4601

Heading home. Folks, we hear you, and more servers will be opening up in time.
An hour ago from Rockjaw.

Per the forums:

Tomorrow’s invite waves start at 8AM CST, and I’ll start another thread then to track progress.

4602

Just one small problem… they decided where guilds go. Unless they move guilds, or allow more people on a server, queues are here to stay and will only get worse.

Morons. Really. They had concrete numbers unlike every mmo previously released. They should have planned better.

4603

Level 11 Smuggler – Mirach – on, umm, Krayt Dragon or somesuch thing. Not bad so far. Just about ready to get off the tutorial planet.

4604

Its not that simple.

Recently, the biggest warning sign you can have of a games impending demise, is the merging of servers. That means, Bioware has to be absolutely certain that this is avoided. IF the result are queues the first week, so be it. People will still play it, and as the numbers level out after the initial rush and “oh god I have to play every day” feeling disappears, you will begin to see more manageable numbers on the servers.

In a week or two, you probably won’t be seeing queues, or at least only very low queues, which means people will quickly forget about those issues, in the last two weeks of their subscription. (Yes, I know, some of you hold a grudge like an elephant, but the numbers are stacked against you - not many are like you).

So, of course Bioware aren’t completely incompetent or morons - They have a plan™.

Of course, this impacts players a bit in the beginning and is annoying (hey, I had 50 minutes lines on my server last night), but it will pass.

Anyways - I started a new character last night - a Jedi Knight who is now a guardian. I love the game, and the story was fun, but man, I can easily tell that some classes and starting areas have gotten a whole lot more love than others.

I suspect the Jedi starting areas will be the first to get an overhaul, because it has so little content compared to say the Bountyhunter /Imperial Agent starting area.

4605

The queues are only going to get worse, not better. The headstart hasn’t even let in all of the preorderers yet and then the game hits retail soon after that. Then soon after that is Christmas.

On Christmas eve, people aren’t going to be waiting up all night for Santa to come, they are going to be waiting up all night to get through a queue.

4606

Just let me in.

I promise I will pick my class and stick with it forever…I will NOT play 28 different alts up to at least lvl. 20 like I did in WOW…or 6 different ones in Rift…I wont do it…I will FOCUS…FORCE FOCUS!

Just let me in.

4607

The server queues seem like a pretty intelligent part of the plan. I’m willing to bet two things:

  1. There’s a whole lot of server hardware ready to be deployed.

but…

  1. The existing server populations are hard capped to an artificially low level right now. Which is causing the queues.

This means that BW can aggressively direct new players towards lower population servers, spreading population more evenly among active servers. It also gives you a performance and stability safety buffer, as each server isn’t running under as much stress as it could be.

This is seems to be working by the way – Performance is unbelievably good for a launch window MMO. No lag. Stable servers. The server queues and early access schedule are the only big pain points I’m hearing from users. From my point of view, that’s a HUGE success.

4608

I agree. I think the only unfortunate thing for them is that they are releasing right on top of Christmas, which means that the loads are going to be much higher than normal with students on Christmas break, and at least around here most of the tech companies have Christmas shutdown – no idea how common that is in other industries.

If it’s true people have made it the unofficial Oceanic server that’s definitely not going to help.

But they need to accept queues now to keep server populations at a reasonable level after the inevitable quitting after the first month or two of play. Even if the game ends up being a great success, they’re still going to have considerable drop off in a month or two until populations stabilize.

Hopefully. I seem to recall that in Rift all the other servers dropped to reasonable levels in a week or two except ours, which continued to have long, long queues even a month out.

4609

My Guardian is level 23, and I haven’t had a queue yet, fwiw (server is Rakata Mind Prison, pvp). Great storyline, and I’m finally getting close to passing the point I reached in beta (yay).

There was a good amount of lag today on one of the planets (Taris), but after I moved on, no lag at all. I never really saw any lag in beta, either.

They’re enforcing a 4-hour break for maintenance right now; I suppose I should sleep. When they announced it (4 minutes prior to going offline) the message said to check the forums for details… but the joke was that website was down, too – no forums. “Alright, alright, I’ll go to bed!”

4610

Quick note about Amazon: if you want to speak to someone in North America, use the callback option on their customer service page. Granted my sample size is small, but when I called them, I got a useless, script-following drone from a galaxy far, far away. When they called me, it was a local, and she knew what she was doing.

I don’t think I’ll be wasting time speaking with “Peggy” anymore.

4611

I got my shipping notice today at 7pm MST. With a est. delivery date of tomorrow.

-Tim

4612

You guys need a pre-order and shipping thread - just to upset all the skyrim thread haters ;-)

One thing is bothering me about the game though, and thats the lore.
Now, I read mostly everything, even the codex, and I really have no idea what and why and when things are happening.

So - the sith (the race right, not the warrior caste) returned some time ago, and devastated the Republic. Now, they are gone again for some unknown reason, but their empire still exists? Who rules on Curoscant? With my Jedi I am there, and all looks nice, but I seem to remember I took a sith warrior there as well, and that was to Curoscant as well?

Where the hell are the Sith now? Why are the Jedi knights hiding on some backwater planet if the Sith disappeared 200 years ago? Just where is the republic? Does it still exist? Where is the Empire?

I’m so confused…

4613

From what I can tell from reading the various comic series, care of Dark Horse Digital, the entire Galactic History consists of different eras where either the Sith are all wiped out or the Jedi are all but extinct, interleaved with eras in which both are at war. Basically the writers come up with some new method to keep massive conflict in the galaxy, with our stalwart heroes or anti-heroes fighting against desperate odds.

Anyway here’s the rough background for SWTOR:

The Sith were thought to be extinguished, and the Jedi and the Republic ruled the galaxy. It turns out though that some of the Sith actually got away, and were rebuilding their society in secret on Dromund Kass (which is the second planet in the Imperial questing line).

Hundreds of years after they were thought to be wiped out, the Sith make a surprise attack on Korriban, their ancient birthplace. This is the opening cinematic for the game. This was the first indication to the Jedi that the Sith in fact still existed. With this attack, the Sith ignited a war that engulfed the galaxy, and the Republic was doing badly. IIRC at some point during the war, the Emperor agreed to meet for peace talks, for reasons which are not known. But while the peace talks were taking place the Empire mounted a surprise attack on Coruscant. This is the cinematic that plays when you first decide to play a Republic character. The Empire’s surprise attack wiped out the Jedi Temple, and IIRC the Empire actually took over Coruscant.

With control of Coruscant the Empire was able to force the Republic to agree to whatever demands it wanted in the ongoing peace talks. The result of the peace talks was an end to the war. As of the start of the game, the galaxy is nominally at peace. However, there is actually a “Cold War” going on that occasionally heats up in different parts of the galaxy.

As the Sith wiped out the Jedi Temple, the Jedi retreat to Tython their ancient birthplace to lick their wounds and rebuild their order.

There is fighting to sway Hutta and other non-aligned worlds, and spies and various Republic and Imperial agents are working covertly and sometimes overtly to sway different worlds one way or the other. A broader peace still mostly holds, but everyone expects that it will fall apart sooner or later and we’ll have open war. One way to think about this situation is our real life Cold War in the 1950-1980, where US and allied nations engaged in small scale wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the Russian’s fought in Afghanistan and used proxies in Korea and Vietnam. Some fighting between the two sides, some hot zones, but no broad WW3.

What’s still unknown is why the Emperor bothered initiating peace talks, as the Empire had the upper hand when the peace talks started and could have pushed his advantage.

You can see a very quick summary here:

http://www.swtor.com/info/story/setting

More extensive information including some info on how this ties into KotOR 1 and 2 can be found here:

http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/timeline

4614

Lore nerds…

Start here.
For some pre-history (and a bit pre to kotor) start around…3,965bby (before battle of yavin)
This is when mandalorian aggression leads to the whole Revan fiasco.

We are live at 3,653 bby. Correction… We are live about 10/12 years after 3,653 depending on character storyline. (that is so aggravating)
There was a war for 28 years before this when the -real- sith came back. Revan was just a converted warm up. I could go spoilerific on why he was converted or you can pick up the book.

Current Galactic politics is a Cold war stalemate between Sith and Republic. The Republic maintains control of the core, Sith has been given sway over most the worlds on the outside of the Hydian Way (huge “s” like hyperlane through the galaxy). This is not concrete, there are worlds on either side that consider themselves one way or the other even if they should belong to a side.

Hutt space is a good example, for all that it is sitting in the Sith lap, it is still controlled by the Hutts themselves. Sith just have a bit more free reign here since they don’t care much about the normal activities here.

You kinda have to piece together both the over story and the current lesser stories. Suffice to say that all of this is because of force users, and the killing will continue for some time yet. This is the start of the long dark that eventually (thousands of years later) lead to Darth Bane and his rule of two.
…

Queues -
Didn’t have one, happy on my lesser populated but growing RP server. The community so far there has been extremely sarcastic and nice. Perfect home. My former server from wow is infesting it , and it seems other folk of like mind are showing up there as well.
Wheee!

4615

Simple really … The dark side by nature is shadowy and hidden. When the sith are not so numerous to be known, they are not felt. Half … HALF the galaxy is “unknown wild space”. Lots of things can go on out there with no one the wiser.

Hundreds of years after they were thought to be wiped out, the Sith make a surprise attack on Korriban, their ancient birthplace. This is the opening cinematic for the game. This was the first indication to the Jedi that the Sith in fact still existed. With this attack, the Sith ignited a war that engulfed the galaxy, and the Republic was doing badly. IIRC at some point during the war, the Emperor agreed to meet for peace talks, for reasons which are not known. But while the peace talks were taking place the Empire mounted a surprise attack on Coruscant. This is the cinematic that plays when you first decide to play a Republic character. The Empire’s surprise attack wiped out the Jedi Temple, and IIRC the Empire actually took over Coruscant.

They did grab control but not for long, part of the treaty gave Coruscant back to the republic. It was too far out of their normal space. The sith could not maintain their force there. A gamble that paid off.

What’s still unknown is why the Emperor bothered initiating peace talks, as the Empire had the upper hand when the peace talks started and could have pushed his advantage.

One can speculate from a book, but that would be spoilerific. In the end we are probably waiting for the hammer to fall … in either direction

4616

The two books that lead up to the game are Star Wars: The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance and Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived. I just finished Fatal Alliance and am 1/4 of the way through Deceived and they are actually pretty decent books as Star Wars books go.

4617

For folks that pre-ordered do you have two codes? A pre-order code and a product code?

The only thing I’ve received so far is the pre-order code. Will they magically turn that into my product code once they flag my account for play?

4618

Depending on where you bought the game from, you will recieve a mail with the product code within the next 4 days.

4619

I preordered off of swtor.com

4620

Then you will receive an email from EA/Bioware on release day.

The whole “no active subscription” and code business has been confusing a lot of people on various message boards. I get a feeling Bioware could have presented this information more clearly.

Wendelius