Producer Note: February 6th, 2009

[Q'in]

Greetings,

I hope everybody has had a good start to their year. Things have certainly been very exciting over here as we gear up for our 2009 releases. I thought things would mellow a bit after the release of Hoth but we’ve kept the gas pedal down to ensure we have new stuff for you as often as possible.

To begin with, I wanted to address our East Coast downtime yesterday. This downtime was to help reduce loop times on Starsider (only) and therefore improve some of the server lag. Starsider was chosen as the initial test environment for this maintenance due to its very large population compared to the other servers. The loop times have indeed gone down. While this may not have fixed every issue, you should see some performance improvement if your issues were indeed with server related. We are continuing to look for additional optimizations for Starsider and the other high-population servers out there.

On to upcoming goodies...

The start of the Ewok Festival of Love is right around the corner with Update 7. If you haven’t had the opportunity to take a peek at it on TCPrime, it continues our trend of making the events more interactive with four mini-games that everybody can participate in.

1. Find Festival of Love Cards (Tyrena and Kaadara only)
An Ewok child has lost all his/her Festival of Love Cards. Players must help the Ewok child by finding the full set of lost cards and returning them. This activity can be repeated each day because Ewok children are a bit careless with their cards.

2. Match Making (Tyrena and Kaadara only)
The Ewok Festival of Love celebrates romance, but not everyone has someone with whom to share their life. Players must help the romantically hopeless find love. L-O53, a protocol droid found near the fountains, will introduce players to a love-challenged person who they then need to help. Players must search the celebrating cities to find the best matches possible for that person. The love-starved person will follow you around as you speak with various Festival of Love NPCs in Kaadara and/or Tyrena to find the one that is the best match.

3. Ewok Festival of Love Sage
Kyoopid, a Festival of Love Sage, will appear in one of the celebrating cities every 60 minutes and will stay for 15 minutes. The players that find him and give him either two Chak Hearts or a bundle of Festival of Love Cards will receive an Ewok Festival of Love badge and title (“Disciple of Kyoopid”).

4. Disillusioned Ewok Sage
Not every Festival of Love Sage is filled with joy and love. This poor soul has lost his way. Players must help him rediscover the true meaning of Christmas the Ewok Festival of Love by going on a quest for him and proving that there really is love in the galaxy.

Update 7 also includes our long awaited Spy update. The Spy update features a Spy collection, a new Spy weapon, an expertise overhaul and other improvements.

Finally, Update 7 introduces a couple of long-awaited inclusions; camera height adjustment and storyteller costumes.

The camera height adjuster is a slider found in the Graphics tab of the Options menu. This slider allows players to customize at what height the camera is set (note that the Offset Camera option under the Control tab must be turned off to use this feature).

The storyteller costumes are holoshrouds that can be purchased from storyteller vendors and consumed to allow players to transform into assorted creatures and characters from around the Galaxy. Costumes last for one hour from the time they are activated. With the release of Update 7 there will be five costumes available for purchase:

• Droideka
  
• Ewok
  
• Ewok Sage
  
• Gungan
  
• Jawa

Because it is a holiday-specific costume, the Ewok Sage holoshroud must be used within 14 days from the date of purchase; all other costumes can be stored and used at any time. Please note that if you enter combat while wearing a costume, that costume will immediately disappear. We plan on releasing additional costumes with each update so you have a variety of different looks to choose from.

Next on the horizon is Update 8. The primary new feature for both Player Cities and Player Associations will be an updated UI. The new UIs give a lot more information, which is displayed in columns and can be sorted by clicking the headers. A screenshot of the Player Association UI is below.

LINK to image due to image size

As you can see, we’ve added a lot more information for you to view including member’s location, last login time, profession, and rank.

The Player City UI is extremely similar and offers similar information. Each UI will also contain a search feature for association member/citizens who are currently online.

One last note before I sign off. Everybody should be sure that they're signed up to receive the Star Wars Galaxies emails that are periodically sent out. Be sure that your account is opted-in for email announcements, and SOE is added to your email “safe senders” list, so that you don’t miss out on any important news. If you’re unsure how to opt-in or add us to a safe sender list, don’t worry, instructions on both are forthcoming and will be posted on the forums. There could be some surprises coming your way via email....

See you all around the Galaxy,

-Dotanuki