SWTOR Developer Livestream Notes (September 24, 2020)

The Developers of SWTOR hosted a livestream to talk about what’s coming up in the game! This includes the upcoming conquest changes, augments, guard changes, toxicity changes, legacy ignore, 6.2, Fest of Prosperity, and more.

Not a lot of new news. The GTN will have commas in next couple builds and trading. Cool. New PTS patch tomorrow.

Conquest

• Biggest change to balancing points passing over all objectives
• Balance conquest points to reward you with time you invested in an activity
• Weekly should be worth more than single daily, example
• They went through a ton of data
• Changes to planets and opening the planets back up and all be available appropriate to your level
• Please five feedback on PTS on Conquest

Augments

• Why introducing new augments: After an expansion is released, they continue monitoring player progress, and after Dxun master mode came out, they’re seeing the completion rates rise over time, they want to continue making that rate go up. They didn’t want to introduce a whole new gear tier. They wanted to make the augment materials come from the other master modes that are maybe easier, so players get rewards either gearing up a new player or old players who are already geared get materials. Another reason to target Ranked PvP and Master Mode Ops with new players and encourage them to join. Example if you have veteran mode on farm another reason to starting trying nightmare mode.
• Player feedback was that the amounts to craft them were quite high. They will lower the number of materials needed to craft it. The final number is not decided. Watch the forums and give feedback.

Guard

• They are nerfing guard for DPS players (not tanks) by 50%.
• They are shifting the meta – they don’t want to do it flippantly. They listen to a lot of feedback. They want to keep tanks and give tanks those tank roles. Tanks are tanks. Guards being used quite a bit in both pvp and pve by people who are trying to use dps characters as tanks. But the game was never balanced around that. DPS specs guarding were never accounted for in the PvE fights so they don’t think it should affect the fights much. PvP they want to see how it affects the current meta. It will be an incremental change and they really want feedback after trying it out. It’s not a final change and may change in the future adjusting based on feedback.

Toxicity

• Adding legacy ignore. Now if you ignore them it ignores all their characters on that server.
• All ignore lists you have on each of your characters will become a legacy-wide ignore list. (they will be combined)
• If someone is on your ignore list you will not be matched with them in PvE. In PvP you will still be matched to avoid people exploiting the feature to throw match making. They will not be welcome in your stronghold and any keys to your stronghold are removed. Trying to make it as smooth as possible.
• They have heard players feel that no action is taken for harassment. EA has “Clean Play Initiative” where they will start being a lot harsher and faster against harassment and toxicity on the internet.
• Legacy Friends list has been highly requested by players. Want to make sure if they address it they allow players to play in private mode too if a player does not want to appear on a friends list. Respecting privacy and the convenience of adding all alt characters to friends list. They want to look in to that properly which is why it was not added with legacy ignore.
• Ranked friction point: ungeared unskilled players entering ranked. New requirement will be 306 gear. Requires a certain minimum amount of grind to raise the barrier of entry. They don’t know if it will help or bed bad so please give feedback.
• Ranked friction point: They are fixing some of the matchmaking including filling matches. They have fixed some of that. Backfill roles with roles so this doesn’t happen. And if declining happens over and over they will increase the desert penalty.
• Vote kick removed for pvp. Example if they were AFK, vote to kick them, but now they have more automated features for stuff like that. They are going to monitor how it works. Botting, afk, and bad behaviour.
• Credit selling – they did some big changes to reduce it. KEEP REPORTING. They’ll constantly be finding new ways to spam so keep reporting so they can develop new ways to stop it.

Currency

• Comma or period to separate the numbers in the currency tab
• Players mentioned it’s frustrating on GTN and trading there’s no commas
• In 6.1.4 there will be commas or dots dpeneding on where you live on the GTN
• Yay!!!!!!! New info!!!
• It’s not on the PTS yet.
• Eric Musco says he plays most of the time in his free time on the GTN lol.

Feast of Prosperity Live Playthrough

• (Swtorista note – I’ll have a live playthru of this up on my youtube later today with all the cutscenes)
• They are hoping for testing on the PTS.
• There’s no reputation track, but a new story mission unlocks each week, which encourages you to log in once a week.
• “Two different hutts you can work for”
• First minigame is a delivery droid who delivers food to tables depending on what the customers ordered from the kitchen.
• Devs are not planning well and knowingly go and try and stream the bugged quest minigame. The first time it doesn’t let them in the door, the second time the minigame never ends and is stuck on an infinite loop. Poor droid.
• Second minigame is a cooking ingredients based quest.
• No launch date, want to test on PTS first
• Targeting end of October, event for fall

6.2

• Intending to do a livestream for 6.2 (story update)
• End of october, early november
• After 6.14 is out the door

New Items?

• No mention.