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Busting SWTOR bugs: “everything else is secondary”

February 1, 2012 by

It's not a bug but you get the drift!

Rich Vogel, SWTOR’s executive producer, has hammered out a developer blog post giving a little more insight into how BioWare are tackling the inevitable bugs that any MMO has. It’s a strategically timed post given the griping over patches and remaining in-game issues.

As you’ll read below, Vogel is pretty emphatic about what the development team’s priority is: fixing bugs, with everything else being “secondary”. There’s a lot of fairly basic information in the post, but there’s also some gems. One that tickled my fancy was this one:

Fixing bugs in a game as massive as The Old Republic is a little trickier! The PC is a very complicated platform to develop for and getting the game to work flawlessly on every PC ever made is unlikely, but we want to fix as many bugs that affect players as we can.

I’m not sure merging the issue of bugs versus PC configurations is anything but a little disingenuous – sure some configs will affect gameplay but they’re not bugs as such unless they occur within the range of the acceptable system specs for the game.

A second issue is: surely the complexity of the system was taken into account with the development process, so I’m not sure that really clarifies a lot either.

Finally, I’m going to make a cheap shot at you BioWare: aside from the obvious expense of developing for the Mac side-by-side, its configurations are markedly simpler so perhaps that might’ve been a route to explore?

Anyway, if you’re not that aware of how bug hunting goes on in an MMO, read on for the detailed overview and we’d love your comments on whether the post from Rich Vogel clarifies things for you?

As one of the original members of the development team and having helped create the studio that brought you Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, I’m privileged to have been on this incredible journey that culminated in launching the game. Now that we are through launch I felt this was a great opportunity to talk about how we balance our efforts when it comes to fixing bugs and developing new content.

The good news is that we have a large team dedicated to the game, which gives us the flexibility to both fix bugs and develop new content. I want to make it very clear here that the live game service comes first though, and fixing bugs is our team’s first priority. Everything else is secondary.

Let me start by explaining how we go about determining when to fix an issue in the live game, whether it is a bug or an exploit. Let’s begin with exploits – those cases when we determine that a bug in the code can give an unfair advantage to a player. (Remember, not all bugs are exploits!)

If an exploit is discovered that threatens players’ experience in the game or the in-game economy, we will usually try to create an Emergency Patch to fix that exploit. Before we declare something an emergency though, we have to validate the issue with our internal Quality Assurance, or QA team. They gather data working with our Customer Service, analytics, and development teams to determine the extent of the exploit and the steps needed to reproduce it. Once we have the steps, we work on a plan to fix the issue. Depending how long the issue will take to fix and how risky it is, we will decide if we need to temporarily disable the cause of the exploit in the game.

Generally speaking, we can fix these types of issues pretty quickly once they are detected in the game. Our turn-around time is really good in this area and we’ve dealt with some recent exploits quite quickly. That’s because we have a dedicated Live Support team that handles these issues, made up of on-call engineers, designers, artists, and producers, who are available around the clock. Our extensive in-game metric tools are also always monitoring the game and generating reports – meaning that if anyone is exploiting, we are going to find out about it. Our main goal is to ensure you have a fun, balanced and fair gameplay experience in The Old Republic. We won’t stop looking for exploits and taking steps to correct them to maintain a fair game.

Fixing bugs in a game as massive as The Old Republic is a little trickier! The PC is a very complicated platform to develop for and getting the game to work flawlessly on every PC ever made is unlikely, but we want to fix as many bugs that affect players as we can.

Not every bug is created equal. Some bugs – even ones that might look simple – take a long time to deal with and some might not be able to be reproduced (as they may be random occurrences under special circumstances). With that in mind, we use a triage process to prioritize our bug lists. This helps us determine which bugs we fix first based on the bug’s severity (which is how many people it affects). We estimate the severity of bugs by looking at volume of tickets sent to our Customer Service team, Forum posts, and using our telemetry data from the game, amongst other things.

The first thing the development team does every day is triage incoming bugs. Team leaders from different groups within BioWare Austin meet to review the incoming bugs, which are pulled from our bug tracking software (managed by the QA team). QA gathers these bugs from several sources (player reports, internal QA, Customer Service tickets, and Community). Before any bug is tracked, we need to verify whether it is a real, reproducible bug by trying to reproduce it ourselves. Sometimes that cannot be done either because we don’t have enough information on the bug (so give us plenty of detail in bug reports, please!) or because there are special circumstances that cause this bug to occur which are not found through normal play patterns. If that is the case we reach out to the community or contact the player to help us reproduce. We have done this many times with great success. Thanks to all of you who have helped us track down these types of bugs.

Let’s get back to our triage process. Every day we review incoming bugs as well as existing bugs to determine the order in which we fix these bugs. The highest priority bugs are what we call ‘blocker bugs’. These are any type of bugs that block a player’s progression through the game, and they’re important enough that they may be fixed via an emergency patch. Whether a bug is fixed in an emergency patch or not depends on the complexity of the bug (which dictates how risky it is to implement) and whether or not there is a workaround available to allow a player to progress. If there is a workaround available, we will usually wait to push that bug into the next publish and ensure players know about the workaround. This allows any players affected to continue to progress, while giving us time to ensure the correct fix won’t unduly affect the rest of the game.

The balancing act of fixing bugs while ensuring we maintain a stable game is always tricky. We have to make sure that when we publish a fix to the live game it doesn’t alter the game code in a way that can make things worse. This is a normal part of complex software development, but it means we have to assess the risk on what we publish to the live game very carefully. The more bugs we fix with each publish, the higher the risk of breaking things, as we’ve changed more game code. That is why we try to limit the number of bugs and types of bugs we address with each patch. If we can fix a lot of low risk bugs we will push more out. Our most important goal is remove as many annoying bugs as fast as we can; currently we aim to push out patches which help fix bugs weekly but that can change depending on the severity of the bugs.

Please remember, if we don’t respond publicly to a bug that does not mean we are not going to fix it. We want to make sure we provide a good playing experience to our players. That is why we have a large team of people working every day to bug fix and remove exploits from the game.

In terms of developing new content I wanted to let everyone know that we are committed to publishing new features and content on a regular basis. It is important to make sure the game is always changing. We have several strike teams working on future game additions. We have a huge list of features and content we want to put into the game and we are constantly adding to it based on feedback we get from the community and from playing the game ourselves. Every single one of us on the development team plays the game, and we see the same issues you do and where we need to expand.

Our most important goal is to make sure you continue to have fun playing our game and we will do everything in our power to make you feel that you are getting your money’s worth every month. Thank you very much for playing!

Over to you: do you think BioWare are wearing down the onslaught of bugs?

Filed Under: News, Opinion Tagged With: ,

Why I don’t want to get to Level 50 (at least yet)

January 31, 2012 by

Now that it’s well over 6 weeks into the life of SWTOR, there’s no shortage of Level 50s running around. Unlike those who levelled up in the first week or so, most of those who’ve reached end-game will have actually experienced the storyline in at least a brief sense. Some will have put in a huge number of hours and truly experienced the story from start to finish, but I’d argue they’re in the minority.

For the rest of us still levelling, we’ve either been putting in a lot less hours, stopping to explore everything, or both. That’s certainly where I’m up to. My Jedi Sage is at Level 29, and whilst running over a sand dune in Tattooine, I stopped to check out the scenery and take a screen shot or two. Whilst standing there I once again thought about how it’d be sad to end that initial levelling journey.

Like any game, that first time achieving a key objective is usually the most memorable and I have no doubt that’ll be the case with SWTOR. What accentuates this for me at present is the current griping about the game’s end content. Given I haven’t experienced that content myself, I’m not in a great position to critique it, but if the end-game isn’t quite as engaging as the levelling content, then I have an even better reason to enjoy the journey rather than speeding to the destination.

There’s a fairly strong opposing argument however. Given how story-driven SWTOR is, even if you do rush through some of the story, every class has different quests so you can easily roll two or three toons and not repeat the same quest once. That still seems a little short-sighted an approach though, as any story is only as strong as its component parts, so skipping through quest cutscenes here and there must affect the overall experience.

Overall, this is a long-winded way of saying that SWTOR is a damn enjoyable visual experience in addition to its story. There are legitimate gripes about performance and end-game content, but both can be easily remedied and in the meantime, I’ll keep stopping at the top of sand dunes to admire the view.

How about you – have you enjoyed the levelling experience and do you feel you’ve done everything you wanted on the road to Level 50?

Filed Under: News, Opinion Tagged With:

Getting grief in open-world PvP? The Angwe Story

January 30, 2012 by

angwe storyWhat is there to say about the Angwe story. I just had to share this little piece of fun from WoW. Like SWTOR, WoW has PvP servers and based on this web page, some people don’t like being ganked on a regular basis. One such ganker, Angwe, has gone to the trouble to create a page documenting the aggro he causes.

There’s some funny stuff in there as well as some semi-disturbing threats made against a legitimate if not honourable means of playing the game. And yes, we know this is an older site but what the hell.

Have a look at it for yourself.

Filed Under: Community, Humour, News, PvP Tagged With: , ,

Flash Point 25: McGherkinsquirters and Roleplaying

January 29, 2012 by

We’re pretty thrilled to have racked up a quarter of a century of podcasts, and what better way to celebrate than with a guest.

A big thanks to Ganden from SWTOR-RP for jumping into the fray for this episode.

Points of discussion:
– SWTOR patches: frequency and effect
– Legacy system – current and future
– Founder title
– Oceanic launch speculation
– Roleplaying discussion with Ganden (here’s his great intro article on RP’ing)
– Star Wars Cello duel and assorted movie reviews
– Shout outs for our forums, Facebook page, Oceanic Guild listing, Google Plus page and Twitter account

Also after the show is Episode 3 of Star Wars Addicts Anonymous, Ed and his flatmate Collyn’s laid back look at everything SWTOR.

Listen via iTunes or right here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:03:04 — 28.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Filed Under: News, Podcast Tagged With:

Heavy Damage: Tricks of the PvP Trade Part 1

January 29, 2012 by

Heavy Damage is our weekly Tanking column – if you have suggestions of what you’d like covered, drop our resident Tank, Alec Bailey a line. 

This week we are going to be looking into PvP specific skills and abilities – what you should be keeping up and using on enemies. I’ll start with Huttball, then in the following weeks I’ll talk about Voidstar, and Alderaan Civil War (ACW).

Huttball is a PvP game that involves taking a ball from the middle of the arena to the opposing team’s spawn point. The premise of the game sounds much easier in theory than it is in practice. Aside from players that are trying to bring you down, you must deal with a varity of traps, such as acid pits, fire hazards and air vents that push you into the sky. The key part of Huttball is team work – I’ve found there are two optimal ways to score in Huttball – passing and protecting. The first option is a bit harder in a PUG. Passing doesn’t only apply to tanks – this strategy can be used by any combination of players. The latter of the choices, protection, is where your Tank abilities come into play. My usual strategy is once the match has started and everyone is waiting for the shield doors to drop so they can rush the ball’s spawn, I ask who’s a healer and who wants to carry the ball. Once this is decided, throw your “Guard” or “Protect” shielding ability on the ball carrier. The Healer will spot heal you and keep the carrier alive –  it helps if the healer is a Sage or if you’re Tanking as a Shadow because their knock-back ability is amazing for keeping melee players off the carrier. Here’s some other advice based on class:

Shadow – Use your knock-back and slows as much as possible to keep enemies off the ball carrier. Also throw out mind crush on any stealthers you see to keep them visible. And don’t forget your stuns. Once your character is a high level you’ll get Force Pull which is great for pulling enemies into traps.

Vanguard – use your Ion Pulse and Explosive surge as often as you can without completely depleting your ammo. These two skills lower the damage output of enemies so they help you and the carrier stay alive. Harpoon is used as a pull to either get a player off of a Healer or carrier, or for pulling enemies into traps.

Guardian – Force Sweep is key when guarding a carrier, does decent damage and it’s AoE, so you can damage more people also lowering their accuracy by five percent for 18 seconds. Sundering Strike should also be used everytime it’s available as it weakens an enemy’s armour, allowing your team’s DPS to burn them down at a faster pace. Guardian also has a bit of an advantage to guarding in its ability to Force Leap to enemies that are attacking the carrier. This is very useful because your Guard ability only works within a 15 metre range, and since it’s a PvP match you WILL be getting stunned and slowed. It’s helpful to be able to take out a pursuer then leap back to guarding the carrier. At high levels you’ll also get Force Push, a very deadly combination if you’re pushing and leaping to the same target – or to push attackers off ledges or into traps. Saber Throw is also a great ability to keep the ranged players on their feet and focused on you.

Overall, as a Tank you also need to remember to use all the tools at your disposal, your self shielding abilities like Saber Ward and the like should be used anytime your health is dropping steadily. Also, Taunts are extremely helpful – taunt everyone you can. Every time it’s off cooldown, select someone attacking you, the carrier or your healer and put a taunt on them.

The best strategy in PvP is to be prepared if you’re wanting to be serious and grind out some PvP games. Search for a group on the fleet and lay out a plan of attack before you enter the Warzone, or find yourself a guild that does a lot of Warzone games.  Remember, Tanks, keep your team alive and stay frosty.

May the Force be with you!

 

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , ,

Family Research Council Decries ‘SW:TOR’ Update Allowing Homosexual Relationships

January 29, 2012 by

In what should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has decided that the latest update to BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO is more than just added content; it’s a strong political statement that must be stopped at all costs!

After some players complained about not having enough relationship options in the new game, BioWare agreed to allow gay and lesbian couples to pair up in the Star Wars universe. This, of course, makes them homosexual activists seeking to destroy the bonds of the family through devious digital means. I’ll let Tony put it in his own pun-laden words:

“In a new Star Wars game, the biggest threat to the empire may be homosexual activists! Hello, I’m Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. In a galaxy not so far far away, Star Wars gamers have already gone to the dark side. The new video game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has added a special feature: gay relationships. Bioware, the company that developed the game, said it’s launching a same-sex romance component to satisfy some complaints. That surprised a lot of gamers, since Bioware had made it clear in 2009 that “gay” and “lesbian” don’t exist in the Star Wars universe. Since the announcement, homosexuals have been celebrating the news, but parents sure aren’t. On the game’s website, there are more than 300 pages of comments–a lot of them expressing anger that their kids will be exposed to this Star Warped way of thinking. You can join them by logging on and speaking up. It’s time to show companies who the Force is really with!”
Read the rest at www.ology.com

Filed Under: From the internets!

Quick patch incoming plus extended maintenance on the 31st January

January 28, 2012 by

If you’ve played SWTOR over the past week you’ve probably heard some murmurs of discontent around the game’s performance, if not experiencing it yourself. Actually murmurs have been shouts in some quarters and there’s not doubt BioWare is listening as they’re bringing down the servers sometime Saturday night Australian / New Zealand time – once we have a confirmation of an exact time we’ll post it.

Additionally, there’s an extended weekly maintenance of eight hours or so:

Scheduled Maintenance

Date: Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Time: 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET)

All game servers and swtor.com will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than eight hours.

So that’s:

– 7pm on Tuesday 31st until 3am Wednesday 1st Feb AEDT
– 4pm to midnight AWST
– 9pm to 5am NZDT

So tonight don’t plan on any extended playing time in SWTOR and Tuesday is out too. Never fear though, we’ll have plenty of SWTOR info for your to trawl through, including a brand new podcast being recorded Sunday night.

Filed Under: News, Servers Tagged With:

SWTOR Game Time Cards in Australia

January 27, 2012 by

This probably isn’t news to some but we still see people ask regularly where to buy game time cards locally. Today I wandered into an EB Games store and spied some of the blighters in the wild:

(Click here for the full-size version)

$30 for 60-days is certainly within the expected price range, and if EB Games have them, then I expect other retailers do too, so post away in comments if you’ve spotted any!

Filed Under: News Tagged With:

Suggestion Box: Douchebaggery

January 27, 2012 by

Over on the SWTOR Gamers of Oceania Facebook page, David K. asked the question on whether people had noticed a migration of what can be loosely termed as ‘WoW Douchebaggery’ – incivility toward lower level players, slagging gear etc etc. I haven’t seen a lot of it myself on my server, but I’ve certainly had other people mention it.

So over to you: if you’ve played WoW or another MMO, how’s the social scene in SWTOR appearing to you so far? Is there just the odd idiot, a wider culture of poor behaviour or have you found it a bed of roses?

Also, anyone wanting to start lobbying for Douchebaggery to be included in the Oxford dictionary should feel free!

Filed Under: News, Suggestion Box Tagged With:

C2-N2: the gift that keeps on giving

January 25, 2012 by

I’d argue that one of the biggest cult figures of SWTOR is the ever loving, cushion stuffing droid called C2-N2. Whether you love him or hate him, he’s hard to ignore, and BioWare’s Lead Combat Designer, Georg Zoeller, has joined the fun with this post:

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you in response to your complaint about our product, the C2-N2 droid. We regret that you are experiencing difficulties with this award winning, state of the art household droid.

Sadly, we have to inform you, that the C2-N2 droid, and its Imperial counterpart, the 2V-R8 autonomous ship maintenance unit, are not rated for combat at this time.

Several regrettable incidents, including the loss of a full squad of SIS operatives (apparently triggered by a malfunctioning speech unit voicing its congratulations to the undercover team during a deep cover infiltration mission), have lead the Republic Technical Support Corps to revoke the combat certification from these units and forced us to replace the ‘advanced weapon and martial training ROM’ from the programming of the unit.

These facts have been clearly disclosed to customers at time of sale, as well as in the programmatic introductory conversation program voiced upon owner transfer.

For this reason, we cannot take responsibility for your problems.

We are however pleased to announce that future updates to the unit’s artificial intelligence core will dramatically increase the efficiency of it’s emergency medical protocol features – and add some other, more questionable features.

The C2 Droid Corporation is also pleased to announce that we have started investigations into a new line of droid casings and cores, aimed at improving the efficiency of the unit’s assembly and construction features. No official release date for this line of top end equipment has been determined at this point.

We thank you for your interest in our product.

The Management

C2-N2 – The only thing that crits is his voice in your earchannel!

Questionable features eh? I’m intrigued, how about you? Feel free to suggest a new feature for C2-N2 in comments. Have a read through the full thread on the SWTOR forums as there’s a bucket of laughs in there.

Filed Under: Humour, News Tagged With: ,

Oceanic Guild Spotlight: Not Steamboat

January 24, 2012 by

If you’d like your guild spotlighted, just use our contact form to let us know. Or if you like, respond to the questions shown below and send them in – we love to profile guilds and the work they’re doing. The only requirement is that you’re an active oceanic guild. Please be patient if you don’t hear back from us immediately – we will only be spotlighting a guild every week or so.

Name of guild

Not Steamboat

Guild website 

www.notsteamboat.com

History of your guild’s name

NSB has been around since 2006 and was originally a WOW guild in which we became popular through multiple oceanic firsts and world top 20 kills in our prime.

SWTOR has become the chosen platform for NSB’s next chapter and many of our old school elite are back.

The name itself came about when a bunch of friends were going out for Chinese food. Upon entering the restaurant the waiter asked Yumchat (NSB founding member) if they would like steamboat or ala carte. Yumchat then replied with “Ahhhhhhh…… Not Steamboat”, to which we then laughed and decided to make a guild around it.

Cool story bro, but what does it mean? I’m not sure, maybe we wanted to be different; too many of today’s guilds base their guild names on some cool word or corny catch phrase which are generally quite boring and forgettable.

What sort of guild do you intend on being?

• Not a family guild
• Hardcore PvE focused (3-5 days a week)
• Players held to high standards in terms of skill, commitment and determination
• Operations run in a highly organized and time-efficient manner
• Small focused guild that focuses on quality over quantity

NSB is a hardcore PvE focused guild and our average member age is 25. We aim to be one of the stand-out guilds in oceanic progression..

We have high standards of all our members in terms of skill/commitment/gear and have a historically high member retention rate.

People who have been part of NSB hold the tag with honor as they know it wasn’t easy to earn. The road ahead is harsh but full of achievement. Bonds will form and you will soon notice the strong sense of camaraderie we have which gives us strength and presence.

Why did you choose to be a part of the Empire? 

It suits the personality of most of our guild members. However we will most likely switch to republic for a change if the game allows it at some point as we would prefer the difficulties of an under represented faction.

You have one minute to convince someone they should be in your guild – what would you say to them?

Right now is probably the best time to join NSB. Once we fill our roster, openings in the guild will be scarce.
Due to game limitations (no server transfers or faction transfers) we are recruiting from a restricted player base which means we are currently happy to take on less experienced players and build them up to an NSB level if they show potential in their application.
Additional RL skills such as web design, programming and mod-design are also a bonus.

• We push each other forward
• We drive one another to perfection
• The only excuse for failure is “I f****d up”
• We strictly follow a ‘no drama’ policy, any form of sabotage to the guild or operation is an instant gkick.
• We laugh and life-grip one another off cliffs.
• Raid times are currently 8pm-12am, Wed/Thurs and Sun/Mon.

If your mindset is similar to ours, I encourage you to send in an application for an opportunity to play amongst some of the best players in the oceanic community.

What are your predictions for the first 6 months of the guild’s existence post-launch?

We have been going through a lot of selection and recruitment and optimizing our roster over the last month or so. This has involved kicking players, recruiting players and getting some of our established members to re-roll classes. While all this has been going on we have been doing some ad-hoc 8 man raiding and have just recently started 16-mans on the 19th of January. Our primary focus will be 16-mans as there is and always will be more prestige in completing the larger raids. Currently we are just taking it easy and gearing up.

We will hopefully see a patch (In March I hope) which will have challenging end-game content that isn’t instantly farmable.

Filed Under: Guilds, News Tagged With: ,

Something new to listen to when playing SWTOR

January 24, 2012 by

TOROZ Reader Kuuzon has given us a heads-up on a nice little piece of Star Wars remixing. Star Wars – Duel Of The Fates (The Noisy Freaks & Dead C∆T Bounce remix) takes a hefty step away from the classical orientation of John Williams’ music and it works pretty damn well.

Have a listen for yourself:

So what do you think? Can you see this in your raiding music arsenal?

Filed Under: Community, News Tagged With:
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