Update 1.1: Rise of the Rakghouls hit Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) live servers today and brought a mess of bugs with it. The main offender of the update appears to be an Ilum exploit that allows players to farm Valor in huge amounts. A thread on the official forums now setting at more than 258 pages is filled with comments from angry players about the issue ranging from exploits to long periods of spawn camping, which one player alleges lasted more than 40 minutes and posted a YouTube video of the occurrence.

BioWare will have a forthcoming response to the update soon. In this case the sooner the better. Since I wrote that first paragraph, the page count has jumped from 258 to 270.

Source: SWTOR Forums

Update: SWTOR Principal Lead PvP, Flashpoints and Operations Designer Gabe Amatangelo has posted an official response to the Ilum PvP issue. Read it below the video after the break.

Update 2: Associate Online Community Manager Joveth Gonzalez posted the following in response to community concerns about the farmed Valor from today's issues.

Hi everyone,



I just wanted to be clear and let you all know that we’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary.

There may be a little issue with spawn camping on Ilum at the moment.

Hello everyone; I wanted to update you on the issues we’ve been seeing today on the live servers, specifically within the Open World PvP area on Ilum. We’re aware that on some servers, either Republic or Empire groups have been capturing the Ilum control points, entering the enemy’s base and ‘camping’ the medcenters, preventing the opposite faction from leaving their base to recapture control points. This is not a fair or balanced gameplay experience and can also severely affect client performance, so we’re taking steps to address this.

Our intended design for Ilum Open World PvP is that players are instantly killed when entering the enemy’s base safe area, just like in Warzones, and that the defending faction can take taxis to other points within the zone. As of Game Update 1.1, this is not working as intended. We have found the issue preventing this from happening under server load and will be publishing an Emergency Patch to address the issue. We’re aiming to have this patch published early tomorrow morning (January 19th, 5 AM US CST).

In addition to these changes, we’ll be reducing the population cap on Ilum. This should help increase performance by requiring your client to render fewer characters on-screen at once.

Regarding Valor gains, with the 1.1 update, players now receive a base reward of 20 Valor per unique enemy player defeated in a short time, and this base reward is modified by the number of objectives that the player’s faction owns. The gains are rate limited per player killed, encouraging players to attack unique players, not to pursue vendettas. The Valor gains players can see over time will vary greatly depending on the activity level in the zone. This is expected.

To dispel a couple of rumors that have been seen today – there is no Valor gain from destroying turrets within enemy bases, and none from killing NPCs.

We encourage players to avoid Ilum until our patch is deployed. As a temporary measure we will be disabling taxi services which would normally take players into the Open World PvP area. However, players will still be able to taxi out of the area.

We will continue to monitor Ilum across all servers and will make further changes to gameplay if required. We welcome your feedback here on the Forums, but please ensure your feedback is constructive and specific. Feedback based on rumor does not help us isolate potential issues.

Gabe Amatangelo

Principal Lead PvP, Flashpoints and Operations Designer