Is it just me or does it feel like every major MMOG developer is waving their arms in the air and screaming “look at me, look at me” this week? Throw a stone in any direction and you’ll either hit an EverQuest II expansion over here, a RIFT expansion over there or a major content update from the likes of Star Trek Online, The Secret World and even Guild Wars 2 later this week. It’s hard to see a downside to all this new content as a gamer and Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) gets its turn tomorrow as 1.5 and free-to-play arrive to help curb the dwindling playerbase and open up the new Cartel Marketplace.

The 1.5 update adds a new set of repeatable daily missions (because who doesn’t want more of those?) to SWTOR that offer more commendations and credits than previous daily missions, and if you’re still playing and not at level cap, you’ll learn all about those soon enough. This also comes with more gear and mods for further customization options. Section X is also where you’ll be working on obtaining that new HK-51 companion.

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1.5 also brings another useful perk that many probably believe should have been with a certain feature at said feature’s launch -the option to travel back to your location when entering a group finder instance rather than being ushered off to the Fleet station at its conclusion. Handy!

SWTOR's 1.5 update will deploy with November 15th's maintenance starting at 12:00am PT with an expected downtime of twelve hours. At that time, the free-to-play option will go live. You can learn more about the 1.5 update via the PTS patch notes and new developer update (comes with possible spoiler warning).

Source: SWTOR 1.5 Patch Notes, Section X and HK-51 Developer update