Welcome, TORWarriors, to the latest TORWars Dev Watch!  The TORWars Dev Watch is an easy way to keep up with what the Star Wars: The Old Republic developers have been up to on the forums.  In every Dev Watch, we also provide our unique insights to the most important dev comments each and every week!

Our Intrepid Dev Monkey Lizard is on the case!

We had some pretty good Dev Posts this week, starting off with the first mention of SWTOR 2.0.  I’m going to take a wild guess and say that is when Makeb arrives.  Could that be the next major patch?  We also got a lengthy explanation about some Galactic Trade Network changes which occurred.  And of course, some information about the Gree vendors and how long they will be around.  Not mentioned here, but important, is that BioWare is looking into armor repair costs.

Bring back Scoundrel UpperHand proc laugh ( Link )

Via Alex Modney, Assistant Designer -

Good news everyone! Upper Hand and Tactical Advantage proc laugh/giggle is coming back in 2.0! Your Scoundrel or Operative will now chuckle most heartily when they gain their first UP/TA when they previously had zero. Before we took it out completely the sound was playing every time you gained an UP/TA and was really spamming everyone with their infectious chortles. I really miss the giggle so I’m glad we are bringing it back, hope yall enjoy it as well!

Lethality Op PVP vid 2 ( Link )

Via Alex Modney, Assistant Designer –

Great highlight video Nebukanezer! I really enjoyed your use of AoE damage and cover (Explosive Probe is so very neglected for the Lethality Ops I find) in addition to those nasty Culls of yours. Especially liked your first video where you fight the Focus Sentinel and DoT up the whole team at center point in CW Great stuff!

Also how about that Carbine Blast, Frag Grenade and Orbital Strike all on top of a ticking Corrosive Grenade? Does some devastating area damage amirite? I don’t use Carbine Blast as often as I should in those situations so thanks for showing me how it’s done. Now you got me all jazzed to play my Dirty Fighter tonight! *POW*

More proof BioWare hates crafters and those using the GTN ( Link )

Via Nathan Emmott, Systems Designer -

I’m jumping in here to give a little more insight on what happened here. First off, I wanted to apologize for the lack of the patch note at release – that was an oversight on my part.

Now I wanted to address why this change was made, and how it will be changing in the near term. Since we have launched, we have continued to add many more items to the game. As we have added more items, there are more items the GTN needs to search against whenever you enter a search team. What we had been seeing is very broad searches were causing enormous performance problems with the GTN. These performance problems would impact everyone using the GTN and not only the person conducting the search. This actually made the GTN unusable for some players.

For example, if I searched the GTN for “a b” then I would end up causing a performance issues for everyone else using the GTN at the same time. In our efforts to provide a solution and address this, we inadvertently impacted y’all pretty severely and created a wretched inconvenience. This is unacceptable for us.

To that point, we have a possible solution that will solve everyone’s needs without crushing the GTN performance. This change will go into a future patch (not tonight’s unscheduled maintenance). However, we feel that this will be a solution that will work for all parties.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and annoyance this has caused everyone. The last thing we want to see is us adding frustration to your experience in-game. I hope this little peek behind the curtain helps explain our rationale and lets you know just how serious we are about fixing this!

No way to buy Gree Weapon this time around… ( Link )

Via Courtney Woods, Community Production Specialist -

Just wanted to let you know that the Gree Vendor will be sticking around after the event ends

Please Eliminate Backfill ( Link )

Via Alex Modney, Assistant Designer -

We have seen how bad backfill can be, loading into a game just to have it end 30s later is a major bummer so we are looking at ways we can make this system more efficient. Most likely we will set a point during each Warzone when it will no longer backfill, based on time remaining and/or a score differential between the teams.

Backfill won’t be eliminated outright because it does serve a valuable purpose, we just want to make it better.

In addition, we also looking into (but no promises) the idea that we grant a medal for backfilling into a game that is in progress, to help make sure those backfillers don’t miss out on rewards by not having enough time to get a medal on their own.

There you have it folks.  Everything the Devs have to say about anything important we want to know about.  Thoughts? Leave ‘em below.