Chat should now be fully functional again.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to give you an update regarding what happened and to let you know what our next steps are regarding the Matrix Cubes. After last night's patch, players reported that Matrix Cubes had disappeared from their inventories. This was an unintended consequence of a behind-the-scenes change to how mission items work. You may have also noticed some mission items missing if you were in the middle of certain missions as well. The team has been working on a fix since this was first reported, and we hope to get it out to you as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we ask that you hold off on contacting Customer Service at this time. Our goal is to restore the items to you as part of a new patch, without needing any manual intervention from Customer Service. We very much appreciate your patience today as we work to resolve this issue. Once we have more information regarding the timing of the patch, we'll let you know.

We have identified that loading into a new area while having a Matrix Cube equipped can cause the item to disappear. We recommend that you refrain from equipping a Matrix Cube until further notice.

We are currently investigating reports from players regarding missing Matrix Cubes. We will update this thread once we have more information.

This maintenance is now complete and the servers are back online.

While I'm in no way shape or form the greatest font of knowledge when it comes to how SWTOR uses hardware, I have run into this exact issue in the past. The crux of my issue (and it was to do with another MMO and iTunes) was that I didn't have a sound-card. What was happening was simply that the on board sound chipset was causing a bottleneck and slowing everything down at a processor level, as it has to use the processor - it simply couldn't handle iTunes and rendering another audio source at the same time. I bought a cheap sound card (£20 ish) and it fixed it instantly. Again, I'm not saying this will fix your issue in particular, but you didn't list a sound card while talking about audio issues, so I'm working under the assumption that you're using your on-board sound. People often don't think that audio requires processing horsepower too.

Adogwood is correct. The title was changed to "Dark", the traditionally used translation of "Darth". I say translation, you're right, there is no direct meaning, but the word "Dark" has been used traditionally since the original trilogy was put out in French speaking countries.

While I can understand that there is frustration around the frequency of patches, as many have already mentioned in this thread, patches are both normal and extremely important to ensure the stability of the game. Some of the issues fixed yesterday and today were absolutely crucial. Given the complexity of software like Star Wars:The Old Republic, what may appear as a simple fix can take hundreds, if not thousands of man hours to resolve. We have teams working around the clock to make sure that issues are fixed in a timely manner, while maintaining the quality that you've come to expect (read: doesn't break anything else ). The timing of these patches are not designed in ANY way to single any one out; they are, as I've mentioned before, done at the point in time where we have one of the lowest number of users connected globally. No matter when we choose to bring the service down, we will impact someone's play time - this is simply unavoidable. However, again, it's important that these issues are fixed as soon as we can, to help ensure the long term stability of Star Wars:The Old Republic. To be clear, the downtimes over the last few days have not been 8-10 hours per day, as you mention. While we announce downtime and give a time range, sometimes things do finish early (and of course, sometimes they run over). Over the last few days, we've totalled just over 7 hours of downtime. Again, we may have said the game may be offline for longer, but we actually achieved very short maintenance times each day.

While today is still classed as a holiday in many parts of Europe and many of you may still be off work or school, this downtime slot was chosen for a number of reasons. Firstly, in the past, we've talked on a number of occasions about how we will run a global service. Many players raised concerns that patches/updates would land later in the EU than in the US. We stated that as we're running a global service, we'll do everything we can to make sure the updates go live in both regions as close together as possible. For this to be achievable, we need to run maintenance at the same time. Secondly, although many of you are able to play at this time, this is actually one of the times in the day (and the week) when we have the lowest number of players in game. It's certainly far from peak. Given that many of you are still on holiday, today's maintenance may feel a bit more out of place than usual, but in the future, the number of users impacted will be even smaller. Finally it's also worth noting that today's downtime was a little longer than usual and in the future, shouldn't be the case. So hopefully that's gone some way in shedding a light on the reasons as to why we've chosen this slot.

This morning, Zakkeg Beast experienced a brief outage. We're currently investigating the cause. The shard is currently online and available for play, but we will update this thread once we have more information.

Happy Holidays everyone! I hope you all have a great time over the next few days. Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, make sure you have fun.