Star Wars Galaxies: Producer Note: June 8th, 2007

After announcing the second postponement of the House Pack Up, SOE producer DeadMeat expounded on the topic:

Folks,

As I posted in the announcement forum, We decided to postpone the Pack-up Event scheduled for Next Tuesday. I wanted to give some of the details here that would have made the announcement too wordy for the average player. There are two main things that are required to make house pack-up really work. Obviously all items in the house need to get into the packed player's datapad, but our game has many types of containment chains that all need to be working when a item is packed to make sure all contained items are also packed as well. Then there are a number of DB contortions to get it all working correctly, and some of those involve race conditions that meant that operations may happen in the wrong order and cause corruption of the DB. This all stems from the fact that the player whose house is packed is not online. We have solved these issues in most cases and are close on all the cases we could come up with. We think we have been pretty exhaustive in imagining all of the different possibilities that could arise, but in the end, you never know with an MMO until it is live. That is why we decided to go with the initial test on the old TestCenter.

We will still be pushing a hotfix next Tuesday to address some live issues and add some refinements to the game. We have also been smashing a ton of bugs during the bug-bash we have been doing for the last couple of weeks and we will be releasing that to the TestCenters soon along with the previously discussed changes to the Elite spawns in non-high adventure areas, improvements to the loots tables, and some other interesting surprises. These will be released to live as a chapter update as well (6.n), but we want to get plenty of testing on these before committing them to the live game.

We are very pleased with the success of C6 and the great player response. As you have probably noticed, server populations have been rising steadily for quite some time now, and there are a ton of new players and returning vets in the game. We will continue to strive for high quality chapters and updates to the game that bring about these types of positive player growth. And we will continue to work with the community to identify key areas for improvements in the game.

Have a great weekend!

DM