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Hello, I'm a level 50 Sith Jugg on Kath Hound and I've noticed most of my time in this game has been spent in front of a loading screen. It sickens me. In WoW I didn't have to deal with a loading screen very often, in most MMOs you see a loading screen very rarely.
This, I'm sorry to say, is poor design.
As a level 50, I basically don't do much but sit on Ilum after I'm done with my dailies and weeklies and such. Because of this I'd like to be able to offer aid to the lower levels in my guild or my lower leveled friends, but there's one problem. The idea of going through 3 to 5 loading screens just to see my friends scares the ever living crap out of me.
It also supremely pisses me off during Flashpoints and Operations.
In WoW and most other MMO's the only wait time I had was long flight paths, which I bet were much faster in comparison to the system in this game.
Now, I'm not the kind of guy to just complain about something and not propose a way to possibly fix it. I enjoy the game and I want to be able to keep playing, but please for the love of all things great, fix the loading screen spam.
Now before I suggest my ideas on how to fix said problem I'm going to assume things about your code, which I have to assume, because reverse engineering it is a crime, and I have no legal way to access said code.
I'm going to assume that the programmers are using a Stack-Allocator. If they are using a Pool-Allocator, it works just the same.
I'm also going to assume that they are somewhat under their memory budget, or atleast have the ability to work within the budget.
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Now: Problem 1, loading screens between planets.
So going between planets there are atleast 2 loading screens, one to get to your ship and another to get off.
I think I can shorten it down to one loading screen.
The problem with this design is that essentially the most used scene is being removed from memory and reloaded into memory. It creates a useless "Buffer" between planets. (Yes, it's useless, I'd rather have a taxi on every planet to take me to any other planet then have my own ship at this point.)
Now, on logging in with a character, I'm assuming important variables about that character are being removed from the servers and loaded into the Stack-allocator. I suggest take it a bit further. When the variable stating a characters class is loaded into memory, load the variables for the character's ship into memory as well (as many as one can within the budget). Now when the character wants to change planets, the only thing that has to change is the skybox ideally, a very short computation in comparison to the load.
If you cannot load all the varaibles needed, atleast you can shorten the load considerably.
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Problem 2: Flash Points and Ops.
Ok, the other problem was a forgivable mistake, but this has no sense of logic what-so-ever.
When the player dies in a Flashpoint of Operation, you've actually told the computer to UNLOAD the WHOLE flashpoint or Op, and LOAD a map the player may be on for a fraction of a freaking second. Unless Bioware, you've assumed that whenever a player dies ONCE in a flashpoint or Ops they're going to quit it, this is the most stupid design I've ever seen. I'm sorry, it is. 9 times out of 10, the player is just going to walk BACK into the freaking flashpoint, and then you have to unload the previous map nad reload the map they were just in! Did not one of programmers have a problem with this? Not one of your software engineers? Did they not say "This is an inefficient use of memory", because I'm pretty sure something most programmers get in the habit of doing is to make sure they keep the memory loaded for as long as they can.
Now, I know you have "check points" programmed into your flashpoints, now uhm, USE THEM. You do not have to boot us out of the instance! Just let us Res at the freaking check point. If only medical droids are able to res people in the same map, I have an idea. Load a medical droid at each check point, now there should be a "visable" variable, turn that sucker off. Congratulations, check point.
If you actually need every player to leave before resetting bosses and mobs, you could just reset said variables after they've left a distance of x from their starting position.
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Sorry for the ranting, I did not mean to insult your programmers or designers, they are problably smarter and more talented then me, but as a pissed off user, who knows how a bit about how games tick, I seriously think someone took a bad design idea and ran with it somewher down the line.
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=45866 anyone actually read this? "People who claim the armor crafts are useless simply do not understand them, or do not like the way they work. Usually it's the former, but for the latter, it's usually people who think "Useless" means "Not necessary because there are other ways to achieve similar results." The fact of the matter is that with armor crafts, you can make armor competitive and sometimes better than you can find elsewhere. However, the flip side is that you can achieve similar results without an armor crafting skill."