Active subscribers to The Old Republic who haven’t yet purchased Rise of the Hutt Cartel are in luck. In an announcement on the official website, Bioware has announced that the expansion will be free for subscribers beginning September 12th. Subscribers who already own the expansion will receive an exclusive title, “The Risen,” as well as 1050 Cartel Coins if they purchased the expansion after August 11th.
(Source: The Old Republic)
Bounty Hunters have the life, don’t they? All that they do is hunt bounties and collect paychecks. In an upcoming update to The Old Republic, Bioware wants to make everyone a bounty hunter, at least for a short period of time. Starting in August, once per galactic month the Bounty Brokers Association will begin posting lists of contracts across the many planets for any and all players to fulfill.
Bounty contracts will take you far and wide in the search for your target, but the BBA Mission Terminal allows you to select the specific planet on which you wish to hunt. Each day, you may sign up for one standard contract and one Kingpin Contract, and each may take you to a separate planet. Completion of a contract requires the death or capture of your target, but you will also be rated on your investigative technique and your aptitude for handling BBA underworld resources.
Look for the contracts coming in August. If you need a Bounty before then, check your nearest department store for ongoing sales.
(Source: The Old Republic)
As much as I know there is a subsection of gamers who want nothing more than for The Old Republic to be down and out so they can justify kicking it over and over, I have bad news for you: According to an earnings call by Electronic Arts, The Old Republic has not only grown exponentially in size, it is making lods of emone. 1.7 million new players have joined since the game went free to play, bringing up subscriptions to just under half a million.
“The really interesting thing that’s happening inside the service right now is monthly average revenue for the game has more than doubled since we introduced the free-to-play option. And as we look forward, we’re going to continually invest in new content for the service and for players every six weeks or so.”
Granted that news shouldn’t exactly be surprising. We would have been more surprised if The Old Republic had somehow managed to have less players and be making less money after the transition.
(Source: Polygon)
Star Wars: The Old Republic continues chugging along with new content updates. With update 2.1, players will be able to customize their looks at the new Appearance Designer Kiosk. Players will be able to change the look of their eye color, body type, hair style, and are even able to recolor their armor. What’s more, gamers will even be able to go the extra mile and change their species completely. And what better way to introduce this feature than with the release of the Cathar species? The Cathar catlike race possess powerful melee abilities in the world of Star Wars, including the ability of rapid healing. How much of that translates into the game will be seen.
Massively has a great article covering James Ohlen’s comments at GDC about how free to play saved The Old Republic.
When free-to-play launched in November, it “blew all expectations out of the water,” said Ohlen. Subscriptions started going up again. Concurrent players on the servers went way up. Both of those statistics continue to rise. As Ohlen put it, TOR is the second biggest subscription MMORPG in the western world, it has had two million new accounts since the F2P launch, thousands of new players try out the game everyday, and TOR is one of the largest microtransaction money-makers for publisher EA.
I’m interested in finding out what EA’s largest microtransaction money-maker is, assuming The Old Republic being “just one of the largest” doesn’t put it at #1.
(Source: Massively)
In their attempt to respond to ongoing community concerns, Bioware asked players on the Asia Pacific servers what they wanted to do about low population issues. Rather than merge the three APAC servers down to one, given that each represents a different playset (PvP, PvE, RP-PvE), the decision has been made to merge each server into an appropriate North America server. On the Old Republic forums, Bioware Community Manager Eric Musco posted the following:
There is no current date on when the servers will be merged.
(Source: The Old Republic)
In my personal book of stuff, commendations and their ilk have generally leaned toward the side of useless. Ignoring how useful they actually are once you hit that mythical creature I have heard of but never seen, often called “end game,” the commendations you receive on the actual leveling path can range from highly useful to discarded and forgotten. This all banks on the prayer that the developer has made these commendations easy enough to obtain, and requires the player spend enough time in that zone, to obtain enough of that area’s commendations, before they outlevel the area and whatever reward said commendations might bring.
Currently in The Old Republic, commendations are planet-specific. So if you leave Hutta before you have any use of the Hutta commendations, odds are you probably won’t have any use for them in the future. With update 2.0, Bioware is condensing all of the planet-specific commendations into one wallet-sized credit card. Alongside planetary commendations, players will be able to obtain Classic (level 50 flashpoints/operations), Basic, Elite (level 55 flashpoints/operations), and Ultimate (Hard/Nightmare Mode) commendations, each with their own cap on how many can be obtained and stored.
Darth Hater notes that the planetary commendation cap is 100, as opposed to the thousand per planet currently in-game.
(Source: Darth Hater)
That piece on the chest plate looks like it might be some sort of coolant system, but it’s actually an Old Republic George Foreman grill for cooking up a grilled cheese sandwich on the run. Bounty Hunters have to eat too.
MMOrning Shots is a (mostly) daily compilation of random screenshots from MMOs played by the MMO Fallout staff. If you would like your own screenshot featured, send it over to contact@mmofallout.com
My credit card is like a third kidney to me, or a second ab, or a third stomach. Always attached, never without function. That being said, some people still prefer to pay for their game purchases via phone, and a good number of MMOs have systems in place to accommodate this. Bioware is the latest to join the club by offering Cartel Coin packs via SMS to players in select countries. Currently, players are only able to buy 450 Cartel Coins ($5 USD), plus any carrier fees that may apply, and the service is consolidated to a select few countries. Over time, Bioware hopes to increase the service to other countries, as well as expand the limits of purchases.
Currently purchasing via SMS is limited to the following countries:
(Source: The Old Republic)
Bioware has launched patch 1.6.2, bringing with it all sorts of bug fixes, balance changes, and miscellaneous changes. Chief amongst the updates in the patch notes is the revelation that Bioware will now be enforcing character slot restrictions. Why now, after all this time? That’s not important. What is important is that free players are restricted to two characters per server, with preferred status players capped at six and subscribers capped at twelve. In a completely unrelated move to the newly enforced cap on character slots, players are now able to purchase character slots from the cartel market for 600 coins.
Here is where the situation becomes confusing. For subscribers and preferred status players who already had more than the default amount, you still have access to your characters, but you still have to buy that character slot if you want to extend your limit on that server. Still doesn’t make sense? Let me explain: Say you are a preferred status player with seven characters on a server prior to today’s update. Your seventh character isn’t locked, but if you want to create an eighth character you are going to have to purchase two character slots, the first to cover your seventh and the second to cover the eighth.
(Source: The Old Republic)
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