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	<title>BloodLine Guild</title>
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	<link>http://www.blood-line.com</link>
	<description>Blood alone moves the wheels of history</description>
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		<title>Speculating on the Guild Wars 2 release date</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/05/speculating-on-the-gw2-release-date/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/05/speculating-on-the-gw2-release-date/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 May 2012 21:20:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Guild Wars 2]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=331</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[All the tweets from ArenaNet say that they haven&#8217;t announced a date yet, but I think we can draw a few conclusions from recent earnings calls. According to the NCsoft earnings report from a couple days ago, Guild Wars 2 is on track for a late Q3 &#8211; early Q4 release. NCsoft Korea&#8217;s fiscal Q3 ends Sept 11, 2012 and Q4 runs until the end of the calendar year. I&#8217;m going to assume that since this was a Korean earnings call they&#8217;re going by that and not the US fiscal year which runs a little different (Q3 is April 1, 2012 &#8211; June 30, 2012 in the US). This matches up with today&#8217;s GameStop earnings call which stated that GW2 has been bumped out of the current quarter (the US fiscal quarter ending June 30, 2012). Logic says that the release will happen in the Aug-Sept range, with a chance of it being pushed into late Sept &#8211; early Oct. Personally I wish the release would be sooner, but I can live with the game coming out &#8220;when its ready&#8221;. Whenever that may be. Join the forum discussion on this post]]></description>
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		<title>Elder Scrolls Online Anounced, Why Am I Disappointed?</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/05/elder-scrolls-online-anounced-why-am-i-disappointed/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/05/elder-scrolls-online-anounced-why-am-i-disappointed/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 May 2012 18:21:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Games]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=318</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I knew the announcement was coming, the rumors of an Elder Scrolls MMO have been circulating the interwebs for quite some time. But now that its official, I&#8217;m more underwhelmed and skeptical than excited. I have a feeling I&#8217;m not alone. The first thing that comes to mind is that Elder Scrolls Online (or ESO) will take resources away from the next true Elder Scrolls game. ZeniMax claims that it won&#8217;t, that the teams are separate, but lets look at the big picture. Bethesda releases a new game from either the Fallout series, or Elder Scrolls every three years, has for a while now. At that pace we&#8217;re due for some Fallout in 2014 and another Installment in the Elder Scrolls franchise in 2017. Might seem like a ways off, but consider that ESO has a launch window of 2013-14 and that only gives three years to develop and hype a new game. What game company would advertise against its own product that early in its lifespan? Hell, WoW has been out for 8 years now, what have we heard about Warcraft? (you know, the loved rts franchise that came before the MMO behemoth). One thing that really sets The Elder Scrolls games (and Bethesda games in general) apart is that they&#8217;re sandboxes, your path isn&#8217;t mapped out for you, and actions all have consequences. I&#8217;m curious to see how much of this will carry over in a MMORPG. From what I&#8217;ve seen so far its going to be dumbed down a lot, and this makes me sad. I can see why they would change things up for a MMO audience, lets face it, online sandboxes not named Minecraft have been pretty terrible lately. So are we REALLY getting an Elder Scrolls MMO, or are we getting a MMO with the Elder Scrolls name slapped onto the box? We know that ESO will have a lot of PvP at endgame, why is that? They have a former Mythic Dev! someone that worked on Dark Age of Camelot is working on the PvP team for ESO. Just like Warhammer, Rift, Swtor and others before. Why is this even a thing anymore? From what I&#8217;ve seen the DAOC devs have done more bad than good since leaving that game. Maybe instead of trying to recapture the magic of DAOC, teams should try to bring something new to the table for once. While we&#8217;re here, lets talk about engines, not the one in your car but the ones that drive the games we play. ESO is using the Hero engine, the same engine that Bioware chose for SWTOR. WTF! If SWTOR showed us anything during the time we spent there, it was that the Hero engine couldn&#8217;t handle large-scale pvp. Remember Ilum? I do, its still pretty fresh on my mind considering all the hype that went into it, and the utter disappointment that followed. Last but not least, endgame&#8230; So far we know that ESO will have an endgame consisting of Heroic [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>Worst moments in MMO History</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/04/worst-moments-in-mmo-history/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/04/worst-moments-in-mmo-history/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:37:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Games]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=308</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[After watching Bioware shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly over the last 48 hours, I started thinking about how this series of events would go down in history. As I look at the historic fail moments of the games I&#8217;ve played its becoming more and more evident that yeah&#8230; Bioware screwed up big time. Star Wars Galaxies The NGE patch was, and still is, the biggest flop that I can recall. Early on in the game if you wanted to become a Jedi it took countless hours and the accomplishment of finally achieving that goal was something that few people got to experience. SOE later shocked the community by making the Jedi class something you could roll from lvl 1, and in one fell swoop essentially killed the game for a large portion of the playerbase. LOTRO Mines of Moria: Buff stacking, instance exploits and radiance. Not done in a patch, but in an expansion. As a person who likes leveling and pvp, the setup of LOTRO was perfect in SOA. I could level up my freeps, gear them up with crafted armor and a few instance drops and be available to help raid on multiple classes. That all changed with the Moria expansion with the introduction of Radiance, that change gated raids off to anyone that didn&#8217;t grind instances for gear drops, and since I don&#8217;t play that game, I was useless to my kin if they needed raid help. At the same time, pvmp was an exercise in frustration because of the buff stacking exploits introduced with the new legendary weapon system. They eventually fixed the exploits, but the legendary weapon dps increases sped up the pace of combat to levels that people didn&#8217;t enjoy, and Turbine never recovered from that. Age of Conan Its hard to pinpoint one moment to dub the &#8220;worst&#8221; for AOC, the game was insanely fun to level up and progress in as a guild, but broken sieges, buggy raids and a series of patches that broke more than they fixed drove people away pretty fast. For me though, the worst is a toss up between the gemcrafting update that introduced gem stacking, and the anti-griefing patch that was absurd to have on an &#8220;open pvp&#8221; server in the first place. The problem with the anti-griefing patch was that it made it easy for a low level character to grief higher level characters by forcing them to attack/kill you (as simple as walking into an aoe). If you did it enough times the higher level player would be flagged as a criminal and would be attacked by city guards. I&#8217;ll admit, I ran around on my alts doing this, and it was fun for a while, but it killed off a lot of the higher-level pvp that would happen in certain zones because groups would just bring lowbies so your entire group would be hostile to guards and attacked in any city. Star Wars: The Old Republic Patch 1.2 was supposed to be [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Mike O&#8217;Brien talks about mirotransactions in the latest ArenaNet blog post</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/03/mike-obrien-talks-about-mirotransactions-in-the-latest-arenanet-blog-post/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/03/mike-obrien-talks-about-mirotransactions-in-the-latest-arenanet-blog-post/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:55:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Guild Wars 2]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/2012/03/mike-obrien-talks-about-mirotransactions-in-the-latest-arenanet-blog-post/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Some good stuff here, gold sellers be dammed! In this month’s closed beta event, we’ll do some early testing of the Guild Wars 2 microtransactions system. Our microtransaction content isn’t nailed down yet, but we have a good framework in place to support it. So, I’d like to take a moment to explain our goals and the system we have developed to meet them. We believe in microtransactions because they fund ongoing development of the game in a very straightforward and open way. You, the customer, get to decide how much money you spend on the game after launch, based on how compelling it is to you. You get a complete and playable game no matter what, but we think we can provide additional content and services that you’d be happy to pay for. And when you pay for them, you help fund our support of Guild Wars 2 in a way that benefits all players of the game. Here’s our philosophy on microtransactions: We think players should have the opportunity to spend money on items that provide visual distinction and offer more ways to express themselves. They should also be able to spend money on account services and on time-saving convenience items. But it’s never OK for players to buy a game and not be able to enjoy what they paid for without additional purchases, and it’s never OK for players who spend money to have an unfair advantage over players who don’t. I know none of this is new; the original Guild Wars also had microtransactions. But microtransactions were an afterthought in Guild Wars, whereas with Guild Wars 2, we had an opportunity to integrate the microtransaction system from the ground up, giving players more options and more convenience without sacrificing our design principles. So, here’s what we’re doing differently this time. In Guild Wars 2 we have three currencies: gold, karma, and gems. Gold is the common in-game currency. Karma, which players earn in-game but cannot trade, is used for unique rewards. And gems are the currency that’s bought and used to purchase microtransactions. We have a new player-driven market that allows players to trade gold for gems and gems for gold. If you want something, whether it’s an in-game item or a microtransaction, you ultimately have two ways to get it: you can play to earn gold or you can use money to buy gems. We think that’s important, because it lets more players participate on a level playing field, whether they use their free time or their disposable income to do it. MMO veterans will note the similarities of our system to EVE Online’s PLEX system. As in that case, our system takes gold trading out of the hands of real-money trading (RMT) companies and puts it directly in the hands of players. We think that’s a great thing. “… it’s never OK for players who spend money to have an unfair advantage over players who don’t.” That line there is huge, something that was promised in other games and went by the wayside. Hopefully ArenaNet follows through with that statement. From a player’s [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>SWTOR 1.1.5 Patch Notes</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/03/swtor-1-1-5-patch-notes/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/03/swtor-1-1-5-patch-notes/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:17:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[SWTOR]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=296</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[General Players can now use the command /roll or /random to generate a random number between 1 and 100. This command will also accept a range (example: /roll 20-40) or a die value (example: 2d6). Classes and Combat General Moving while channeling an ability (such as Telekinetic Throw and Force Lightning) will no longer cancel the Global Cooldown, which would allow those abilities to deal more damage than intended. The French version of the &#8220;Darth&#8221; title is now correct. Flashpoints and Operations Operations General Bosses in Operations now drop the correct amount of loot when the group is using the Master Looter loot distribution setting. Eternity Vault The &#8220;Duel of the Fates&#8221; and &#8220;Penalty of Destiny&#8221; effects are now properly removed when the Infernal Council encounter resets. An issue that could cause buttons to stop responding during the Ancient Pylons encounter has been fixed. Karraga&#8217;s Palace Completing Karagga&#8217;s Palace in Nightmare Mode now correctly grants the title &#8220;The Unyielding.&#8221; Items General New high-level black-yellow color crystals can now be purchased from the Pre-Order Vendors on the Imperial and Republic Fleets. Several high end speeder models have been temporarily reduced in price until Game Update 1.2. A vendor that sells a variety of previously unavailable endgame crystals has been added temporarily to the Imperial and Republic Fleets until Game Update 1.2. The Portable Holo Dancer once again displays the correct visual effect. Dark/Light requirements present on some color crystals have been removed. Missions and NPCs Missions Republic Chaos and Harmony: Corrected an issue that caused Children of the Emperor to disappear and reappear during the final boss fight, making the encounter more difficult that intended. Imperial Manufacturing Miracles: Corrected a dialogue problem that could cause Destris&#8217; conversation to end prematurely. PvP General Players can now build credit towards the Battle for Ilum daily and weekly missions by playing Warzones. Warzones General Healers in Warzones now receive kill credit when a healed player kills an enemy. Players affected by a Damage Over Time ability are no longer interrupted when interacting with objectives. Battlemaster and Champion Commendations are now available on the PvP Vendor for Warzone and Mercenary Commendations. Champion Gear Bags are still available. Valor gained from Warzones has been increased. Medals are now worth 500 Valor and 10 Commendations. Players only earn Valor and Commendations for the first 4 medals earned each match. Increased the Warzone AFK timeout from 60 seconds to 90 seconds. Alderaan Civil War The speeder bikes that transport players back to the battle now have a three-second activation time to increase the likelihood that an organized attacking team can successfully take the side turrets. World PvP Ilum To improve Ilum performance, the two large defense turrets outside each base on the Western Shelf no longer fire lasers into the air. Players can now kill a much larger streak of players before they are temporarily prevented from gaining more Valor for kills. Additionally, once the threshold has been passed, players will be prevented from gaining Valor for a shorter period of time. UI General The Shader Complexity preference now supports [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/03/swtor-1-1-5-patch-notes/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Guild Wars 2 Preview Roundup</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/02/guild-wars-2-preview-roundup/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/02/guild-wars-2-preview-roundup/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:31:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Games]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guild Wars 2]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=267</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The press NDA has been lifted, and that means Guild Wars 2 news. I nabbed some snippets from some of the first few previews so you can see what people are saying, so far its a lot of positive feedback, but we&#8217;ve seen that all before. Is it all hype? can Guild Wars 2 follow through with the inflated expectations people have, or will it fall flat like so many AAA releases have in the past few years? You be the judge and weigh in with your thoughts in the comments below. From Kotaku: Ten Things I Learned From the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend. As you explore the world of Tyria on your quest to unravel your character&#8217;s personal story you&#8217;ll constantly be stumbling across world events, special situations that might be worth your while getting involved in. Maybe there&#8217;s a scrapyard that needs a little cleaning up. Perhaps a band of harpies is attacking an outpost and they need help breaking the creatures&#8217; moral. There&#8217;s no one to click on, and you aren&#8217;t obligated to participate; they&#8217;re just adventures waiting for an adventurer. From Massively: Massively&#8217;s Guild Wars 2 closed beta impressions. Given that, you don&#8217;t really have a game where everybody&#8217;s their own healer &#8212; you have a game where healers are unnecessary because combat rewards intelligent play and there&#8217;s an incredibly well-designed system of boons across every profession&#8217;s skills. That said, I do have to say that my self-heal was in high demand during more challenging endeavors. In the level 30 dungeon, for example, it made a huge difference. However, it only made such a difference when used with strategic timing and positioning. Using your heal while standing in the middle of enemy AoE isn&#8217;t going to cut it. From MMORPG: The Closed Beta Preview At first you’ll start with just your basic heal skill, and little else. But as you level, and explore to find “skill point challenges” littered around the world (there’s that exploration focus again) you’ll gain skill points. Each skill of your profession costs a different amount, with the more crazy powerful ones costing the most. So you can either use a point or two to get some skills early, or you can save and get something extremely useful and fun (flamethrower on the Engineer!) early on. Either way, if you hunt down all the skill challenges you’ll be able to get every skill for your profession by the time you reach level 80. Just like in GW1 though, you can only ever equip as many as your hotbar can hold. So it’s up to you to figure out what combination works best for you. I know I spent some points on other healing skills I don’t really care for, but it just means I’ll have to wait longer to get other skills. There is no “re-speccing” of skills because there doesn’t need to be. You just have to wait to get more skill points and eventually you’ll unlock them all. From [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/02/guild-wars-2-preview-roundup/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>SWTOR Raid Progression Update</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/02/swtor-raid-progression-update/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/02/swtor-raid-progression-update/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:34:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Games]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SWTOR]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=262</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Its been a while since we updated folks on our raid progress, here&#8217;s where we are so far: 8 Man EV Normal Mode: 5/5 EV Hard Mode: 4/5 EV Nightmare: 1/5 KP Normal Mode: 5/5 KP Hard Mode: 5/5 KP Nightmare Mode: 0/5 16 Man EV Normal mode: 3/5 Big grats to the raiders that keep pushing, and looking forward to seeing more and more people jumping in there!]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>SWTOR PvP Gear Changes Explained</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/02/swtor-pvp-gear-changes-explained/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/02/swtor-pvp-gear-changes-explained/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:24:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Games]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SWTOR]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=250</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The recently released notes for patch 1.1.2 raised a lot of eyebrows when people saw the following line: The number of commendations in Champion and Battlemaster Bags has been greatly increased, and the direct item trade tokens appear less frequently in Champion Bags. This change allows players to obtain PvP gear at a steady and significantly more predictable rate with an occasional bonus. At first glance it appeared that gearing up would be more difficult than it is now, but that was debunked by some dev posts today. It&#8217;s obvious from comments here that the patch note is not specific enough, so we&#8217;ll get it updated before the patch goes to the live servers. Here are some specifics: Champion Bags now always contain 15 Centurion Commendations AND 7 Champion Commendations. Battlemaster Bags now always contain 15 Champion Commendations. So Centurion gearing up progression for new level 50s is increased significantly and Champion gearing up progression will be steady. We do still intend on adding more intro level 50 PvP items as well as change how Battlemaster Commendations operate toward the same &#8216;steady&#8217; goal. It&#8217;s just the scope of that change was more than could be done in a weekly patch as it included vendor changes, conversions to existing commendations on players already, etc. That being said, the current interim &#8216;gearing up&#8217; system will change significantly when we introduce Ranked Warzones (aiming for Game Update 1.2). Stay tuned for more details on that. - Gabe And: The cost of Champion and Centurion items are NOT changing. The chance for a Battlemaster Commendation to be in a Battlemaster Bag is NOT changing. It is still 25%. To reiterate the mention in my previous post, we will be changing Battlemaster Commendation drops in a future patch toward the same &#8216;steady&#8217; progession goal without changing the overall average time to gear up. When you break it all down, gearing up as a fresh 50 will be a LOT less painful, and they&#8217;ll essentially be getting a new champ piece for every 10 bags they open up, as someone that has gone 0-52 without a single piece in the current system, I&#8217;m 100% behind this change. Join the forum discussion on this post]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/02/swtor-pvp-gear-changes-explained/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Important Aion Information</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/01/important-aion-information/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/01/important-aion-information/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:04:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Recon</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=243</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[All, If you are still interested in Aion there is a VERY important announcement. The veteran&#8217;s reward program is changing, if you have veteran rewards still unclaimed, as of Feb 28th 2012 if they are unclaimed they will NOT be able to be claimed. More information can be found at the following link: http://forums.na.aiononline.com/na/showthread.php?t=76238 Hope to see some people back in game *not holding breath* ~Recon]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Bioware clears up SWTOR Resolution questions.</title>
		<link>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/01/bioware-clears-up-swtor-resolution-questions/</link>
		<comments>http://www.blood-line.com/2012/01/bioware-clears-up-swtor-resolution-questions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:51:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dalgar</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Games]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SWTOR]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.blood-line.com/?p=239</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From Stephen Reid- &#8220;Hey everyone, thanks for bearing with us as we investigated the concerns raised here. After investigation, it seems that the confusion here is a combination of a UI issue that&#8217;s been resolved and a feature that&#8217;s working as intended, but the reason why it&#8217;s &#8216;working as intended&#8217; needs explanation. First, the UI issue. The preferences menu as it is seen on the Public Test Server for version 1.1 of the game is correct &#8211; there are only supposed to be two texture choices, &#8216;Low&#8217; and &#8216;High&#8217;. This replaces the original three-choice preference of Low/Medium/High because in reality, there was never supposed to be a &#8216;Medium&#8217; choice &#8211; that was a bug. Here&#8217;s where we need to explain. As many of you have noted, your character in the game world is rendered using lower resolution textures than inside of cinematic conversation scenes. This was a deliberate decision by the development team. To understand why this was done, I have to briefly talk about MMOs and their engines. In comparison to single player games and other genres of multiplayer online games, MMOs have much higher variability in the number of characters that can be potentially rendered on-screen at the same time. In MMOs, even though most of the time you&#8217;ll see a relatively small number of characters on screen, there are certain situations in which many more characters will be seen. Some examples of these situations include popular gathering places in-game (in our case, the two fleets), Operations with large teams, and Warzones. In those scenarios the client (and your PC) has to work hard to show off a lot of characters on-screen. During development and testing of The Old Republic, our priorities were to ensure the game looked great and performed well. In testing, we discovered that using our &#8216;maximum resolution&#8217; textures on in-game characters during normal gameplay could cause severe performance issues, even on powerful PCs. There were a variety of possible options to help improve performance, but one that was explored and ultimately implemented used what is known as a &#8216;texture atlas&#8217;. To understand that I&#8217;ve got to get technical for a minute. When a character in the game is &#8216;seen&#8217; by another character &#8211; ie, gets close to your field of view &#8211; the client has to &#8216;draw&#8217; that character for you to see. As the character is &#8216;drawn&#8217; for you there are a number of what are known as &#8216;draw calls&#8217; where the client pulls information from the repository it has on your hard disk, including textures, and then renders the character. Every draw call that is made is a demand on your PC, so keeping that number of draw calls low per character is important. With our &#8216;maximum resolution&#8217; textures a large number of draw calls are made per character, but that wasn&#8217;t practical for normal gameplay, especially when a large number of characters were in one place; the number of draw calls made on your client would multiply very quickly. The solution [...]]]></description>
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