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We cover what made it into Game Update 2.7.1, the developer livestream, and the new Galactic Strongholds trailer about the Nar Shaddaa Sky Palace. In the discussion, we analyse what has been revealed so far in the Forged Alliances story arc, and indulge in some wild speculation about where it’s going.

1. Introduction

2. Tip of the week

Congratulations to this week’s winner, Darth Malvictus! Thanks to The Malgadar for entering.

Please send your tips to ootinicast@gmail.com by next Wednesday for a chance to win a M8-R3 code, courtesy of BioWare, and an OotiniCast-provided Cartel Market pack from the latest shipment.

3. Holofeed

• Game Update 2.7.1 was deployed during maintenance on Tuesday, three weeks following Game Update 2.7, reflecting their new delivery cadence. It includes the addition of the “Bolsterizer”, which grants the “Bolsterizer” buff that effectively bolsters a character such that their stats reflect what they would be in a warzone.
• The occurrence of the new Quesh Huttball warzone has returned to its default probability of appearing. It seems that based on community feedback, BioWare will not increase the probability in the same way again!
• Ranked PvP Season 2 began with Game Update 2.7.1. BioWare’s official leaderboards
  now show the results for the new season, with all ratings having been reset. Our own leaderboards page, showing a graphical analysis of the current leaderboard data, has also been updated for Season 2.
• To celebrate Star Wars day (4 May), in addition to the double XP weekend, if you log in anytime until 4 May, all players (subscriber, premium or free-to-play) will receive the MT-4T mini-pet.
• If you’ve found yourself stuck in a warzone, unable to move no matter what you try, then please contribute your experience in as much detail as possible in this thread to assist BioWare in solving the issue.
• Game Update 2.8 was deployed on the PTS on 1 May. While Bruce MacLean’s roadmap mentioned a fifth ship role being added to Galactic Starfighter, Eric Musco indicated that the plan has changed, meaning the addition of the new ship role has been postponed indefinitely. New Bomber and Gunship variants will be added in Game Update 2.8.
• Bruce MacLean’s update to the roadmap for the rest of 2014 is still being worked on, and may be published next week.
• Charles Boyd, Ben and Eric Musco participated in a live stream on Wednesday 30 April, with Ben joining a random group to play through the Korriban Incursion tactical Flashpoint. The following points came up during the conversation:
  • The Esseles is pronounced “Essa-LEEz”, according to Charles Boyd
  • There will eventually be hard modes for all tactical Flashpoints, but there is no timeframe for this
  • Tactical and regular Flashpoints are not typically designed to prevent soloing, but they also don’t make it easy (e.g., kolto stations can’t be used outside a group)
  • Initial pulls in Flashpoints are deliberately designed to be difficult, intended as gear/skill/level checks
  • Ben’s group almost wiped on the big droid boss
  • New tactical Flashpoints are intended to be easy and thus accessible so as many players as possible can directly experience the story; they are not meant to be replayable content, especially for well-geared players
  • Charles Boyd quashed the theory that all the story content being released was written before launch; it’s all new, though obviously using many pre-existing characters
• At the end of the live stream, they showed the new Galactic Strongholds trailer “Galactic Living: Nar Shaddaa Sky Palace” (also available on YouTube) narrated by Jack Wood (Producer). It’s the first episode in the “Galactic Living” series, so expect more to come!
• The latest three questions from the class representative programme have been answered for Guardians and Juggernauts.
• In general Star Wars news, the Expanded Universe is getting rebooted, and we have the cast announced for Episode 7!

4. Community

Dulfy has a compendium of information she has put together about Galactic Strongholds, though we recommend swtorstrongholds.com created by Swtorista.

The second episode of the Galactic Gamers Coalition podcast has been published. You can subscribe to it via iTunes or directly using its RSS feed. For further updates, follow @SWTORGGC on Twitter.

Our Republic-side guild is attempting to expand our Friday night Operations group to 16-man. It runs for 3 hours starting at 4:30pm Pacific (Saturday 9:30am EST in Australia). Please contribute to this thread on our forums if you’re interested in joining us.

5. Force Feedback

We discuss tweets, emails and comments from Bear, Ru, @ThePummeler, Laurie M (@Lawilc01), @AlexDGeslin, @JediKrackr, @Adam_Schumpert, Shamar, Thross, Oofalong, @darksplat, Chaz Lobo (@Strongshocker), @FrankT800, @Jayconnell, @FerrousTerran, Terg (@TheTurg), @TheMalgadar, @Manciferous, JB (@O_JohnnyBravo_O) and @Rrubb.

Chaz Lobo sent us the following:

The ever-observant Krackr spotted the following bug in the new Quesh Huttball warzone, thankfully fixed in Game Update 2.7.1:

6. Sarlacc Digest

Redna leads a discussion about what we’ve discovered so far in the missions and the two new tactical Flashpoints that start the Forged Alliances story arc, followed by some wild speculation about where it might be going. Note that this section contains mild spoilers!

7. Outro

Thanks to Road (@ThatRoadGuy) and Redna (@R3DN4, twitch.tv/r3dn4) for joining us this week.

Information about our guilds on The Harbinger, Ootini Knights (Republic) and Ootini Rage (Empire), can be found here.

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. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, and listen to us on Stitcher.