October 24 maintenance will be quite long – longer than 4 hrs.
Operation bosses development is taking longer than planned. Not able to hit the target of having all 5 bosses before end of 2017.
16-man operation lag – we are aware of it, please send bug reports/info to us. Cause is not Hero Engine, it is some memory issue.
Credit cap for legacy bank will probably be 100 billion.
Timothy Zahn, the author behind the Thrawn trilogy, will be coming to the Cantina to talk about the game update and his work.
Server Merges
We won’t reveal the full details on how character name conflict resolution will work to prevent people from gaming the system and getting a name. However, higher level and more active character will give you better chances at keeping that name.
Non subs will lose their names to subscribers no matter what.
Having non unique names like guild names (with the origin server) isn’t possible with character names.
If you have two level 50 legacies, one is randomly chosen to be your legacy after the merge.
If you have fully decorated strongholds, they will all be there after the server merge. However with decorations if you have them placed at the cap limit (i.e. 10/10) on multiple strongholds, you will need to remove some of them before placing new ones. They will allow you go over the cap but to place new ones you need to go under the cap.
There isn’t technically a RP server right now, we are exploring options to allow RPers RP in a safe place which they can control. It may not happen with United Forces update but we are looking into it.
They always had a list of potential server names. Musco remember the Hot Prospect server name from when he joined Bioware six years ago and he thought it was a funny name. He helped Hot Prospect to rise to the top of the list of prospects.
The theme with the new server names is that they have three KOTOR ship names and two character names.
They are looking to reduce the cost of server transfer, legacy name, character name, and guild name renames.
Max number of characters per server is 52 (if you brought character slots). Max for subscribers without buying any character slots is 12. We are looking to change these numbers for the merge.
You can have a max of 10 strongholds with 5.5, but conquest bonus is capped at 150%.
PvP/Starfighter
New PvP map based on the Alderaan ruleset and cross-faction. Making other PvP maps into cross faction is something we are looking into but need to make new voice overs etc.
We are hoping that the higher server population after server merges will reduce the chances of win trading.
Bringing back old PvP Rewards (like the Furious rewards) – We are talking about bringing it back, we won’t put them in cartel market but thinking of an ingame way to bring them back.
Extensive changes to all ships in GSF. New GSF map will be team deathmath.
Augments/Gearing
Any unopened command crates you have now can be saved up for 5.6 and disintegrated into unassembled components.
The new augments will be obtained with the new flashpoint currency, with harder difficulties rewarding more currency. These new augments are more powerful than current auguments and are not taken into account for our class balances so you should go over our target DPS with these new augments.
There will be a detailed blog post explaining all the changes to augments later.
Class Balances
Changes with 5.5 will finish our initial sweep of class changes to our target goals. After that we can look into things like if we nerfed something too hard or if there are content people can’t do with the new changes
Companions
Andronikos will be coming back as a companion a bit sooner, they got some story planned for him. Same for Keira and Scourge.
Companions actively being worked on for a return
Ensign Temple (5.6), Arcann with Romance, Corso, Risha, Akaavi, Mako, Vector, Keira, Scourge, Dark Side Jaesa, Felix Iresso, and Ashara.
Companions that are not named will eventually return.