You really only need to look as far as WoW. Their realization of bubbles is about perfect...BUT, it took them a while to get there. It's fully toggle-able, and even when it's on, you only see bubbles from people in your immediate vicinity, and only from certain channels (/say and /party IIRC). The biggest problems are depth-ordering, what happens when they intersect, and how you handle bubbles that abutt the edge of the screen. Those are non-trivial issues and not everyone will agree with how they should be solved. I'm wondering if those averse to the feature are imagining speech bubbles to infinity, with every NPC emote pasted up on the screen life graffiti? That's really not the way it will work. Anyway, enough said on the subject.

I won't tell you my software credentials because you simply won't believe me. You need to stop spouting this stuff. We're talking about a well-understood feature with a definable impact on the game's performance. Of course it's possible, it just takes the will, the prioritisation, and the time. There's a limited supply of these things, which means it might not ever happen, but it's got nothing to do with the code.

I wouldn't accept a massive FPS reduction. I wish they were there. I won't lose any sleep without them. I can wait. As for the engine's ability to handle it, of course it can. Like anything software it just takes man-hours.

Chat bubbles certainly *are* a required feature, at least for me. They allow me to focus on the actual game when I'm conversing, as opposed to continually flicking my attention to wherever the chat pane is. That's important. They are a difficult thing to do well though. They weren't in WoW to start with and it took Blizzard a few iterations to get it right.

Link me this laptop for "200-300" that can play TOR on max, please.

I would expect SWTOR to match or exceed WoW's first day/week sales. If the question was: do you think SWTOR will ever have 12 million subscribers? I would say no. The marketplace has changed too radically for that.