UPDATE: There’s a two hour delay so add that into the calculations below!

Well it seems those damn Rakghouls have spent some time chewing their way out from the inside of game update 1.1, as it hasn’t been particularly smooth sailing since last night’s downtime. The most obvious issue has been the glitch with PvP on Ilum, where people have been able to camp the enemy medcenter, which prevents their opponents leaving to recapture control points. To resolve that issue and others, there’s now further downtime scheduled:

Please be advised that the servers will be unavailable beginning at 5AM CST (3AM PST/ 6AM EST/ 11AM GMT/ 12PM CET) as we deploy a new patch. This deployment will fix a few high priority issues in the game. We expect the service to be available again by 10AM CST (8AM PST/ 11AM EST/ 4PM GMT/ 5PM CET). Please watch this thread for updates and information as they become available. To view the status of your server, please visit the Server Status Page.

So locally this means no access to SWTOR starting tonight 19th January between 10pm and 3am AEDT, 7pm to Midnight AWST and Midnight to 5am NZDT.

Below is the full text from SWTOR’s, Principal Lead PvP, Flashpoints and Operations Designer, Gabe Amatangelo:

Hello everyone; I wanted to update you on the issues we’ve been seeing today on the live servers, specifically within the Open World PvP area on Ilum. We’re aware that on some servers, either Republic or Empire groups have been capturing the Ilum control points, entering the enemy’s base and ‘camping’ the medcenters, preventing the opposite faction from leaving their base to recapture control points. This is not a fair or balanced gameplay experience and can also severely affect client performance, so we’re taking steps to address this.

Our intended design for Ilum Open World PvP is that players are instantly killed when entering the enemy’s base safe area, just like in Warzones, and that the defending faction can take taxis to other points within the zone. In Game Update 1.1, this is not working as intended. We have found the issue preventing this from happening under server load and will be publishing an Emergency Patch to address the issue. We’re aiming to have this patch published early tomorrow morning (January 19th, 5 AM US CST).

In addition to these changes, we’ll be reducing the population cap on Ilum. This should help increase performance by requiring your client to render fewer characters on-screen at once.

Regarding Valor gains, with the 1.1 update, players now receive a base reward of 20 Valor per unique enemy player defeated in a short time, and this base reward is modified by the number of objectives that the player’s faction owns. The gains are rate limited per player killed, encouraging players to attack unique players, not to pursue vendettas. The Valor gains players can see over time will vary greatly depending on the activity level in the zone. This is expected.

To dispel a couple of rumors that have been seen today – there is no Valor gain from destroying turrets within enemy bases, and none from killing NPCs.

We encourage players to avoid Ilum until our patch is deployed. As a temporary measure we will be disabling taxi services which would normally take players into the Open World PvP area. However, players will still be able to taxi out of the area.

We will continue to monitor Ilum across all servers and will make further changes to gameplay if required. We welcome your feedback here on the Forums, but please ensure your feedback is constructive and specific. Feedback based on rumor does not help us isolate potential issues.

And finally – if you’ve been exploiting the glitch, punishment may be on its way according to Joveth Gonzalez, Associate Online Community Manager:

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to be clear and let you all know that we’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary.

So it’s more downtime though it’s actually a more favourable time than we’re used to, so that’s a small consolation.

Over to you: noticed any good or bad stuff about the 1.1 update?