Avian Gamers Network

Well... I miss the space expansion of SW:G I have no reason to hide it.

I was a good pilot back in 2005.

Anyway I just started downloading the needed files for the game and my download is running with aproximatly 160 kByte pr second. Still it will take about nine hours before update is done.

If I calculated correctly it means I downloading 5 gigs of data.
Can anyone comfirm this?

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1st Feb 2008

dunno...but I got a reactivation email from them yesterday...they want me back...and if I dont come back my stuff is getting packed into my datapad

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Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
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Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

Well... still downloading. Got to work 2.5 hours ago and restarted the download.

Still about 3.5 hours. Being realistic I think it'll be done in 4 hours. So if I'm lucky I can play a little this morning or I'll have to wait till next week.

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1st Feb 2008

Well so far I have played the first part of the game...

Though I can't seem to find out how to get to the regular planets...
I'm stuck at Ord Mantell, the beginners place nowaday I think, though I fear that the trial is only there.

I then reactivated my old account. Remembered the account name by sheer coinsidence. Anyway got meself a new password and hope to fly in my X-wing again.

Alas luck wasn't with me.
Azz De'Nolo as you might remember him, is gone.

So I'm gonna jump in and out of the new char I made during these two weeks and tell my impressions.

I'm trying to keep an open mind and I have to say, while all the old is gone and the space part seems more sluggish than I remember, I am actually enjoying it.

I picked the Bounty Hunter as a class, since it is the one which is mostly geared toward ranged solo combat. The new style of combat is despite it's annyance quite entertaining.

But already there you realise that SW:G has becommen more a MMO-FPS/3PS rather than a MMO-RPG.

The space expansion is basically the same, though I can't seem to modify my ship as we used to. That is we just went up to a Space Terminal then we got a window showing us our ship(s) and a menu wehther or not we would modify it.
Now if you click on the space terminal you jump directly out to space.

And there are no Hyperspace buoys as of yet. Though I would suspect I need to finish a couple of more missions as a BH before I am allowed to leave the system.

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1st Feb 2008

***UPDATE***

Well I have discovered that my earlier assumption about more missions would get me out.

I will begin with the start.

When you start you end up on a space station in the Ord Mantell system. A closed system purely for beginners.

As earlier stated I started as a BH. Being imprisoned I was rescued by none other than Han Solo and Chewbacca along with R2-D2.
This was an indicator for me that the game has becommen populistic.

My introduction mission was given to me by Boba Fett, where after I cleared the mission was referred to the stations administrator. I got some missions from her then her aide.
I then took the pilot trainer missions (Privateer) and attempted to finish some of the missions in hope I could jump to hyperspace. I was told I don't have the permission to do so.

I then went back to the aide and she told me that I could piggyback with Boba Fett, so back to him.
He told me I was too weak a BH to go to the rest of the galaxy. At this time I was level 4 BH.

I did two more mission and leveled up to level 5 and I talked with Boba again.
He dropped me off on Tatooine.

Oh joy I was in a place I remembered.
Han Solo gave me a little quest to get meself a Landspeeder (XP-38 ) and he pointed me to Jabba's palace(I believe that since it pointed me to Bib Fortuna)

I ignored that and traveled from Mos Eisley to Mos Espa to meet the Rebel Pilot trainer.

I actually met a couple of people there actually a whole group, but it wasn't the mindnumbering amount it used to have. Where there used to be atleast 100 to 150 people when I played 2,5 years ago there was now less than ten regularily, this was a group of eight people.

When I had 300 credits I purchased an one way ticket to Tuskens Bane.

I looked around in the city and found more or less as it used to be. Some buildings had changed (looked at my old screenshots) and other still were there among them our old PA hall, though the sign is gone.
I found Karmola's house and looked inside....

Empty... Just like the rest of the city.
So I bought a ticket to Mos Espa and I noticed that I payed 100 creds to the city.

When I got back I decided to scrap the Hutt light fighter and got the Z-95 by the trainer. And I discovered that I was now able to modify my ship. This wasn't possible in the beginner area...

I could find the skill trees for pilot so I presume it is going automated and linear now.

So I found a Bazaar terminal and tried to find some chassis and I dicovered I don't have enough to purchase anything (I'm 95k short for a Y-Wing) and that there are very few places where you can buy any parts at all.

So I logged off.

BTW if you have any questions feel free to ask.

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1st Feb 2008

Good post, I enjoyed reading it.

I quit just before JTL beta ended. Sounds like a lot has changed.

I would like to ma a correction;
while Ord Mantell is the beginners area, once you leave it you can't go back to that.
But the option to hyperspace there is open and when you arrive you end up amongst high level NPC fighters. And that is Tier 6 through 9... Got killed in two blast by a Tier Nine Black Sun medium fighter - so there are more levels to the space part of the game now, where there used to be five.
Ord Mantell has a space station there and there is a Star Destroyer in the system.

And while I remember the download to in total 9 hours and 37 minuetes for me, spanning over two days. Total download was 6 Gigs plus a little more.

I went back in the game again about two hours after the last post and played on with the space part. I rememberd something about the stats and wanted to check it out.
I discovered the reason it felt so slow and sluggish and it turns out that the vehicle cumtomisation hasn't changed at all.
My engine had a Yaw/Roll/Pitch ration on 40/45/45 respectively and the speed was 45 (which give around 420 units per second for the beginner ships).

My old engine from Azz De'Nolo had much higher stats and were placed on a X-Wing (68/73,2/74,1 Speed 89,6). So my regular speed was 1137 units persecond in cruise mode on the old ship.

Though I would like to mention when going so slow in the ship now all you do are circles and going against three Regular TIE's is not only exchausting, but quite lethal.

***Added***

I also need to mention that I was running through a Wireless network with unstable connectivity.

But fighting at 50-75 meters distance from your enemy is far from optimal, when the blaster on your ship (which can't be adjusted) are set to best fire at 150-200 meters.

***End Adding***

One mission requires me to destroy four regular TIE's.
No biggie for me I though, but then I was given four waypoints. Destroy one at each waypoint.
Okay it may drag out, but then I realised that each waypoint got not only one or two TIE's, but they also have two TIE Bombers and One Interceptor. If you are unluck there is a TIE Opressor there aswell.

Worst of all I can't improve my ship.
This stems not only from the fact that money is a in shortage, and player craften parts is nearly impossible to find, but also that spaceloot has becommen much more rare. Three years ago you could loot up to 60k credits in one hour space grind, now you are lucky if you loot for more than 5k in same time frame.

So, my plan is to follow the string of quests that is given to BH next time.

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1st Feb 2008

I can't believe that they are still running servers for SW:G. What is the population like? Is there any PVP?

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80S - Madson-(450 BS / 450 M)...........80H - Madera-(447 Eng / 412 Enc)...........80K - Madala-(450 Herb / 450 Skin)
65L - Madwyn-(430Ins / 329 Tail)........61M - Madran-(300 M / 250 Enc).............64P - Madmon-(315 M / 347 JC)

I did see two PvP situation, but as far as I remember Chilastra (The server we used to play on) is primarily a PvE server.

The first two hours I played was on the beginners area and I met three others there, one of which I had a chat with; he was trying out the trial.

Second time around I started 13 hours ago (about two o'clock in the morning London time, nine o'clock at the evening New York time) I saw two players within the first hour on Tatooine and two more in the space around Tatooine, a rebel Tier 3 and Imp Tier 3 dogfighting (overt rebel and imp - therefore PvP).
After I got dirtside I saw two players, one who was extremely busy and another who actually stopped to chat with me. He has been playing for six years now and is doing basic high level quest, since he has reached max level (which I believe is level 90).

Then I logged out and wrote my fourth entry (the one starting with ***UPDATE***) and entered again two hours later.

I went outside Mos Eisley spaceport and met the earlier mentioned group of eight players who were preparing for a raid of some sort, all rebel and one imperial showed up. Needles to say he was slaughtered.

Since I haven't explored other planets (can anyone point me to the places most likely to have high level players. There aren't many newcomers ingame so it might be high levelers at the difficult areas) I can't say how many there might be.

But if I played at a low population period we could assume that a high level planet can have at best 300-400 players simultaniously at best and Tatooine around 50-100.

In total for the whole server might be at max 1000-1200 on a busy day or hour. And that it an optimistic assumption, but there are 10-11 planets with each around 16*16 kilometers. So that is alot of big areas.

Though I am unsure of the size of each planet I think that was what we were told at the time.

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1st Feb 2008

What was it, 3 years ago? that someone hacked the client and could read the metrics that decided if a server load was "heavy" or "low" and they posted the connections for a Friday night.

Chilastra had about 470 people if I remember - peak time. I know they are doing server merges now, so it's possible Chilly could see 1000 players on-line again. Doubtful, but possible.

That was two years ago as I remember it... It happened about a year after NGE. And NGE was forced November 2005. I played in September Octorber that year...

And yeas they are making server mergings... But Chilastra is one of the more active servers... only one so far that have had medium load when I checked it.

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1st Feb 2008

Well I quickly lost interest, mostly due to the fact that there aren't any people around.

But I did manage to notice a couple of things.

1)
As I stated earlier the skill tree is no longer exsisting as we knew it. Now it is more or less linear and the old system, with four choises is gone.


Where the old system (the code above if you can regognize it) gave us the oppotunity to only focus on certain aspects of a profession to create a hybrid with another profession, the new system is linear exp gain and certain base skills, where you choose from more advance skills which can make you focus on certain areas of the class.

I.E. a Bounty Hunter(BH) that does high critical damage with low HP or make a BH that tanks with medium regular damage and high HP through a skill tree I never figured out completely.

You gain exp that is for sure. And for each level you gain, you are granted a point or two (or more I never noticed) which you can place in a skill tree.
And since I didn't pay attention to it I won't write more about it.




But when it comes to the pilot skill tree it is all linear.
Likewise the old system is gone and in pilot you don't have special skills to choose from.

It seems that skills are now granted from left to right on the old system.
As I recall the leftmost branch of pilot was ship licences, then equipment, the ship skills and then droid/flightcomputer commands. The new system runs from first to last, then when you have finished the first tier/level you are sent to the next pilottrainer and so on.


2)
There wasn't a lack of any crafting stations in the game. Saw them everywhere. And from what I was told, the crafting part of the game has been made into a subclass like pilot and you gain skills in the same manner. Though this hasn't been comfirmed.

Will add on later. Gonna play CoD-UO (The first game with expansion) against my class mates.

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1st Feb 2008

Lastly I would like to add that after I checked the servers again at my usual playing time, the server with most players was Starsider with a "Very Heavy" population...

So my thought was trying that one out to see the game with more players.

But then it occured to me.
While I am playing around as a pilot I don't get into the subjects you care for.

So I propose that you choose the class I should play and give me assignments of this and that, what to look for, what screenshot I should take and such.

For this I'm gonna use one of my other e-mail adresses and get another free trial.

What do you say?

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1st Feb 2008

I have lost all understanding of SWG Classes, professions; I don’t know what to tell you to play. I just enjoy reading your reports, so play whatever you want, and keep posting.

I can quicly give the informations about the classes right away.

But I was thinking at the time I wrote the last post that I could take screenshots of the game's skill system and such and explain how it worked and more...

My attempt was to make more people show some interest and have a chance to ask questions which have been on your mind for a long time...

Besides I only play at the trials... I don't wanna pay for the game anymore.

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1st Feb 2008