Eurogamer: ‘Valor Exploit in SWTOR Update 1.1 Causes Player Uproar’

Ilum be illin'?

Star Wars: The Old Republic‘s Patch 1.1 has propped to the live servers and has brought along a huge wealth of new and wonderful content. It has also brought along with it some new issues, most related to the status of endgame PvP planet Ilum. Apparently, things aren’t going quite as planned there with reported turret valor exploiting and spawn camping.

A thread on the Ilum issues currently stands at over 200 pages and gaming web sites have begun picking up on the issue. Eurogamer has posted the headline at the top of this post, “Valor Exploit in SWTOR Update 1.1 Causes Player Uproar.”

BioWare’s Joveth Gonzalez gave us the official response: “We understand that some of you may be frustrated, but we ask for your patience on this to give us time to respond with thorough developer input.”

We’ve seen first-hand that BioWare cares about fixing things and providing the best game possible and we’re sure the “Ilum Valor Issue” will be handled soon. Hopefully, very soon. Stay tuned – and stay calm.

Eurogamer quote:

“The most serious allegation is that many users are racking up huge amounts of valor points in Ilum PvP via turret farming and spawn camping exploits caused by factional imbalances…”

Official BioWare Quote:

“Hi folks,

We’re currently investigating potential issues related to the Ilum open world PVP area post 1.1. We understand that this is a topic of much discussion and we ask that you please direct all discussions to this thread.

As always, we ask that the community keep the following things on mind when responding:

No insults, name calling, or personal attacks
Please stay on topic.
If someone violates the Rules of Conduct, please flag it instead of replying to it.

We will update as soon as we have more information.

Update #1

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let you know that we are currently working on an official response to these issues (we used the term “potential” during our initial investigating, and have now removed the wording on the title of this thread) and we will be posting it soon. Please understand that these issues require some time to investigate and we are making sure that we provide you all with the most updated information in our official response.

We understand that some of you may be frustrated, but we ask for your patience on this to give us time to respond with thorough developer input.

Thank you to those of you that have been posting constructively in this thread.

We will have a response shortly.”


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17 Responses to “Eurogamer: ‘Valor Exploit in SWTOR Update 1.1 Causes Player Uproar’”

  1. Starhaze says:

    Can someone explain what the faction inbalance is all about? Is it that too many Imperials are on the servers and they are just chilling at the Republic base killing their turrets and any Republic players that come along?

    I would suspect that any lvl 50 republic players would gladly do the same. But apparently more people on the forums are upset with the fact that their valor grinding from warzones are becoming void.

    • SpankOne says:

      War zones aren’t void… I still need my gear cannot get coms from just doing ilum…

    • Dingc says:

      What happened was 100+ imperials raided the repub base spawn point and spawn killed them. I watched a video stream for like three and a half hours of 200 or so imperials using AOEs on the spawn point. Guy would respawn and die within seconds. The only way out was to queue for a wz and go afk, which transported you to the repub fleet I think. I think the turret thing was just a myth and you couldn’t get valor from killing it.

      Funny thing about the situation was that the video had close to 700 viewers and went on for over three hours. Eventually imperials started messaging the guy saying they were talking to all the imp guilds to try to get them to pull their people out. I was just amazed that at no time a GM stepped in at all. If you were a republic character there you had to use an exploit/bug to escape Ilum. Really embarrassing for Bioware.

  2. Jeckt says:

    If they going to fix that as fast as fps issues, so we have a lot of time

  3. Perdy says:

    Folks who die a thousand deaths about this issue in SWTOR apparently forgot (or never played through) the time when city/settlement guards awarded PVP “honor” points in WoW. They were also farmed and really through a wrench into the PVP system.

    It also got fixed by Blizz. This current issue will likewise get fixed by Bioware. “This too shall pass.”

    • Soulstar says:

      Amen X roads, Tauren Mill, and a few other spots were camped for like 24/7 but, blizzard did fix it eventually. Growing pains course there seems to be alot of random issues with swtor right now other than just the pvp stuff.

  4. Nataswar says:

    I think people have been spoiled by the last several years of WoW’s relatively stable environment. Most were not playing the game in the “old days”, when it was extremely hard to level, elites were impossiblew to take down alone (unless you were three levels higher), and people found many exploits and advantages that devs had to figure out before fixing. The start to TOR has actually been smoother than WoW’s…but no one seems to remember those days.

    • Eridian says:

      Absolutely right you are… I feel as if the MMO community has lost it’s way over the years and have become very self-entitled, and extremly (unrealistically) demanding on game devs. You are right, people have played WoW but not at it’s infant years (or have just forgotten) and don’t realize just how horrible it was.

      Those that weren’t there, or never played WoW, are perhaps just following the same self-entitled individuals that seem to ruin the community and make it worse. There’s a story for you guys at torwars, do a kind of “community past and present”, our demographic has changed, we 30yr old + with wives and kids that started our MMORPG gaming when some of the people in today’s community were in diapers are few and far between (sadly), and I feel that today’s community just don’t A) understand, B) are all dev experts and C) self-entitled “I want it all right now mommy!!! [insert tantrum here]” cry babies.

      Thankfully that’s what guilds are for, close the general chat tab, pay no attention to the public forums and look at the amazing things that are coming out of SWTOR and at an alarmingly pleasantly surprising rate. I wish the MMO community was more like it was when I first started… what fond memories…

  5. Iceveiled says:

    I realize this game is new AND an MMO, and PvP things can be tricky, but this is downright unacceptable. On my server Imperial faction already heavily outweighs the republic (I’m republic) and the imperials have been farming PvP ranks all day, thus unlocking better pvp gear and widening the gulf of imperial talent vs republic talent even further. Sickening.

    The PvP team over at BioWare has some explaining to do. I love this game, but it’s becoming harder and harder to do so…

  6. Warfist says:

    Ahh good to see MMO players haven’t changed much over the last 15 or so years. ;)

    Crying about every little thing, jumping to conclusions and faux rage-quitting every time something they dislike happens. For those of us who do have MMO experience, and/or are somewhat rational human beings, we know that those exploiting will be “fixed” appropriately, either rolled back on a case by case basis, suspended/banned AND rolled back or even reset to zero.

    It’s both amusing and sad to see people carry on like they do on the forums, always is, in every MMO.

    Ah well, back to the game for me!

    • Jindo says:

      To bad they already said they will not roll anything back which means people who farmed their lvl 60 valor in a few hours will now make BGs ever worse because one side will all have battlemasters gear and face roll the other sounds like fun pretty much breaks pvp balance that wasn’t even there in the first place.

  7. [...] earlier today David posted on the Ilum exploit issue currently brewing with the release of Star Wars: The Old [...]

  8. Eridian says:

    I cannot believe what I’m reading here… let me edify you as to what is “unacceptable” in an MMO game, what would be unacceptable is if Bioware did nothing about it, but implementing an emergency patch under a 24 hr turnaround is quite the contrary, it’s amazing, good job Bioware!

    “love the game” this is the problem, a true fan would not whine and cry out loud “injustice!!!” if they loved the game, a true fan having had any real experience in the world you would know that nothing is perfect, things only become better from having had problems to build upon, before something can be great, it needs to have encountered issues to fix.

    Errors occur all the time… it’s how Bioware will respond to problems that will make or break them…

  9. [...] exploit, and what they did about it, Bioware is well into 2013 with new content, EA has shareholders in a [...]

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