Anyone currently playing Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) will know that Bioware released Patch 1.1 a couple of days ago which sought to fix a number of issues with the initial release(and forced a very hurried addendum to my first impressions article, cheers Bioware... bastard).  Well aside from making the UI a little more user friendly it would also appear that Bioware broke Ilum, the world everyone goes to at level 50 for their daily and weekly quests.  The intention was good, they wanted to provoke more world PvP on, what is essentially, their world PvP planet and so they adapted several quests to require the killing of players from other factions AND upped the amount of Valour earnt from each kill.  Unfortunately it would appear that Bioware didn't bother to look at the server population balances before they rolled the patch out, which meant good times for any Imperials but the Republic players had to endure this...

Additionally, there is a handy little feature that alerts you to whenever an enemy player gets near an important objective, you know just in case you try to be sneaking and avoid the big roaming packs of death called the Imperial Playerbase.

Even on those servers with a slightly fairer population balance the net result seems to be one big AOE grindfest as demonstrated below.

Bioware did not think this one through... no siree... *sucks gums*... nope.

To be fair, however, Bioware did react quickly by instituting a hotfix to limit the number of Imperial and Republic players on Ilum but apparently this has just resulted in players win trading for points.  Honestly it's kind of difficult to see how Bioware will police that kind of action in a world pvp environment.

Patch 1.1 brought with it a whole host of other proplems too including complaints of black loading screens, broken hotkeys and of course the ongoing complaints about framerate drops (although it's difficult to tell if patch 1.1 has actually exacerbated that or if it's just the same people complaining from before the patch dropped).

Before we hang Bioware out to dry, I suppose it is worth noting that this is the company's first experience with a large scale MMO and the programming, design and problems that arise are vastly different from those that arise in a singleplayer process and I don't think that Bioware has been truly prepared for that.  It's easy to demand better whilst we've been so spoilt by Blizzard but Blizzard has had a very long time to get that process right and now have very experienced game designers, coders, programmers and leads.  To be blunt, this early in SWTOR's life, Bioware doesn't.

In any event, Bioware has opened an official forum thread to openly discuss any problems so you can find it here.

A full list of patchnotes for 1.1 can be found here.