Community Q&A: April 27th, 2012

Last Friday BioWare posted another Community Q&A. Here are two of the questions and answers:

Arymono: When will character transfers be available for everybody?

Dallas Dickinson (Senior Producer, Live Services): We will be rolling out our Character Transfer Service in early summer. First we’ll have some targeted free transfers from/to specific servers, but that will be followed with a broader system where you can either take advantage of free promotional transfers to specific servers or paid transfers to the server of your choice. We know everyone has more questions about character transfer, and we’ll reveal more details closer to the launch date.

DrakeAssaShin: What is being done to address low population servers?

Dallas: The Character Transfer Service, as mentioned above, will be offering free transfers from/to specific servers. This should allow the most motivated players to get onto a higher population server.

I kind of wonder how that's going to work. If the free transfers are from unpopulated servers to populated servers then isn't that just going to make things worse for the unpopulated servers? And the other way around I can't see a lot of people taking them up on the offer. The only thing of use that I can see is offering people free transfers if their server is going to be merged into another server or such. But I'm sure BioWare knows what they're doing better than I do.

The Q&A also has some tantalizing hints of things to come in the future.

After the base The Old Republic expands, its player base shrinks (a little) and the developers keep chattering away on the official forums.

Big news last week was that The Old Republic expands to a number of new countries in Europe and in the Middle East. Just look at this list (I removed the "not/only available at Origin.com" from the list; see the official announcement for that):

Europe Albania Andorra Belarus Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Estonia Gibraltar Iceland Kazakhstan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Malta Moldova Romania Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Turkey Ukraine

Middle East Afghanistan Algeria Bahrain Egypt Israel Kuwait Lebanon Libya Morocco Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia Tunisia United Arab Emirates Yemen

That's a lot of new places where people can play The Old Republic. Though I'm a bit surprised that it wasn't already available at a few of the places listed (like Luxembourg since all the surrounding countries had the game available).

At the same time that The Old Republic grew it also shrank a bit... as BioWare took action against a number exploiting accounts. Here's the official news:

We place a high priority on ensuring a safe and fair game environment within Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. As part of this, we continually monitor the live game service for exploits and cheats within the game. Anyone found to be in violation of our Terms of Service risks action being taken on their game account, up to and including the possibility of being permanently banned from play.

With Game Update 1.2, new measures were put in place to improve our detection of exploits, particularly in relation to 'speed hacking' and teleport cheats. With the help of this improved detection, we recently took action against hundreds of game accounts. In many cases these accounts were permanently removed from the game after being investigated by our Terms of Service team, who double-check every detected account to ensure fair rulings.

Moving forward, we will continue to improve and upgrade our detection methods, but we still need your help. If you witness what you believe to be an exploit while playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, please notify Customer Service by clicking the '?' icon in the game client (by default, situated at the top of your screen). Every reported incident is reviewed by our Terms of Service team and action will be taken when warranted.

Thank you for your continuing cooperation in helping us maintain a safe and fair environment in Star Wars: The Old Republic!

It's always good to see a company taking action against cheaters.

That leaves the developer quotes:

Developer Quotes

• [link] to Stephen Reid on APAC character transfer.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on APAC character transfer, part 2.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on APAC character transfer, part 3.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on APAC character transfer, part 4.
• [link] to David Bass on Legacy Promotion.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on Feedback Request from James Ohlen.
• [link] to Allison Berryman on Legacy Promotion.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on APAC character transfer, part 5.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on APAC character transfer, part 6.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on APAC character transfer, part 7.
• [link] to Allison Berryman on feedback channels.
• [link] to Joveth Gonzalez on community relations.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on future server transfers.
• [link] to Joveth Gonzalez on Field Respec.
• [link] to Stephen Reid on APAC character transfer, part 8.

As you can see most of it was about the server transfers for those in the Asia Pacific region and that has now concluded (as per Mr Reid's last post). And the rest didn't really have anything I found needed to be highlighted, so I'm leaving it at that.