Most unfortunately for me, I was in meetings at work all day while  the SWTOR Guild Summit was in progress, without even time to check the twitter feed, except at lunch, to see what nuggets of information about the next big content patch were shared. But thanks to the many attendees who liveblogged from the event itself or while watching the livestream, I was able to get caught up pretty quickly.

First and foremost, I’m excited that today’s maintenance brings with it our next patch, which brings with it, those super top secret and awesome color crystals we heard about last week. I KNEW hoarding all those credits would eventually come in handy…other mentions of note:

• Friends of Star Wars Free Trial
  Starting today, and only for a few weeks it looks like, SWTOR players can invite three (3) of their friends to take part in a 7-day trial of the game. During this trial period, invited players can explore each of the four Origin Worlds.
• Server Group Finder Coming in Patch 1.3
  This is one of those much debated issues, and I’m glad with where they landed on this. The group finder feature will be introduced in the 1.3 game update, and will be limited to your server.  This makes me incredibly happy. Yes, expanding a group finder to a larger server pool would mean potentially shorter queue times, but having played WoW with both server-only and wider population looking for group tools, I can emphatically say I preferred the ability to get to know folks on my own server (and the inherent accountability for behavior) that went along with the server-only looking for group.
• Ability to kick AFKers from Warzones
  That’s right, a Vote to kick system will be added in patch 1.2, allowing folks to kick out inactive players (you know, those people who stand in the corner for Huttball.) Will be interesting to see what they come up with to prevent abuse of kicking people who aren’t actually inactive (kick able to be cancelled by moving character?)
• Ability to do 8-man Warzone premades, with groups able to persist between matches
•  Lots of Legacy Unlocks!
  • Level to 50 with a species and you unlock all class variations of that species across both factions (i.e. yes, you can play a Sith Pureblood Bounty Hunter.)
  • Completing Chapters in your class story unlocking abilities across your characters. Example of unlocking Force Choke on all your characters after completing Chapter 3 on your Sith Warrior.
  • Social ranks will unlock some abilities too, such as ability to dance with your companion or new emotes
  • Jetpacks for Bounty Hunter, other classes receive rocket boots for a short duration sprint type ability.
  • Sprint moved to level 1. I am buying this for every alt. EVERY alt!
  • Mailboxes and the Galactic Trade Network on ships, so you need never return to the fleet again.
  • When character transfers come, the higher of the two legacies will take priorities, which means you won’t lose out on your high level legacy by transferring to a new server.
  • Ship droids will sell a voice restraining-bolt for certain mouthy ship droids.
  •  All these unlocks and rewards are retroactive, i.e. when the patch hits, your existing characters will automatically have access to all of this. you won’t miss out by having already leveled to 50.
• Guild Banks coming in 1.2, with up to seven tabs available. Future patches to include a Guild calendar and some sort of “guild advertising” to help guilds recruit new members.
• More vanity pets confirmed for 1.2, but we already knew that, didn’t we? 🙂

For full coverage of the event, head over to Darth Hater.