The 5.2.1 patch on May 2nd was a bitter-sweet day for BioWare and SWTOR players. Overall, the patch was quite small, but the day still caused some big splashes in the SWTOR community. What was originally a 4-5 hour maintenance window ballooned to nearly 10 hours of intermittent login issues for most of the playerbase. Needless to say, but the internet wasn’t happy.
Some small bugs are being addressed in Patch 5.2.1, such as one that prevented players from (re)gaining Dorne or Quinn as a companion on the planet. But of infinitely more interest is word of better Iokath rewards, such as more command experience and credit explosions, for doing dailies. The studio also added loot in the level 51 to 64 range for veteran and master flashpoints and fixed some niggling issues with the Gods From the Machine operation.
SWTOR fans are going to want to log in starting May 4th. Players will get a free astromech mini-pet through the 8th and enjoy a double XP event through the 14th to celebrate the “May the 4th” unofficial holiday.
On May 1st, the SWTOR twitter account also tweeted a teaser for a new section of the Iokath operations. Although it’s not all sunshine and roses on the planet of Iokath. A lot of players are complaining that the open-world PvP sections of the expansion are all but dead. And to be fair, most PvP is centered in the Warzones, and trying to make the transition to open-world PvP has been tried, and failed, before with Ilum. It must be said that the design differences between Ilum and Iokath show an obvious attempt to avoid the same pitfalls by BioWare. Luckily, server load has not been a huge and game-breaking issue on Iokath like it was on Ilum.
So in closing, the future of open-world PvP remains fuzzy for SWTOR, but Iokath is still keeping players in the game, so it’s successful in that regard at least.
