[It's time to get rid of the Account Unlock cost for CM items]

I have to agree with this post. I dabble with SWTOR every so often, coming back about once a year or so to play around for a few months.

 

So I recently came back and Subbed (I wont play unsubbed) and bought a few armor sets from the CM and I was totally shocked at the whole double dip unlock for account thing.

 

I can't think of any other MMO, even shady ones, that has something like that. Its pretty crazy to be honest. I mean, the armor was 2000 CMs and then I have to spend another 400 to unlock it?

 

This kind of greed/double dipping is exactly why EA is, time and again, voted the Worst Company in America.

 

It wont ever get better till things like this stop.

[Today's the day nVidia informs us of the select few who will receive the give-away]

So apparently I won. Interesting cause I have GEforce Experience just naturally cause I use it to update my drivers but just on a whim I just logged in and I have a notification on it that I won and to redeem my FREE Reward: SWTOR Expansion Package!

 

Either way Codes are going out or/are already out.

 

Actually It appears that I won twice as It seems I have 2 codes.

[Nvidia promo confirmations]

why ?

why are others punished?

you had already done it with the speed run ...

why this national segregation?

 

You should petition your government about that and not Bioware/Nvidia

[Blurred, Diagnal Line across my Screen]

I have had a ton of artifacting in game lately. (Artifacting is where you will suddenly see weird crazy lines start appearing randomly in a game, the usually last for fractions of a second and disappear).

 

Usually it is related to your graphics card overheating, and while SWTOR runs your card hot, I don't think thats the problem.

 

I did recently switch to Window Mode so I wonder if that is the problem. Either way its really annoying, it doesn't kill the game, but its jarring every 30 seconds when running around for just random line/lines to just shoot across the screen.

[Five Words That Sum Up State of the Game]

I would actually sum it up in seven words, which about covers everything: "Producers don't know what they are doing."

 

I am reminded of a great presentation given by Noaki Yoshida at the GDC 2014 (link for reference: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020179/Behind-the-Realm) - For those who don't know who he is, he is the man responsible for fixing the disaster that was the FFXIV online and turning into FFXIV: ARR and helping move this MMO into the Number Two position in the market.

 

In it there were two very important slides:

 

An MMO Is Like Running A Country

 

1.) If a Dev Team is the Government, The Players Are It's Citizens

If citizens disapprove of your policies, they will move to Canada

Yoshida-san referred to always remembering that even if you are WoW, there is a lot of competition in the space for the MMO player and if you dump all over them, like they did with FFXIV online, they WILL go elsewhere.

 

2.) Clarity, Vision, and Willingness to Listen Are Keys to Success

Without these, the government [devs] devolve into a dictatorship

Yoshida-san mentions that what do citizens do when they are in a dictatorship? They flee as soon as they can and as fast as possible. He attributed developer arrogance as the number one killer of good titles on the market. He also mentions how he is glad there is so much arrogance as Square Enix is able to differentiate themselves by actually listening to customers.

 

3.) Learn to Listen and Adapt. A Complaint is Worth Twice a Compliment.

The silent always leave first

If citizens are complaining it means they still care

Yoshida-san gives an example of wanting to implement a big change in the game. He proposes that you should run the idea before your player base before even committing development resources to it. He then says, if the feedback is too negative, you should abandon the idea before even starting on it. He reiterates, that if the complaints are piling up then you need to address them URGENTLY before they become silent (which means you have lost a customer).

 

4.) Creators Must be Players In There Own Realms

If the leader don't live there, why would their subjects?

Yoshida-san was adamant about this point. How can you know what improvements to make to your game if you don't even play it. At Square Enix, they insist on a certain amount on in game play time regularly among the development and creative staff so they have to live with the changes the make in game.

 

Lessons Learned

 

1.) Never forget the fans

Without them there would be no us

Here Yoshida-san reiterated how hard is is to get customers compared to working to keep them. He says that no change should ever go into a game that upsets customers. They are your citizens, without them you would not have a country.

 

2.) Fun comes first.

If it isn't fun, you are doing it wrong

The comment is self explanatory but he covers a lesson learned from FFXIV online, never put something in the game that makes players dread doing it. If you do, get it out immediately otherwise you risk your title failing. It is a game and games are supposed to be fun. He also mentions how he doesn't like players ever saying something isn't fun. If he reads those comments, he immediately prioritizes it to fix it so it is fun.

 

3.) Never Back Down

Always aim to amaze

Here he talks about realizing the value of what customers expect for their money and reiterates that their are dozens of other companies they could choose to spend that money with. Therefore, you should always strive to exceed what you deliver compared to your competition otherwise your players (and your revenue) will walk.

 

4.) Don't Forget Your Roots

It's what fans crave

This was his last point, do not forget that your customers make you who you are - not you. He reiterates that without your customers there would be no you. That the goal of running an MMO is to always strive to keep your customers because the growth in MMOs doesn't come from new features or expansions, but from good word of mouth from existing customers. He reminds everyone that MMOs are about community, and strong communities will grow games while toxic or weak ones (like they had with the original FFXIV online) will kill you.

 

Now this is from a guy who successfully turned a failing MMO into the second biggest on the market. Can you see how many of those eight points BW violated - especially with the GC System.

 

 

Such a poignant post highlighting a true visionary in the world of MMO Development. What Yoshida-San and his guys did with FF14 is really the crowning achievement of MMO success. They took a quite literally a DOA MMO took it OFFLINE for a year, and then relaunched it to be the second biggest MMO out there. That is nothing short of amazing and any developer who doesn't look to Yoshida-San for guidance is a fool.

[Pay for subscription with credits]

I cannot get over how there are so many people who do not know what this post is talking about.

 

 

Pretty much every other MMO out there has a system in place like the OP talked about. This isn't something new or revolutionary, it just means SWTOR is, as always, late to the party.

 

The system is a good system when done correctly. I, personally, prefer WoW's way of doing it because the token itself isn't actually in game and you do it through a locked marketplace (Though price is not a negotiable). Sony (Daybreak now) has it where the item is actually in game, which is fine, except items start being sold not for actual game currency but for the token instead, and the token's rule the marketplace not in game currency.

 

Either way though, the system works. It lets people pay for the subs by playing the game and it combats the gold sellers with a more legit way of buying/selling gold.

 

SWTOR should have done it a year ago.

[Republic population here vs Shadowlands?]

All my characters are stuck on POT5, and frankly the pub population over there is pretty much non existent.

 

So I am trying to decide where to go, whether I should just transfers to Harbinger and deal with server outages and downtimes or should I go with one of the next 2 servers.

 

 

Is JC considered the most populated Pub server after Harbinger? I am mostly interested in PVE, though I do very casual pvp just to level characters and such.

[Best ISP for swtor?]

Most ISP's have a Natural and intended monopoly on their area.

 

That being said you are in Chicago so I imagine you have more choices than the vast majority of people in the U.S. Unfortunately most of the big carriers don't operate in the same place and more unfortunately those big carriers almost always have the highest speeds of internet available.

 

There may be some local Chicago place that can get close or match Comcast's speeds that you could look into, but other than that I would imagine your going to be out of luck.

 

Consider yourself lucky, where I live you can get Time Warner Cable 30mbs for 85 dollars a month - or you can get AT&T 3mb for 40 bucks a month (with a 50 gb data cap) and if those 2 don't work for you then you just don't have internet.

 

 

Most importantly make sure you check data caps. IF you are a heavy internet user (Netflix and such) you can VERY easily hit data caps. I cut the cable and we watch Netflix a lot and I use between 500-600gbs of data a month - With AT&T's 50gb data cap I would be completely screwed.

 

Thankfully Time Warner Cable does not have data caps or I would be in big trouble. I am very scared for the day that they do get data caps.

[Episode VII NOT based on George Lucas's vision]

Lucas sold everything to Disney - he has 0 say over Star Wars now and Disney can do anything they want. That is how buyouts work.

 

I think this latest story is just confirmation that Disney is not asking George much of anything about Star Wars now.

[Mace Windu vs Darth Vader]

Maybe Im crazy, but I thought it was pretty obvious that, in the movie (The only canon thing anymore) that Sidious let Windu beat him. Sure it was a risk on Sidious part, but he knew the prophecy and he knew Anakin would turn and help him, but yea, I sure seemed pretty obvious that Sidious purposefully let Windu beat him. He needed to be hurt to prove to the Senate that the Jedi attacked him and he needed Anakin to willfully give himself to the dark side, by letting WIndu beat him he accomplished both.

 

If he fought Windu as hard as he fought Yoda, Windu woulda lost pretty badly imo - Heck, once Sid finally DID unleash his full power he dang near destroyed the guy in half a second.

[Could we get a yellow post on whether BW sees gearing as a problem for 12x time?]

I level for a while then do 5-6 pvp matches and turn the warzone comms into Planetary comms and buy gear that way.

[SWG players, give up the ghost.]

Oh I agree. The NGE is what doomed SOE. That's when Lucas Arts began looking for a new partner.

 

 

FOr someone who played SWG you don't seem to know much about the NGE update.

 

Go read the Smed articles on it - SoE created the game but pretty much everything had to go "ok'd" through LucasArts. When WoW launched and was such a huge success LA went to SoE and demanded they make the game "More like WoW" to capture some of the market share. LA wanted the class base system to be like WoW and all that junk.

 

The NGE was forced on SoE by LA - Smed has said so much in interviews/articles and he still considers it one of the biggest blunders that SoE ever did.

[Conquer and prestige points, Musco we must have some yellow.]

I see what your saying about how conquest points favor large guilds. On POT5 I am in the biggest guild on the server and we frequently have 70+ on every night. We are trouncing everyone below us by over 2 million conquest points and there is no possible way they could ever come close to beating us. We just have so many people that they could never get close. Even the uber pvp guilds are getting stomped into the ground by our superior numbers. So my mass invite guild is destroying the hardcore pvp/pve guilds at conquest just cause we outnumber 2 or 3 to 1.

 

I also completely agree with your point about how much prestige is given for items. It is completely stupid to go into the top stronghold on the server and it is nothing but the same things just dumped all over the place because that is the most efficient way of getting prestige. I am definitely for the first itme you place an item it is 100 prestige but eveyr other time you place it in that same stronghold the prestige goes down to almost nothing.

[SWG players, give up the ghost.]

Not saying your completely wrong in your post, but comparing sub numbers between SWG and SWTOR is not very relevant - It was a different time and the market was much smaller at that time - SWG had a respectable amount of subs for its time just like SWTOR has a respectable number right now.

[Is there any server that is stable?]

I take it you were not here at launch...or visited Ilum during the early months.

 

I was, actually - and were not talking about launch were talking about August 2014...

[Is there any server that is stable?]

I would luv to play without crashing. I've tried The Shadowlands, Begeren Colony, Jung Ma and The Ebon Hawk, and they all crash. Are any of the others stable? How about the EU servers?

 

All the servers are stable - if you are crashing it is either not related to server stability (IE your computer) or it is your broadband.

 

I am not one to spout that answer, but truthfully, the servers are fine - it is on your end.

[Is it possible to max Thorn reputation during Rakghoul event]

assuming it lasts a week you will need 5 alts doing every daily every day to go from 0 to Max faction before the end of the event.

[Extremely slow download from .com]

Even with a retail copy you will have a huge amount of patches to download - it wouldn't be worth you time and would probably end up taking longer than the download when you factor in driving to a store and installation.

 

Sucks that it is going so slow, but my suggestion is to either just leave it running and go do some other things for a few hours or just do it overnight.

[One more thing for my wishlist]

FF14 has this ability and it is really awesome. I like being able to hit it and not know what It is going to pick...furthermore you get use of all your mounts without having to have 18 hotkeys for different ones.

[Low fps on my PC.]

I run SWTOR under Windows 7 64-bit at 2560x1440 and everything but bloom, on one of four monitors connected to my home built system that includes a GTX 760, a Core i5-3570K at 3.4GHz, 8GB of memory, and a 250GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD. I have 150 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up cable internet and see ping times around 30ms. Generally, performance is fine, and any lag seems more attributable to the servers than my local system.

 

I do turn off the eye candy in some ops, but that is mainly to make it easier to see ground effects.

 

Graphical Lag =/= as Server Lag

 

That's a pretty decent computer but I have a hard time believing you get anywhere close to 60fps at that resolution while in an ops or on fleet - That computer is about upper-mid range by today's standards.

 

I bet if you turn on you FPS you hover between 35-45 and dip as low as the 20's during heavy action - especially at that resolution - a 760 is not the most amazing card and especially at that high of a resolution

 

That's the problem with lag it is so subjective. Some people, like myself, that anything under a constant 60fps is considered lag but others can get 40 or even 30fps and think that is perfectly ok.

 

Truth be told anytime a computer drops below 60fps it lags, no matter how slight or how little the user perceives it, any drop below 60fps will create some lag to the human eye and depending on how sensitive you are some people can even see lag up to around 120fps (over that and its pretty dang hard to perceive any lag)

[Instead of adding another starfighter addon give us PODRACING!]

UNLESS the gambling involves Real WORLD Currency then it would up the ESRB. But as long as it would involve In-Game Currency then the ESRB would not and does not change at all.

 

 

Actually that isn't true and was the problem - it was ANY form of currency exchange in-game or out of game.

 

Now, I am not saying that Blizzard wasn't lying about it, but this was one of the reasons they gave for not being able to add any form of gambling to WoW - you couldn't bet any sort of money and even betting in-game money counted as gambling to the ESRB - You could have it if it was you betting against the computer but when you started betting with other people that is when there was a problem.

[Low fps on my PC.]

No. SWTOR doesn't require a bleeding edge gaming video card. For $200, you can get a AMD 270X, and that is more than enough to give really good performance in SWTOR for single-display gaming.

 

There is no reason to require a $300 video card.

 

The guy is complaining about low FPS - if he wants to maintain a High FPS with good graphics settings (Which if he is willing to buy a new computer to obtain that then I can only assume he is) then getting a good video card is very important.

 

My 780 TI cannot run this game and maintain 60fps constantly at max settings and it is just about the best gaming video card that money can buy - When there are 10+ people on the screen it can easily drop into the 30's.

 

For OP:

 

If you can save for a 770 go for that, if not the 760 is not a horrible card for its price, but the X60 series is Nvidia's budget line.

 

The 760 is on par with the 670 of previous gen and only about 3 steps up from your 560 - not a terrible card and you will see some increase over your previous card, but you won't see as much as you might expect to.

 

The thing is no matter what graphics card you get (Unless you go crazy and get a 290X2 or something) you are not actually going to see "HUGE" gains in FPS. A 600 series to a 700 series Nvidia sees large gains, but the 500 series of Nvidia cards were the last video cards to have an on board processor meaning that they performed at a much better rate than new video cards do. Upgrading from a 580 GTX to a 780 TI was a gain for me but in most games it wasnt more than 20-30fps - while that is significant in many ways it also isn't insanely huge either.

 

If you wanted, you could upgrade your processor, MB, and RAM (This is something you need to do - all 3 of your systems are very very outdated - I had a similar computer to yours but it was so many years ago I dont even remember 5+ I would imagine).

 

If you upgrade your CPU/RAM/MB your bottleneck will definitely become your GPU, but that 560 could hold you over till you had enough money to upgrade to a 770 or even 780. With that I5, 8gigs of 1600+ RAM, and a 770 you will probably get around 50FPS on max with it dipping into the 30's when alot of people are around.

[Leveling Gear Question]

Questing will always keep you in adequate gear from 1-50 - Flashpoints will give you gear that is good, but unless your a tank getting a flashpoint these days other than KDY is dang near impossible (depends on server I guess).

 

I have been leveling a gunslinger slowly for the last couple of weeks and every second I am online I have been queued for a regular flashpoint and in all that time I have never had one pop. People just don't do the normal flashpoints anymore and the only way I ever get into one is if I'm on my tank (even then it can take a while). I did get into a Mando raiders one time after waiting about 5 hours and as soon as we got in the tank quit...fun times.

 

Also, to supplement your gear with really good gear you should run the PvP daily every single day as well as the weekly - pvp gives decent enough exp but doing pvp and questing gives PvP Commendations taht you can turn into planetary commendations that you can then buy some really nice gear from the planet vendors.

 

That is how I keep me and my companion in the best gear possible - I just use pvp Comms to get Planetary coms which lets me deck out my guys at whatever I want.

[Instead of adding another starfighter addon give us PODRACING!]

This is Star Wars.

 

Why can't I play Pazaak or Dejarik anywhere?!

 

I can see them adding these if it is done in a single player environment but Blizzard one time said why they could never add games like poker to the world and it was because if you add those games in the game world and then let players play each other it becomes actual gambling and the ESRB would up the rating from Teen to Mature and they don't want that.

 

which I always found weird cause you can drink in these games, but I guess the ESRB will only let so much non-teen stuff in a game before throwing it to Mature.

 

That is the big problem with things like this. They can add these things in so long as the players cannot actually bet with each other over the outcomes and if you can't bet credits on Pazaak or Swoop Racing or whatever then what is the point?

[Low fps on my PC.]

What do you think about Intel Core i5 4670K ?

 

4th Gen I5 is good (Which is what you asked about) - That is what I would recommend for people who want to game well but are not concerned with being cutting edge.

 

The only way your gonna get much better is upping to an I7 which really isn't needed for gaming right now and especially not for SWTOR.

 

Just, whatever you do, don't skimp on the graphics card. So many people build new pc's with I7's and everything then buy a budget 200 dollar graphics card...

 

If you are not prepared to spend at least 300 dollars on a graphics card then my suggestion is to just save a little more till you can.