Chill and Teo are joined by Izaak to talk about the deployment of Game Update 1.4 and other news. We also discuss SWTOR’s gearing model for endgame, with its proposed three tiers of operations.

1. Introduction

2. Question to the panel

Chill provides his interpretation of the new moods that are now available for our characters in Game Update 1.4:

• Neutral—Neutral
• Alarmed—Stupid
• Annoyed—Constipated
• Astounded—Macaulay Culkin
• Awed—Slightly Stupid
• Cheery—Cheery (some of them are named pretty well)
• Dejected—Pouting
• Depressed—Doing a Robert DeNiro impression
• Discomforted—Doing an angry Robert DeNiro impression
• Eager—Still Novocaine’d from the dentist (lip sticks out weird)
• Flattered—Smarmy
• Frustrated—Doing a Gilbert Gottfried impression
• Hurt—Doing a Clint Eastwood impression
• Joyful—Pleased (looks happy but not joyful)
• Meditative—Pretending to be Asleep (also: how am I fighting now?)
• Mournful—Puppy-dog eyes
• Saddened—Mildly bummed
• Scowling—Nearsighted
• Stunned—Freshly Tased. Pretty darn accurate, actually. Could use some drool.

3. Trivia question

The following screenshot contains a sample of Aurebesh, the Star Wars writing system. The question is simply to translate it! If you are interested in learning Aurebesh, you can try Teo’s simple Aurebesh trainer.

If you are interested in being entered in the random drawing for a Tauntaun Fawn code, please send your answer to ootinicast@gmail.com.

4. The Holofeed

• While there was no maintenance on Tuesday, Game Update 1.4 was deployed during an 8 hour maintenance on Thursday morning. Patch notes are here, and James Ohlen’s Welcome to Game Update 1.4: Terror from Beyond is also worth reading.
• The deployment wasn’t entirely without issues, the most pressing of which was the GTN being unusable. The Preferences option to hide one’s headslot doesn’t work; the workaround is to select the checkbox via the Customize Appearance button (right side of your Character Sheet, near your Feet slot).
• An explanation was provided regarding name conflicts with guild names following the recent merger into super-servers: it turns out that if two or more guilds were merged onto a server that shared a common name back on their origin server, all those guild names now have “@ <origin server>” appended (e.g., “Despair @ The Harbinger”). Once there is only one guild remaining on the server with that name (due to the guilds changing their name or being disbanded), the “@ <origin server>” will be removed.
• The first Livestream community discussion was held on Friday. Dulfy almost immediately provided a YouTube copy of the broadcast, along with a transcript.
• Damion Schubert (Principle Lead Systems Designer) provided a Quality of Life Improvements in Game Update 1.4 blog post.
• An unexpected (but most welcome!) change in Game Update 1.4 was to drastically increase the respawn times of the objectives for the Black Hole dailies.
• It sounds like multi-spec is still a long, long way off (unfortunately).
• Rob Hinkle (Senior PvP Designer) says that BioWare is considering penalties for abandoning an in-progress warzone, though may instead opt for additional incentives for staying until the end.
• The three Oceanic servers also received 12 character slots per server in Game Update 1.4, bringing them to parity with the rest of the servers after the merger. Action is still being considered to alleviate the low populations on those servers.
• Bioware has placed a job advertisement for a “Monetization Analyst“. They subsequently needed to allay fears that this implied that the free-to-play conversion hadn’t actually started.

5. Force Feedback

We discuss tweets from @Dimbo56, @voyak, @ForceChuckle and @AspisVodox.

6. Outro

Thanks to Izaak (@IzaakTheMad) for joining us this week.

You can email questions and comments about the show to ootinicast@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter via @OotiniCast. Check out our website, ootinicast.com, which has links to our presence on Google+ and Facebook. We are a proud member of the TOR Syndicate! Subscribe to us on iTunes, and watch for us in your Bind on Equip feed.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download