News

SWTOR Launching in the Pacific

Bioware just announced their release date for the Pacific region - March 1st. Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore are all receiving their own regional servers. So for those of you wanting better pings and live in the Pacific region, you will finally get that coming next month.

According to Bioware, if your account qualifies for a character transfer you will be notified and given limited-time opportunity to migrate your character over to a regional server in the beginning of March.

Here's directly from swtor website:


Star Wars: The Old Republic will be available in both Standard and Digital Deluxe editions. The Standard Edition will retail for $79.99 AUD / $89.99 NZD / $389.00 HKD / $64.00 SGD and the Digital Deluxe Edition of the game, an Origin.com exclusive, will retail for $89.99 AUD / $99.99 NZD / $465.00 HKD / $76.90 SGD. 30 days of game time will be included with every version of the game, and after that time players will be able to continue playing the game by paying a monthly subscription, or by purchasing a 60-Day Pre-Paid Game Time Card for $32.99 AUS / $42.99 NZD / $249.00 HKD / $39.90 SGD. Star Wars: The Old Republic has three recurring subscription plans and players in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore will be charged in USD:

• 1 Month Subscription (automatically billed every 30 days): $14.99 USD per month
  
• 3 Month Subscription (automatically billed every 90 days): $13.99 USD per month (one-time charge of $41.97 USD)
  
• 6 Month Subscription (automatically billed every 180 days): $12.99 USD per month (one-time charge of $77.94 USD)

Star Wars: The Old Republic is currently available for pre-order* at the following participating retailers in Australia and New Zealand. There are no participating retailers in Hong Kong and Singapore for pre-orders. Also, there will be no pre-orders available at Origin.com:

Australia

• EB Games
  
• JB Hi Fi
  
• GAME Australia
  
• Big W online

New Zealand

• EB Games
  
• JB Hi Fi
  
• Mighty Ape

Individuals who pre-order the game in Australia or New Zealand will be entitled to the Color Crystal pre-order item, which changes the weapon effect.

Players in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore will also be given the opportunity to receive the Founder’s Medal** – an exclusive in-game title awarded to early players of the game. In order to qualify, players must complete one of the following transactions by Monday, April 30th, 2012, 12:01AM EDT, 2:00AM NZDT; Hong Kong & Singapore: Sunday, April 29th, 2012, 9:01PM HKT, 9:01PM SGT:

Billed at least once for an active Star Wars: The Old Republic recurring subscription
Redeemed a Star Wars: The Old Republic 60-Day Pre-Paid Game Time Code

source: http://www.swtor.com...rticle/20120214

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Bioware Releases Video Guides

Bioware just started releasing video guides for beginners wanting to learn the basics and a few of the advanced features of their individual classes. I'm happy to see Bioware getting beginners into the game and giving frustrated players a guide to keep from jumping ship prematurely just because they didn't understand or got stuck.

If you want to check the videos out, here's the link.
http://www.swtor.com...ory%5D/20120203

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Performance Increase for AMD Radeon Users

AMD just released a driver update - 12.1. This new update increases performance in several games including Star Wars: The Old Republic, as well as improving their new card that they just released: HD 7970.

I am on a Crossfire setup with 5870 x2. After patch 1.1 came out for some reason my performance dropped big time. I would watch my fps go from 100 down to a steady 30-20 and be almost unplayable in certain areas of the game. Once the fps dropped it would never go back up again. With this driver update I am now at a steady 50-60 fps...where it should be with crossfire.

So if you are having bad framerates and are running AMD Radeon cards, I am sure you will get big performance gains.

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New Content Coming Soon to SWTOR!

Bioware just announced they are working on a bunch of new content coming to SWTOR. It appears they want to make sure everybody knows they are dedicated to the game and its players!

I posted the video they released, and it can be viewed to the left or you can find it by clicking on "View Other Media".

Now to the details! Apparently the story arch of Rise of the Rakghouls isn't done and they are working on and will release part 2 of this story with the coming update. They are adding a Legacy System that allows you to join your characters into a family tree. Not exactly for sure what this exactly means yet, but we are told it will allow you to unlock abilities that you would normally not have access to without this. A big feature we are looking forward to are Guild Banks, this will allow guilds to have a bank of items that we can all share among each other. The details on guild banks and how they will work is still under wraps as well. Another feature a lot of people have been asking for is the ability to customize your UI, to be able to move around menus, windows, and the map to wherever you want them positioned and change their size displayed on the screen.

I am glad Bioware keeps pumping out these updates, it really shows they want Star Wars: The Old Republic to succeed and become a gaming legacy.

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Patch 1.1 Just Released

For those of you playing a lot of SWTOR, you should already know about patch 1.1 releasing today. Bioware is patching a lot of issues that were plaguing players. I have yet to play to check everything out myself. I know a big complaint was not being able to abandon missions. Well, now you can abandon bonus missions. Well, here are a few of the fixes.

• All Bonus Series missions and their required missions can now be abandoned.
  
• Item hyperlinks now display stats for crafted research items properly.
  
• Item hyperlinks no longer display erroneous additional information relating to schematics when examined.
  
• Corrected an issue with older ATI cards that could cause the game to render as a black screen.
  
• Corrected an issue that could cause the game to crash during area transitions.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause players to fall through the world during or after a conversation or cinematic.

Also a new flashpoint for those players hitting level 50 already has been added. Sadly...it's going to be a while before I get to experience this one. I put the trailer for the new flashpoint: Rise of the Rakghouls to the left so be sure to watch it!

For the full breakdown of everything in the update, you can check out their site with the link below.
http://www.swtor.com.../rise-rakghouls

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Updated

As you can tell, we've updated the boards again. This was a fairly large update, so I don't even know all the new features

I will be applying a new skin shortly and will start work on our homepage renovations. Look forward to the changes! Oh, and we're always open for suggestions/concerns.

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Welcome Back

If you got the email and you found yourself back here, I want to first say Welcome Back! I kind of want to summarize what I said in the email to reiterate and add some more things. .

I am starting by reorganizing th forums and theme to being focused on only PC gaming. I talked to Andrew about it and we both thought it would be a better idea to focus ourselves on one market. So what I've done is taken away all the console gaming sections and just made it one section for those of you who still want to talk consoles (and I know there and those guys out there ). I also moved to sub-forums from one section out to the main area since we are more focused on PCs now.

Secondly, I made a new member group called Founding Members and I added the first 8 of you guys who were with us from the start. This is sort of a token of appreciation for trying to make us work. You have more privileges on the boards such as customizing your profile page and giving reputation to other members. I want to add more to that list soon. If you guys have any suggestions on what we can do for you, please let me know, that's what being a community manager is all about.

Finally, I asked somebody to help me make some new grahics for our site and forum. We desperately need a makeover. I want to add a unique forum skin too. Our website will be completely overhauled in the next few weeks...maybe a month, just depends on how much help I can get and how much free time I actually will have. I want to go with a lot more simple design and keep it to only updates and maybe the occasional game review that gets posted.

We are always open to suggestions guys. We would love to hear from everybody in everything from recruitment concerns, to the site, to the forums. This community is just as much Andew's and mine as it is yours.

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