After a rocky Update 1.1, BioWare has patched a widespread problem in Star Wars: The Old Republic that allowed players to farm huge amounts of Valor points in the open-world PvP zone Ilum.
When the patch first went live, our very own Andrew Clouther wrote in his initial impressions that the new system would fail due to server imbalance – predicting the faction with more players would crush, camp, and "make the other factions' life hell".
Guess what? That's exactly what happened as players farmed huge amounts of Valor on Ilum by spawn camping the weaker faction and farming turrets. In some cases, people were rumored to get as many as 20 Valor levels in about 4 hours of fully exploiting the glitch. As you can imagine, this caused quite a bit of controversy from the SWTOR player-base.
Game designer Gabe Amatangelo posted on the official forums that BIoWare has found the "issue preventing this from happening under server load" and published a patch to fix it. In addition to fixing the exploit, BioWare reduced the population cap on Ilum to improve performance.
But what about those who took advantage of the exploit? After all, those are the source of many player's frustrations. After putting in weeks of time to gain Valor, these chumps were able to reach max Valor after a few hours of exploiting?
Well, as of right now, there are no plans for a general rollback on Valor points earned since the exploit, but associate community manager Joveth Gonzalez did say, "We’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary."
Many players have vowed to cancel their account until BioWare issues a rollback on Valor, so we'll have to keep an eye on this.
