Ok I am going to be slightly angry if I missed out on something here.

I just got an email from Bioware stating this:

Now that you've had a chance to experience your own Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ saga, make sure you don't miss out when the game launches. Pre-order* for Early Game Access and lock in your copy today.

I have already pre-ordered and have listed it under my subscription. Did I miss out on some beta invite???

I just got the same email and I've also preordered. I'm not sure what's going on. I would guess that somebody screwed something up.

I probably shouldn't say this (NDA garbage...), but I also got a second email asking me to fill out a short survey (with a broken link - I can't even get to the survey) about my testing experience and an invitation to discuss my thoughts with other testers on the forum. However, as a former weekend tester, I've never actually had access to the beta forums (we had our own).

One thing, you might want to check swtor.com/tester just to make sure you haven't been invited. They did invite a whole bunch of new people over the last 48 hours.

I got the same two emails, but never got one about being picked for beta. My guess is someone or something sent out the emails in error.

Yeah, it looks like somebody made a big mistake, and sent the emails out to everyone, instead of just the beta testers.

d'oh

Okay, now it looks like it didn't go to everybody, just to a lot of people.

I would say relax for now and see what they have to say about it tomorrow. My personal theory (since I'm exempt from closed beta now thanks to my first weekend) - and this is completely unsubstantiated in any way.... - is that the people that received the email tonight may be the next test weekend group (since I am going to get one of those). Stephen Reid did tweet earlier than they would have some kind of statement to make about testing tomorrow, so maybe it's beta weekends starting up again in a week, and somehow mail was sent out of order.

But it's probably something else completely. That's just me throwing shit at the wall.

The funny thing is that my first thought when I was reading the emails (and realized that there was no invitation) was to come here to see if anyone else had gotten them by mistake. Sure enough, Barret had already posted :)

her is something off the forums. I don't know the truth of it but don't click on anything in the email.

Might want to not click anything on those emails, this is a tweet that Stephen Reid responded to (I haven't looked into it myself):


@Rockjaw The code td valign="top" width="650"><img src="http-bp-specificclick-net?pixid=99062343" alt= inside the mail
5 minutes ago
James
JArnoldOK James
@Rockjaw Steve, that email contains an encoded malware link to. its bp-specificclick-net hijack virus.
8 minutes ago

Yeah, I saw that about an hour ago (when the malware stuff first showed up). I don't think it's phishing. The sender information is b.email.swtor.com which is the same as every other Old Republic Community e-mail that's gone out. It wouldn't have made it to my inbox if it wasn't a legitimate address, in fact, although that was the first thing I checked anyway (yes, I'm that paranoid). Beyond that, if you take the email external it's an ea.com root address.

I've also run a complete scan of my system since I got them, just to be safe, with both spybot and malwarebytes and they both came back clean.

So I could be wrong, anything's certainly possible these days, but they appear to be official emails.

(I also suspect that if they weren't, they'd have said immediately that they weren't).

We'll find out one way or another tomorrow.

From Allison Berryman

Earlier today, two e-mails were sent to members of the Star Wars: The Old Republic community. These e-mails were sent to a larger group than intended, and have caused some confusion in the community. We can confirm that these e-mails were from EA and BioWare and apologize for any confusion they have caused. Please note that receiving these e-mails does not affect your chances to be invited to test the game. Thank you all for your understanding!

Galaxy map added to the holonet. Make sure you install the 3d software.

http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/galaxy-map

So are planets basically like the "zones" in other MMOs? Or does each planet have multiple zones? (This may be explained in the holonet link, but I can't access it from here).

And did you get to try the space flight, keg? (feel free to just say "NDA", if you can't discuss it)

I think planets have multiple zones, but I could be wrong. From what I understand, the game world is absolutely massive.

Each planet has multiple zones but there's no loading, so it's seamless. Basically the starter worlds are fairly small and then they get progressively larger. I made it to the third planet on each side (this is level 16ish) and they were freaking huge in comparison to the starter planets. I haven't played WoW in years, but going on my distant memory of the Vanilla game I would say Taris and Balmorra would compare to the larger WoW zones from the vanilla days. The planets after that supposedly get steadily larger, but I was not high enough level to explore them (you can go there in your ship, but if you get attacked while you're running around you're toast).

I did play the space combat mini game and I actually liked it, to my surprise. I didn't think I would, but I ended up running several missions on both my toons. It was hard. Like...brutally hard. I hear it's been nerfed into oblivion with the latest build, and now it's ridiculously easy, but my guess is they'll swing that pendulum back to a middle ground.

As for what it is, it's exactly what it was billed to be. It's space combat on rails. I ended up enjoying it a lot considering the limitations, but there was still a lot of "it's not open space combat like SWG" crying on the beta weekend forum. I would say give it a shot, and keep an open mind about it. And it looks amazing, artistically-speaking. It's very cinematic and feels star-warsy (as you can see in the few vids they've released, or if you've happened to catch any leaked videos).