...* Slurpee machines, maybe I can find Blue Goo in a slurpee machine...

LtWarhound wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

I had no idea what I was doing other than targeting things, lobbing grenades, firing off pot shots, firing off my dot and running in for a shiv on high armor or almost dead targets.

Means you were on par with most of the other players in the warfronts, so, have fun.

I'd love to try some organized PvP, but with Huttball randomly scrambling players between teams, that's a bit hard.

*REs his 4,013th green implant and sighs when he fails to get a blue recipe, and goes back to farming Blue Goo...* Slurpee machines, maybe I can find Blue Goo in a slurpee machine...

If you queue with a party of 4 it will keep you together. If you mean 2 parties of 4 then no odds of getting in at the same time is slim, but it can happen.

Dramatic Marlin wrote:

SWToR Freeze Mob in NY

Best MMO launch event ever! BTW - Merry Christmas, even to the Sith.

Did my first PvP a couple nights ago and had a pretty good time. No clue what I was really doing in Huttball, but the other two are pretty straight-forward enough. I actually got to lvl 19 in my first PvP match, and thought I'd try getting another level by just playing PvP. It worked, and in less time than I would have imagined (was a couple days ago, but I believe I was getting 8-10k experience/match, matches lasting 15-20 minutes, minimal wait time btwn).

StaggerLee wrote:

Did my first PvP a couple nights ago and had a pretty good time. No clue what I was really doing in Huttball, but the other two are pretty straight-forward enough. I actually got to lvl 19 in my first PvP match, and thought I'd try getting another level by just playing PvP. It worked, and in less time than I would have imagined (was a couple days ago, but I believe I was getting 8-10k experience/match, matches lasting 15-20 minutes, minimal wait time btwn).

Yeah, it's amazing how much xp you can get in PvP. I've only done it once or twice (running around like a chicken with my head cut off) and had a blast. But I don't want to do it too much cause I'll out-level myself and since I royally suck at PvP I'm not getting any commendations to buy gear with. Think I saw Ranalin (and was killed by him) last night.

namikaze wrote:
Dramatic Marlin wrote:

SWToR Freeze Mob in NY

Best MMO launch event ever! BTW - Merry Christmas, even to the Sith.

Love it.

mwdowns wrote:
StaggerLee wrote:

Did my first PvP a couple nights ago and had a pretty good time. No clue what I was really doing in Huttball, but the other two are pretty straight-forward enough. I actually got to lvl 19 in my first PvP match, and thought I'd try getting another level by just playing PvP. It worked, and in less time than I would have imagined (was a couple days ago, but I believe I was getting 8-10k experience/match, matches lasting 15-20 minutes, minimal wait time btwn).

Yeah, it's amazing how much xp you can get in PvP. I've only done it once or twice (running around like a chicken with my head cut off) and had a blast. But I don't want to do it too much cause I'll out-level myself and since I royally suck at PvP I'm not getting any commendations to buy gear with. Think I saw Ranalin (and was killed by him) last night. :)

I was actually surprised by how easy it was to get commendations. I was usually in the middle of the pack for getting them, and occasionally came up towards the top (though never had the most). I haven't really looked to buy anything (spent 5 minutes being confused by too many different PvP vendors, and saw no weapons yet), but might get some lvl 20 gear at least for anything I am a bit behind on.

StaggerLee wrote:
mwdowns wrote:
StaggerLee wrote:

Did my first PvP a couple nights ago and had a pretty good time. No clue what I was really doing in Huttball, but the other two are pretty straight-forward enough. I actually got to lvl 19 in my first PvP match, and thought I'd try getting another level by just playing PvP. It worked, and in less time than I would have imagined (was a couple days ago, but I believe I was getting 8-10k experience/match, matches lasting 15-20 minutes, minimal wait time btwn).

Yeah, it's amazing how much xp you can get in PvP. I've only done it once or twice (running around like a chicken with my head cut off) and had a blast. But I don't want to do it too much cause I'll out-level myself and since I royally suck at PvP I'm not getting any commendations to buy gear with. Think I saw Ranalin (and was killed by him) last night. :)

I was actually surprised by how easy it was to get commendations. I was usually in the middle of the pack for getting them, and occasionally came up towards the top (though never had the most). I haven't really looked to buy anything (spent 5 minutes being confused by too many different PvP vendors, and saw no weapons yet), but might get some lvl 20 gear at least for anything I am a bit behind on.

if its set up like ours the pvp weapon vendor is next to the daily pvp machine vendor.

Dear EA - please separate the server maintenance/patch update times for the EU servers from the US ones. While I'm sure everyone in Americaland is happy that their server maintenance happens more or less in the middle of the night - it does rather waste a perfectly good day on the side of the planet currently awake at the time. Kthanxbye.

Apparently other people in the EU get pissed off if they don't get their patches and updates at the same time as people in North America (i.e., "Dear EA - why do you treat your European customers like second-class citizens who have to play on older and/or buggier clients longer than Americans?"), so they're rather stuck between a rock and a hard place.

And for what it's worth, this update was scheduled to run between 5AM and 11AM EST and has now pushed past noon EST, which included 4-5 good hours of daytime playing time (at least this week, when I don't have to work), so it was nowhere near the middle of the night.

EDIT> Their twitter says still no ETA as of 12:15 EST, with another update promised by 1:00 EST, so it's going to be a while yet...and none of us are sleeping, at this point. Except possibly those crazy Aussies, who are probably in an entirely different month for all I know.

- Ash

stevenmack wrote:

Dear EA - please separate the server maintenance/patch update times for the EU servers from the US ones. While I'm sure everyone in Americaland is happy that their server maintenance happens more or less in the middle of the night - it does rather waste a perfectly good day on the side of the planet currently awake at the time. Kthanxbye.

It does seem odd that they don't have different maintenance times. that said, watching people go batsh*t crazy on the SWTOR forums with rage because they can't play their game is hysterical.

Honestly, I would love someone to explain to me what exactly happens during server "maintenance". I understand that they need to do backups and stuff like that but couldn't a lot of that stuff be handled in an ongoing basis?

I can't escape the image of some tech pulling a server off the rack to change the oil! Are their grease fittings that need to be greased?

Bear wrote:

Honestly, I would love someone to explain to me what exactly happens during server "maintenance". I understand that they need to do backups and stuff like that but couldn't a lot of that stuff be handled in an ongoing basis?

Well, with this one I know they're making the 1.0.1 patch live...not that that really answers your questions of "what takes six hours?" and "why are we now at eight hours and counting for a six-hour maintenance?". I'd be curious to see how the sausage is made in this regard, as well.

- Ash

I made the mistake of reading the official forums during downtime. Please kill me now. T_T;;;

Bear wrote:

Honestly, I would love someone to explain to me what exactly happens during server "maintenance". I understand that they need to do backups and stuff like that but couldn't a lot of that stuff be handled in an ongoing basis?

For the normal weekly maintenance (i.e. not what's happening now), the typical scenario is this: They're doing local backups all the time throughout a cluster: data is being transferred back and forth between machines in a single data-center, for all of the machines that are supporting a given "server". This is done on very high speed local networks, mirroring changes that are made (in things like your inventory) across the whole cluster.

The first thing weekly maintenance makes possible is transferring a quickly restorable backup to a remote location. This kind of backup is generally more IO intensive on the storage drives, trading extra work on the "make the backup" end to produce a much more portable condensed form of the backup. That kind of IO load can slow performance significantly as the entire database is traversed. And all of that data has to be transferred off-site, tying up network resources in a similar way. It's sometimes (depending on the DB design) much easier to do all of this kind of thing at a time when the database is guaranteed not to be changing.

The second big thing is doing any necessary hardware maintenance that couldn't be done while the servers are up. Swapping out equipment that's been having trouble but not actually failed yet. Adding new equipment. (Disks might be hot-swappable. Some network equipment might be if you're very careful configuring it. But there'll always be something in a critical path that can't be done without.) Running extra diagnostics to try to identify problems that don't show up during normal operation but which will cause problems later.

MMOs are pretty complicated beasts--they have to handle a very large number of complex transactions in real-time and share the results of those transactions in real-time with many connected clients. Contrast with a bank: banks have to do similar sorts of things, except that you don't expect to be able to press a button and receive cash in under a second, or to have thirty of your closest friends also see your account balance decrease during that same second. (On the other side, banks have much more need for [em]perfect[/em] consistency, while MMOs can cut some corners safely.)

If anyone hasn't played it yet, KOTOR (Knights of the Old Republic) is on sale for $2.49 on Steam today.

Looking at the patch notes in the Launcher and the big one that sticks out is:
- Rewards from Slicing have been reduced to bring them into balance with other skills

edit: PS-server is up

maxox wrote:

Looking at the patch notes in the Launcher and the big one that sticks out is:
- Rewards from Slicing have been reduced to bring them into balance with other skills

edit: PS-server is up

Aw, man. Slicing was an awesome money maker. That's a shame.

Cant check here at work, Did they nerd death from above? That is way overpowered as is.

Hypatian wrote:

I made the mistake of reading the official forums during downtime. Please kill me now. T_T;;;

Bear wrote:

Honestly, I would love someone to explain to me what exactly happens during server "maintenance". I understand that they need to do backups and stuff like that but couldn't a lot of that stuff be handled in an ongoing basis?

lots of good stuff, redacted for space

The one other thing I'd add is that in my experience (and I've done more than a few maintenances myself on SAAS applications on the web) is that maintenance is often one of those things that is either done faster than you expect or takes much longer than you think. Padding in case of problems helps, but it's hard to estimate how long something unexpected will take to correct. Once something unexpected happens, there's almost certainly 20-30 min before any action is taken, because you want to make certain you're doing the right thing. Good operations people have the uncanny ability to remain calm and deliberate when things don't go as expected and take the time to make sure they take the proper corrective actions. Rushing because you're worried about going over (which you probably will anyway once things go outside of expectations) will almost guarantee a larger disaster.

As a hypothetical example, let's imagine that they saw something in the logs that indicated there was a possibility the backup and the live (but disconnected) system did not perfectly agree about the state of characters. Given how important that state is to a lot of people, they're probably going to slow down and take some additional time to run various queries against the data to give them an understanding of where what they saw came from. It's not always enough to be able to show that multiple characters match, say, but rather you want to know how you got the result that made you nervous in the first place and why it's not actually an issue.

How are so many people already at the level cap?

ZaneRockfist wrote:

How are so many people already at the level cap?

does it matter?

ZaneRockfist wrote:

How are so many people already at the level cap?

I'll go out on a limb and say it's because they've been playing a lot.

After reaching lvl 10 with an alt, Bioware sent me a class-specific email explains the advanced classes available to me, a Black Talon guide, warzone intro and hints of things to come.

This is a really great idea and it's a wonder other mmos haven't thought of this.

TrashiDawa wrote:

After reaching lvl 10 with an alt, Bioware sent me a class-specific email explains the advanced classes available to me, a Black Talon guide, warzone intro and hints of things to come.

This is a really great idea and it's a wonder other mmos haven't thought of this.

Yeah I love the mail you get from quest people you've helped. great immersion!

ranalin wrote:

does it matter?

The game has been out for a week and people have already reached end-game. I say it matters quite a lot.

ZaneRockfist wrote:
ranalin wrote:

does it matter?

The game has been out for a week and people have already reached end-game. I say it matters quite a lot.

They have stated that you are supposed to create alts in order to play their story lines.

ZaneRockfist wrote:
ranalin wrote:

does it matter?

The game has been out for a week and people have already reached end-game. I say it matters quite a lot.

Vector wrote:
ZaneRockfist wrote:
ranalin wrote:

does it matter?

The game has been out for a week and people have already reached end-game. I say it matters quite a lot.

They have stated that you are supposed to create alts in order to play their story lines.

And there's the actual end-game... if they're having fun doing i dont see what the issue is. Games arent like EQ and games before WoW where you took 3-4 months to reach end game.

ZaneRockfist wrote:
ranalin wrote:

does it matter?

The game has been out for a week and people have already reached end-game. I say it matters quite a lot.

If you play enough anyone can get to end game if they skip stuff