I believe people will be fighting over this for the next months. A: "WoW was buggy and lacked features at release as well! There were no battlegrounds, LFD tool etc." B: "But that was 2004 even other games learned what WoW improved and implemented it why not this 2012 game?" So A and B will be at odds forever. Why not agree to both? Both have a point but A just carries less relevance in the light of B.

Yeah, targeting in general is a pain because of that. Feels like trying to a catch a fly by throwing darts at it. Especially when targets are in motion. Bigger hitboxes or at least having a clickable nameplate/health bar would help alot. Of course that needs a bigger health bar as well.

I have recently started alot non-Force user toons. In some cases, Bounty Hunter and Trooper I felt that they are bound by a different moral code yet the game wants me to stick to one alignment only which doesn't always make sense and limits actual in-character play in that it forces my character to act pretty illogical for gear purposes. When can we actually expect neutral gear or at least gear which aims at non-Force users maintaining a balanced distribution of Light/Dark side points?

From my lengthy dealings of strong mobs I have found that power levels are inconsistent because of stacking debuffs especially armor reducing ones and dots. Lots of dots do tick per second that mean in case you get a dot applied ticking for 90 per second and have 5 of them on you then you'll have to deal with bursts flooring at 450 DPS. In addition melee is far more powerful than ranged, you can't kite them, they are more resilient than ranged, they come with a devastating arsenal of instants - my favourite in this regard are Talz Commandos. In contrast to that sniper mobs are the weakest, in fact even sniper champions are a snorefest as their damage levels are on level of the weakest silver melee mob (those with just one standard attack). I have seen mobs with blaster and sniper rifles used with standard attack only dealing far more damage. But on the other hand I have noticed quite a few people getting unnecessarily killed by them because they ignored them. Always kill mobs from weakest to strongest and not vice versa because these weaker mobs are added DPS and debuffers for the strongest mob of the chain.

The lack of support for neutral character continues to disappoint me. Then of course the lack of support for modern graphic cards. Lack of lively worlds, and continued feeling of constantly being walled in (Tatooine *cough*). Sure there is more however my main gripe is with neutral characters really. I feel being shoehorned into choosing a side which makes very little sense as non-Force user.

The only quest I actually spacebar are these with alien/placeholder voiceover because "watta wampa smorgasbord" for the n-th time in a row isn't really interesting. Otherwise, I am not really in a rush anyway.

Well, to be fair, using the numbers of WoW is hardly a point because they had an unchallenged build-up period lasting years to get there. No MMO using the WoW paradigm will even get close to the numbers which WoW had at peak. It's usually a general rule in the video game industry: If a game ruled as unchallenged king over its domain over the years, the size of its community and impact it made on gaming culture will make it impossible to be ever replaced by a game using the same design paradigm - no matter how good or improved it is really. If WoW as polished and most developed king of its design is having difficulties to attract and keep players then what are the chances that a presumedly less polished and less developed challenger will take its place or even take a spot at its side? That said they seem to have made a contingency plan anyway based on running it with half a million subscribers at least. My predictions for it were around 750k by end of March/April. Perhaps I am too optimistic. But even under the best case scenario the game wouldn't have kept more people like this anyway. This kind of games has found its culmination in WoW and begun with WoW. If the quitters of WoW are an indication for anything then certainly for the waning interest of them in that genre or design paradigm. It's more like that people are blindly buying into hype without exactly knowing what they want for themselves. They have exaggerated expectations and a list of features to quote. When asked what they want from a game they'd tell you that it has to be "better" whatever 'better' looks like and it has to be "awesome" with again varying meanings. People just don't know what they want and that's why they keep searching and keep getting disappointed. Some games win this hit&miss game like Skyrim, others completely miss it even though their design doesn't have to be bad per se. The question is which pricetag justified it for you? Why did you buy this game? Did you buy into hype? Did you buy blind or did you thoroughly inform yourself? Did you have a list of things you wanted for a game and did the game offer that on the box?

It's slated for March. If they keep their timetable it may not even be a whole month away.

...and then you will group with a Sorcerer healer, who's healing you using the powers of the dark side. The seed will be planted that very moment, there's no turning back.

I am by comparison casual. Casuals are not people who are not liking a challenge. I like a challenge but I am not a hardcore player. I believe in having a steady challenge keeps you at your toes and prevents you from settling in and getting lulled into complacency and phlegmatic stupor. The game is balanced around having your companions around. Granted, some bosses were tougher and there is nothing more frustrating than conversation death which is more a fault of encounter design and initial camera positioning rather than problem with bosses themselves. Overall however far from impossible. Also typing speed has nothing to do with it. I am far from 200 words per minute and by comparison of the average age of the MMO gamers these days old. Failure in games mostly something to do with a few things which people are missing in their mindsets these days: - If you fail or die assume it's your own fault. Don't blame others or the game, blame yourself first and only. - Realize you committed a mistake, were you too arrogant and complacent? Did you underestimate the level of challenge? Did you indulge in laxity? Did you forget to use an ability, did you stand in the proverbial fire? - Most issues can be fixed by being more spatially aware and being less tunnelvisioned to your bars. Memorize the crucial keys because clicking under stress is less effective than stroking the right key. - Retry, and stay calm. It's foremostly a game, if things are not beatable your initial way, try another way, analyze, think, strategize, abuse any advantage thrown at you. It's not honourless at all to kite, or to make creative use of your environment, it's there for a reason! Also it was a good choice to have some sort of death penalty, no death penalty promotes recklessness and some encounters may benefit from that especially if they are not supposed to. You could have an artificial mob boost or...a death penalty. It is still by far the most lenient death penalty I have ever seen in an MMO.

I will give you an example. I get better shadows in KOTOR1. In SW:TOR shadows are causing quite a load and look ugly, leave artifacts on the grounds in the manner of footsteps, it can't handle shadows based on cloth-based objects very well and tends to leave trails. Also remember the old bug in Hoth leaving you a completely black sky and horizon? Gave you an insight into what actually is real landscape and which one is horizon. The far view system in this game is horrible by modern standards. You can see it on the example of how the engine adds objects, suddenly they appear in front of you, very immersion-breaking in case of NPCs. Grass-rendering is also the worst thing I have ever seen, instead of seamless foliage rendering we get foliage which pops and grows right in front of you. I call that immersion-killing. In addition it can't handle adding variable world objects adding to the sound stream very well, which could be a bug, but could also be a limit of their most likely ancient FMOD implementation. In addition I wouldn't call it HeroEngine per se, it's the SW:TOR engine, the modern HeroEngine is undoubtedly far more advanced than what we got right here today.

If they are at your level then you should be *easily* capable of beating them. Which companion, what is your class? What about my other questions? Like are you aware of the different abilities? Do you prefer to interrupt full auto or grav rounds? What are your strategies? If you see a boss and multiple companies, are you: - attacking boss first and leave the adds for the cleanup or - attacking the adds first and leave the boss to solely focus on with your main abilities? You definitely must be doing something wrong otherwise your problem would be epidemic.

You are assuming that because it's hard for it means it's hard for everyone. I've levelled 2 toons to 50 so far and never needed any help, even so I solo'd heroics and champions with them. So I am asking: Can you give an example for why you think they are too hard? Are you using interrupts, medipacs and stims? Are you situationally aware of your position and surroundings like being aware that that you don't have to stand in the fire, that you can keep a 4 m distance to a mob in melee? Are you chosing the correct companion? Are you underlevelling or outlevelling bosses? How's your gear - are you using the correct attribute i.e. no strength on a sniper, no aim on a marauder? I know this is alot things asked but I think most difficulties are self-created - either through negligence, impatience or ignorance.

My Juggernaut was committed to the Dark side. By doing so he did alot of good for the Empire like killing and turning mercilessly what was threatening it. On top of it of course the dreaded Jedi. I enjoyed every moment getting every Jedi NPC into giving into his hate and let it fuel him. Every vein of me felt joy as they were bristling with fury and couldn't stop it - not even their indoctrination was strong enough to resist my taunting. I had a blast in breaking every Jedi's spirit, and indeed, them living forever as hate-filled husks or lieing there as dead body mattered little to me: The deed was done.

I'm running on a Asus DirectCUII GTX 580 and although the game does put up an unusual load it's usually not higher than 70°C. Currently at 68°C. That is on Imperial screens. On my Republic screens it's getting hotter, the GPU usage goes up from 44% to 72% and temperature rises to 76°C (using my Smuggler and my Trooper as reference). So if you don't want to toast your hardware, roll Empire. (<- Joke, no need to turn Sith irl)

1.) I am serious! It was their reasoning that this prototype engine offering excellent team-collaborative authoring and development tools was a main selling point. You can find hints of these all over the net at serious game development sites. That's what mainly influenced their choice. Why would they commit such a choice? Obviously they planned to have their teams, all of their teams, participating whereever they were located while also centralizing their development base. Other games do it differently, prefer staggered development, or write their own tools to do the same what Bioware wanted. But what cheaper solution can you get than an already implemented one? It was a choice based on their development structure. 2.) Of course the Hero Engine was exclusive with these feature here. It was just the icing on the cake that at that time it offered these features but was also open for more. Not all engines offer the same, even today engines like to provide their own solutions (Unigine to name one example). Now, next time you are telling me to be serious read the whole thing. Understanding someone is not equal to supporting someone. Even so you could just be playing devil's advocate and I often like to. But I hoped my last sentence made it clear that I am distancing myself already. I too think they should have made a better choice and probably either written some engine of their own - which they are easily capable of - incl. their tools or adopted some else established engine. It was probably a decision based on costs and the fact that they wanted to have their hands free for content. We don't know whether they are in retrospect happy with their choice, it's possible that there has been quite alot pillow fighting in-house and behind the scenes, heck even the guy who made that statement about their initial choice, Gordon Walton, has long departed since then. It is also possible that they think we are going over board with our criticism and that they can "easily" address all of our issues. I'd think realistically they have no other choice to do the latter unless they absolutely hit an architectural brickwall.

More or less what I basically wrote. The gist of it is: The HE prototype had the tools needed to develop a MMO while other engines did not, most of them have not until today with the CE3 being the exception (update in Oct '11 added it, probably because MW:Online is using CE3). The second selling point was its openness to and adoption of licensed standards such as FMOD, SpeedTree, ScaleForm Gfx and more. Problem it being an unoptimized and feature-poor prototype on the performance side which in the end lowers its overall presentational value. An aspect greatly underestimated by their crew it seems.

Well, the only reference we have is this. And there it was said that "if we(Bioware) don’t respond publicly to a bug that does not mean we are not going to fix it".

Lol, that was a fast correction, a fast answer for either situation: "wasn't there" and "was there". But it was there and it had plenty of bugs, from auto-resetting itself every day (very nice for progression) over multi-chained packs, mobs getting stuck in the wall to dreaded evasion. Existing even a couple of months after release. I've been a Molten Core raider from early June 2005 and we still hit a couple of bugs. And yes, angry players met calm players who told them to be patient because they are working on that kind of stuff.

The engine was chosen on the terms of allowing team collaborative development which no other engine allowed. To my knowledge only CryEngine3 offers this feature these days. Mostly you'll have to use what's there already or write inhouse tools for that which costs time and of course other resources. I'm assuming that they were hit by several limitations, writing a new engine from ground takes about 2-3 years, that includes writing its tools as well, the HeroEngine provided them with everything they needed plus teamwork orientated development tools. It just wasn't in a more than a prototype shape at that time. The HeroEngine in SW:TOR hasn't received any code update from its developers since about 3 years now, meanwhile the original HeroEngine itself got an overhaul, so what we are having is based on a pre-overhaul and also a very customized and heavily altered one. The old HeroEngine apparently had alot of issues with shadow rendering and Bioware didn't really bother to address that themselves, most likely because of architectural restraints which also inhibit further technological progression unless they invest alot of time to remove these as well. In short: Don't call it HeroEngine but SW:TOR engine.

Ironically the audio engine is using FMOD which is pretty much common these days and more than capable than handling it. There is a preliminary sound cut-off for certain objects, 25m for players, 50m for mobs. In addition sometimes a new sound is added to the stream but existing sound objects get gradually muted down or muted completely causing sudden silences.

The developers who fixed are most likely be sitting in a different team than those developers responsible for raid design. When you do parallell design as it is normal in big projects then priorities differ from team to team.

DDO and LotRO seem to thrive pretty good on F2P basis. F2P is just another payment model. It's basically turning games into shareware and offering you a trial version. If some companies chose to make pretty bad payment plans it doesn't mean it's bad for everyone. Every reasonable company won't change anything for those already paying subscriptions for the game. Indeed at the end of it a subscription model may still be part of the package in order to unlock everything. That said: WAR still is subscription-based so I wouldn't keep my hopes up SW:TOR will as well. Easily possibly they keep their projected 500k subscriber base.

I pretty much tend to think that corruption, the ways to ignore the rules in order to secretly benefit at the cost of others is selfish, selfishness in this game is usually hard-earned dark side points. The Republic has alot of rampant corruption going on. The senate, the situation on Ord Mantell a.s.o. Nothing really conveys the feeling to fight for the good side, more like you are having a hard time to dodge all the corruption as well.

The Belsavis 2-mans I found soloable however the 4-mans not, some of Belsavis 4-man content is fairly untuned even for 4-man themselves. There's a quest named Breakthrough in Belsavis which is very hard even for experienced 4-man teams due to its insanely powerful final boss but if you are a stealth class you can easily solo that quest without a scratch. Honestly alot are even soloable for DPS, I solo'd some early 2-mans on my Sentinel and Trooper. Just make sure to pick your targets and bypass difficult packs, yes even dieing counts if they are clearly blocking your path. If you are a class with aggro drop then dismiss your companion while trying to find a comfortable spot. Make use of interrupts, coodowns and intelligent positioning (if you are the tank). Yes, they are meant to be done in groups, as much as champions and world bosses are, but it doesn't mean that with correct execution you can solo them. Heck I am not even that great player myself I just tend to try finding a way. Anyways, keep in mind that heroics are not mandatory they are meant to offer a break from the solo-play in fact that's their original decision intention. There are ways to compensate such as bonus series, pvp and space combat. All heroics are repeatable so in case you wanted a certain orange reward you may come back later any time.