Hey folks,

As I talked about in my previous post we needed to finalize our data and ensure that we were ready to move on appropriate actions for those players who abused the Ravager’s Exploit. Since we have been a bit more open in our process regarding this particular exploit, we thought it would be best to bring it full circle and tell you specifically what we are doing to those players. As of this post, our actions against players has begun. Here are the types of actions we are taking based on the severity of their exploits:

• Received a warning along with anywhere between 1-7 days of in-game suspension time.
• Anyone who received an in-game suspension will also lose their forum privileges for the same period of time.
• For our most egregious offenders, they will have received a suspension up to a permanent suspension.

Inside of those categories of player's it is also possible they could have very specific additional actions taken against them including:

• Removal of inappropriately obtained high-end gear and crafting materials
• Removal of credits and commendations

We know that one of the gameplay impacts from this exploit was an influx of crafters being able to make items which they reverse engineered from ill-gotten gains. Any player who exploited (regardless of severity) and gained a crafting pattern is likely to see that pattern removed.

We didn't take these actions lightly and reviewed every account to determine where we could be lenient. From our end, this was a no win situation. We feel responsible for allowing the exploit to occur and remain in the game for an unreasonable length of time, but we also cannot and will not condone cheating. Thankfully, a large majority of our players didn’t exploit at all, but unfortunately, some of those who did have been with us for a long time, even all the way back to launch. It breaks our hearts to see a few of those loyal players partake in the exploit. Still, it would be unfair to not punish those players, and so we had to take action.

We have all learned some valuable lessons this past month or so, and we’re hopeful to catch these types of situations long before they get released or very quickly thereafter. Please continue to do what you can to notify us quickly should we create another situation where someone can benefit by exploiting a bug in the game.

We appreciate your understanding of our position and hope you’ll continue to enjoy your time with us. We have a lot of great additions coming to SWTOR this year and we look forward to sharing them with you.

-eric

Hey folks,

First, as Tait alluded to we will be having a maintenance tomorrow, on Wednesday the 21st. We didn't have our regular Tuesday maintenance due to the federal holiday here in the states. I wanted to let you know a few of the things coming in tomorrow’s patch:

• Item rarity borders will now show properly
• No more getting stuck in Blood Hunt if someone dies to Jos or Valk Beroya
• The Underlurker will no longer rush extremely quickly back to his target after leaping
• There have been adjustments made to the Contraband Slot Machine (more on this in a second)
• There is also one other fix, check the final patch notes for more info

Let's talk about the changes coming to the Contraband Slot Machine. When we were going into 3.0.2, we wanted to make Grade 11 materials more accessible to more players than they were at the time. As you know, we simultaneously put in the Contraband Slot Machine, which afforded you a fairly good chance to get Jawa Junk and other Jawa vendor scrap parts. This had two effects:

• It had the risk of taking the Grade 11 material costs in the economy, in the long term, to a price below where we would like
• It created a situation where it could be more profitable to completely ignore crew skills by use of the Slot Machine

• The drop rate on all Jawa scraps, has been greatly reduced
• The drop rate on Contraband Reputation items, has been increased
• To insure that the Slot Machine is still an awesome item to strive for, we have added a faction specific walker mount as a very rare drop
• Lastly, we have increased the cost of each Slot Machine coin from 500 to 750 credits. It was always our intent that the coin cost would increase over time as we add more Slot Machines that accept the coin

Thanks everyone!
-eric

Hey folks,

As I mentioned in my post last week, we have been working hard on assessing and figuring out how to address the "lag" issues which have been prominent since Game Update 3.0 went live. After speaking with our engineers, we thought the following would help explain what's happening and what we are doing to address the issues:

What The Problems Are

Here are some of the issues that players have been experiencing since the launch of Game Update 3.0:

• Server performance: Ability delay, Latency issues
• Client performance: A drop in framerate
• The game having a general "laggy" feeling, which is really a mix of the above

Causes and Their Status

As you might expect, when you start to talk about performance, almost every game system has an effect. Once the performance issues with Game Update 3.0 were identified, we needed to isolate what was causing them, and narrowed it down to two main sources:

• Server code – There is a whole lot going on behind the scenes to keep the game running. The main symptom of server related issues is something we call "hitching". Server hitching is the main culprit behind what a lot of you will commonly refer to as lag in SWTOR. The servers are busy processing responses from all the players at once, and sometimes a particular activity on the server can take longer than usual. This is basically the equivalent of a low "framerate" on the server rather than on your client. Server hitching occurs when you issue a command on your client (such as activating an ability, moving your character, opening a vendor) and there is a delay in the server actually performing that command. The server will "hitch" in its response since it is taking a long time to deal with your action or the actions of other players. For the most part, this behavior is responsible for nearly all of the problem areas mentioned above.
• Note: Many of you noticed that shortly after Game Update 3.0 we made a quick change to limit the amount of players in each planetary instance. This was an interim solution to this problem as lowering the number players in a specific area reduces the impact of server hitching to the player. We'll continue to monitor and adjust this number as needed.
• Status: We’ve implemented changes in Patch 3.0.2 to address some of these issues. We will continue to monitor and make additional adjustments, as needed.
• The User Interface – Next up is our game's UI. Following Game Update 3.0, we noticed a large spike in time spent rendering our UI. This caused a lot of the framerate issues many of you reported. Keep in mind that the UI will always have some performance impact versus having it turned off—it’s busy doing something, after all. The question is how much time is acceptable to spend rendering the UI, and what can we do to improve it.
  
  • Status: Several changes have been made for 3.0.2 to address the UI's performance issues.

I learned a few other things while talking with the development team. First is our data tracking around performance. We are constantly monitoring the performance of the game to determine when things have gotten worse and to find ways to address it. That data, as well as your feedback, reports to Customer Service, and information from the Forums helped isolate the major focus areas. After reviewing all our performance data, we were able to pinpoint some pretty critical areas. The engineers informed me that any code change will have a profound impact regardless of the change, so they consider them very high risk. That means extensive testing! A bad change could take down the entire service, or at least cause some surprising bugs.

Second is how performance is adjusted - think of it as a sliding scale. Our engineers will constantly make optimizations where we can to help move that slider in the direction of best performance. When we implement new features, or new systems, typically they require additional game resources and impact our overall performance and the slider moves away from “best”. For example, last year we made substantial changes to the way our chat systems worked and it had a dramatic and positive impact on performance. In fact, performance for the chat system has never been better. Each time we patch the game, it typically includes slider performance adjustments of some type, even if they have a very small impact. We know Game Update 3.0 moved the slider in the wrong direction, but we fully intend to get to back to pre-3.0 performance and improve it even more.

I know performance is far from perfect and that changes aren't coming quite as fast as we wish they were. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused many of you. Please know that we are working on them and will get performance back to a better place!

-eric

Happy holidays everyone! Beginning tomorrow, the Cartel Market will have daily surprise sales for the next 12 days (12/18/2014 – 12/29/2014). You can find out what’s on sale in game, but we will also be posting here and on social media the items going on the Market that day. The Market will be updated at 11:00am CT each day.

• Day 1: Crime Lord and Blockade Runner's Packs
• Day 2: Skip Tracer and Space Pirate Cartel Packs
• Day 3: Coming Soon
• Day 4: Coming Soon
• Day 5: Coming Soon
• Day 6: Coming Soon
• Day 7: Coming Soon
• Day 8: Coming Soon
• Day 9: Coming Soon
• Day 10: Coming Soon
• Day 11: Coming Soon
• Day 12: Coming Soon

May the Force be with you!