In the news this week, we cover the introduction of in-game purchasing of Cartel Coins, the details of the Character Name Renewal program, and some revelations about how the Ranked Leaderboards will work.

1. Introduction

2. Tip of the week

Congratulations to this week’s winner, Mike!

Please send your tips to ootinicast@gmail.com by next Wednesday for a chance to win a Tawnfaun code, courtesy of BioWare, and an OotiniCast-provided Cartel Market pack from the latest shipment.

3. Holofeed

The Rising Hero Bundle, mentioned in last week’s show, had to be removed from the Cartel Market. It will return in Game Update 2.4.3 on 12 November.

During a very short maintenance on Tuesday, the in-game purchase of Cartel Coins was made available. You need to enable the feature on the official site, nominating a credit card (not PayPal) to be used. However, you must have purchased Cartel Coins on the site previously using a credit card; if you haven’t done so, you’ll have to buy at least the minimum amount as an initial transaction. Subscribers do get the one-time 50% discount from their first (and only their first) purchase of Cartel Coins, though only one bundle can be chosen (it’s not possible to obtain more than one and get the discount).

The “Character Name Renewal” program will start on 12 November. BioWare has elaborated on exactly which names are at risk, and how to hang onto your characters’ names if you are not subscribed.

The Gree will be back in December! It was announced in Bruce Maclean’s holiday update, but we may have forgotten to mention it.

Some information about the mechanics of PvP Season 1 appeared in the SWTOR Help Center on the official site.

4. Community

BennyKrak of the SnX guild is organising open world PvP mini-events on The Harbinger. For more information, see his post on the official forums.

The Vy’aalators are looking for more raiders! They run on Monday evening (US time), starting at 5:30pm Pacific. If you’re interested, please post in this thread on our forums.

5. Force Feedback

We discuss tweets from @ForceChuckle, @FerrousTerran, @GregCarter78, @TheTurg, @Adam_Schumpert, @AckaanTalgala, @fnord3125 (Brian Peters), @Strongshocker (Chaz Lobo), @AlexDGeslin, @GTeeg (Gaddock Teeg of the Unnamed SWTOR Podcast), @EmpireDivider (Moff Chong) and @nicknightmoves (Andrew Bailey), emails from Kalf, Josh (Oofalong), Green Armadillo, Oxi-jin and Grim, and a comment from The Malgadar.

Josh’s (a.k.a. Oofalong) post on the official forums arguing against the change to Bloodthirst/Inspiration can be found here.

Green Armadillo, author of the Player Versus Developer blog, reviewed the fictional game found in Neal Stephenson’s Reamde: A Novel.

Green Armadillo has also documented his experiences with the Friends of Star Wars: The Old Republic promotion:

Account Status Before Experiment

Preferred Account, last subscription time lapsed in June (I used a 2-month time card to qualify for the discount on RotHC), no authenticator attached, ineligible to add a mobile authenticator due to non-subscriber status. Upon activating referral (more on this in a minute)

Account status upgraded to subscriber, in-game non-subscriber restrictions lifted, account page shows seven days game time. Account eligible to add a mobile authenticator. All characters on my account – yes including a newly created one – now receive a bundle containing four unlocks which are bound to character and vendor for 0 credits. These are a crew skill slot unlock (preferred have two normally), title display unlock, unify colors unlock, and an inventory unlock (I have 60 base from account-wide unlocks, so my new level 1 immediately got the 100K credit bump to 70 slots with this item). Upon subscribing

Game time from the subscription added onto the free time (i.e. I did not forfeit the free time for entering payment info early, which happens in some other MMO’s). Immediately received both a monthly stipend and the 100 CC supplement for having a mobile authenticator – not sure if this works the other way around, so I recommend you do what I did and add the mobile authenticator if you intend to use one between activating your invite and re-subscribing. I am not yet ready to use the free character transfer that is supposedly included (want to finish a current character first before copying my legacy), but I got all the way to the “start transfer” button without any indication of what, if anything, I would be charged. Technical issues

I received the referral in an email and clicked on it in Firefox, only to be taken to a “site down for maintenance” page on SWTOR.com when SWTOR.com was clearly up. Next I pasted the link into Internet Explorer, and was taken to a generic signup page for completely new players. I clicked on the “already have an account” button and logged in, but nothing unusual happened here. THEN I pasted the referral link into the IE browser bar with the login session to SWTOR.com still active and was sent to the referral page, which had a one-time banner at the top of the screen saying that I had been successfully referred by my friend.

Oxi-jin recommends Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One: A Novel .

6. Outro

Thanks to Oni (@Freakin_Ninja) and Redna (@R3DN4) for joining us this week.

Information about our guilds on The Harbinger, Ootini Knights (Republic) and Ootini Rage (Empire), can be found here.

You can email questions and comments about the show to ootinicast@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter via @OotiniCast. Check out our website, ootinicast.com, which has links to our presence on Google+ and Facebook. We are a proud member of the TOR Syndicate! You can subscribe to us on iTunes and Zune, and listen to us on Stitcher and Radio4Gamers.