The NDA is lifted!

[Vigow Milla]

So if you have any questions at all, ask and I'll do my best to answer them.

[Janel Kast]

What is the imperial presence like on Rori?
Do you think the planet will have good size population when the game launches?

Those are the only two questions I have left about Rori and whether or not it's the perfect place to start.

Oh and do you think the game is ready for release?

-Janel-

[Vigow Milla]

Well Janel, in answer to your first question there is an Imperial presence on every planet. the one on Rori is not as significant as some. What this means is there will be enough to keep us busy, but not enough to overwhelm us.

As far as the population size when the game launches, well that remains to be seen. As of now in beta, Rori and Talus are the least populated worlds. They aren't as popular as the planets that have been mentioned in the movies so most people don't tend to settle there. I look at this as a positive reason for our PA to go there. With the abundant resources that it has, this could work out well in our favor.

Now to the tough question, "do I think the game is ready for release?" I have never played an MMORPG before being allowed in the beta test. One thing that I have learned from the dev's posts and from fellow beta testers is that MMORPG's are never "finished". With that in mind, my answer would have to be yes, the game is ready.

Are there still bugs in the game? Yes. There are still some bugs to squash. The dev's have really stepped up the pace the past two weeks, so I'm sure that the glaring ones will be taken care of by next week. From what I've seen on the beta forums, this game is in better shape than many other MMO's that were released.

Is there enough content? In my opinion there can never be too much content. There is enough to give you that "star warsy" feeling when you get to your starting planet.

Is the Galactic Civil War apparent when you land on your starting planet? In my opinion the oppressive atmoshere is somewhat lacking. What I mean is, in order for me to really feel like the Empire is oppressing the citizens, I would like to see more stormtrooper patrols in the cities. But the great thing about MMO's is that the dev's can add new content at any time. And I believe that all of these things will be taken care of in short order.

What's up with all of the negative posts from beta testers? Well the game took a radical shift Monday. If you'll remember previously I mentioned that the dev's were trying to balance several systems like the economy, combat, etc. Monday with the latest patch the game was made much more difficult. And it needed to be. In slightly over a month I was able to get master marksman, over half of the carbineer tree, and had a ton of credits in the bank. This needed to be slowed down so that power-gamers wouldn't max out there characters in a month or two and get bored. Don't worry though, the dev's are already backing down the difficulty some. What balancing is all about. Make it real easy to advance so the elite professions can be tested, then make it so difficult that everyone screams in agony. Then leave the systems somewhere in the middle.

Is there enough of the fun factor? Definitely. I have had a ball playing this game. Well, until the four corpse runs I had to make last night. Remember what I said about balancing? Anyway, yes this game is a blast right now, and I only see it getting better.

And no, I'm not a fanboi. I do love the Star Wars universe, and I love gaming, but I'm not a "The Dev's are right and all you other testers are wrong" kind of guy. Could the game be better? Sure, any game out there could be better.

Anyway, to sum this long-winded ramble up, I haven't cancelled my pre-order, and I plan on paying for a one year subscription to get the 20% discount.

[Janel Kast]

Great, thanks for the info

-Janel-

[saiber]

hey i have a question
could an "overt" rebel get an at/st?
oh and what are "pets"? are they just hired ai's?
and how many couold u have

[Vigow Milla]

Sorry saiber, no at-st's for Rebels. That is an Imperial only perk.

Yes, the "pets" that I referred to are basically hired ai's. As far as how many you can have, I don't know.

[LeekorYair]

Please describe the combat sytm whther or not you press a button and the gun shoots or you click on moves or stances

[Vigow Milla]

The way the combat system works is pretty simple. You can target an enemy or structure on of two ways, either by clicking on it, or by cycling through all available targets using the Tab key. Once you have the enemy targeted, you can attack by either double clicking or by using a hot key(F1-F12). Once you have attacked, then you can use special attacks. These I have set up on hot keys as well. In between your attacks the enemy can counterattack. Basically it's turn based, but it moves fairly quickly. Once your character has advanced enough, the special attacks can really do some damage. For instance my character after a month can kill most green /con MOBs in one shot, light blue /con MOBs in two shots.

What /con stands for is consider. Whenever you target an enemy, it will have a circle to the left of it's name and stat bar. The color of the circle represents how tough the enemy is.

Green-easy kill
Light blue-Somewhat easy
Dark blue-You should be able to defeat it
White-Even match
Yellow-Good chance it will kill you
Red-Instant death

These aid you tremendously when deciding to engage or not.

Also you mentioned stances. There are four basic stances. F1-stand, F2-kneel, F3-sit, F4-prone. All four have trade offs. While standing your accuracy is ok, but you can move and defend yourself against melee attack. Kneeling gives you better accuracy, but you can't defend yourself as well. The prone position gives you the best accuracy, but leaves you wide open for melee attack. You cannot attack while sitting.

[Droider]

Here's my question: I know you can untrain a skill if you want to try something different out, and I know it doesn't cost anything in Skill Points (or Learning Capacity, whatever they're calling it) to untrain it. My question is, do you lose the Combat Experience or Pistol Experience or whatever other type of experience that particular skill used? In other words, if you untrain a skill accidentally, can you immediately and instantly train it back right away? Furthermore, if you untrain an entire specialty area, and train another specialty area in a different class, can you then untrain the other class and train back the first specialty area, or do you have to go out and get enough XP to retrain that skill from scratch?

Here's why I'm wondering. I want to be a Creature Handler, Droid Engineer, and Architect (I'll have to rewrite my background story to make this more in line with my character, but that's another story). The problem is, this combination requires almost 300 skill points. So, I am planning to master all of Architect, build whatever I need to while I'm there, untrain it, then master all of Droid Engineering. Now that I have gotten all the experience and prerequisites out of the way, how long would it take me to toggle back and forth between the two professions?

Hopefully that's at least as clear as mud,
David

[Vigow Milla]

I understand you completely, and yes, all xp that you used to train the skill that you're surrendering is forfeited. It kinda sucks but that is the system. In all fairness it just makes sense or else we would all have ube jack of all trade characters that could do everything just by switching to the skill of the week.

As far as how long it would take to retrain a skill that you surrendered, well that just depends on how much you play using that skill.

I hope I answered your question clearly.

[Droider]

Dern, I was hoping they solved that problem the other way around.... i.e. it takes X amount of time to forget a skill, but you can retrain it quickly and easily. Well, this is going to make my job decision tougher. I guess I'll probably make the push to master architect to build us a guild hall and get our city started, then surrender most of architect once we have the basic building structure set up and demand lowers.... I imagine real estate will be a good business to be in for the first couple months of the game, but will slow down as the first rush of people fill up all their plots. Then I can go full into Droid Engineering, and forget some or all of Architect to make room for some extra combat skills. Creature Handler will probably be a constant the whole time.

[Jaron Ardren]

Can you please describe to me what a battlefield is like? Are there objectives to the fights, or do you just shoot everyone you see? Also, how do trainers work?

[Vigow Milla]

There are two types of battlefields, Player vs. Player and Player vs. Environment.

To be honest I haven't made it to a PvP battlefield yet, but I believe the objective is just to kill the enemy players.

The PvE battlefields do have objectives, usually power generators inside the base or fort. These are surrounded by turrets and NPC stormtroopers.

The way NPC trainers work is, once you have the skill points required you go converse with an NPC trainer. He will tell you what skills you are qualified for. You pick what skill you want to learn and he charges you so many credits. Training is instantaneous. The only problem is training from an NPC is very expensive, but unfortunately since we'll have no other option when the game goes live we'll just have to deal with it.

[Droider]

Vigow, got another question for you.... there's so little info about droids out there. Do you know or can you find out what combat droids are available? From what little I can find, I've seen some stuff that looks like you give a protocol droid a blaster and an armor module and call it a combat droid, and other stuff that looks like there will be speciallized IG-88 Assassin droids and the standard Episode 1 battle droids in the game. I WANNA PLAY! But any info you can find out to whet my appetite till Thursday would be greatly appreciated.

[Shadow]

droider what you also can do is look at the online skill tree and look for away to get all tree without giving up to much of abilitys (like not mastering everything in the architect prof or in one of the others,thats how i combined everything i need )

just my 2 cents