The guy who was instrumental in choosing the hero engine for this game.. left 11 months before it came out. Anyone remember what this game looked like back then? Remember those bland looking characters? that wasn't artwork not done.. that was the best they could come up with without killing the FPS. (name any other game that 12 months before release had unfinished artwork as bad as swtor did in their trailers). In the end they had to split it into high-def for cutscenes, and low def for everything else (except the faces.. they backed themselves into a corner with that one). So what happened about a year ago? Rift launched around the same time, and looking infinitely better then SWTOR did back then. I'll have to check my facts, but im pretty sure ther was a blog about swtor in the past year where they had to revisit all the sets because the art department hadnt gotten it right (so who told the art department the wrong stuff to begin with? hmmm i wonder). I can't help but wonder if that was anything to do with the way Rift looked, and honestly Rift still looks way better environmentally. Shadows that dont look like they belong in minecraft? amazing! I'm honestly not surprised that the Gordon skipped town to a casual game company after what he did to swtor (oh did i mention he was at SWG too??) Neil Harris, president of HeroEngine, went on the defensive recently with regards to this game and its reception. One fact stands out quite a lot: BW split off developing this engine more then 2 years ago; they stopped getting updates from HeroEngine themselves. If you had faith in the 3rd party providing the engine to you.. wouldn't you want to keep getting the latest code? BW will claim they customised this engine so much then couldn't easily update it any more. I'd love to know what was customised so much they couldnt manage those updates any more (eg even the space fights are a *core* component of HeroEngine). Either BW lost all faith in the engine, or (and this seems more likely) they thought they could do better themselves. This being the same company who didnt even think on to include a /roll option in a game with master looting. Yer.. wonder who made those decisions.... One last point. Graphics don't make the game, theres no doubt about that: They add to the experience. But then why are so many people so vocal about the engine? because once you get past the quest lines, and look into the actual MP part of this game.. its decidedly lacking. This is a single player game, trying very hard to be MP, that we're paying a monthly fee to play and we dont even get proper graphics fidelity to distract us from that fact. SWTOR is a game where the design documents, and the engine, were locked down about 5 years ago. If this game had launched back then, it would easily be top of the charts right now (the missing features now, wouldnt have been an issue 5 years ago). As it stands, it just smacks of being stuck in the past.

The inability to have both AC's on one class, is BW's way of covering up the lack of end game content. Everyone rolling alt's to see all the stories/playstyles gives them time to make some end game content. "expanded" raids next month just shows how badly they screwed that up

RE: LFG/Social interaction WOW has a LFG system that works. It's voluntary to use. Those who feel the need to find groups manually can do so. Rift took that a step further, and puts players in a chat channel containing all the people within a level bracket regardless of location, which means (for those wanting to make manual groups) it's far easier to chat to people most likely wanting to run the same flashpoint as you. There's obvious benefits of the help provided by a channel full of people similar level to yourself. Oh and both games give the option of summoning the party to the dungeon. On the other hand, SWTOR requires you to ask on both the planet (or 2) and on the fleet chat to find people (especially in offpeak periods). It's also the reason why the LFG flag doesn't work as well as it could. SWTOR also involves a lot of manual travelling to get to the flashpoint, especially if you're out of transport CD's and are on the arse end of a planet. Multiple that by 4 people and you end up doubling the time it takes to run the flashpoint waiting for people to show up. More issues with the social side of this game include no /roll option, and the lack of a grace period to trade BoP gear incase of misrolls. Both WOW and Rift took time to implement some of these things, but implement them they did. Bioware, don't be blinded by management types (who cancel grace periods for eg) who say we dont need these features. We do. We needed it at launch.

Flashpoints. They kinda describe quick paced stuff. Not 3-hour-marathon-story-time. I don't know about you but after playing through ess/bt a couple of times to get all the dialog options, I started hammering the spacebar. Personally I think the flashpoints are breaks from the already dialogue rich game. A place to group up and just go kill stuff. Just like PVP is.. or do you want storyline in that too?

because the name is correct, it's not something that jumps up at everyone when it happens. Of course now it will be one of those 'cannot be unseen' things for me. I think it's entirely plausible for this to have skipped over peoples head tbh. If the name was entirely wrong, well that would be a little more unforgivable.

Ta for the info. Guess it's good for when you just cant be arsed

Apparently the security key vendor has a fleet hearth, with a 1 hour CD (better then the 18 hours one you get at level 10) Won't help you if you don't have a smartphone of course, but it's something. Also some planets have direct shuttles to the fleet, skipping the need to go all the way to the spaceport. One of them is at "the Wall" on Dromund Kaas for eg.

The number at the top left of the gui represents how many people are on your instance. As most starting planets have 3 instances, you would have had to spend an hour on each side swapping instances to get a real number (hardly what you would call accurate after that much time). Unless of course your server wasnt full at the time. Either way I doubt the population was that unbalanced. That said, on the Imperial side i've never had to wait more then 5 seconds after looking for a group. When I rolled a JK, it took a good 20 minutes before I got a group. Conclusion: Imperials are more social!

Funnily enough Rift had the same issue with not designating oceanic servers. End result was 1 server being choked to death with extended queues due to the crossover of US/Oceanic timezone players. At least they had the server transfer mechanics already in the pipeline when they launhced, so it wasn't too long before the oceanic people could move en masse to the new designated server.

Bioware is in a lot of trouble. Come launch day, we're going to get an influx of new players. Lot's of those will want to roll on a server their friends are on. More servers won't help that situtation, unless Bioware comes up with a painless way of transfering your existing chars to new servers (eg Rift) otherwise people will roll on full servers to be with their friends already on it. Personally, I expect to see server queues double (on the current server specs/limits). The only hope we have is that the servers are deliberately being held back from running at their full capacity to encourage people to give up and roll on new servers. After launch, they can then unleash the full potential of the servers, reducing server queues with a single button push (but really, I don't expect this to be the case)

There's an option in preferences to turn on detailed comparison (or similar). This will show you the break down of each mod and what it is adding without having to yank them out to see how much it drops. But in your specific case, 15/25 sound like the base armor to me (based on what you pasted in)

Well you should know better by now that what gets said on these forums by employees, and what happens in reality are rarely one and the same. But don't worry, after a week of bad publicity, I'm sure they'll change things back and then write it as if they were doing us all a favor.