Monthly Archives: February 2012

Coming Soon! New SWTOR Features from Mr. Robot

Posted on by
1

We have a few features in development over here at Team Robot. We’re also keeping track of features people are requesting, so be sure to tell us what you want to see!


Currently in development  

  • Signatures! That’s right, you’ll be able to generate a signature that links right back to your character’s profile.
  • API for developers: why reinvent the wheel? If Mr. Robot has it, he wants to share it! From item tooltips and information to loading entire characters from his database. If you’re interested, please contact vee <at) askmrrobot *dot* com. Or leave us a comment.
  • Item pages: in the very near future, you’ll be able to look up more information on individual item pages, or search the entire item database.
  • Item comparison tooltips: this feature will compare an item from the item list to the one you have equipped (very similar to what you see in game).
  • Random items: there are a ton of random items in the game, and we’re working on a way to sort them all out, coming very, very soon!
  • More item information: You’ll notice a lot of items have no drop location listed. That’s because Mr. Robot’s goal is to only show you information that is correct. If he isn’t sure of the answer, he doesn’t want to show anything. Very soon, we’ll have a way for you to submit item drop location, and when enough people enter the same thing, we’ll consider it verified. So keep an eye out for that.

On the drawing board  

  • A few mobile apps meant to be used while you’re gaming, from datacrons to companion gifts. Tell us what YOU’D like to see in a mobile app!
  • Companion goodies: a gift optimizer, companion affection optimizer (calculates affection gained at each affection level and gift rank), and more… these are all on the drawing board!
  • Gear optimization: in traditional Mr. Robot fashion, he wants to help you optimize your gear by suggesting the best gear, mods, enhancements, armoring. As theorycrafting develops even more, we’ll be able to build this out.

User requested  

  • Stims: add stims to the buff list (user request)
  • Matrix Cubes (Relics): Add “Matrix Shard” as a source, to find all relics that can be make from the Matrix Shards.

BETA TRACKER: SWTOR Character Builder

Posted on by
4

We are updating the site at least once a day to make sure we fix bugs promptly! The following bugs have been reported:

  • Stats are not matching up in-game, this is due to a bug with the orange items – when you replace the default mods and click ‘save’ – the default mod stats get saved, not the stats from the mods you put in. ETA – 3/17 evening
  • 5% crit buff from Coordination isn’t showing up in the stats properly
  • Stances and buffs don’t save to profiles (feature request)
  • Some [random] items are listed twice in the gear list - fixed 3/7
  • Searching for mods on your companions is bugged for some companions, the list returns mods with the wrong stats. fiixed 3/12
  • Ensign Temple (a companion)’s original blaster pistol doesn’t show up in the OH list, when it should. fixed 3/12
  • When removing a mod, it still hows up in the tooltip for the main item. fixed- 3/12
  • Clicking on a higher level version of a crafted item doesn’t equip it, it only equips the basic item. To work around that, you can search for the item by name, for example, “Overkill” or “Redoubt.” The item should then show up on it’s own line in the list and you can equip that. (we’ll fix the bug today and put it in our next update) Fixed Mar 2
  • There is a strength multiplier somewhere in the code, that is making the total STR 2-3 times higher than it should be. - fixed 2/29
  • Checking ‘all datacrons’ selects republic and empire ones, listing 94 / 67 - Fixed 2/29
  • Unpublishing a character from the Armory currently doesn’t work. Fixed 2/29
  • Some of the MH / OH weapon type filters aren’t including the right items. For example, shields don’t show up for Assassin / Shadows in the OH list. Fixed Mar 2
  •  What else – leave a comment, hit us up on the forums (or pm zoopercat on the forums)

Top 10 SWTOR Resources

Posted on by
5
  1. Best companion customization info (Dulfy.net) – Includes pictures and vendor location info
  2. Best companion gift guide (Force Tremor) – we like the nice, clean charts, and the gift-rank points at the bottom
  3. Best PVP guides (Taugrim.com) – including fantastic instructional videos
  4. Best guide to make sense of the PVP Gear system (MMOverflow)
  5. Best PVP medals list (Reddit.com/r/swtor) – the /r/swtor subreddit is just entertaining in general, with a lot of great links popping up
  6. Best place for theorycrafting (SithWarrior.com)
  7. Best guild platform (Enjin)
  8. Best columnist – Laura Shot Third (Force Junkies)
  9. Best datacron list (swtor-spy) – includes lots of pictures and videos, and organized guides (force tremor)
  10. Best server analysis (Dulfy.com) – is your server imbalanced?

Best Podcast: There are so many good ones, and the jury is still deciding. Who’s YOUR favorite?

Quick-Start Guide: Mr. Robot’s SWTOR Tools

Posted on by
1

Welcome to Mr. Robot’s Quick-Start Guide. This is a neutral zone, so please leave your lightsabers and blaster pistols with the Jawa attendant at the door (who may or may not tinker with them, which may or may not result in an upgrade or an explosion).


RoboVision  

Mr. Robot’s goal is the make games more fun for humans by providing easy-to-use web tools. To get started, he needs a representation of your in-game character, out of game. Once that’s established, the real fun can begin… tailoring gear options to your character, looking up your friends’ characters, and eventually, optimizing your gear.

Build Your First Character  

  1. Create an account (look for the orange register button at the top of the site). If you don’t formally introduce yourself to Mr. Robot, he won’t be able to remember what characters belong to you. Once you register, his memory chip activates and he can save all of your characters and settings to your account.
  2. Click the “New” Icon in the menu strip and follow the wizard. On the last screen, Mr. Robot will ask if you want to publish the character to the Armory. This will allow other people to search for your character, and it’s recommended to only publish one profile per character (the main one you want people to see). You can change all of your character’s information at any time, including adding or removing it from the armory, by clicking the edit button next to your character’s name.
  3. Equip your gear! Click the “Gear Editor” tab, then select a slot to add some gear. Mr. Robot automatically filters the list to items relevant to your class and stats. But feel free to filter the list even further or search for items by name right from the item list. Be sure to check out Mr. Robot’s favorite filter, “Match Profile” under the “Usable By” section – he will automatically filter out items that you can’t equip. For example, if you’re a Biochemist, he won’t suggest BoP synthweaving items, and he won’t suggest gear that has a Dark III rank or higher, if you’re only Dark I.
  4. Save your profile! Click the save button in the menu strip. If you want to make a copy and not save over an old profile, click “Save As.”
  5. Fill in the extras: skills, datacrons, and companions.
    1. Set up your skill tree by clicking the “Skills” icon in the menu strip. You know how to do the rest.
    2. Did you get any datacrons yet? If so, be sure to select them from the “Datacron” icon in the menu strip. This will make sure your in-game stats match the ones Mr. Robot has on file for you. You can find a list of the datacrons you’ve acquired under the codex tab in the missions menu in-game.
    3. Set up your companion’s gear if you’d like! It’s pretty handy for leveling, actually. When your companion can’t be summoned (while you’re in a flashpoint or he/she is running a mission for you) just ask Mr. Robot what your companion is wearing to see if something is an upgrade.

Search the Armory  

Looking for a special someone? Just search for any character name, if they are in the Armory, Mr. Robot will find them. You can also search by guild and see who’s listed and what they are wearing. Try searching for your own guild – if you’re the only one listed, tell your friends to get with the program!

Mr. Robot is working with a few other tool developers so they can import characters from Mr. Robot’s armory, and possibly even entire guilds too!

Check Back For New Features

Mr. Robot and his minions are hard at work creating new features. For example, very soon, he will be releasing signatures soon so your can show off your characters.

Tell Mr. Robot what you’d like to see next, and get notified as features launch.
on Twitter

 

Take it for a Spin! Mr. Robot’s SWTOR Beta

Posted on by
Reply

Mr. Robot posted a huge update to the beta site. Take it for a spin before he launches it within the next 24 hours.

Things you should know:

  • Logging in: Anything that you save on the beta will NOT transfer to the site when it goes live. Also, if you’re logged in on the live WoW site, the beta might say you are logged in, but you aren’t. To fix that, logout on the beta, then register a (fake) account.
  • If you see something wrong, tell us! The items should all be right, your stats should match in-game, etc. This is very, very close to the version we want to launch with. So if there are errors, Mr. Robot wants to know!
  • New feature: If you played on alpha 2.0, you’ll see an entirely new feature: the Armory. That’s right, Mr. Robot now lets you search for other players in his database. Of course, it will be empty on the beta unless you make a character and search for it ;)

http://beta.askmrrobot.com

Tell us: What will be your main use of the SWTOR site?

SWTOR Alpha Feedback, Round 1!

Posted on by
3

We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback and plan to make a bunch of changes before the site launches. There are also a few things we have yet to implement, as well as some cool features on the drawing board. Mr. Robot wanted to share it with everyone on the internetz, so here it goes!

Feedback: Mr. Robot is flattered by all of the positive comments and excitement! It’s good to know that so many people think the tool is awesome and can’t wait to use it in production.

  • Filters: 50% of the guinea pigs didn’t know there was a option to filter the gear and mod lists. We’ll update the UI to make it more obvious.
  • Companions: Filling out companion gear is daunting. We’re working on some options where we define a starter set of gear for companions. This won’t be available on launch.
  • Design: All of the humans seem to like the design and layout, yay!
  • Paging: Paging on the gear lists should be added to the bottom of the screens (not just the top)! Thanks, our developer already wrote the code to do that :)
  • Stats: The stats aren’t showing up the same as in-game. If you make sure you aren’t in a special class stance, they should match up. If they don’t match up, there is a bug. Thanks for Ecmel for troubleshooting with us to uncover a bug that doesn’t add the right armor from mods to the stats. Thanks to the guys at sithwarrior for giving us an updated surge formula!
  • Datacrons: The alpha-males want to add datacrons to up their stats (see the play on words? Mr. Robot thought that one up). We’ve added datacrons already, as well as buffs (those changes aren’t public yet, but will be on launch).
  • Mod Preferences: A couple people wanted a way to have Mr. Robot remember their preferred gear / mod types, for example, ‘always pick resolve ____ for me.” We plan to add that in soon as well!
  • Copy Gear: Someone asked if we can let you copy gear from the ‘My Gear’ tab to the ‘Wish List’ tab. We sure can!! We’ll work something out for that.
  • Signatures: Dulfy (one of our favorite bloggers and guide writers) asked for Signatures that link back to you character on Mr. Robot. Already on it like a bonnet! It’s specced out and waiting for Mr. Robot to code it up.

You still have some time to check out the beta and provide feedback. Just leave a comment! Tell us how YOU will be using Mr. Robot’s SWTOR tool.

Beta URL: http://beta.askmrrobot.com/tools/gear

  • Do not try to login or navigate anywhere else (it isn’t hooked up yet)
  • Mr. Robot will remember all information for the most recent character you setup, per browser. So if you make a second character, he’ll forget the first. Once we hookup the login feature, his memory chips will activate.
  • The item drop information is not complete, so don’t worry about that. But item categories, stats, etc, should all be complete.
  • Stats likely won’t match in-game, as we haven’t published the code yet to account for stances, buffs, etc.

 

SWTOR Alpha 2.0 is Here!

Posted on by
1

We’ve had a lot of people asking to check out the site, but up until now it’s been a very private alpha. Now we’re opening it up to our fans who know where to find us (Twitter, FB, and our Blog!)

There is one big rule!

  • If you are a member of the media (blogs / podcasts / Conan O’Brian), DO NOT post any reviews until the site launches (which will be sometime between Feb 25 and March 1). We don’t want people getting all excited and then not being able to find our site.

A few tips:

  • Do not try to log in or make an account, it isn’t hooked up.
  • Do not try to navigate around the site, that also isn’t hooked up.
  • We cache all of the data for your most recent character in the browser, so all of the work you do will be saved, for ONE character (per browser). If you make a second, it will wipe out the first. (Accounts will fix this, of course)
  • Item drop location isn’t finished yet, sorry about that!
  • The site may take a while to load the first time (we have it on a small server until we go live). It should load with a character builder wizard, if it doesn’t, hit refresh (because clicking on the ‘gear’ link isn’t hooked up yet)!

What did you think? Share your feedback, good and bad. What do you think you’ll use the tool for? What took you a while to figure out (what did you overlook)? What is your favorite feature that you don’t want us to change? Was anything confusing?

  • Leave a comment so we can get a dialog going with everyone!
  • Add veronica.tegen to Skype (mention SWTOR in the invite to connect) if you want to join us at 8pm PST Monday night, 2/20 at 8pm PST. We’ll be doing a big call to gather feedback.

Here’s the URL: http://beta.askmrrobot.com/tools/gear

  • If you leave the /tools/gear off the end, you’ll go to the SWTOR home page. Since the navigation isn’t hooked up, you won’t be able to do anything.

 

Every War Needs an Armory

Posted on by
5

*This tool is not yet released, this is a preview of what’s to come in a couple more weeks!*

SWTOR is fun, really fun! But it would be even better if I could show off my badass gear to my friends, amrite? We all got spoiled by World of Warcraft’s maturity… with our fully functional armory api, mods, simulators and amazing community. But SWTOR is a new game that has to be built upon; we don’t get an armory, we don’t have our fancy Deady-Boss-Mods, and the game is too young to have a reliable simulator.

Mr. Robot has adjusted his approach to SWTOR, since it’s a new game. Many of you will be expecting a gear optimizer, but he won’t have that for a while. Instead, his first SWTOR tool will act as an armory until the War Masters over at Bioware have time to release one (who have their hands full making more fun content that drops more badass gear). Phase 2 will build on the gear optimizer, of course!

Phase 1: Mr. Robot’s Character Builder

Many of you know Mr. Robot from WoW, for his gear optimization magic. But he can’t optimize gear if he doesn’t know what you’re wearing! Enter: Mr. Robot’s Character Builder, a tool that lets you recreate your character including:

  • Character name, guild, and server
  • Gear for you and your companions, and a separate wish-list tab
  • Skill tree
  • Crew skills
  • All the extras, like your Dark, Social and PVP levels

Here are some screenshots of our character walkthrough – the process you’ll go through when building a brand-new character.Mr. Robot also wants to help you discover cool items, so the second major goal of the Character Builder is to provide quality and accurate item data. Mr. Robot intends to have the most accurate item information, so we’ve spent weeks in-game looking up item lists from vendors, mapping random prefixes to sets of stats, and verifying end-game drops. He’s also built out some filters you won’t find on other sites, like browsing items by flashpoint/operation or special handling of crafted items.

Crafted items are tricky, since a lot of green items can turn into even more items. This can ‘junk’ up an item list, interrupting all of the fun you wanted to have perusing items. So we’ve condensed the crafting lists by grouping the related items.   Below is the expanded view of a green crafted item, showing you what other items are discovered from RE’ing it. You can select any of those items to equip on your character.There’s also my favorite filter… the “Match Profile” button, which will remove items you can’t equip because the dark level is too high, for example.

Make an account!

Our WoW tool doesn’t require an account for most of the functionality – you can import any character from the armory at any time. But since there is no official armory for SWTOR you will want to save all of your hard work! Be sure to make an account and save your profiles! Mr. Robot doesn’t want anyone throwing their gaming rigs out the window in frustration of losing the hard work, so he’ll remember the latest thing you did (tied to your browser), but that’s about it.

Phase 1.1: Sharing ‘The Armory’ with 3rd party tools

Mr. Robot plans to develop an API for other tools to import your character data. No reason for everyone to enter their gear multiple times into every cool tool on the internetz! And eventually, Bioware will have an official armory, which we’ll LOVE because users won’t have to manually pick all of their gear anymore. When that happens, 3rd party tools will be able to import our BiS lists and whatever else we have to offer, as well as the character information if they don’t use the Bioware armory directly.

If you’re making a tool that would benefit from our API, let us know! We want to chat with a few of you to find out the best method of getting you the data you want. Leave a comment or email vee (at;} askmrrobot (d0t] com.

 

Mr. Robot’s Tour d’Love

Posted on by
Reply

Will you be mine? Mr. Robot invites all SWTOR bloggers and podcasters to his Press Tour d’Love from Feb 20 – 24. RSVP to secure your interview spot and ask him anything you want!

Mr. Robot just wants to be loved. Many of you know he tried out for a spot in Transformers, and that he wanted to be the lead in Wall-E because he had a crush on the lead actress, Eve… and he wanted to be one of the main Droids in the SWTOR game, but they didn’t pick him… they said he wasn’t evil enough.

So he’s returning to what he knows best, optimizing games for humans. He’s about to launch his SWTOR tool and wants YOU to write about it. It’s his version of being on late night talk shows or on the cover of Rolling Stone. So what do you say, will you join the Tour d’Love?

When: Interviews will be scheduled between February 20 to February 24. The articles and podcasts cannot go live until our site launches, toward the end of February.

RSVP: Fill out the form below

Have Fun: Mr. Robot really wants his personality to shine through these interviews. If you have a fun angle you’d like to take, let us know when you fill out the form.

XOXO: Mr. Robot also has a few surprises in store for everyone who joins his press tour, as well as his favorite blog and favorite podcast interview. Don’t worry about kissing his @$$, he’s just looking to see his robot personality come through… he wants this to be FUN! Think Conan O’Brien, not CNN.

PS: The image in this post is from a great photographer, and you can buy his cards and calendars here.

  • Are you a Blogger or Podcaster? *

Mr. Robot Loves Being RIGHT!

Posted on by
14

Who doesn’t love being right, honestly?! Mr. Robot takes a lot of pride in his work and he knows that providing tools with data errors will confuse his human friends. Or worse, it might frustrate them enough to cause a revolt, and Mr. Robot really doesn’t want to DIAF!

Mr. Robot has gotten a lot of love mail begging to release the tool asap. He apologizes for launching slower than expected, but it’s because he had to get the item data himself (and the help of a few trustworthy humans). The current databases have a lot of wrong information, missing items and things are just categorized wrong: some items show up as craftable when they aren’t, others supposedly drop form 1,000 different vendors… ORLY??

We originally intended to rely on these databases like we did for WoW, but since the data is not up to Mr. Robot’s standards, he has spent hours and hours (more like days and days) in game going from vendor to vendor to gather item location information. He’s been verifying which items have removable enhancements, and which ones don’t. He’s cracked the code on craftable items. He’s still working out some theories on random items. And he got a LOT of help from Dulfy on Flahspoint and Operation items.

All of this work, btw, has slowed his leveling. Poor Mr. Robot is only level 35… sure he could hack in and make himself 50, but the class quests are SO MUCH FUN!

Anyway, Mr. Robot will have another version of the alpha coming out soon. He’d like some help from detail-oriented and trustworthy humans to verify his item information. If you’re up for the gig, leave a comment, and let us know your class, level, faction, and if you do a lot of PVE or PVP content.