Hanse: Howdy! I'm Hanse and I'm a system designer. I've worked on all sorts of things (space and gunships, most recently). I'm working on smuggler top issues and fixes, currently. :)

DeadMeat: Hi this is DeadMeat. I am the SOE Producer for Star Wars Galaxies.

Blixtev: Howdy Everyone! I'm Blixtev Lead Designer for Star Wars Galaxies. Thanks for showing up to hang out with the Dev Team.

Shadowbrak: Good evening all. My name is Travis Hicks, and I am a system designer working on Heroic Encounters.

Teesquared: Hello, I'm Tony Tyson, Star Wars Galaxies Technical Director.

Loche: Hello all! I am Jesse "Loche" Benjamin, a designer on SWG.

Valara: Hi everyone! I'm Valara, the Community Manager for Star Wars Galaxies.

AdeptStrain: Hello all. I'm AdeptStrain. One of the programmers here on SWG.

CancelAutoRun: Hey all, I am CancelAutoRun, I'm a programmer on SWG.

Neif: Hey ho, everyone! Welcome to another SWG Stratics chat -- this is Tim Temmerman, Associate Producer at LEC.

kupyi: Can Hanse tell us anything about what will be in the Smuggler update?

Hanse: I'm focusing on the top issues you folks have as well as pistol damage. I'm going to try to fix as many bugs as I can, of course.

ArkonPhoenix: With the news of AdeptStrain being given the task of fixing combat animations, I just wanted to see if there has been an end goal selected to resolve this yet, like the queuing of specials, or allowing animations to play out regardless of other specials being fired to maintain a smooth look?

AdeptStrain: So, We are really trying to bring our animation back to a fully rich part of the game. As for the details, I think that might be a little too technical but the overall effect is we will have smoother animations and something players will really enjoy.

AzareeNoise: Will player cities see changes in their settings in the future? IMO returning them to the old settings would remove deserted cities.

Blixtev: We really don't have any plans of reverting back to the old numbers of citizens player cities used to require. If this is causing issues with planetary caps and players unable to reach certain city ranks we can certainly look at that.

ArkonPhoenix: The recent announcement with the focus on reviewing professions, how long do you hope to be done going through all of them (2 a month)?

DeadMeat: It should take us about six months to hit all of the professions. Including things like cites, PA and other constituencies.

Vikra: Will there be any updates/fixes to Medic? Such as Stasis...

CancelAutoRun: As you have all heard, we are planning on giving some attention to all of the professions, Medic included. As for the stasis issue, I am looking into it right now. It turns out to be a bit of a nasty issue because we have trouble getting it to happen consistently in a way we can use to fix it. I should be able to track down the buff breaking issue soon.

squenepo: is there any thing in the works for Droid Enginners?

Blixtev: We are planning on looking at all the professions, Droid Engineers included in that!

kronus: How do you plan on changing smuggler (and pistols in this chapter?)

Hanse: I'm adding new abilities and a new pistol. Exiting abilities will not be touched, unless a bug affects them. I'll discuss the additions in the forum, once they're on Test Center.

Hanse: All of this is subject to change, of course...

Volntyr: The last Letter stated that Spies will be getting looked at again. Will this be a total revamp or fixing issues such as action cost and expertise tree fixes?

DeadMeat: The update we are doing for Spies will be pretty modest. Trying to address the major bugs, and enhancements and tweak. Certainly not a revamp of the profession though.

Giolon: Is anything being done to help the poor performance and desirability of Spies in PvE content?

Loche: I am currently working on the Spy update. One of my tasks is to make them more viable in PVE. One of the steps I have taken is to add armor rating to decoys and reduced chances of stealth breaking immediately. Basically for 1 second after you stealth, it will not break for any reason. This will help eliminate problems with an attack landing at the same time as your stealth firing.

ArkonPhoenix: There has been a very popular request to add more diversity of weapon specialization regardless of profession, is this possibly being considered when reviewing all the professions and expertise.

Blixtev: Ultimately with weapons we don't want to see everyone migrating to one type of weapon ie Rifles because they have huge top end and distance. This is why we built specific weapon bonuses into the expertise trees. I'd like to see us solidify these weapons linked to certain professions more.

Blixtev: So we may see some changes while we are looking at expertise trees.

Notluf-Bria: To start off, I really like Chapter 7 and 8. I know this chat is about chapter 8, but I was curious if Chapter 9 is still going to deal with Droid Commander?

DeadMeat: We have pushed Droid Commander to Chapter 10 in order to do sufficient backend work to make it solid. Chapter 9 will be Exar Kin, the profession updates to Smuggler/Spy and Entertainer and Medic, plus Some Storyteller enhancements and new collections. These will come out in multiple parts as described in my Producer note just recently.

JediPhreak: Hey, do you have any plans on making seperate paths for dark and light Jedi?

Hanse: The separate paths are currently available through the Jedi expertise system. You must spend points to use offensive and defensive abilities. In effect, you are making a choice to be light, dark, or grey.

Solaris: What are the botting rules and economies of starwars galaxies like?

jneri: botting is cheating and cheating is failing. we dont support botting.

Awweo: With the decision for no new expansions is there a chance we could see a new planet in a future chapter update?

Blixtev: We are definitely going to see portions of other planets in upcoming Heroics. I'm really excited to see us get approval to use some of them.

kupyi: Is there any chance of opening up existing animations for roleplay purposes?

AdeptStrain: We recently fixed some bugs with the animation system and are taking a close look at all the animations we have, the states they are in, and what we can do with them. So, the possibility of opening those animations up as new emotes that roleplayers could use is definitely on the table.

Solaris: Do you support chinese botters/farmers?

DeadMeat: no

pyrochenko: my next question involves the looping sound bug. DeadMeat hoped that reversion to WAV files instead of MP3 files would fix some of this, yet the problem is unchanged and has been so since the miles drivers were updated around chapter 6. any update on this?

DeadMeat: We have recently updated Miles in our test branch and will be getting that Live soon. The problem is that we do not have an easy repro case in house. We know there is an issue, and we are constanly looking at ways to fix it, but we may just have to go back to wav's in the end but that would be a big change and a lot of files.

Zin: Do you have a time frame for when we can expect C9?

Blixtev: We are underway on Chapter 9 content as well as the first Update. You should see the Update sometime Sooonish and 9 a few weeks after that! Sorry we can't promise dates as we don't want to release the new content until it is ready.

kronus: Hello, Hanse what do you plan to do with the useless parts of the smuggler expertise (like the sly lie and fast talk trees)

Hanse: We're not performing a Smuggler-wide revamp. Those areas of the expertise are not changing in chapter 9 (barring management intervention, of course).wwwwww

Hanse: ack, my freaking keyboard repeats sometimes.. :(

SuperRich: Chapter 8 saw many great bug fixes for space yet a "few" still exist. (Space XP meter showing incorrect advance for instance) How is it decided what bugs will be fixed and which will not? This is a top 5 pilot bug on the forums

Teesquared: The team decides what issues to work on. We look at issues from players and from our Quality Assurance team. We try to spend resources on ones that have the biggest impact on the game.

Bulletbullet: any word of server consolidation in the future? perhaps in an effort to promote population density?

DeadMeat: We know that there are a lot of concerns about low pop servers, and we are looking at all possible solutions. We really do not have any plans that are final, and honestly the solutions to population are not really that easy or obvious.

Nadun: Is there any internal discussion on improvments for traders, weaponsmith in particular?

Blixtev: Yes I always am looking at what we can do for the munitions folks, its even on my whiteboard! Just what I really want to do is a large portion of a Chapters implementation time. I'm hoping I can get the time to push it forward this year.

Jubilee: What about more quests? There are a lot of complaints the new ones are just kill counters, with little thought. Will we see anymore good storybased quests in publishes, or are these now restricted to expansions?

DeadMeat: Yeah...We need more quests. We hope to have a new theme park this year that hits in the 40's range.

squenepo: what changeds can we look forward to for player cities?

Neif: We're looking at making life easier for home owners and mayors, including some new item placement/story teller features. Also expect a Politician / PA update down the road.

ArkonPhoenix: Any chance on adding an option to disable the Look at Target / Blue Bracket feature, as this has been a long time request for many players?

Teesquared: We are aware of the issues with targeting. The option you suggest sounds reasonable. We are dedicating resource to improving aspects of the user interface.

Onyx: from BadgerSmaker, Now that players can expect regular high level group content, has there been any thought given to enhancing the current in-game community tools to help people find groups? For example, adding the ability to search the entire galaxy for everyone that is looking for a group to do the Imperial Star Destroyer instance, or marking yourself to do a specific quest or activity?

DeadMeat: Looking for Group will be improved. I think it is actually the biggest hole in our new content and we will be addressing that soon.

Soups: Weapons used to track their targets on 3 axis and have only been tracking on 2 for some time. Is this an animation issue and could it be looked at with the other animation imporvement efforts?

AdeptStrain: I don't know where the issue is off-hand, but yes, I plan to look at targeting animations once I have some time.

Flurry-Austinr: Will there be any boost to the mass on gunboats?

Hanse: Nope! The gunships are balanced with 3 million mass.

Hanse: You must make a choice what to equip to them what you feel is important to yourself. :)

Cemoa: Is there going to be any focus on some more of the non-combat content, such as the proposed Gardener expertise, in the future?

Blixtev: A very large portion of SWG is dedicated to those who don't want to play the combat game, we even added some collection types just for folks who like to go around and explore and click on things! Any chance we get we always look at the social game, the city game, etc. I'm hoping we can get gardening in this year, we can make it a really fun feature.

Housty: On behalf of ranged spies, is there going to be a new special added? Also i hear rumors of the whole ranged AND melee tree being changed. Is this true?

Loche: We are not significantly changing the expertise. I am however adding a ranged version of the Hidden Daggers expertise.

Schnizz: Many people are looking for a new start, that being a transfer to a new server. Is anything being looked into that would lower the price of the transfer or even eliminate it completely?

jneri: we would rather continue to work towards giving you reasons to stay on your servers and stay with the groups and communities that you have created rather than incentivize you to leave them behind

pyrochenko: my first question involves the bug introduced in chapter 6.8 with entering mustafar instances. this is not the same bug as for the kubazaa beetle foreman cave. i'm referring to the bug of CTD or crash to character select screen upon trying to enter the droid army or hk47 instance, then zoning in at the exit spawn point. can we get an update on this?

Teesquared: Go into the game options in Launchpad and turn on the option to send crash reports to us. Also post the steps to reproduce the crash on the forums and we will have our QA run them so we can resolve the issue.

Anon980: How much attention will weaponsmith receive?

DeadMeat: Weaponsmith is scheduled for an update as well. We are always of course adding in new schematics and crafting options.

Onyx: For the crafting profession updates, is it possible we will see some new things as well as fixes? By new I mean things like "sockets for jewelry" or new schematics or even new colors for existing palettes?

Loche: You will see fixes, and some new things. Hopefully not just schematics...

Volntyr: DM, Do you think the Wa