Last week we informed you that BioWare has decided to conduct weekly Community Q&As on the Star Wars: The Old Republic site. The first Q&A’s answers are in and there are some interesting tidbits here indeed, including future plans for Ilum, colour crystals, bug priorities and the future of the colour match system!

Tim 'Crtl+Alt+Delete' Buckley's take on recent changes! Source: http://www.cad-comic.com/

Some 15 questions were answered this week and here are a few you won’t want to miss:

NommNomm: Are you still planning on giving us an option to make our chest item colors match the rest of our armor?

Daniel Erickson: The new and vastly improved ‘Hue to Chest’ system launches with Game Update 1.2 and there are more customization and quality of life improvements along those lines hot on its heels.

No more Clown suits in March! Oh how I have missed that function. Of course we still need to see what the ‘new and improved’ version is like.  Maybe it shuts itself off after 12 hours just to remind you that you had it set in the first place, so as to negate the ‘All my gear looks the same’ – effect.

Annexes: In the EU our keyboards are a little different than in the US, and I´m wondering if you guys are going to make the “bug report” shortcut key unbindable?

Daniel Erickson: Yes! This will be addressed in a weekly patch in the very near future.

I play on one of those keyboards and I can’t say how many times I’ve cursed at my screen as it was covered by a bug report window, which takes several clicks (or in game terms it takes the same amount of time as it takes for Imps to kill my Trooper girl) to shut down.

Jeunedorsk: What will happen in the future for PvP (Ilum, new Warzones ?)

Daniel Erickson: We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how popular PvP is in The Old Republic and we’ve been doubling down on our efforts to bring exciting new content and systems to the PvP community. Right now there’s a new Warzone planned for Game Update 1.2 which we’re already testing internally and really enjoying. We can say it’s enabled for same faction vs. same faction play, so if you’ve been playing a lot of Huttball, expect some variety soon! Also coming in 1.2 is the pre-season of our Warzone ranking system, bringing better matchmaking which means better PvP. In the future expect a ton more PvP news as we expand and polish what has proven to be one of the most popular aspects of The Old Republic. Weave got big plans.

New Warzone coming? Exciting! Better match-making? Even better!

Venomlash: I was excited as anyone about the Magenta Adegan crystals, but I’m not a huge fan of magenta. Will there be more rare items of this nature?

Daniel Erickson: Absolutely. In the near future expect to see not just rare items but limited availability items, more treasure hunts and some big surprises for the community to discover and work together to figure out.

Squee! I am expecting to hear about Aqua, Teal and the much vaunted White crystals in March! And finally Writing Director Daniel Erickson gives us his take on the priority of different types of bugs. Something I’m sure we have all been prone to second-guessing.

Buddytonto: When you made the blog post about the balancing act of what to fix, what to balance, and when; got me thinking about how the items are prioritized, as it didn’t really explain that?

Daniel Erickson: How we prioritize bugs is a complicated question and one that can be maddening from a player point of view. The answer is as complicated as the question but I can give a high level view. First comes anything that blocks the critical path of a class story for any reason. If you can’t progress, your game comes to a screeching halt so that always takes precedence. Next is the question: how many people are being affected and what is the damage being done? Half the population being slightly irritated loses in priority to ten percent of the population having their game crippled, for example. The last consideration, and the most opaque to players, is how hard the bug is to fix. There are fixes that look complicated and are nothing more than a database entry that went rogue. There are fixes that look easy and take months of untangling code. What we can promise is that we never ignore bugs or decide something is good enough as-is.

There is lots more to read in the Q&A so head over to the SWTOR forums for your fill of answers! Also, next week’s Q&A thread is already open for your submissions: Official Q&A Thread for February 17th, 2012 Q&A Blog Post.