An update on Republic Trooper and a massive thank you to all of our readers!

Written By: Andy Muchmore

This past week, July 2nd to be exact, Republic Trooper turned 1 - happy birthday RT! Although it is our birthday week, I felt it was appropriate to update all of you with the status of RT as a whole. Obviously over the past several months things have slowed to a crawl and I would like to personally address the situation.

Three years ago a very good friend of mine, Dave, approached me with the idea of RepublicTrooper.com. At the time I was neck deep in other projects and I was unavailable to help out, even though I was eagerly following the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Over the years I would get phone calls, emails, texts, and the like asking if and when I would be available to “make it happen.” Around May of last year I was finally in a place where I could offer my services to Dave and help build Republic Trooper from the ground up. After several months of planning and development RT saw its first public reader and we were off to the races!

Since that time RT has seen tremendous growth and acceptance within the overall Star Wars: The Old Republic community – and I have to say, all of us cannot thank you enough for being readers, listeners, fans, and for not only playing the Trooper class in game, but being believers in BioWare and SWTOR to begin with. When RT went live we were woefully late to the game, in terms of established fan sites, but we did this for the love of the game, the love of the class, and to be honest – the love of the company that made it all happen. As long time gamers we had faith that a company like BioWare would, without a doubt, blow our minds with their new MMO.

Command Decisions is a column where Republic Troopers can get the skinny on the ins and outs of guilds and the officers and members that keep them running like well-oiled war machines.

Written By: Lady Republic

Hello and welcome to another installment of Command Decisions, the column for guild leaders, officers, or anyone else interested in guilds and their management. Last time, we discussed guild banks – the pros and cons of them, and how to set up funding for them. This week, we’re looking at another issue entirely. Unless you’ve been living in a cave or off the net, odds are you’ve heard that The Old Republic has begun instituting server moves for a number of servers. The long term plans for this are still a bit murky, though rumors abound about the intention of creating “super servers” and such. What we do know in the short term is that a large number of servers have been marked as either origin (where you can transfer toons from) or destination (where you can transfer toons to) servers. There are multiple origin servers feeding into the same destination servers so far, so this does look like the first step in a larger server consolidation process. You can read more about the overall process here.

Now for individual players, this appears to be a pretty welcome direction. Many servers have suffered from low populations and Fleets with barely ten to twenty players online at peak hours. Moving to a larger population server opens up all sorts of welcome opportunities such as the ability to get flashpoint groups, faster PvP queue times, and people to buy or sell from on the GTN. What does it mean for guilds though? This week, let’s look at some of the pros and cons of the server transfer in TOR and how it impacts guilds.

Command Decisions is a column where Republic Troopers can get the skinny on the ins and outs of guilds and the officers and members that keep them running like well-oiled war machines.

Written By: Lady Republic

Hello, and welcome my first article for Republic Trooper's Command Decisions column – a place to talk about all things guild-related. As some of you may know, I used to write Council Chambers, which was the guild management and advice column over on the former Ask A Jedi. We’ve always enjoyed a close partnership with the folks at Republic Trooper, and I’m delighted to be able to continue writing about guilds and troubleshooting over here! On that note, as with my former columns – always feel free to post in the comments section below with any questions, topics for advice, suggestions, or helpful feedback.

This week, we’ll be talking about one of the new features introduced in Patch 1.2 – Guild Banks. Guild banks in TOR are very helpful – but also very expensive. In fact, to purchase all 7 tabs for your new guild bank, you will be spending a total of 59,910,000 credits. At the Guild Summit in March, the developers said that in their demographic data, the average player only has about 400,000 credits at any given time. So – saving up for nearly 60 million credits is a serious endeavor.

When the weekend rolls around it’s time to relax, grab a cold one, sit down with your squad, and catch up on some scuttlebutt. RT is here to provide you with some things that are worthy of talking about over a good pint with a few friends.

Hating On 1.3!

The roadmap for The Old Republic relies heavily upon BioWare’s ambitious patch schedule to keep the livelihood of the MMO intact. The first two major patch iterations have, if nothing else, delivered a lot of changes to the game. The nature of the changes that BioWare has included is the topic of much debate amongst the community and the information that’s beginning to trickle out regarding Patch 1.3 is no exception. The evildoers over at Darth Hater have a SUPERB guide—which they will keep updating—regarding any and all information on Patch 1.3.

The Rules of Engagement is the column that provides Republic Troopers with highly detailed intel on everything a Trooper needs to know to adapt and overcome on and off the battlefield.

Our resident Commando goes in-depth in discussing changes to the Advanced Class in Patch 1.2: Legacy

Earlier, I had given a review of the Trooper changes in Patch 1.2 concerning Combat Medics. This week I'd like to take a look at the Gunnery tree and analyze the changes we find there.

As before, let's look at each change separately.

Charged Barrier now provides 1% damage reduction per stack

Pre-1.2: Provided 2% damage reduction per stack (5 stacks)
Change: 50% reduction in damage reduction (5% now vs 10% at 5 stacks)

Welcome to the Mess Hall, where every other week we will lay bare a new topic to be discussed on the upcoming episode of Combat Chatter. This is the Mess Hall, so eat up, get loud and say what you have to say! There are no ranks here...

Legacy Patch 1.2 was The Old Republic’s first major content patch, and with it came a sizable amount of new things to do and see in BioWare’s seminal MMO. Now that the masses have had a month to consume, assess and digest all that new content people have varying opinions on the current state of TOR, and what Patch 1.2—and future patches—will mean to the livelihood of the game.

I know many people (myself included) have been playing more since 1.2 went live, but the dilution of the population on the servers is unmistakable. It has now been confirmed that The Old Republic has shed about 400,000 of its initial subscriber base which would account for a noticeable lack of active players in game. While early subscriber attrition is to be expected in any MMO the question remains…what will BioWare do about the future health of those of us who are still active in TOR?

So let us know, in broad terms, your thoughts about The Old Republic’s most recent patch and the needs for Patch 1.3. Fire away below!

Time slows.

Kat pitches forward. Blood splatters my face. I think I scream his name, cry out in horror and in panic. Shells explode all around me, their fragments tearing up the ground behind me, before me and to either side, yet nothing touches me here, in this haven of duracrete. Only Kat.

I rush to him, scrambling on hands and knees. There is so much blood and so it was a shell and not a sniper. Shrapnel has torn into Kat’s neck just below the hairline and above his shoulder blades. I ease him onto his side while I apply a kolto patch. He groans.

“Kat,” I say, desperate to believe him well, that this is nothing but a scratch that looks so much worse than it is. I want him to sit up and laugh and tell me its fine, not to worry. He does none of this.

When the weekend rolls around it’s time to relax, grab a cold one, sit down with your squad, and catch up on some scuttlebutt. RT is here to provide you with some things that are worthy of talking about over a good pint with a few friends.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Content!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Content is King. I didn’t make that up and I wasn’t the first to say it in regards to MMOs, the guys who started EverQuest were. It’s an axiom that applies to all gaming but is especially important to MMOs, which aren’t supposed to last days, or weeks, or months but years. Everyone has criticisms about what they want in a product, and The Old Republic is no different. One thing that is clear though is that people need more to do in TOR, and Daniel Erickson stopped by over at RPS to talk about that and some other cool stuff.

Combat Chatter is the official podcast of RepublicTrooper.com

Combat Chatter is back for another episode! This week Dave, Andy and Mike spoke about changes to the Combat Medic Advanced Class in patch 1.2, the new Explosive Conflict Operation, farming Hoth for mega credits, Legacy System system companion buffs, the Rakghoul Pandemic, as well as our most recent Mess Hall poll. You can listen to the show, download the file, check out the guests and view the topics of discussion below.

Republic Trooper hosts Fan Fiction Mondays every week and recently we had the opportunity to sit down with a few other prominent Fan Fiction writers in the SWTOR community. We asked them to share their thoughts on writing and what brought them to a Time Long Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.

This week we were priveleged to talk to Dimbo from Dimbo the Trooper. If you don’t already read about his exploits, you can do so here.

Republic Trooper: How did you get into writing? What was the earliest thing you can remember writing?

Dimbo the Trooper: I entered a writing contest from Mos Eisley Radio that involved writing a back story for your main character in SWTOR. After I posted mine I got several emails and comments asking when the next episode was. My initial response was 'um never?’ It really kind of took off from there. I started to think about Dimbo adventuring through the Star Wars galaxy and it came so easily [that] I had to write it down.