Well i assume something is going to change regarding this issue since Georg Zoeller said at the guild summit that tanks are not going to get away with using dps gear and tank specs when 1.2 comes out and we're doing rated warzones. As of right now, he also said that by using dps gear tanks are just giving away the option to mitigate a big portion of the damage the two current top damage specs do, sentinels/marauders and gunslingers/snipers. Those were his words, anyone who watched the livestream saw it, i know i did because he was asked about this precise issue. I would love to be able to deal decent damage as a tank specced character in tank gear right now, but we know it's not the best option for now, wether they intend to change this or not is still not clear, anyway, so for now i'm just doing what every other tank does, i have a tank set with dps mods and i saved the tank mods in my bank, just in case... In small battles i think wearing dps gear as a tank is far superior right now because we can still do some meaningful damage while not being as high as that of a dps class, and we can still guard and do our job as tanks. For big scale battles like Ilum ops, using high endurance gear and mods with endurance stim is better i believe, since the damage taken there is a lot higher and our job is to push forward while our group selects targets and destroys them.

Well if you call "working Ilum" to a 10 FPS lagfest of 20 rep vs 120 Imps yes, i guess it's working. I just believe i barely see this issue because we are very underpopulated on Ilum, so i never get to kill the same imperial twice, most of the time, as i said, i've still suffered the problem ocassionally, but i just don't camp inside my base where the same group of imperials are allways waiting outside. Still waiting for official responses anyway, i want to know if this is intended or not, just like anyone else, it could become a serious problem, no doubt.

I've had no problems with this new patch's "measures" to avoind exploiting on Ilum. I raid with a small gruop of 5-8 people and we've done our dailies in 15 minutes these two last days, today i finished weekly aswell in not more than 1.5 hours. I guess this new system is there to avoid the use of stupid and dumb tactics like staying at your base semi-AFK just buffing random players and AoEing, expecting to get credit for eveything else other people do : ) I only had no credit for my kills when we encountered the same players we killed like a few minutes ago and i guess there must be a hidden timer in place where if you kill the same player twice in a row the second time you don't get credit. That's fine, since i just love moving around Ilum looking for random groups of Imperials with a couple friends, as it should be. Camping bases for 4 hours is stupid, the sooner people realize, the better. Also, this problem might affect the overpopulated faction the most but that's entirely their own fault, they should just stop trying to base camp and move around the whole Ilum map capturing points, it's a big zone, just use it...it's no use complaining about something you're not doing right in the first place and considering Ilum still has far more worse issues (like lag/FPS) this "bug" is just a trivial thing. Anyways, i don't know if BW has said something regarding this issue, this is just my experience since the new patch regarding this "bug".

Don't want to say you didn't put enough time and effort into putting all this together, it's cool some people want to help but...unless you're one of those players affected by absurdly low FPS with a good machine (like 10-30 FPS all the time everywhere), most of these fixes posted here won't solve the evident flaws and problems inherent to SWTOR's engine or the way it's been built and tweaked for this game. My machine is capable of running the game at 80+ FPS with everything high, AA included except when some sort of "mass" interaction among players, specially PvP-wise, happens in the game, i.e. on Ilum ops where 20+ people are fighting eachother...the moment i see the big bulk of people FPS drop from 60+ to 9-10 all the time, this is what's mainly happening to most of the people. There're other issues related to user error and badly configured PCs, mostly regarding to OS power settings and some GPUs not operating at load clocks when the game is running, but that's just either a problem with certain driver/GPU combinations or the user in question didn't bother to adjust his power management options in windows and his system is saving energy when playing SWTOR, hence the low CPU, GPU clocks and FPS on some high end machines. Then, for people like me, who don't have any power settings problems and are able to measure ingame CPU/GPU clocks and usage...we clearly see the game uses 90%+ GPU and around 50% CPU on non crowded areas and starts decreasing constantly where more people join and stay close to your character, ending with an usage of 30% GPU and almost the same CPU usage...that's not caused by any power setting uncorrectly configured, since CPU and GPU clocks stay at full, all these can be easily monitored with simple free software (comes with most GPUs these days). So, yeah, obviously setting nvidia options to use optimizations and stuff for the lowest possible quality will improve FPS...that won't solve the problem anyway since most of the problems described on the Horrid FPS thread have nothing to do with which level of quality you have the game set on or your GPU for that matter. Oh and by the way, forcing AA levels with nvidia control panel to enhance or override application settings will do nothing for SWTOR, so if you have AA set to off ingame, it will do nothing, you will see the game with no AA, and if you are using ingame AA option to high (low does nothing at this moment xD), it will also do nothing, the AA you will see is the one the game is doing, not your nvidia control panel one (which we all know would be better quality, though). The only way to force AA and tell the game to use nvidia's own AA is with tools like nvidia inspector and using S.T.A.L.K.E.R. profile for AA compatibility mode (DX9), but then you will have visual artifacts with bloom enabled (screen borders will glow when you are close to light sources affected by the bloom setting), but it still works and shows nvidia AA is better quality and has no performance difference from the one the game is using right now, which is a very badly done 2x something, if anything...don't know exactly what it is xD. Regardless...this info you posted is still valuable, thanks for that, but the real problems are still there, mostly.

He says that the republic from SWTOR becomes the Galactic Empire 3000 or so years later when Palpatine becomes emperor. But yeah, empire's fleet is a bit more modern looking and all, but it doesn't matter to me, both are well done IMO, and yeah...the floor reflects the empire's flags, i noticed it too (can be seen much better if you adjust your graphics drivers to use a negative LOD value, indeed).

Don't see any problem on people working harder than others getting gear at a faster rate, RNG bag system makes it a little hard even if you do a lot of PvP. Otherwise if you prefer free stuff you already have WoW, you ding 85 and you can get a full epic PvP set from last season in 2 nights of PvP, how fun is that.

Errr, tanks in this game are not OP at all as said already by many others, what kind of tanks are you talking about exatly? xD. I play a guardian tank and i don't feel any better than any other class/spec combo, my roles inside a WZ are clear and eventhough i can't outdamage damage dealers i can still support my teammates with some nice extra damage, not the greatest but certainly not poor if played properly. And be aware of this, playing a tank in PvP is not easy to new players and they're not going to be very useful with them unless they understand basic stuff like switching guards to players who are being focused or choose when to do certain type of crowd control or when to save it for other moment, to name a few among many. If played properly it's a very stressful job, nothing overpowered IMHO, an overpowered "anything" is usually something quite easy and simple to use which yields powerful results with minimal effort, tanks in this game are the opposite of that TBH, specially when doing PvP. Besides, in this game 2 of the most important damage sources, tech and force, can't be avoided by defense mechanics as seen and explained by several people across these forums and the game itself, so i don't see how that could make a tank OP in this game. If we could deflect and parry every cast and spell from a sorcerer or bounty hunter then maybe we could be called OP machines of doom, or so, but for now we're just a little bit more durable than a well geared DPS who knows how to use his survival CDs. If you ask good PvP players about how tanks feel in this game they will tell you exactly this...tanks in this game feel a little less resilient than they do in other games and for now that's ok at least for me, if played properly tanks are useful, just like healers and damage dealers. And if you remove tanks from PvP prepare to notice a huge unbalance on almost everything, it's already bad when i join a WZ and i'm the only person guarding others, if you have good tanks healers will have some breathing room there now and then, you can't just remove a key component of the game simply because you believe all the "noobs" are trying to play tanks thinking they're OP, maybe they're just playing them because they represent the most iconic characters from the movies and the whole SW universe, which is logical since this is a video game and they want to have fun.

As a guardian tank i have to pay a lot of attention to my whole team all the time, it's not as simple as it sounds unless you try it and you try to do it properly. I have to do damage as well to get my 8-9+ medals and only then i consider i've done all it could, i'm not just a simple protector who sits there taunting people and dropping guard on random teammates. Because of that, i also appreciate other player's efforts and i usually know when a healer did well and when he/she didn't. If the game was heal intensive usually healers can't afford the luxury of doing damage, eventhough a good player will allways look for the chance to do it and help bringing down that low health enemy standing by. Anyways, some people don't give MVP votes randomly or only based on number of medals/damage/healing/protection, i myself do it based on many factors and things that happened during the whole match, not just by looking at a scoreborad for 5 seconds...like many people seem to do. So yeah, don't lose hope and keep playing, maybe you can do some damage sometimes and get more medals as a healer, maybe not the 300k healing one but it's still valuable effort, and some people appreciate it, i know i do.

I've noticed a bit more smoothness overall with my guardian but i believe riposte is still getting stuck sometimes in the initial animation like it did before, i don't think this patch fixed those kind of problems with the animations, but i think they said they're already working on fixing it for next patches which is cool. As a tank i need riposte used as soon as it procs and sometimes if i you spam the hell out of the key it won't work But if you do it just once it usually does, but needs some fixing to be honest. But yeah, overall, my skills seem to be responding a lot faster than they usually did, i notice this specially when doing PvP, i can actually chain now several different skills and most of the time they will work as intended.

This happens to some of the guardian skills aswell and eventhough we don't know if it's intended or not, it can be avoided or partially solved if you use proper melee strafing, making the enemy you're targeting allways be in front of you. If you try to just sit there and expect the enemy to be still so you can launch your abilities it won't happen most of the time against decent players. As a melee in this game you need to learn very well how to move since some abilities won't work if your enemy is not in front of you, as i said. This happens with my lvl 50 guardian and with my lowbie sentinel aswell, but when i'm strafing and circling around people all my abilities work as is should be unless i'm doing it wrong and not strafing well enough, which happens now and then specially if the FPS become a bit choppy.

As some people have already told here in this thread, never forget to use your protection abilities when pvp'ing, every one of them counts towards your protection score, that includes al sort of taunts and guardian leap, any kind of damage you make your team mates mitigate is protection points for you. I have breach a couple of times the 100k protection mark and i've seen other players doing almost 200k, it's all about paying attention, having good teammates and some healers, so you don't die in 5 seconds while protecting. In any case, just keep doing it, never forget to use all the nice protection abilities even if it means buying your teammates a couple extra seconds of life, it's allways worth it if you do it while using your brain and not just guarding the first person you see, check their healthbars and who's attacking them, and also peel enemy players from them too, you have plenty of stuns to do so.

Whiners =! players, if some people choose to leave when the "free" month is over it's ok, the game's been out for a month so it's still too soon to judge about that. People who spend the whole time complaining and whining are not players IMHO, because if you're complaining you're not playing much since you don't enjoy the game, better unsub ASAP in those cases. Here we're discussing about a very common feature most games have and it's not fully working for now despite being announced in the patch notes as being present in the game as of today's patch, nothing else. It really doesn't matter if some players like it or don't see it as an important feature, when you know something doesn't work, just don't release it, we already had the beta to test if it worked or not.

Some more pics showing the issue, from the rep fleet windows i talked about: High setting using the game option Forced 4x MSAA w/nvidia inspector As you can see, the edges from those windows don't get any AA applied at all, the character model does, and some other areas only noticeable in movement seem to be not affected either. Forcing AA with that tool makes it look much better, like 4x MSAA is supposed to look anyway, and that is not "high" by any means, it's a moderate amount of AA very commonly used these days. And don't mind the small FPS differences, as you see the FOV is not the same since i had to close the game for nvidia inspector settings to apply and i wasn't able to get exactly the same position for the pic...FPS are nearly the same as expected since my card can handle 4x MSAA just fine on any game i've tried.

I play games at 1920*1080 and usually i need 4x AA to get rid of most jaggies with almost no FPS impact (GTX 560). The high setting in SWTOR is not even close to 4x quality which anyway is not "high" considering you can still do 8X, 16X+ etc if you have more VRAM and/or SLI/crossfire setups... so for the moment we have none, more of that aka none again, and low trying to be "high", xD.

Just launched the game with the new patch and doesn't surprise me at all that the AA they implemented now officially is the same we allways had by editing the .ini settings file, which is a very bad AA, not performance wise, at least for me since everything runs the same as it did before this patch, but the quality is subpar compared to proper AA forced by our graphics card driver or any software capable of forcing AA in games. You can check this by being in the fleet and looking at the windows where you can see the exterior/space, and check those windows borders, very aliased. Character models and other structures seem to have AA applied but some other things do not. Also, the low setting does nothing, just switches AA off completely if my eyes serve me well, i don't know but i can't notice any visual of performance impact from none to low, and high seems like a bad 2x AA at most, considering you can still see jaggies in some places as i mentioned.

You can use bigger letters if you want, yet the SUBclasses from SWTOR, properly named advanced CLASSES are different types of CHARACTERS since don't even share same role or if they have similar roles like damage dealing it's not performed in the same way as a simple talent change would allow like it already does once you pick your advanced CLASS and choose different talents. Wakatta ka? Ok.

But yet this game has 8 classes as you know them from other games, since they play totally different: Guardian, sentinel, sage, shadow, gunslinger, scoundrel, vanguard and commando, and then the other 8 which are from the other faction and (almost) totally mirrored. It doesn't matter how you call them, they are classes (like warrior, rogue, etc, from WoW). You won't be allowed to play several classes with the same character, at least while the developers keep their sanity, since it would be ridiculously stupid and would lead to people getting bored of everything too fast, among other things.

It takes like one hour to get to lvl 10 and choose a new advanced class, roll a new character and star enjoying it, learning it. Advanced classes are SWTOR's way of naming classes like we know them in other games, and you don't ask for class change in those games don't you? Well some people are allways asking for such things because they want the game to be everything they dream/ask for, and that's not possible. The game has 8 different classes, deal with it, you want a new class in any other game, you roll that new class...it's the same here but with a different and more subtle name.

I very much doubt that using some skills which i'm sure have at least or more than a minute cooldown can be called a rotation. I don't know about the smuggler but a guardian doesn't have a "rotation" of 26 keys not even at lvl 50, the core skills of a rotation, if you can call it that...are like 6 or 7 at most, the rest are only situational skills like force push, force stasis, several stuns, etc, those are not part of any normal rotation whatsoever since they have long cooldowns. The difference on the number of skills from lvl 26 to 50 is not very big anyway so i wouldn't worry too much. Besides, having most of your core skills, and many of the utility skills by the mid levels offers a much richer PvP experience, and PvE aswell anyway, at least for me.

The companion skill bar position is a very bad design, i agree, but for me there's no difference wether i use bottom bars or side bars since i don't click my skills, i use keybinds. I put the most important skills and things i need to track a lot on the two bottom bars, the rest goes to side bars and everything i need to use in combat is set with keybinds so it doesn't make any difference to me when it comes to use any of those skills. The way the UI is designed right now doesn't allow more space for bottom bars, maybe when they re-design the UI and allow moving and scaling everything, which i believe they said they were working on all of that. But yeah, if your problem is the difficulty on clicking stuff on the side bars, just stop clicking and put less important stuff like stims, diferent techniques/stances and skills you rarely use on those side bars, and the important ones at the bottom of your screen so you can track them better.

Whenever you get to a new planet you have to wait like 20 seconds to load, then there're no more load screens untill you're done with all the quests on the planet, i fail to see the problem. Doesn't take that long for me it's like 15-30 seconds at most considering the hugeness of most planets i say it's fine. Unless you feel like you need to go back and forth to those planets like 50 times a day it's not even an issue woth mentioning. And if you have way longer load times than those consider improving your PC's performance or getting a faster HDD, it's 2012 you know, and the game is 20 GB with huge planets so no surprise here and i expected a lot worse tbh, but i can just do all the quests on a planet with no other load screens other than the initial shuttle one, which is fine.

I agree with the OP, the LFG tool is already in the game, use it, love it, tell your friends about it, nothing else needed here, so move along and enjoy the game, we don't need an automated LFG system and if for some reason some people are not "sociable" enough they should just keep trying harder, this is an MMO.

My point is that if you don't like Star Wars the Old Republic don't need to try and make it look like the game is bad or failing. You fail to like the game, not the other way around. As stated, try other genres/games/themes. I like the Star Wars universe and i enjoy anything well done which follows that theme. This game is good, certainly better than most games from 2011 and any MMO i tried from launch. That's the point, you don't like it, boo hoo, case closed

This game is fine and fun, i'm sorry to say that the OP doesn't even know what he's talking about. This game has nothing to do with the original trilogy movies or the newest ones, is based on the Old Republic times following little bits of the story originated in the KOTOR series. If you don't like that kind of story, this is not the MMO for you, try one of the 3000000 million games with dragons, some more dragons, bit of flying dragons here, and then some more, maybe that will suit you better. The game keeps the important things at a simple level which i love and makes other things like crafting much more interesting unlike a ton of other MMOs where it's simply farm mats, click button x1000 times, profit, for example. And eventhough the game only has 3 warzones i just can't stop doing them because it is that good compared to other games which pretend to have decent or competitive PvP. Can't wait to see some new warzones and have even more fun. Regardless, there're still a lot of issues which prevent the game from being perfect, but for me perfection is something unnatainable anyway, so i just enjoy it from now the way it is, and i'll welcome any future improvements I mean, complaining is fine, anyone is free to do so, but claiming it's failed/failing...you must be really bored of MMOs in general, try other genres maybe.

ToFN still has 1+ hour queues in the afternoon/evening, but if you're looking at the servers now, at 3:30 AM sure, not many people playing from Europe. I don't play on that server but my server's republic fleet has like 120 people at normal times and that usually is considered good for republic population on a pvp server.