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As we noted yesterday, Star Wars Galaxies Game Update 4 will be going live tomorrow morning. In preparation, full patch notes are available on the official forums. We put up our highlights from the notes earlier this month. There have been a number of major and minor tweaks to the new game systems since that point, but the fundamentals remain the same:

• Commandos, Officers, and Smugglers are seeing the most updating. As a result, all three of these professions will receive expertise respecs after logging in tomorrow.
• Bounty Hunters are also seeing a number of changes, likely as a result of background work done to accommodate the Commando.
• Medics, Spies, and Jedi are all seeing minor quality of life improvements.
• Quality of life additions have been applied to graphical settings, combat, and other UI elements.
• Heroic Instance bosses all have a chance of dropping the schematics for the new CC-V 'Cryo' Projector.

Servers will be coming down at 4am PST/ 7am EST, and will be placed live with the changes after some last minute testing. If you have some thoughts on the new class tweaks, be sure to let us know!

Posts to the official Star Wars Galaxies forums have noted that Game Update 4 will be released during the upcoming week; very welcome news for Officers, Smugglers, and especially Commandos. There's more goodness coming to the game beyond next week, though. The official site looks to the primary feature of Chapter 10 in this week's Friday Feature. The new and improved SWG group search tool is a concerted effort by the developers to solve the game's pressing population issue. Check out the accompanying forum post for hints at the community's reaction.

The new search functionality, which will extend galaxy-wide to reach as many players as possible, has numerous selectable criteria. On the individual player's side, there are several ways of advertising your interests. The role you want to play in a group, what kind of group you're looking for, even the possibility of gathering for social situations are all covered by the tool. The previous LFG tool had numerous drawbacks, including a limited range and now-useless search criteria. When actively searching for new group members, the tool offers a similar range of options. Professions, level ranges, and interest are all tweakable by the group leader. Pure utility, but interesting nonetheless.

The Test Center server was updated yesterday with patch notes for the fourth Game Update to Star Wars Galaxies. This time around Commandos, Officers, and Smugglers are all looking at fairly significant changes. All three classes are popular (as popular as class without a lightsaber can be), but needed some serious overhauls.

Officers now have toggleable group buffs instead of timed ones, making one of their core functions far more utilitarian. They also have two types of rally points now, one offensive and one defensive. Commandos received a rework almost from the ground up, remaking their abilities to be more effective and understandable. Stackable element-based DoTs, all new expertise options, improvements to existing abilities ... GU4 is definitely Commando Christmas.

Smugglers snagged across-the-board tweaks, making their abilities generally mesh more cohesively, and even Bounty Hunters pulled down a few useful changes. Officers, Commandos, and Smugglers will receive free respecs when they log in, allowing them to make use of their new abilities. The update includes a number of smaller tweaks, supporting both the new DoT mechanics and the wearable equipment concealment code. There's even a brand new weapon for the reworked Commandos, the CC-V 'Legion' Cryo Projector. It's always nice to get new toys.

Lead designer on Star Wars Galaxies, Blixtev, compares going through the old Damage Over Time code to rummaging through your grandmother's attic. "It's loaded with old junk and it sure smells really bad", he says. Still, that's exactly what the SWG developers are doing as they work to revamp Commando abilities for the upcoming Game Update 4. In some posts to the official forums, Blix talks about opening up moldering trunks and tossing aside ancient silverware to get at the DoT code beneath. "The DoT system is one of our oldest systems, and it sure does some wacktacular things. We found 10 different calculations amoungst 5 functions to determine just the value of absorbtion from armor against DoTs. For folks who don't code, that's alot."

He goes on to describe their upcoming plans for the system, which will spread DoTs to two different abilities and substantially change the way they're applied. After the update they're going to stack up to 10 a piece on a single character, a process that could take some time. Because of this change, DoT removal will change as well. Taking long minutes to apply the full 10-stack to a PC shouldn't be automatically negated by a Medic power. Instead, DoT removal will take away part of the stack, and make the recipient immune to further DoT additions for a short period. Meanwhile, the existing debuff will continue to tick down - harming the character with an element type determined by the Commando's weapon.

A later update indicates that these trials are proving very effective in making the Commando a more fun profession to play, a claim we'll be able to put to the test hopefully very soon.

The next big patch coming to Star Wars Galaxies is Game Update 4. It's a systems tweak, aimed squarely at addressing community issues with the Commando and Officer classes. SWG's community manager Valara dropped into the forums this week with previews for both sides in the chain of command. What's really interesting is that she includes the 'top five issues' list that each classes' senator have been maintaining. Senators are player representatives for one facet of the game, and these top five lists are the biggest issues facing each class at any given time. Valara then offers up changes coming in the update that directly stem from this list.

For example, the preview of Commando changes lists "Address issues with heavy weapons, including design, DoT complications, and UI interference" as one of the top five community issues. This is the response to that concern on the 'in the works' list: "Investigate issues with heavy weapons including DoT applications and UI interference. Add a new cold elemental weapon." Similarly, the preview of Officer changes has "Leadership abilities such as /sysgroup and /rallypoint need to be re-introduced." The update's response: "Investigate the addition of system group messages and rally points; rally point may grant group members a new buff for meeting at the rally point. Investigate Supply Drop." Both of these threads have several visits from developers as well, making for a very interestinv conversation about these class issues. For more background on the Commando's DoT problems, check out the thread entitled the history of Commando DoTs for more details.