September 2010

Galactic Civil War

Rebels continue to lead the Galaxies Wide scoring. With yesterday's release of the GCW Leaderboards, top contributors of both factions can now be monitored. This new intelligence should prove useful in gaining a more strategic hold on the war. In addition to bragging rights, top players will receive new badges, collections, titles, and travel perks. If you haven't been actively involved in the war, now is the time to help your faction and start earning GCW points.

Bonus Everything Weekend

Bonus Everything Weekend is live now! What are you doing reading my producer note! You should be playing SWG. Oh wait don't stop reading my note. I'll try to make this quick.

As you have probably already noticed, we fixed several issues with leveling pets. This was feedback we got from Fan Faire and from the forums. For this bonus weekend, instead of just fixing the loyalty bonus we went ahead and revamped the system to address all that feedback. Pets are also getting a bonus on top of these other changes. However, with these changes we did introduce a new loyalty issue. We have a fix for this loyalty issue and the loyalty meter on public test right now. We'll get this fix out in the next update.

And for those of you who are going to give Hoth a try, in order to earn some extra heroic tokens, we fixed the issue with the reward for the perfect score while bonus tokens are enabled.

Enjoy the bonus weekend!

Fishing for an update

As we mentioned at Fan Faire, fishing is getting some love in SWG. The team figured since we were spending so much effort on the war front, fishing would make for a nice diversion. With this upcoming change, we are adding record length tracking for all fish types in the game. That's seventy fish variations that are being tracked (7 types on 10 planets). Catching a record length fish will earn you a badge and some notoriety. The rule is that if you catch a fish that is equal to or greater than the current fish record, you will earn a badge and possibly other TBD goodies and your name will go in the record. The record fish will also be renamed to indicate it is/was a record fish and will have additional information in its Examine window to indicate additional record information: galaxy/planet/location/bait. To view this record window, we added some new radial options on the fishing pole. From the fishing pole, you'll also be able to access other new fishing data like your own personal best and the personal best of another targeted player.

Like the Galactic Civil War, it's about more than just fishing. It's about competition. In addition to the fishing records, we also have added individual, city, and guild fishing leaderboards. They work very similar to the GCW Leaderboards (in fact there was a lot of implementation reuse as well). Each week at the same time the GCW Leaderboards update, so too will the fishing leaderboards. And yes we'll have collections and badges as well. All fishing leaderboards will be based on a limited number of top length fish from the contributing players. More details will follow.

And there's another surprise or two in store. You'll need to wait until it goes public to find out.

May the best fisher person win!

Rare Loot System

We've made some great progress on this system. As we are approaching the release version, we've made a change in the naming convention used. The new categories of rare loot are:

• Rare
• Exceptional
• Legendary

Originally, we were calling them normal, elite, and boss. This was inline with the game mob types. We changed it because we wanted to give everyone a change to get the best loot even if you killed a mob that was not an elite or boss. Also, as we add rare loot to other game systems, it will make more sense.

The other change we've made is when you examine an item received as rare loot, it will display that it came from the rare loot system.

Many players have been making suggestions on what to add to this new system. We've got many great ideas from these discussions. The more variety of items, the rarer the items become. Having lots of items as choices will make for a lot of rare loot goodness. Please keep the suggestions coming.

Star Wars Galaxies 7th Year Anniversary

The year 5 gift is live now. It's a Duel Recorder. Ok what's a Duel Recorder? In addition to being a nice decorative item, it's a device you can use to record the offensive and defensive stats of a duel with another player. We took the combat dummy functionality and made it work on players. So you can think of it as turning yourself into a combat dummy. When you have recording turned on, it shows a buff icon. The reason we did this is so that all players involved in a duel will know if recording is turned on. Just like a duel is consensual, we wanted a recorded duel to be treated the same way. We also thought about making it a more general purpose combat recorder instead of limiting it to dueling. However, there would be too great of a performance hit if everyone turned the feature on for normal combat. Limiting to duels allowed this new feature to be useful to players and not interfere with normal PvP and PvE combat.

So far, for the 7th anniversary, we've given out some nice decorations, an amazing tree house, a hot lava rock/vehicle lava resistance kit, and now we've turned everyone into dummies. What could be in-store next? You'll find out when year 6 goes live. Oh and please keep your suggestions coming for future gifts. You just may give us the right idea for this fun anniversary celebration.

The other surprise for year 5 was the new helmets on the Restuss vendor. Be sure and check them out.

Player Created Load Screens

It's time to get creative and check out this week's Friday Feature. We cannot wait to read your tips and stories. And we're excited that we can let you and your stories become a part of SWG.

Player Tips and Stories for the Loading Screen

You are still reading my note!

It's time to get busy advancing on the GCW Leaderboards, leveling pets, earning tokens, and having fun with the bonus weekend. Oh and the team is still working hard on the Witches of Dathomir. It's shaping up nicely. The profession updates are still on the horizon as well. I'll have more to talk about them in next month's note.

- Teesquared & Team