Patch 4.1 - Over Nine Thousand!

At last, yesterday it was patch day again, almost four months after KotFE's early access. Remember when we were never supposed to go for more than eight weeks without a major patch? Those were the days.

I had read that 4.1 was going to be enormous and that it was advisable to "pre-download" the patch. As I didn't know how to do so, I googled it and found this nifty tool on TORCommunity. I fired it up for about an hour on Tuesday morning and it worked great! When I came home in the evening and opened up the launcher, it went straight to installing everything.

For once, I was ready to play right away on patch day! Which of course meant that the servers went down. Apparently they were up for a whopping four minutes before Bioware had to announce that they had found a problem and no ETA for how quickly they could fix it. /rage

Upon raising the servers online, we discovered a potential issue. We are putting the servers back into maintenance mode for the time being.

— The Old Republic (@SWTOR) February 9, 2016

I stayed up for a couple of hours, hoping that the servers would come back up, while Musco practised damage control on the forums by giving people free Cartel Coins for guessing what colour shirts people were wearing in the office, but eventually I grew too tired and went to bed.

Fortunately I had a bit of extra time today to catch up. I won't comment on the new story chapter yet because I want to avoid spoilers for now and I'll eventually get to cover it in my "KotFE Chapter by Chapter" series anyway, except to say that some of the mobs behaved in a really strange manner, seemingly teleporting around or running over to attack me from three rooms away. There was also a majorly scripted encounter which I apparently managed to finish before the script had run out, so the following cut scene took place with sky troopers standing everywhere and things blowing up all around us while we were having a perfectly calm conversation. But hey, that's what "early access" is for, right? Bug testing?

I think that despite the new story chapter, the biggest thing this patch really brought to the game was a small but meaningful quality of life change: Item stacking now goes up to 9,999 instead of 99. So many more crafting mats in my legacy bank! Of course I'll have to relog all my alts and upgrade their crew skills and sort their inventories... but that seems like a small price to pay in the long run.

My favourite 4.1 patch note was this one:

Players can no longer toggle off the “Dusted with Snowflakes” buff that is received when hit with a Snowball. 

Mostly because we have one guy in our guild who's professed to hate the snowflakes and always clicks them off instantly whenever someone snowballs him. He's going to go nuts.