Rumor: Imminent closed beta announcement for Star Wars: The Old Republic?
by Seraphina Brennan 
Sep 28th 2009 at 5:00PM
Filed under: Betas, Sci-fi, Culture, MMO industry, News items, Rumors, Star Wars: The Old Republic
While the news announcement has been removed from the website, some screenshot happy community members have snapped pictures of their RSS feeds, which still show the call for testers. This has, of course, sent the community into an uproar of anticipation for the
Update: The intended date of the closed beta signups is today! We have all of the details over in this post!
Now, the call for testers does not usually indicate anything other than, well, a call for testers. Closed betas usually call for prospective testers early on and take a few months before they begin. The testing process itself is also quite lengthy, meaning that SWTOR still won't be showing up until some time next year at the earliest.
Other community members are also of the opinion that this may be a complete hoax with phony screenshots, but many different members are independently confirming that they have record of the story in their RSS feeds. Still, it's all very exciting news and who knows, maybe we'll be seeing that news story appear very soon in our RSS readers for real!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
WoWplayer said on 5:39PM 9-28-2009
I hope that i can get into this if its real. I'd dedicate just about all my free time! Now if only the actual game would come out sooner then sometime next year or the following.
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7R4UMA said on 3:03PM 9-29-2009
Probably noteworthy that there are people, including myself, that not only have seen the title on RSS, but have seen the whole article on www.swtor.com itself.
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Machineman said on 7:19PM 9-28-2009
Can you remember any details from the article?
Sean said on 7:16PM 9-28-2009
To note, as the article does, call for testers != imminent start of beta. Proof? Starcraft 2.
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derella said on 7:41PM 9-28-2009
If there is one beta I would trade a family member for... it would be SWTOR.
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RogueJedi86 said on 7:42PM 9-28-2009
Betas can last awhile, but at least we're further along on TOR than we thought. I hadn't even heard of an alpha, and already we're coming up on the Closed Beta. But I guess when they said TOR is playable by the devs at home from a server at work, that counts as an alpha. At any rate, yay beta! Even if the Closed Beta will likely be NDAd to hell so we get no info, still yay!
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Noz said on 8:19PM 9-28-2009
This doesn't have to mean anything. E.g. Earthrise beta sign-ups started in January.
http://www.massively.com/2009/01/05/earthrise-beta-signups-begin/
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Mike W said on 9:07PM 9-28-2009
http://www.remnantgaming.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2624
we caught it haha
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draakull said on 9:18PM 9-28-2009
swg is going to shut down in december or sometime shortly after that. this would make sense if they started beta then.
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Arrow-Pop said on 11:44PM 9-28-2009
@draakull
where did you read that? I had read they were consolidating servers, but never heard they were shutting down the game. It would have serious trouble competing w/ TOR unless they reverted back to how it was before all the major changes. But i don't think sony would ever do that because of ego & pride.
LaughingTarget said on 10:36AM 9-29-2009
They are from competing companies, it won't get shut down.
And, no, going back won't save SWG. It was losing subscribers because the original was so abysmal. The game is still a mess on a basic programming level let alone gameplay mechanics. I'm surprised it STILL doesn't have functional animations after 5 years of waiting for patches (trial from last week, unless functioning animations are subscriber only). SWG is a tainted property at this point. An old, niche, and mostly irrelevant MMO won't ever get a mass of new subscribers.
RJGiskard said on 2:14AM 9-29-2009
"...indicating an [i]accidental posting[/i]."
AKA, PR stunt - with someone from their marketing team submitting the pic to Massively.
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RogueJedi86 said on 6:06AM 9-29-2009
Did someone from their marketing team send it to DarthHater.com too? They reported it at about the same time as Massively. Someone in the comments even found a blank news announcement for today on the site. http://darthhater.com/2009/09/28/forum-buzz-beta-sign-ups-coming/
Hypester said on 8:38AM 9-29-2009
Site is down for maintenance now. Grrrr.
Regardless, yes, this would be spectacular. Obviously they've been betaing, having friends and family members test the game and given them feedback... enough people are playing the game that they have to use surveys, instead of meetings, as feedback. That's certainly alpha, and it's been happening for a while.
Release being a year out sounds about right.
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FrostyDroid said on 9:43AM 9-29-2009
The SWTOR official site has been "down for maintenance" for almost two hours now. Perhaps this gives some weight to the story?
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Rhonwynn said on 11:44AM 9-29-2009
The SWTOR sites back up & has the article to sign up to test.
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Hypester said on 11:51AM 9-29-2009
Site is back up. Announcment is back up. Can't login though. Maybe overloaded?
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Hypester said on 11:59AM 9-29-2009
Aaaand down again.
They got a lot of 'splainin to do!
shibumi said on 11:54AM 9-29-2009
logged into this. had created an account a while back. signed into the account and hit the tester's sign up.
got to a page that said 'Unsupported Browser' - though I'm using firefox 3.x
"he system scan tool requires that you use the Windows operating system and either Firefox 3.0 or later, or Internet Explorer 7 or later. To complete the scan and continue with your application to participate in game testing, please access this page using one of these browsers."
Ah I see - I'm doing this from my Macbook pro.
What scan? What are they scanning? dxdiag isn't good enough? can't trust that the dxdiag is from the machine that would be used? (in fact I do enough betas that I have a copy of my windows game machine dxdiag handy on my macbook pro). curious. I'll probably try this from my game machine and see just what is taking place.
/shibumi
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Thrunk said on 12:01PM 9-29-2009
They use a java program to do a simple scan of your computer. Blizzard is beginning to use a different method than dxdiag as well with their betas.