In the usual Friday maintenance post, Community Manager Courtney Woods let us know that with scheduled maintenance on Tuesday morning, Game Update 1.7 will be launching!
Untested Content Never Has Issues!
Scheduled Maintenance for Game Update 1.7: February 12th, 2013
Hello everyone, we wanted to let you know that we will be performing scheduled maintenance for five and a half hours on Tuesday, February 12th, 2013 from 3:30AM CST (1:30AM PST/4:30AM EST/9:30AM GMT/10:30AM CET/8:30PM AEDT) until 9AM CST (7AM PST/10AM EST/3PM GMT/3PM CET/2AM AEDT). All game servers, SWTOR.com, and the launcher will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than five and a half hours, but could be extended.Game Update 1.7: Return of the Gree unveils a new in-game event, Relics of the Gree. Travel to Ilum to investigate the appearance of an ancient Gree starships, called “the Gray Secant.” The Reputation System is also introduced in this game update, which allows you to earn Reputation points by completing missions for organizations such as the Gree or the Voss, or for military divisions within the Republic and the Empire for great rewards.
After this maintenance is over, restart the game launcher to patch to Game Update 1.7: Return of the Gree.
Events are available to Free-to-Play Players and Subscribers at no additional cost. Visit the Free-to-Play Features Chart for more information.
So it seems there wont be any PTS testing for 1.7. Seems an interesting choice from BioWare. What do you think, TORWarriors? Excited? Worried about untested content? Sound off below!
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Looking forward to the update. Some of the image of the Gree equipment you can equip look wonderfully strange : )
Really looking forward to this one, yay for PvP! No testing though, what could possibly go wrong?
Sigh. They never learn do they? This update should have spent at least a month on the PTS before going live. Even three months on the PTS wouldn’t have given them time to fix all the inevitable bugs. I guess we’re all Beta-testers now.
Then again, Bioware doesn’t exactly have a good track record of *listening* to their beta-testers. IIRC, there are bugs that were reported in beta that are still in the game. Maybe a “release early, patch often” approach is the best we can hope for.
I think I’m going to keep leveling my lowbies for a while and wait for a couple patches before I send any of my level-50 characters to Makeb.
Edit: I hate Captachas… I know why they are there, but space I hate them.
The rakghoul event went live with no fanfare at all and that was incredibly stable. I’m guessing this went through a similar internal testing regiment and that’s why it’s been almost a month between announcement and release.
If I recall correctly Bioware snagged a bunch of players from the Austin area to test 1.7, least i think i remember seeing a post saying as such.
I believe the testing iniative is for Makeb.
This is update 1.7 there is no Makeb, you are thinking of the expansion that is coming.
This update just adds the reputation system and the event on Ilum
Yup, and I fully expect the Reputation system to launch full of bugs of the sort that most people won’t even know were possible. For some weird reason, it’s always the things that should be the simplest that end up still having esoteric problems three months later.
I’ll reserve judgement until around the 15th. Since there’s so little to go on yet.
Obviously I’ll be waiting to see if there’s emergency maintenance on the 13th.
Then whether the reputation system has any relevance to players who don’t need or maybe don’t want to level more characters.
It’ll also be interesting to see the reaction to the Ilum event, especially since I’m sure some people are still expecting something resembling world PvP. (I’m assuming it’s not… based on previous BW comments, but then I’m in the dark with everyone else).
Then of course, how long the event is active and what the schedule will be for it’s repeated returns.
Finally, personally, whether anything happening on Ilum has any relevance to a non-PvP players like myself.
To partially answer one of my own questions.
Apparently the event will be known as “Relics of the Gree” and will be active for a 2 week period. Obviously no news of how many times a year it will be available yet. I guess we’ll find out some of the answers next week.
Source: http://www.swtor.com/gameupdates/1.7-return-of-the-gree
They said earlier that there will be PTS first with character transfer test – hope 1.7 and transfering is tested somehow.
With 1.7 on the horizon, I can only say that as always I am pleased to see another update. I was surprised that 1.7 did’nt make it to the PTS, so let’s hope for no emergency maintenance on the 13th/14th!
I am looking forwards to the reputation system, the playerbase have needed this oh-so staple mmo feature for some months now, glad to see it arrive. However Ilum? Yes. I expect I will enjoy it (though I am not a big PVPer) so I hope the event will allow as much or as little PVP interaction as the individual requires.
Here’s to 1.7!
I’m really excited about the update. Once again Bioware has held true to their release cadence. They got so much grief about it but they’ve proved all the doubters wrong so far. I wish things were less buggy, but then again I must not play enough because I’m not experiencing these bugs as often as everyone else. I can’t wait to see what this event entails and I’m looking forward to Ilum becoming relevant again!
Funny thing that, i thought for sure there would be pts-testing for 1.7!
I was looking at the copy-to-pts yesterday and just for fun i tried to copy some characters over to pts (3 to be specific) and got success on all of them. Therefore i was looking forward to test with My live-characters for the first time since 1.2!
I will stick to my guns and say any NEW content is GOOD content! nuff said lets play!
Nice to see 1.7 coming out. I’m not much of a PVPer so I probably won’t do it. But it’s long past due that they something with Ilum. Hopefully it goes off relatively bug free.