Valinoreon
-
Posts
7 -
Joined
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Events
Articles
Downloads
Gallery
Posts posted by Valinoreon
-
-
I agree, it is already in place for the player and as such should be fairly simple to port to the companions.
-
I suggest that for the Voidstar, which is the only two phase Warzone; that you implement an algorithm that will check how many players are ready in queue and put the team with less players on offensive first so that as their team fills up it may take longer for them to attack but they will have a fair chance than if they were defending and got rushed before they got players leaving them with much less time in the second round when facing relatively more opponents.
My second suggestion is that you remove the three medal minimum for Warzones as sometimes people who join a game in the middle may not have the opportunity to get at least three medals and there is nothing worse than waiting for a long queue and load just to get shafted on your commendations. As the system is, AFKers cannot get medals unless they are guarding a point and in that case they will get more than three anyways. To have the three medal minimum is a redundancy.
I also suggest that you increase the amount of commendations awarded to a player for receiving an MVP vote as right now it is at one commendation and with items costing in the multiples of the thousands, offering one commendation is ridiculous.
I might add that while it seemed the first few days were difficult, you have actually succeeded in making the Warzones more hypercompetitive and not just constant team deathmatch which I applaud and anticipate that the Ranked Warzones will only make this even better. I have noticed that aside from the commendations received for medals and MVP votes, the losing team gets no bonus commendations while the winning team does. While I can understand that this encourages people to play to win and avoid the team deathmatch scenario, it also means that many players will drop from a losing game. This won't be a problem in Ranked Warzones with premade teams. I propose that you add a lesser reward than winning if you stay with a losing game all the way to the end. This will stop players from rage quitting and provide incentive to keep playing until the very end win or lose.
My final suggestion concerns the PvP Daily and Weekly Missions. Instead of having a Weekly Mission, I suggest that you make two tiers of Daily Missions. The first will be for the standard three wins and the second can be for some higher amount with a relatively higher commendation reward to supplement the admittedly meager commendation rewards post 1.2; this will encourage players to play to win more often and will be especially relevant as a motivator with Ranked Warzones and Premade teams.
Keep up the good work, your teams attention to detail as well as level of involvement with the customer has proven itself time and time again and I feel that the game right now is just the tip of the iceberg of its potential.
-
Hey everyone, thanks for bearing with us as we investigated the concerns raised here.
After investigation, it seems that the confusion here is a combination of a UI issue that's been resolved and a feature that's working as intended, but the reason why it's 'working as intended' needs explanation.
First, the UI issue. The preferences menu as it is seen on the Public Test Server for version 1.1 of the game is correct - there are only supposed to be two texture choices, 'Low' and 'High'. This replaces the original three-choice preference of Low/Medium/High because in reality, there was never supposed to be a 'Medium' choice - that was a bug.
Here's where we need to explain. As many of you have noted, your character in the game world is rendered using lower resolution textures than inside of cinematic conversation scenes. This was a deliberate decision by the development team. To understand why this was done, I have to briefly talk about MMOs and their engines.
In comparison to single player games and other genres of multiplayer online games, MMOs have much higher variability in the number of characters that can be potentially rendered on-screen at the same time. In MMOs, even though most of the time you'll see a relatively small number of characters on screen, there are certain situations in which many more characters will be seen. Some examples of these situations include popular gathering places in-game (in our case, the two fleets), Operations with large teams, and Warzones. In those scenarios the client (and your PC) has to work hard to show off a lot of characters on-screen.
During development and testing of The Old Republic, our priorities were to ensure the game looked great and performed well. In testing, we discovered that using our 'maximum resolution' textures on in-game characters during normal gameplay could cause severe performance issues, even on powerful PCs. There were a variety of possible options to help improve performance, but one that was explored and ultimately implemented used what is known as a 'texture atlas'.
To understand that I've got to get technical for a minute. When a character in the game is 'seen' by another character - ie, gets close to your field of view - the client has to 'draw' that character for you to see. As the character is 'drawn' for you there are a number of what are known as 'draw calls' where the client pulls information from the repository it has on your hard disk, including textures, and then renders the character. Every draw call that is made is a demand on your PC, so keeping that number of draw calls low per character is important. With our 'maximum resolution' textures a large number of draw calls are made per character, but that wasn't practical for normal gameplay, especially when a large number of characters were in one place; the number of draw calls made on your client would multiply very quickly. The solution was to 'texture atlas' - essentially to put a number of smaller textures together into one larger texture. This reduces the number of draw calls dramatically and allows the client to render characters quicker, which improves performance dramatically.
When it comes to cinematic scenes, however, characters are rendered using the higher number of draw calls and maximum resolution textures. This is because in those scenes, we have control over exactly how many characters are rendered and can ensure that the game performs well. The transition between 'atlas textured' characters (out of cinematics) and 'maximum resolution' textures (in cinematics) is mostly hidden by the transition between those two states (when the screen goes black), but obviously it's clear if you pay close attention.
In summary; yes, we had a small UI bug that unfortunately caused confusion over how the game is intended to work. The textures you're seeing in the course of normal gameplay are optimized for that mode of play. The textures you're seeing during cinematics are also optimized for that mode of play. They are higher resolution, but that's because we're able to control cinematic scenes to ensure good performance in a way we can't during normal gameplay.
We understand the passion and desire for people to see the same textures you see in our cinematic scenes in the main game. Because of the performance issues that would cause for the client, that's not an immediate and easy fix; we need to ensure we're making choices that the majority of our players will be able to benefit from. Having 'atlassed textures' helps performance overall, and that's a very important goal for us.
With that said, we've heard your feedback here loud and clear. The development team is exploring options to improve the fidelity of the game, particularly for those of you with high-spec PCs. It will be a significant piece of development work and it won't be an overnight change, but we're listening and we're committed to reacting to your feedback.
Why can't you enable HIGH RESOLUTION in game for just the players character? This will not affect performance in highly populated zones as the players character is always loaded in RAM, will not increase the minimum sys requirements and will make the complainers happy while improving a great game for everyone else without compromising the game for those on minimum systems. and for all those on top end rigs, there are probably more guys on their family home computer than guys on a custom built gaming rig. more here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1511319#post1511319
please comment so Bioware takes notice as this seemslike an easy fix taht will not interfere withi all the reaason they brought up. A simple check box in graphics settings for Enable Player High Resolution Textures will do.
-
I agree with you, but I don't appreciate the green text. Just keep it white. It's easier to read.
lets keep this board racism free
-
many people have been complaining about your lack of use of the high res textures first seen in trailers, cinematics and even beta gameplay. the developers response was:
In comparison to single player games and other genres of multiplayer online games, MMOs have much higher variability in the number of characters that can be potentially rendered on-screen at the same time. In MMOs, even though most of the time you'll see a relatively small number of characters on screen, there are certain situations in which many more characters will be seen. Some examples of these situations include popular gathering places in-game (in our case, the two fleets), Operations with large teams, and Warzones. In those scenarios the client (and your PC) has to work hard to show off a lot of characters on-screen.This is completely understandable as I have noticed myself that while I can run smoothly at max settings in game, in a pvp situation i lag up even when latency is decent and even when switched to the lowest graphical settings the same thing happens which means that it is actually the time taken to render frm reading the hard disk and extrapolating the data. I see two solutions to the individual user: buy a SSD to speed up read rates, have the game installed on a large enough flash media device OR the developer recodes the game to store more of these testures in the RAM. However the main problem for this is that even though some users may have powerful systems with multiple drives, latency optimised RAM and multi GPUs, it is not realiztic to change the entire engine to cater to these few and as a result make the game unplayable by the many, ie gamebreaking lag or increased RAM requirements.
So here is a simple suggestion. The one thing that is constant in the game no matter where you go and what i believe most people will end up caring about the most is: their own character being played. It would not be that hard at all to modify the engine code so that ONLY the players character is rendered in high resolution textures. since the character is always loaded it will not affect loading times or gameplay and will drastically improve the gameplay expectations being met for all those complaining. Bioware, why dont you simply incorporate a setting to use high res textures for the players character..? It seems to melike this would be a very simple solution that does not affect the existing player base negatively, addressing the concerns of those complaining and keeping the game playable and enjoyable for all.
Please leave your comments so that Bioware takes notice. This is a great game with alot of potential and will get better if we give actual gameplay based advice instead of just complaining all the time.
-
Would love to see SWG's "Saber Reflect" added for Jedi Knight, where Deflecting Blaster bolts will result in damaging the attacker.
a passive ability like this seems to make alot of sense for a knight as the activated ones are next to useless. it would help balance out the fact that jedi knights have almost no ranged attacks and take alot of damage on the approach
Class Feedback
in Sentinel / Marauder
Posted · Edited by Valinoreon
Your efforts to balance the classes damage/armor wise are commendable however i think that having only one cc for the sentinel is a drawback as this is the only class that can be cced so easily and indeed repeatedly. I recommend that you add another cc or better yet reduce the cooldown of the one cc that we have. Which will also ensure that we cant quickly break through double ccs although to be fair most of the other classes have many ccs while we only have the one that i am aware of that is proper cc and not slowing movement cc.
edit: I should note that I play Watchman