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October 6, 2021: Launcher Incident


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Hello everyone,

 

On October 6th at around 5:15pm CT, a portion of players who were logging into SWTOR through the game launcher were prompted to download a patch that was unintended to be pushed out. This effectively caused players to be unable to play the game. At 7:45pm CT, the issue was resolved.

 

Players who downloaded this patch or began downloading the patch had to re-download the game in its entirety in order to fully recover from this issue and play the game.

 

We recognize that this is not an ideal experience and understand the game time impact that this incident has had on our players. We were able to identify which players had been affected by this issue and will be compensating them with the following:

 

  • Free to play/Preferred accounts will receive 100 Cartel Coins
  • Subscriber accounts will receive one additional day of sub time + 100 Cartel Coins

Impacted players will receive this compensation within 24-48 hours as of this post automatically and will not have to contact Support or manually add anything to their accounts.

 

We apologize for the disruption this incident has had on the impacted players. We understand the significance an unexpected full download of the game has especially for players who are affected by bandwidth caps. We thank all of our players for their patience and appreciate their continued support.

 

- The SWTOR Team

Edited by JackieKo
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Good to see that BW is being proactive about making up for the issue. Last time people were making some pretty wild demands that made the thread pretty entertaining but I didn't think it's inappropriate to say that at least the day of subscription should be compensated. This is definitely a much improved response compared to last time, so thank you for that BW.

 

Honestly this wouldn't be that big of an issue for many of the users if the download speed of the launcher was faster. I wasn't impacted by this incident but if I had been then I'd probably be thinking hard about switching to the steam version.

Edited by WarbirdVIII
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On October 6th at around 5:15pm CT, a portion of players who were logging into SWTOR through the game launcher were prompted to download a patch that was unintended to be pushed out. This effectively caused players to be unable to play the game. At 7:45pm CT, the issue was resolved.

 

Players who downloaded this patch or began downloading the patch had to re-download the game in its entirety in order to fully recover from this issue and play the game.

 

This is the second time this exact thing has happened in the last like, 4 months or so. That window has only included 4 patches (going off the patch notes and including this new, yet to be released patch in the count). So that's 2 out of the last 4 patches that have been pushed out early and caused full game redownloads for any players unlucky enough to log into the normal launcher at those times. That's a really worrying stat to see.

 

What exactly is causing these patches to be pushed out early and, more importantly, is anything being done to stop it from happening again? Was there a process change on the backend? I don't remember this ever being an issue before, so it's weird to see it suddenly pop up twice in 4 months.

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Great job guys! Really happy to see the proactive step to let players know they are respected and their time is important to you too.

 

I hate to add critique as this is really a nice step you've taken, but I would like to point out that 1 day of sub time isn't really equivalent to the disruption some subscribers experienced. If you're part of a scheduled team/event that was cancelled due to the patching issue, it's not like it just got moved to the next day and happened anyways. I know this doesn't effect everyone, but for the odd person this might have been the one night a week they have some social group activity.

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Honestly this wouldn't be that big of an issue for many of the users if the download speed of the launcher was faster. I wasn't impacted by this incident but if I had been then I'd probably be thinking hard about switching to the steam version.
It was super annoying the time that steam made me re-download the entire game (even though my language settings were correct), but the overall launcher experience is SOOO much better. It's amazing when you forget it's patch day, but steam auto updated the game while you were doing other things on your computer.
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I hate to add critique as this is really a nice step you've taken, but...

Bioware has performed a nice gesture, which the gaming company did not all have to do. I flipped to Steam a long time ago so I wasn't affected. Even had I been, I would never delve into parsing any make-good gesture.

 

For anyone to sit here and be judgmental over it, to split hairs tearing apart the equivalency of the gesture, is just plain obnoxious.

 

Thank you, Bioware, for the gesture.

Edited by xordevoreaux
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At last Bioware starting to play fair - how many times over the last ten years have things like this been brushed aside?

 

I was going to be smart and say that the rest of us were also impacted by not having our friends able to log in and we should be rewarded also but I'm genuinely happy that some form of redress has been forthcoming.

 

Credit where credit is due. *thumbs up emoji*

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I appreciate the gesture. There's just one little "but" - my account wasn't affected. I'm a Steam user and I've never logged in via non-Steam launcher. BW might want to investigate how many unaffected accounts got freebies this way.
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I appreciate the gesture. There's just one little "but" - my account wasn't affected. I'm a Steam user and I've never logged in via non-Steam launcher. BW might want to investigate how many unaffected accounts got freebies this way.

 

Even were anyone unaffected to receive the stated recompense, Bioware ripping it back would cause more noise than it's worth.

Edited by xordevoreaux
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I received an email from EA describing a change to my subscription, as well. Since the letter did not mention the subject incident, I assumed something without my authorization was occurring. This has happened to me in the past on other games. This led to some avoidable tickets filed.

 

You might want to be a bit more clear in your emails to customers in the future.

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can eny one tell me if there star wars is working mine not work since the last up date

 

If the game was not working, there'd be a lot of threads and posts about it by now. The game is working just fine. I'm currently playing and haven't seen any issues in the last two days at least.

 

"mine not work" is too generic for anyone to be able to offer any suggestions. Can you go into some detail on what is happening?

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