[member="Slice Spiralflame"], [member="Valiens Nantaris"]. I'm in Australia too. Internet is mega fast if you already have NBN (National Broadband Network), like I do. Eventually all Australians will have it once it's fully rolled out. The problem with SWTOR is their servers. With everyone downloading the fallen empire around the world at the same time, it slows everything down. This never happens with the even bigger parches/DLCs for ESO however. That's cos they use megasevers perhaps.
Anyway I already knew that in Australian eastern standard time the downtime for all swtor servers yesterday was between 8:30pm and 2am. I also knew that pre-patching would probably begin 2 hours before. This was important cos not many people know about that. I started downloading the fallen empire patch at around 12:30am. Because most people would've waited until after 2am, or whatever time that was for them in their part of the world, I was able to initially download most of the 8.64 GB patch at over 2mb/s. It did slow down once others started downloading. In fact the last 1 GB took 3 hours! Ironic when the first 7 or so GB had taken less than 2 hours. Lol I just went to bed and it was ready in the morning when I woke up.
Valiens as for the game changes. Haven't really looked too much into it. Probably because I was playing only the story part or the Outlander part. I have noticed changes however. Like when you press N to bring up all your companions it's different. Btw you are gona laught at this. When I loaded 2 of my existing characters, Kira the companion to my Jedi Sentinel Rajki had no pants on. Really she didn't! Same was the case with my other companion the Doc. And same was the case with Mako when I loaded my Powertech Kixi-Ratnik. I didn't load the other 2 characters I have, the Sith and Gunslinger, but I reckon it's the same with them too. Also for both my Jedi sentinel and Powertech, my protocol droids were gone. Not that I cared as they were useless. Ive never used them.