I have the 15 inch version of the same laptop. SWTOR pretty much destroyed my video card due to the heat though thankfully HP replaced the motherboard free of charge. Are HP laptops the issue or is it SWTOR? Probably a little of both. FWIW, I have played WoW, LOTRO, and Secret World in the last year and none of them seemed to generate the same level of heat. Then again HP isn't known for quality as much as price/support. One other thing you should get used to is being the last into an instance. I only have 4Gigs of memory but I'm pretty sure SWTOR is a 32 bit game so it can't take advantage of your 6Gigs. I think the game really relies on your video card and the integrated cards on the HPs can't compete with the separate cards on a desktop. You can play the game but I recommend an external cooling solution to prolong your laptop's life. You can find something for around $20 online and after my experience I highly recommend it. --- Edit - Since you asked, I usually run the game on the lowest settings due to lag issues. Not sure if it is SWTOR or the laptop but my 5 year old desktop with a Nvidia 8800 GTS runs the game smoother. I've never tried it but I don't think you'd get a good experience running the game at much higher than the lowest setting especially if you plan to PVP.

This x1000. I'm sure the Bioware higher ups provided cover due to their history of success but once the sub's started to drop in March you know there had to be a meeting with EA and the whole team was called out. Anyone that watched the guild summit show, saw a bunch of people that had no clue what they were doing. Some of the ideas given by guild leaders were MMO 101 and you could tell by the responses these were new ideas to the game designers. Once I saw that meeting it was obvious there was going to be a bloodbath. These people took $200 million with the best intellectual property in the genre and produced an MMO that would have had less than 15% retention (subscribers/game purchases) by the end of the year if not for F2P. Drastic action was needed to fix their mistakes and all the designers had to go. The sad thing is if they'd followed Blizzard's example and put highly respected players from other MMOs like WoW did with Everquest's Jeff Kaplan and Alex Afrasiabi and actually listened to their input, most of this was avoidable and they'd all have jobs.

This is actually great news for subscribers once the system is in place. Now that the game is free from 1-49 they have no incentive to make it better. All their development will be to keep us subscribing which means more flashpoints, pvp, operations, and gear. They will have another team that will work on fluff items for the 1-49 crowd. This is actually good news assuming EA/Bioware is actually going to follow through with their stated plans. That is where I have an issue is I don't trust them anymore and may unsub until we see actual new content.

The biggest failing of Bioware was not understanding the payback of the money they were investing. Class Stories are nice but ate up a large part of their development money.available cash. When you consider a majority of people never make it to max level and those that do only make it there with 1-2 toons, it is obvious that 8 class stories is a huge waste of money as most people won't see most of the content. What they should have done from the beginning is concentrate on things that everyone will enjoy at a low level like real space battles, a worthwhile crafting system, a usable GTN, and a better travel system. It's too late for that but under a free to play system you can bet that any any future development will have expected revenues attached. That most likely means that we will only see additional class stories during an expansion as they are too expensive to justify in a free to play system.

Dual spec would have a lot as most classes have options to take another role. One big different people forget between WoW and SWTOR is the 5 man vs 4 man group. I personally like the 4 man size better but for dps in SWTOR you will need 50% more tanks/healers queueing to handle the same number of DPS (3:1:1 ratio vs 2:1:1) I think the loot rules will make tanks/healers less available pretty soon too. I like the fact in SWTOR that it is more likely I can get usable loot but once I get my full set of Rakata, I'm only doing my daily on my healer. In Vanilla WoW I think I ran UBRS twenty times until I got my chestpiece to drop. I'm not sure players will put up with that anymore though.

I'm loving the LFG. I probably ran 3 flashpoints before 1.3 and i've done at least 40 since then. If they had this at lanuch the game would have 50% more people but that's water under the bridge. The only change I'd like is an NPC in the fleet/Ilum that gives you the option to return where you were questing. Right now you need to choose between questing and running flashpoints and it is limiting people from running them (especially while leveling).

People are getting a little ridiculous about their names. I've used my screenname as my main character going back to Pen and Paper / Ulitma / and Neverwinter nights. It isn't hard to create a new name. I've gone by Jebeï or Jebein to accomodate it when someone else has my name. If you are a big roleplayer, then tell the people you roleplay your nickname (Jebei in my case). I'm never happy with losing a name but quitting over it is silly. There are many other reasons in the game worth quitting but they are slowly addressing them (I'm loving LFG). I do like someone's suggestion of allowing the people who have stranded toons the option to transfer to any server once the merges are done. It only seems fair for the people who have no place to go (I toons that can't transfer because I've got 8 on the destination already).

I think one of the reasons they are holding this announcement is for their quarterly financial conference call where it will get the most attention from stockholders. Announcing additional sources of revenue are good to hear at these things. In the meantime the servers settle and they will be able to estimate how many players they will have longterm. I'm most interested in the subscriber number as I think it may shock a few how low the number has gotten (unless they include the level 1-15 that are playing for free). It is still good to release any good news they can release at that time to keep their stock from sliding further.

Other games allow you to datamine the items in the game so it populates databases like Torhead or Mr Robot. Right now these places have information but it can't be counted on to be accurate. These are the types of things that keep people involved in the game. For instance, I am trying to change the look of my operative and am looking for the different types of modifiable weapons. Right now we rely on rumors and screen shots on forums. Torhead has a 3d model viewer but it isn't always accurate. Even then the database if full of items that aren't available and if they are, we have no idea where to get them. This isn't something every customer would be interested in but these are the types of things that add depth to a game. Ideally a database would have every item in the game, where it can be found, a 3d model of the item, all faction/class limitations, if it can be crafted and a link to a schematic, and a model group so each item could be linked to other similar looking items with different skins. I really think you are underestimating the need for something like this and if you just provide accurate data, there are people that will do the rest for free.

It's obvious they have caved to the mass of PVPers that are upset about operative'ss burst/stunlock ability in PVP. Since that doesn't work in most boss battles the nerfs to burst have made the class useless in PVE. The answer is pretty easy as they need to give ops a stacking debuff which once it is max'ed out increases dps so that boss fights are similar to other classes. A secondary issue is PVE survivability as other melee classes wear heavy armor and have self heals so their time on target is increased. The game designers don't seem to recognize the disadvantage op's have in this area. Again this could be helped by giving ops a self heal tied to debuffs that would be almost impossible to achieve in pvp. I really think the answer is obvious is they should make changes so that concealment is viable only in PVE and lethality only viable in PVE. As currently designed, Ops are dead in PVE. I'm currently specced heals and have run at least 50 flashpoints since the LFG went live. In that time I've healed groups made up entirely of other classes not one dps operative. I will repeat that ... out of the 150 people I've healed (50 groups x 3 other members) not one of them was a dps op. It's ridiculous they haven't seen this and is really unfair to unknowing people that level as an operative only to find out when they get to endgame that no one wants them unless they heal. It's really a sad state and something that has to be addressed.

I like this one. http://www.torhead.com/item/e9LB1P1/v-31-fusion-blaster-rifle#modelviewer It drops from HK-47 in the Foundry and is the gun he uses in that fight. It seems like something a secret operative would use instead of some of the larger models. The only thing I'd like to see is something similar with a folding stock. I really like the green the previous poster listed as that seems about perfect.

Then perhaps we should give our money to people that know what they are doing.

Mini games shoud have some sort of point. Space combat is currently set up as pass/fail. It desparately needs a personal best score system and a server leaderboard which wouldn't be hard to implement at all. Right now all I feel after running a space missiion is 'yay ... more tokens!' It is things like that which make me wonder if the designers understand why we play games and what makes them fun.

Legacy is so pre-1.2. Allies LFG is the new hotness.

It will happen just after the dance studio is put into WoW.