General

• Anti-aliasing is now available and can be enabled in the preferences menu.

Classes and Combat

General

• Healing caused by crowd control abilities no longer generates threat.
• Tooltips for abilities modified by skill points now display correct damage values.
• The cooldown indicator on hotbars no longer causes all ability icons to appear grayed out (unusable). Now, when an ability is on cooldown, it will not be grayed out if its activation conditions (like resource costs or range) are met.
• Using character rotation keys no longer breaks a character out of cover.

Guard

• This ability now transfers to a new friendly target without requiring deactivation on the previous target.
• Activating this ability while targeting a guarded or invalid target will still toggle the Guard ability off.
• A distinct visual effect is now present on characters using Guard on another character, and another effect is now present on the guarded character if they leave Guard’s range.

Taunt

• A new visual effect has been added to the user and the target of the Taunt ability for the duration of its effect.

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Hello everyone, we wanted to let you know that we have rescheduled weekly maintenance for eight hours on January 18th, 2012 from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET). This downtime is in preparation for our first major game update, Rise of the Rakghouls! All game servers and SWTOR.com will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than eight hours, but could be extended.

As some of you may have already noticed from our patch notes for Game Update 1.1, we’ve made adjustments to several high-end, purple, player crafted items on the BioChem and Cybertech professions. Simply put, we reduced their overall impact on gameplay and I wanted to explain why it was necessary.

BioChem crafted medical kits were too good. In fact, they were too good both in the amount of healing they provided (often more than half a character’s health) and the frequency they could be used (every 90 seconds!). This was negatively impacting the game for everyone else. We’ve seen significant chatter both in and out of game about how players not picking up the BioChem professions would be ‘stupid’ and ‘gimping themselves’. This indicates that a small number of competitive players have been denying access to high end content based on whether a player has the BioChem Crew Skill. Read more»

Hello everyone! Because we care about ensuring that Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ provides you with a consistent and quality game play experience, we will be postponing weekly maintenance this week. Downtime was originally scheduled for Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) to 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET) and will now occur at a later date due to issues requiring additional testing that have been discovered with the Game Update 1.1 content on the Public Test Server.

These issues were primarily brought to our attention by the diligent players on the Public Test Server Forums. Your participation in testing helps to improve the game as a whole, and we appreciate your discussion and feedback. The bug reports you provide are a valuable part of the development process. Thank you!

We’re working hard to bring you Game Update 1.1: Rise of the Rakghouls and are working hard to ensure your overall experience with Star Wars: The Old Republic is spectacular! The maintenance window for Game Update 1.1 will be rescheduled for some time within the next few days, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. When there’s a definite time, we will post here on the forums as well as on the Community Blog. Please keep your eye out for updates, and we will provide information as soon as it’s available.

So the legacy system, it’s kind of inspired by the fact that the family dynamic is so important in the Star Wars movies. You have Luke being Anakin’s son, the most famous father-son relationship in movies. We wanted to have a system that encouraged players to create alts and to play the game through the different story paths. So the legacy system is meant to do that. It essentially allows you to, instead of just having a bunch of alts that have no relation to each other, you can actually create a family tree where your alts can be related to your main character, either as, you know, a sibling, a son, a father, a family friend, or a husband and wife.

You can actually choose the relationship your characters will have with each other. And then you gain legacy experience points and legacy levels, and with legacy experience points and levels, that gives you–that allows you to unlock abilities, perks, a whole slew of different advantages, essentially, that all the members of your legacy tree will be able to enjoy.

So it’s pretty tight. I think people are going to really like it, and it’s something we want to push towards players who enjoy the level-up game. It’ll also be beneficial to the end game, but it really is going to have a lot of abilities that make leveling up even more enjoyable and allow you to customize your leveling experience.

“We knew with the light side/dark side system that there would be an urge – especially for min maxers – to go completely light side or dark side. It happened in Knights of the Old Republic back in 2003. We knew that was going to happen,” said TOR’s game director, James Ohlen.

“We have a system for people who want to stay more in the middle… but that’s something coming up in a later release.”

“It’ll let you play a “Gray Jedi”. Basically you don’t need to go to the extreme to get rewarded. You can have a different playstyle. We like to call it the “Gray Jedi” playstyle. That’s coming in a future piece of content.”

Hey everyone, thanks for bearing with us as we investigated the concerns raised here.

After investigation, it seems that the confusion here is a combination of a UI issue that’s been resolved and a feature that’s working as intended, but the reason why it’s ‘working as intended’ needs explanation.

First, the UI issue. The preferences menu as it is seen on the Public Test Server for version 1.1 of the game is correct – there are only supposed to be two texture choices, ‘Low’ and ‘High’. This replaces the original three-choice preference of Low/Medium/High because in reality, there was never supposed to be a ‘Medium’ choice – that was a bug.

Here’s where we need to explain. As many of you have noted, your character in the game world is rendered using lower resolution textures than inside of cinematic conversation scenes. This was a deliberate decision by the development team. To understand why this was done, I have to briefly talk about MMOs and their engines. Read more»