Onslaught Expansion to Launch on October 22nd

Last Monday, when nothing much of interest was happening in the MMO world, Bioware decided to finally give us an actual release date for Onslaught: October 22nd. This went against their initial announcement of 6.0 coming out in September, but I for one was relieved about the delay, not chagrined. Anyone who's been on the PTS could tell that the new systems were not ready yet, and who would benefit from a much-anticipated expansion launching as a broken mess just to meet a self-imposed deadline? Nobody, that's who.

Still, to make sure that nobody who'd subscribed early specifically in anticipation of a September launch would feel tricked or disappointed, they changed it so that Nautolans won't count as an expansion feature but as a subscriber reward for which you become eligible from September. So if your sub runs out in September, you could technically let it lapse, "earn" Nautolans that way and then claim them and/or check out the new content later.

Personally I've been on the six-month recurring sub for years anyway, so a delay makes no real difference for me on that front, but to be totally honest another reason I don't mind is that I, too, have been swept up in WoW Classic fever, and am therefore quite happy to have another month to get that out of my system before it's time to get excited about facing Darth Malgus again.

Even if you're not playing anything else though, there is no lack of things to do until October. Most importantly, Bioware can still use our help on the PTS! Phase two of PTS testing has officially started, which means that you can now earn titles for your live account by participating in group content on the PTS. The linked article gives more information about what to do and look out for if you are interested in helping out and earning those limited time rewards.

The first big ticket item to deserve attention is the new gear acquisition system, and unfortunately people's first impressions aren't very good. I think I even saw some comments along the lines of "Galactic Command 2.0" flying around... yikes!

However, even if the way things stand right now isn't good (purely based on other people's observations), I think it's important to remember that there's one very important difference compared to Galactic Command: the latter was dropped on us as a fait accompli, with player criticism and concerns being largely dismissed with assurances that we were sure to love the system if only we gave it a chance - only when people actually started to leave the game over it did Bioware rapidly start to backpedal and then spent the next few months fixing things up.

This time it's all on the PTS, with clear and explicit intent to make it as fun as possible for us and to give feedback on how to make it better. Hopefully if enough people get in there and make their voices heard, there is still time to mould the Spoils of War system into something that we'll all enjoy.