While I find some of the data interesting, this is one of those applications of statistics that would make my statistics professor rant. First off, let's acknowledge the one most important facet that was left out of the poll: It wasn't a random sample of players. This is a self-selected sample of forum-goers, not players. In order to get anything from that, you need to look at the data through the lens of that bias. This will likely come up a couple different places. No... More people clicked Light than Dark in a question who's entirety was: "Light Side or Dark Side?" You can't really infer much from that question. Most people are going to answer the one that best matches their most played character. The fact that the question is without explanation, and without any option for middle ground means its going to be loaded with all sorts of bias and inaccuracy. Was it correlated with class? Lots of people play Light Side Bounty Hunters to please Mako. That has absolutely nothing to deal with the relative power of compassion over selfishness. It just means they were trying to build affection with their healer. There's extra bias here. First, you didn't ask which one they like the most, you asked which one they played the most. When you apply the additional forum-bias, you have to start correcting for the fact that humans are the most available species to classes and they are one of the few species available to F2P accounts. While forum access requires a subscription, you still effectively asked people what the species of their main and usually oldest character was. That's not necessarily the species the like the most. This leads to an unsupported conclusion: You haven't really shown that people like humans better as a species. It may be nothing more than they liked them better than the other limited options. Furthermore: This has actually been shown to be an incorrect assumption in RPGs and especially Bioware RPGs. Most people play characters than look very little like them. The most common similarity is gender, with generalized race (whatever you define that to be) being somewhat less common, and others similarities drop quickly after that. The actual statistic is that people rarely play characters that roughly resemble themselves. And finally, the most biased result: You actually did a better job of polling "video game forumgoers" than "SWTOR community members" as there is more similarity in demographics between SWTOR and other video games than there is between SWTOR players and SWTOR forumgoers. The demographics might not be drastically different, but the selection bias and the fact that you are polling from a population that is already heavily-biased toward white-male-young-adult, the statistics can't really be taken to say much at all about the greater playerbase.

Umm... Why? Why do you need to know now? Knowing today or knowing four months from now won't change the end result. To be clear: You are not part of the development team. You have no special right to information any sooner than Bioware chooses to tell you, and they are well within their rights to tell you absolutely nothing up to the day of its release. They might be smart to release some details of that as they become certain, but short of that, they'd be wise to say nothing, because this community has shown time and time again that it cannot handle preliminary or uncertain information. This is all that matters, and its how you should be living every day of your life right now. Whining about what might be or what changes might occur are pointless. Demanding that you be told the future won't help either. Either you enjoy the game and are willing to pay to play it today, or you're not. Bioware isn't going to give you insider information just because you said you really, really need it, and they're not going to change their plans because you threatened to cancel your sub if they don't make you happy. So, play or don't. Sub or don't. No need for the demands or pretense that you're entitled to information because you want it.

Pretty much. It seems to be a case where a tiny fraction of the fanbase got so attached to the game that they considered themselves to be worthy of being involved in development decisions. Then, when a decision was made that they didn't like (regardless of how necessary it was, or how it might have played into bigger plans by the developer), they take it as a personal betrayal. Now, they refuse to let go, because admitting that it wasn't a betrayal would mean that they'd have to admit that it was just a game that was struggling to stay alive and their part in that was ultimately inconsequential. So, like a bitter ex, they continue on, complaining about that one time they got hurt, and actively sabotaging themselves and others, by insisting that the inevitable betrayal is just around the bend, and that they should lash out and strike first before that happens.

Like what? From what we've heard, nothing from Level 1 to 60 is changing. They're not reworking combat or revamping crafting or making drastic changes to the advanced classes. They're just adding a new block of story quests. That's what makes this SWG/NGE whining so worthless. There's no information at all to support it, just a bunch of former-SWG players desperately hoping that this game will be hurt by an NGE-like change so that they can soothe their decade-long anguish with the annoyance of others. And with every release, they hope that will come... and it doesn't.

More specific: thousands of years before Ep VII.

Again: His i7 gives him no advantage over an i5. As its just a 3700, not a 3700k, it's got good, but not excellent single-core performance. I'm not saying the 3770 is a bad CPU, just that its functionally a downgrade from a 2600k or 2500k (both commonly clocked to 4.5GHz). Also: If he gets a GTX 750Ti, he won't need a new PSU (assuming his existing PSU is in good working order). The 750 doesn't require tons of power, and he has plenty of room on his 12v rails. The nice thing about the 750 Ti is that the 6-pin PCIe connector shouldn't be required. A lot of vendors add it as a supplementary power source, but the card should run fine even if you don't have one. And just to jump firmly into esoteric tech discussion: There isn't much worth waiting for in the Broadwell CPUs. The main change over Haswell is a simple die-shrink and the reduced heat and power requirements you get from that. No real performance increase is expected, and they don't appear to be better overclocking targets. Skylake will come with a CPU redesign with Broadwells's lower heat and power. That's where we'll see the performance increase. If your CPU is okay for now (and the 3700 should be...) then you're better off waiting for the i5-6600k, which should be the next mainstream gaming CPU. Note, however, that motherboard compatibility becomes more and more of a problem with each generation you jump over. I don't expect the OPs motherboard to support a 6600k. It might be able to physically and logically support it, but its unlikely that Dell would release a BIOS update to support it, as its unlikely that they will still be developing the BIOS this winter. Short of bug fixes, don't expect any new CPU support on the motherboards.

No. Please no damage meters or threat meters. I see no value in catering to the min-max, hardcore crowd, That only drives out the casual players who are the actual core audience of the game. The hardcore players can use their parsers and get what they want after the fact. Also, pets and mounts should be legacy wide. (with exception to faction unique, or pvp ranks, social ranks, light/dark side, etc) If I remember the statements correctly, this is actually quite a bit of work. They're already looking at this, but the solution isn't as simple as you think it is.

Yeah, a number of people have said that they think that droid post got it backwards. It simply doesn't match the behavior we see in-game. Or perhaps, it's stated in a way that doesn't mean what people think it does. Or perhaps its switched since 1.2. When the servers were being DDoSed, the framerate numbers went red. Clearly that wasn't trying to tell us that the DDoS was making our video cards slower. During normal play, I see routinely green numbers, and that matches the reports from my hardware saying that my GPU is at 95% and my CPU cores are at 80%/40%/10%/10%. In busy areas, the CPU spikes and the numbers go yellow/red. People who turn on Vsync see the numbers as green when they hit the sync limit, not red. It makes far more sense to interpret them as: Red = Game Code/Netcode limited (CPU, most likely), Green = Display limited (GPU and vsync)

Indeed. There's virtually nothing that could be used to even guess at that connection, and it contradicts loads of stuff that we've heard both about the status of SWTOR in cannon and the evolution of the script for Ep7. I'd be inclined to say that its a social experiment, but I don't think there's enough thought behind it to justify that. However, its at least coherent, unlike this: He's been trying to make some sort of connection between SWTOR and his hallucinated version of mythology for quite a long time now, with no success outside the obvious. At least the Vitiate-in-Ep7 claim will be easy to falsify. It's hard to falsify the vague ramblings about a "dragonian emperor". Even trying gives it more validity than it deserves.

I can argue with your main argument. I've finished the game on a good dozen characters. I've gone through Makeb (but not Rishi, yet) on about 6 or 8 more. I've maxed the Makeb reputation on two legacies. In my opinion, you're simply wrong. Makeb was actually a step up in complexity and difficulty from Corellia. There were more complex quest mechanics, more bosses requiring changes to tactics, and simply more density of higher-difficulty mobs in various areas. This was originally managed by supplying better equipment. Later it was smoothed out by adding in the GSI buff, which alleviated some of the equipment issues with the faster leveling. If Makeb had been faceroll-easy, those wouldn't have been added. Was it really "difficult"? No. It's a game. The grand majority of games aren't difficult, because most people who play games don't enjoy repeated failure. They want the interactions to be interesting and entertaining, not challenging. That is what really changes in the post-chapter-3 part of the game. There are still the standard fetch-quests and kill-10-spiders quests, but most of the main-line story quests include extra complexity, whether that be from mechanics, mob difficulty, or simply managing geography and pathing. Does this continue on Rishi and Yavin? Mostly, with some return to the story/quest interactions of Chapter 2-3, where story quests are somewhat simplified in order to integrate into the story. Side quests still range from MMO standard to semi-unique uses of macrobinoculars/excavation-droid and some non-standard fight mechanics. The biggest difference isn't really in quest or single-fight difficulty, but in the sudden difficulty jumps that happen when things don't go as planned, in particular patrolling mobs and the increased chance of being pushed into other mobs aggro zones. Makeb, Rishi, and Yavin are much less forgiving in these instances than previous planets. All in all, its still an advancement of the difficulty and mechanics variety than we saw in chapter 1-3, and the majority of players still died more on Makeb than during Chapter 3. The fact that you don't see this seems to be largely because of your inability to deal with your own selection bias. Take this as an example: Here you show your lack of familiarity with the game and the community. There are numerous calls for help with various bosses in Chapter 1 through 3 (Skotia is popular, Lady Frabaal is a little less so, end of Warrior-Chapter3 used to be popular), but most of these instances come from players that are either horribly under-leveled, horribly geared, or are missing some critical technique (use of interrupt, usually). Makeb has a number of places where people have routinely asked for help even with good gear and being max level. The end of the Imperial quest is a famous one. It is probably the boss fight with the most requests for help, and at least pre-GSI-buff, was tuned to the point that even end-game-geared characters with experience in the fight would die repeatedly if they didn't pick a complimentary companion (even if they had played just fine with others up to that point). Seriously, you see requests on Gen Chat for help with other bosses, but the end of Imperial Makeb generated numerous forum threads with people asking for help. But you seem to have ignored those people, and that's both human and sort of expected. By your interactions with others on this thread, you don't seem to be very adept at seeing things from other perspectives, and so it's not surprising that you'd think that your experience is the normal one and that any counter-examples you might have come across are nonsensical and can be easily ignored. To be clear: Yeah, my last time through Makeb, I played rather fast and loose and burned through with some somewhat sloppy play and still made it through with a minimum of challenge. However, I've played through many times and I know what to expect, what to be wary of, and how to counter most challenges. At the same time, I'm not so arrogant or blind that I've forgotten my first play through, or that I can't see the challenges being faced by new players, many of which are not MMO veterans. I would much rather that I play though with very few challenges than they quit halfway through because they're not here to play a game that forces them to spend a half hour on a quest before looking up the solution on YouTube. Most people don't find that fun. If that means that you're not "most people", then you should take that as a learning opportunity and realize that your opinions on what makes a good game are not as common as you think. Of course, simply arguing that wasn't enough for you, and you descended into some of the worst examples of internet hyperbole I've seen tossed out here ("Fights are easier than opening farmville!"). And no, the criticism of hyperbole is not a new thing, It's been around for years, but only in recent years has the actual use of hyperbole and the weak-minded belief that its now suddenly an effective argument technique taken hold.

Right. We just paid for it. In that... we paid for it nearly 7 months ago, and the next expansion is coming in 4 more months.

No, not nothing. He'll gain a bump in single-core performance. Or rather, he'll gain a significant bump in performance up to four cores. The only place he'd see any possible downgrade is in fully multithreaded video encoding. You have repeatedly overstated the performance value of CPU threads. A hyperthreaded CPU gives zero advantage unless you can actually nearly-fully load each core of a non-hyperthreaded CPU. Considering that the OP would get a boost to performance for both of the cores that SWTOR uses, but the other two cores would remain mostly unused, there's little value in an i7. It's extra cost and heat for no real performance gain. Thanks for the compliment. The only place where Oyranos has it right is in the cost-per-performance. With a GT 640 right now, the best money-for-performance would be in upgrading the 640 to a 750 or equivalent. That will improve the graphical quality and increase the maximum framerate, but do nothing to reduce the framerate drops of busy areas. The CPU improvement is more cost, but would go further to smooth out the framerate. However, the 3700 is still a very good CPU and the cost of an i5-4690K isn't quite low enough to justify the cost of upgrade against the moderate framerate improvement.

This is probably my advice, too. A CPU upgrade would help the most for smoothing out performance, but the 640 is probably more likely to be causing problems right now.

No. The number of threads isn't important if the target app can't actually use them all. SWTOR only really uses 2-3 threads heavily, with one of them taking the bulk of the work. There's no benefit to the i7-4790k over the i5-4690k for the majority of gamers, and for pretty much anyone running SWTOR. For SWTOR, what you want is good single-core speed, and in that measure, the 4790k and 4690k are virtually identical (in that they start at almost the same level, and overclock to the same level). And you still don't seem to understand that "all games" don't have the same performance profile as SWTOR. Most games are GPU heavy with only light CPU use. SWTOR has heavy CPU use and medium-to-heavy GPU use (hence the heat issues!). That's not certain. Most of the Ivy Bridge motherboards can be firmware upgraded to accept Haswell chips. The socket and voltage ranges are the same. Whether Dell has an upgrade to do that remains to be seen. But there are plenty of people who did that exact upgrade with little more than a BIOS update and a half hour of CPU installing. He said that he only really needs the performance for SWTOR. So long as he's not doing professional video encoding, the 3770 doesn't outperform the 4690k in anything else. If he can overclock the 4690k, then the performance difference becomes is even more in favor of the 4690k.

You're thinking about it all wrong. It's the CPU that matters on Fleet and Ops and WZs. It doesn't matter if you have a Titan or a 560 Ti, if you have a fast enough CPU, you'll be okay on frame rate. I don't have a Titan, but I regularly get 50-60fps on a crowded fleet. How? My CPU is a i5-4960k running at ~4.4GHz.

Wait... You're complaining that the game has a quest that doesn't use a brainless "See opponent. Kill opponent" structure? You're sad that they made you actually pay attention to the fight? There's nothing frustrating about this. If you pay any attention to the fight, you see what's happening. There are a dozen similar fights in the game. The "solution" takes very little thought, but at least its a diversion from the same brainless mob-smashing that you go through in so many other quests. Are you suggesting that lightsabers should give you one-hit-kills on pretty much everyone, like in the movies? Is that your idea of great game design? Right... you're getting bored of them including fights which are more than "Use rotation I learned on YouTube until the game says I win". Right. Let's just say: I disagree.

Why are you shocked? They did this with RotHC too. People who wanted to play right away paid for it. People who subbed later got it for free. It actually benefits the game and the community to make sure that players get dragged forward into new content eventually. Even without it, the value of that expansion will drop over time, just as pretty much everything does. How about this outrage: Tomb Raider (2013) sold for $60 in 2013. In 2014, I bought it for just $4, thanks to a Steam Sale. And you know what? They didn't refund any of the people who bought it in 2013. How dare those jerks conform to a hundred or more years of standard pricing practices. So, to further push the point: You knew this was going to happen. If you have a shred of market awareness, you knew the price was going to drop, and you knew that eventually the expansion would be given away for free, just like the last expansion, and just like most expansions in these sorts of MMOs. Being outraged just shows that you haven't been paying attention and that you don't have much experience with MMOs, video games, or shopping in general. If this annoys you, then you have a simple solution: Don't ever buy the expansion packs. Eventually, as a subscriber, you'll get them for free. Or the amount of expansion content you get will reach a point where it's worth while to buy. Of course.. that means that you'll have to wait months in order to take part in the content, and you may be blocked from some gear and activities. But that's what you'd be paying for, isn't it? If you don't want those things, don't buy the expansion. If having those things means a lot to you, then even if you pay for the expansion and it is given away for free later, you still got a good value for your money.

I'm confused. Why did you think there would be a Tracer Missile animation change in a cartel pack? How was it botched? I don't remember seeing abnormally large numbers of reports of update issues, except for the people who tried to update before the maintenance was finished.

Note: I have no strong feelings on this topic. However, I do have strong(ish) feelings about some of your opinions: And Blizz is? Or Lokin? Or Rusk? Or Pierce? Or Broonmark? Yes. She was your mostly-over-the-top, petulant Sith. You got to see her cross the threshold of apprentice to independent warrior (presumably). This doesn't place her all that far from Vemrin or Ffon/Harkun. Or half the NPCs in the start of the Bounty Hunter story. And in all that, she has more personality to her than a good portion of the existing companions. I could toss out way more effective complaints against Rusk and Skadge. The bar to become a companion is pretty low. Why not? She can't be worse than Dark!Jaesa or Kaliyo or Doc. I'm pretty sure that word (shrill) doesn't mean what you think it means. Thana is voiced by Laura Bailey (aka: Keira, Demon Hunter in Diablo III, Trunks (ha!)). Her sort-of signature is a slightly deeper-than-normal voice with a smooth quality. She made it a bit sharper for Thana, but "shrill" is not really even close to the right word. < insert sidelong glance at Skadge and Rusk > < glance at Skadge intensifies > Wait, no. That's right, the first time you meet Skadge he's both incompetent, stupid, and threatens sexual assault. Umm. She uses the same "Female 2" model as a large portion of the NPCs and players in the game. Right. No one ever likes tattoos. Whatever, everyone has their own tastes. You don't find her attractive. I don't know that I've seen anyone say that she's supermodel material, but she uses some of the same face and hair models that other players use. There's nothing "ugly" about them. If the choices aren't to your taste, that's fine. Objectively, she's no less attractive than loads of other NPCs... because they're using the same models. Personality. Not everyone likes the same companions. Some love Kaliyo, some hate her. Some find Khem Val to be cool, others just want to get rid of him. Some people find Doc funny, others find him repulsive. Pretty much everyone hates Skadge, but... well, there has to be someone who likes him. Some people find her personality entertaining. I find her chuckle-worthy in her selfish, frustrated flailing. That puts her way above my feelings toward Broonmark, and at least on par with Ashara.

We also know: 3) There were six companions in the original game. 4) The smallest number of faces on a solid 3D object is four. What do all these things have in common? None of them really have any effect on the others. No, it's a huge leap. Specifically, that leap you make when you seemingly assume that each chapter in KotFE is equivalent to a chapter in the original game or even a planet in the original game. For all we know, a chapter is nothing more than a series of three or four large quests. You have no idea how large a chapter is. I think its frankly silly to think of a single KotFE chapter as being the same level of content as Rishi. As much as I might like that, I really doubt it and I know for certain you have no data to back that assumption up. My initial guess would be that several chapters will share the same location, and that Chapters 1-9 will likely give us 3 or maybe 4 levels on their own (assuming you start at level 60 and just do the new quests, not WZ, Ops, etc).

This is why the line is bad, not because of the OPs dreams of all force users being unstoppable gods or the dream that there are no ways that you could ever prepare to fight one. This, however: ...is still Internet-standard gross exaggeration. The line is used a lot, but its still used by only a small minority of opponents. However, being used even six or eight times is enough to make it laughable.

But there is. Atton Rand makes note of such things. Sure, he was Force Sensitive, but he wasn't unique and he learned from others who used similar techniques. Then we have HK-47, who had his own set of tricks for handling them. And we have the Bounty Hunter in SWTOR (and Jabba in RotJ) who have been able to show resistance to mind tricks. Or how about Droidekas (Destroyer Droids) which had designs that worked well against Jedi. And remember Order 66? That was put in place as a bit of anti-force-user training. None of these tactics need to be 100% effective, and they don't need to be applicable to every single level of force user or every single situation. They might be nothing more than just ways to give yourself a chance to escape or maybe a chance to succeed in some very specific situation. Or maybe they will only work against weak force users or force users that are distracted or unprepared. That's enough to label them as "special training for dealing with force users". The issue you're having is that you keep moving the goal posts and redefining the words to fit your bias. "Force user" doesn't need to mean "all force users" or even "powerful force users". Similar situation: My car has special safety features to protect me in case of collision. Does that mean that it will protect me in case of collision with a meteor traveling at 11km/s? Nope. Does it mean that it will protect me if another car collides with the roof of my car? Not necessarily. Does it even mean that it will protect me in all cases where normal cars collide with my car at a normal speed? Nope. The normal interpretation is that protection is not absolute unless stated to be. It means that my car has features which are designed to provide some level of protection in some cases where my car collides with some other objects. You hate the line because you've expanded and contracted the meanings of the words to be something that it wasn't. It simply says that the person saying it has been trained in some techniques that may increase their chance of surviving an encounter with a force user. That might be nothing more than hiding their thoughts and plans so the force user can't sense them as well. Or it might be ways of keeping the force user concentrated on other things so they can't pull out any of their fancier tricks. If its a weak force user, they can probably be reasonably successful. If its a strong force user, they're probably not going to be successful.

This has nothing to do with worries over gambling. The game already has fake-gambling, loads of other games have fake-gambling, even real-life has fake gambling. It's a non-issue. The issue is the fact that they need to add in new items, new UI, integrate the UI into the UI customizer, integrate the items into drops or chests or whatever. Then they need to test it so that its not exploitable or unbalanced and make sure its not bot-farming-friendly. Basically, its a lot of work for a team that isn't short on stuff to do. They've said they'd like to add it, but there's no timeline to add it because they've got other more important stuff to work on. Remember GSF? People begged and insisted that if they just have free-flight space battles, they'd play forever and be happy. Then they got it, and promptly complained when it didn't fit 100% of their desires. And then people just sort of went back to ignoring it. So now, when people whine and beg for Pazaak, what is there to convince them that its not going to be another GSF, but with even fewer players demanding it, and more potential for credit farming?

Thank you. Understand that I also have no ill will toward you either. I respect that we can disagree without it turning into personal attacks (and I hope I've never made it feel that way). I can be fairly aggressive and my wife tells me that I can sometimes come off as being overly un-emotional. If I actually disliked you, I'd simply ignore you. The reason I respond to you so often is due to my desire to try and share my perspective with you. No point in sharing perspectives with someone who you don't value, right? Actually, I feel that the engine (whatever people might think that is) is a valid target for criticism, but that we should criticize it by saying what we dislike, rather than just declaring that some amorphous idea ("the engine") is the problem. Yes, absolutely. And that is what I was trying to get across in the Reddit post. You might appreciate that at least part of this has a source in some of your past statements. Yes, most of the people who are saying "The engine sucks!" are just trying to express their opinions about performance, and they lack the right words to express that, or perhaps they feel that their previous attempts fell on deaf ears. Both of those are valid sentiments, they're just expressed in a non-helpful way. When a developer sees a user complain with a statement like "The engine sucks. Replace it!" all they see is a user wielding words they don't understand. It's easy to ignore them. Its not a dev's job to handle irrational customers. However, if a dev sees the comment: "I have a good PC, but the game runs really slow in some places," its harder to brush off. If they see: "I get 70fps on a crowded fleet, but it drops to 10fps while in 16M HM DF" then they really start to take notice. In the third example, you remove all attempts at diagnosis, and just relate your experience. As a result, it's the developer who looks at the information, and uses their own expertise to diagnose the issue, and because they do the diagnosis, they can't really pass it off as just another uninformed customer. It actually yields more impact because, to an engineering-oriented mind, there is less uncertainty in the terms. Precisely. And from my point of view, she's being unhelpful by saying "Its the engine". And from your point of view (at least, one you expressed earlier), she's doing nothing wrong because she's expressing her problem as a customer in the way that she understands. The conclusion I've come to is that *both* are correct, and that part of the issue is that both sides are thinking of a different "problem". For me (the mechanic in this story, I guess), I want to find the solution. For her, she just wants the noise to go away. There's no guarantee that the two are related, and its compounded by the additional confusion over various terms (what is "the engine"). So, instead, complaints about "the engine" should be understood as complaints with limitations or performance problems with the game, and we should encourage people to try to explain the experiences they're having that cause those complaints. In some cases, we may find solutions that have nothing to do with the engine, or the game at all. I've helped a dozen people fix their lag problems by diagnosing network issues. If I and others (possibly including you...) had let them continue complaining about "the engine" they would still be complaining. We got them to describe their problems and found an actual solution. Yay! Success! Another happy player. Ugh. Yes. Bioware shares some blame in this, and I can understand why, because its just he sort of mistake I'd be likely to make. In fact, I'm sure that I did. To the developers, "the engine" has a very specific meaning, and even I don't know enough to say where they draw that line. To the users, that line isn't defined and won't ever be defined. Using it in explanations just ends up fuzzing the information and making it easier to come to the wrong conclusion. Then, once this "engine" explanation came out, it became a meme, and people who didn't even know where it came from or what it was began using it and tacking every problem they had to it, because... well, everyone else was. And again, some of those complaints are legitimate. Maybe a lot of them. Some of them are not. Maybe more than even I know. Some of them can be fixed. Some of them are local hardware problems that can at least be identified. Some of them might just be people expecting too much. The problem is the fact that people lump their complaints into this one huge barrel with an abstract word on it. And as customers, that actually makes their complaints easier to ignore. Some of them should be ignored. And some of them absolutely should not.

Wow. So many responses I've caused. I feel sorta like hiding, but... My understanding of FF is that their "engine replacement" was just replacing the "front end", namely the part of the game that handles user input and renders the visuals. The server and client netcode remained the same, the server code was the same, and all their datastore stuff remained largely the same. So, it replaces the part of the engine that most people care about. Perhaps something like that could happen with SWTOR. However, "the Hero Engine" part (which is now heavily modified) is far more than just the client application. The Hero Engine even at the time Bioware bought it was a client with graphical rendering, a server with resource management and scriptable interactions, data storage, management servers, and development tools to interact with all of that. Replacing the graphical renderer is a doable thing. Its expensive, but it wouldn't be the first --or second-- time a major game has done that. Replacing the whole client application is an impressive bit of work, and FF shows that its possible, if very costly and disruptive. However, replacing all traces of the Hero Engine would require a complete restructuring of not just game code but loads of hardware across three datacenters and numerous development tools and environments. It would be cheaper to just start fresh with EA's Frostbite engine. And if we're realistic, that's the only option they have. They won't ever pay the money to replace any major portion of the game and not move it to the unified gaming platform that they've already put tons of work into. If they remade SWTOR today, it would use the Frostbite engine. Sadly, that would probably make loads of people happy, including the developers. But this is the horse we're riding today. Keep feeding the horse and the owner will be more likely to give you a newer, different horse sometime down the road. Kick it and let it starve and the owner will probably just decide that horses aren't worth the hassle. (Of course.. that doesn't mean: "Pay them money or no more Star Wars." You shouldn't pay money to someone in hopes that they'll give you something cool later. However, if you enjoy the game, keep playing. Your interest will be noted and eventually we'll get a shiny new option.)