It doesn't scale "per player". With 2 players it is the same difficulty as 1 player. It scales up when you add the 3rd player, and it appears to scale up by increasing the adds that spawn when you activate the terminals on the ledges from normal mobs to strong mobs. There is also one AoE fired per player, which can sometimes make it impossible to get out of the AoE blast if the only path out of the AoE that targeted you is to run into the AoE that targeted one of your team mates. But that is manageable once you get used to it, and once you realize the AoE's are doing most of the damage. Important thing in a group is to 1) don't fight the adds up on the ledges. with more than one player it'll be almost impossible to avoid the AoEs if you stay up there once multiple AoEs are firing. lure the adds to the ground floor where there is more maneuverability. 2) activate the terminals on the ground floor when the adds come down to soften them up.

we worked out a plan for doing it in a group of 3 when we came back to it that worked. healer and DPS stayed on the ground floor near the turret terminals while the tank ran up, activated the terminals on the ledges and lured the adds down to the ground floor. then activated the terminals on the ground floor so those turrets would soften up the adds as they came down. rinse/repeat on that sequence was able to counter the fact that all the adds appear to be strongs. it was still some work, but we finished it with a group of 3 on the first try once we worked out that plan. that and making sure everyone understood: do not get caught in those AoEs!!! They do most of the damage.

does anyone have any suggestions about how to handle those adds up on the ledges in a group of three. All those who have made any suggestions so far are talking about doing it solo, and solo....the adds are so weak you can ignore them.

I did it solo with my first toon on the first try without much difficulty. It was hard, but easy to take out the adds. The adds are the issue though in a group. I did it a second time today (or tried to) with a group of three, and the adds were so strong that they were decimating us. When they are strong, the explosions from the AoEs don't really impact them, and with a group of three there are more AoEs to avoid. We have so far not been able to manage the adds and avoid the multiple AoEs simultaneously when doing it in a group of three. It does scale with group size but not linearly.... it is an order of magnitude more difficult with a group of three.

^^^ this. i was annoyed at first, but then I realized after playing for a while that the only real loading screen is the one from ship to planet. Even when you are in the hanger or (on the planets that have them) in the orbital station, you are effectively already in the main planet zones and all the other screens you see along the way load almost instantly and don't really count as a full load screens.

Yeah I know what rhetoric is, in your case, it is exagerating the facts to make your argument appear stronger than it is. All i ever said was this: the cost of the speeder for a given level is about equal to the amount of money you earn naturally from a couple levels of regular play at around that level, if you just spend money on nothing but your skill training. You've insulted me twice in response making unrelated points about ecomonics and rhetorics. Since that has zero relevance to this discussion, I will ignore it now. My original statement is still correct.

I'm not assuming any such thing. Based on your reply it sounds like the truth is you were engaging in hyperbole in the statement i quoted and didn't actually mean what you said. You specifically said it took ALL the money that the player earned prior to level 25 to buy the level 25 speeder training. I was replying specifically to that statement. which I still maintain is obviously false. Apparently you didn't mean what you said, in which case all I can say is I was replying to what you said. Not to anything else.

No it isn't. Its a false statement. If you don't spend money on anything, for a level or two and just do quests and sell, you will earn enough money to buy the speeder training that is appropriate for that level range. That is far, far less than your claim that it takes ALL. It simply doesn't.

That is why. The cost of going out on missions scales with level. If you let your mission skills go above your level, and keep dumping money into them, you will be spending money faster than you are making it. As far as I can tell though, if you keep your crew skills balanced with your level and stop sending them out on missions once the mats they are collecting is for crafting things that are too high level for you to use, you will have more than enough money for everything. As you discovered yourself, as soon as you stopped spending on mission skills.

I think it does depend. Leveling solo as a BH healer is a little rough in the mid levels because Mako, as awesome as she is, is also a healer. She's not all that useful if you go with a healing spec yourself. Get's easier once you start unlocking the other companions. Though the BH doesn't get a proper tank healer till level ~40. More generally, how is this any different than other MMOs? In every MMO, on average, it is always the healers, and then the tanks that are harder to find. (note that I said on average).

Nice hyperbole on your part too.. :p

Other MMOs have dynamically cropped models when one model over laps with another one? No they haven't.

But the graphics for when it shoots are very slow. When does it really shoot? When it draws the graphic, or half a second before, or half a second after? When I was manning the turret i was definitely seeing that things dying didn't always seem to correlate to when the bullets were being drawn on the screen. I would also at some angles of rotation the cannon didn't seem to be firing at all (no graphics drawn for the shots) even though I think things in front of the line of fire were still dying. I was fine with it, but I'm sure it drives some players nuts.

I thought about that in the first PUG I did this with, but I was the healer, and the non-healers were the ones that weren't able to hit anything with the cannons. Me getting off the cannon was like having 2 people manning the cannons even though there were 4 in the group. Have no idea if it was lag or something else that was preventing the other player from hitting anything. The interface for those cannons, as I mentioned earlier, is not lag tolerant.

Of course. Profit is dollars_per_sale*number_of_sales - cost_of_doing_business. And number_of_sales is a function of dollars_per_sale. If you plot the final profit as a function of the amount you charge for it, it will always be some form of bell shaped curve (maybe not a bell, curve, but something you can convert to a bell curve with an appropriate transformation of the x-axis ), and whether profit is increasing as you drop the price is going to depend on which side of hump you are on. This doesn't really weigh directly into my argument. Validation is expensive. It is very expensive because it requires a huge amount of man hours to get done. For complex software, more man hours are spent on validation and debug than on development. This is likely true across the entire software industry. That is my main point. The factor I neglected to mention that I probably should have is time-to-market. In the gaming industry this is very important. In an industry where expectations on the level of content are increasing rapidly, sales will directly translate to when the game is released as well. Sure, I can spend more man hours debugging and validating for another year, and my game will be better a year from now than it is today in terms of the number of bugs. But in terms of the quality of the graphics and the depth of content? It will be a year behind. And that will reduce my sales by a huge amount. that point, which I forgot to mention before, is the one where the gas station analogy breaks down. Gas is a basic commodity. Gas today is no different than Gas that is a year old. Not so with software.

The only flaw with your reasoning is your assumption that you are paying premium prices for software as complex as these modern games are at a ~$60 price tag. Compare, for example, to that part of the software industry where they really do considerably more testing and validation before releasing something and do specifically make much stronger guarantees on the quality of the code. Do you know how much that software costs? Hundreds of dollars per license, frequently thousands. In the larger software world <$100 for something as complex as a modern game is, is dirt cheap. So the tradeoff the gaming community actually needs to make is: are they willing to lower their standards on game complexity and depth of content in order to get games with fewer bugs at the current price point? Because honestly, the only way game companies could achieve the level of quality you are saying they should target at their current price points is to reduce the amount they spend on content development and instead invest that money in more extensive debugging and validation.

there are other minor issues to contend with even if you have a group of like minded players willing to take the time to die a few times while they piece together the mechanics. the rate of the cannon fire is rather slow, and it is likely if there is any amount of lag at all, that the time you see the cannon fire and the time it actually did fire are not in line with each other. normally, in an mmo, you adapt to the lag because you can see how the time you pressed the key translates to the time the event occured on the screen. But with this, since you have no control at all over when it is suppossed to fire, its impossible for you to gauge the lag and adapt. i also noticed that at some angles of rotation the cannon simply doesn't draw any fire graphics at all. and there is no way to tell if it is firing and just not drawing the graphic for the shot, or it it really isn't firing anything. if we had a combat log, that would at least provide some of the missing feedback there, but we don't.

completely off topic but this recent talk of a bethseda mmo is curious. bethseda games are a lot of fun, and a fallout mmo sounds like something that could be pretty cool. but every bethseda single player game has included a skill system that allows one to very easily min-max their character (often without even trying all that hard) to the point where all content becomes trivial because your character ends up so over-powered. it would be really interesting to see if bethseda is capable of creating a balanced MMO given they way they design their single player games. not saying they can't do it....but the balance requirements of a massively multiplayer game don't seem to be something bethseda is historically very good at.

the way I view it is that part of the challenge of the game is knowing the size of your AoE's and learning to gauge distance when you are centering them.

It is an issue for any AoE where the size of the burst is not the shape of the symbol that is projected on the floor. It takes some getting used to, but I don't really see it as a problem. The only issue I see is that the shape of that targetting thing creates the false impression to the user that it is showing you the area of effect, and if you don't know any better, that is what you'll assume. But once you figure that out, it isn't really a problem.

I understand what you are saying, but if you think it isn't that hard to implement a feature where you dynamically crop the the mask's model to the boundaries of the hood based on whether or not the hood is being worn then you clearly don't now much about how computers render graphics. That would require going in and creating two different models for every mask ahead of time and then testing them all against the various hood graphics and making sure the cropped model works correctly. Changing the shape of the model at run-time is not something the engine can likely do. It is certainly possible to create extra mask models and then test them all, and it would be cool if they did it. Just saying, it is not as easy as you think it is.

there is no such thing as a "partial" bug.

i'm surprised at the people who say use the right mouse button to turn. that is the first thing I did, and I can assure you that as soon as i pressed the right mouse button the turret immediately dismounted me every time. the only keys I was allowed to press were A and D. Any other sequence of keys or buttons immediately dismounted me. If that aspect of the mini game is working differently for different people it must be bugged too. In any case, as I said. I'm not saying its hard. Its easy, once you know the rules of the mini-game. My point is that the only challenge of that opening fight at all is to figure out the rules of the mini game. I don't find that fun. Tell me the rules, and I'll use them to defeat challenges in game. Changing the rules of the game on me without telling me and then making the challenge be that I now have to figure out the new UI rules... no thanks.

I agree that is shouldn't have an effect on that if implemented as expected. But could the ability queue have some unintended side effect that causes things which you expect to be instantaneous to take longer only when the ability queue is enabled? Well, yeah, it very well could. Not saying it does... but assuming it doesn't based on how you think the ability queue is supposed to work would not be wise.

Actually that isn't what I said at all. When I say that it is poor game design to throw the player into a minigame which has no instructions in which the basic game mechanics are the exact opposite of everything the player has been doing for the last 40 level without even giving the player a single hint that the game mechanics he will be required to use to play this mini-game are completely different I am saying the implementation of this instance is just bad game design. Saying that is NOT the same thing as saying "everything must be the same and not innovative". You are reducing my argument to something I didn't ever say. But since I never said what you said I said, I'll dismiss it. The whole idea of an instance that works in a unique way could be innovative, but the implementation of this one is so bad and counter intuitive that it isn't possible for it to be so.