Hi there

Goodbye. You can't please everyone. The designers of SWTOR need to decide who they want to please - the initial rush of buyers just trying out another new game, or the future players who will (or won't) keep paying month after month based on how well this game receives them - such as whether there are other low level players to play with, whether the community is helpful and friendly, etc. If they're smart, they'll build the kind of place where people want to stay, not the kind of place that just serves content locusts, or solo-only players, or the kind of place people are so eager to get out of they keep hoping for a newer, better, less antisocial MMO.

In order for this to change, BioWare must be prepared to ignore, not listen to, the current crop of "I try every new MMO, and WoW was my first" players and instead focus on doing what is going to build a good future. The community will eventually shed the WoW playing-alone-in-a-crowd mentality but only if they don't give in to the complaints of those very players. There's a massive crop of people who hate these socially disconnected MMOs with a passion and if EA/BioWare is smart, they'll let those people just unsubscribe for the future good of the game. The World of Warcraft model is not the way to do things. The game was a fluke, it just happened to come along at the right time as EQ was getting old and more and more people were leaving dial-up behind.

That's too bad. SWTOR was honestly not even something I was going to purchase until I heard that it wouldn't have any kind of cross-server grouping. I play MMOs to take part in a good community, not play the game single-player (random groups where no one talks to each other might as well be full of AI companions) while chatting with a couple of friends. I can do that elsewhere. I hope they don't go ahead with this. I think it would be a very knee-jerk reaction to what the first initial rush of players want. I don't believe EA/BioWare should be chasing those players, because a lot of the initial rush is just the people who buy every single new MMO that comes out, play it for two months, and quit. In my opinion they should go ahead with the vision that I was originally sold on, and stop trying to chase the dollars of current WoW-generation MMO players - they should be chasing the dollars of people brand new to MMOs, Star Wars fans, and old-time MMO players (who have never had a new EQ-like community focused game since EQ). That is what would make me pleased as punch.

Quoting this since it saves me from just saying the same thing. If SWTOR really wants to be healthy, they'll let players that are bad for the game community go ahead and unsubscribe. Trying to please everyone is impossible, it just ruins the game across the board.

I like Aric. He's rock-solid as DPS. And as far as personality goes, I appreciate his no-BS no-excuses just get the damn job done attitude.

I have a mere i3 2100, and a single Radeon 6870, and I run everything maxed with no framerate troubles whatsoever (I also have an SSD, but I don't know to what degree this game streams data from disk). It's clearly far more GPU than CPU intensive. That said, if you can afford it, I'd still say to get an i5 just to have some overhead for the future.

I disagree with that particular statement. Vanilla WoW (the state of the game before any expansions existed), and all previous major MMO games, (Everquest, AC, etc.), put the onus on the DPS to pull their own share of weight and know how to work with the particular tank they had at the moment, not just shut off their brains and hit whatever they please. I miss those days and haven't really gotten into MMO's since, until this one. That being said, to the above poster who asked if another class would be different: Yes, very. Vanguard troopers have a much easier time just tanking an entire room and having a good time of it, but they are also significantly weaker vs. tech and force attack types. They're better at getting aggro, but softer than a Guardian.

On the first page of this thread at least, no one has pointed out that this is an introductory card, not a gaming card. 6600+ series is for gaming. 6500 is of course midrange. Cards below that are entertainment cards that can be used to power older or lightweight games.

Ah. Just a few posts in and already brand fanatacism is starting to creep in. You could make a lot of changes all over the place, but target the 9800 first. I would know because that is the exact card I had during the beta, so I am very familiar with how it performs. It was a good card. Lots of horsepower. But you have to realise that today's games rely on good software support for the latest shader models and efficient instruction design just as much as they do on raw computation. I replaced mine with a Radeon 6870 and everything is now fully maxed at 1920x1200 (but I also have an SSD and 8GB RAM, so I never have to wait for data swaps to disk), but I'd stick with Nvidia just to save yourself the hassle of having crap left over in the registry from removing Nvidia's software. Nothing wrong if you want to switch to AMD though. edit: Today's solid Nvidia cards are the 450-480 and 550-580 range.

No it will not. You require some kind of dedicated graphics processor. Look for solutions from AMD/ATI and NVIDIA. Some acceptable cards are the Radeon 5700-5900 range of cards, 6600-6900 range, or the GeForce 450-480 and 550-580 range of cards.

Just FYI, right clicking does not use your basic strike. It uses whatever you have placed in action bar slot 1. If you never re-arrange your bars, sure, it's your basic strike. But that's not actually what the right mouse button does.

This, all the way. Benchmarks are low because Windows doesn't work well with the design. That will change over time. People have this assumption that Windows just runs the same on everything, it doesn't. You can't run Windows on an ARM chip, for example, because it was never made for that (Windows 8 of course will change that).

You can say it, but it doesn't make you correct. Use google. See the date range features? Go nuts. It'll help you from being incorrect so often.

I'm not going to get into a thing about it, but are you *seriously* naive enough that you just bought the company line about 'enabling players'? Really? They've NEVER had stable talents, and it's never worked right from day 1. You can check out all manner of blogs from that date range and see I'm right. You can also check out recent items from Ghostcrawler confirming that Talents were always supposed to be a customisation thing, not a requirement to be able to fulfill some task, or something you had to switch to and from just to PVE and PVP. Years of searchable data on the internet backs me up. I haven't been wrong about it once. If you think otherwise, you really haven't been paying attention, at all. edit: You'd already know all this though if you had paid attention to the fact that the talent system in that game is being scrapped and rebuilt because, by their own admission, it was unfixable. It always was.

My point was made very clear. It is not 'nescessary', it is a convenience. And yes, that is why they added it. I was there. I've been doing the MMO thing since all we had were MUDs.

So how many of these folks that 'need' dual-spec realise that World of Warcraft didn't have it for years, and years, and years, and only added it because they could never actually make the talent system work well? Need is just way too strong of a word. Want is more like it.

I don't disagree with your post, but right is too strong of a word. You have no rights other than the ones given to you by your government. Everything else is a privelege.

Hardly. I play on an RP server. But roleplaying is not the same as writing a novel. I don't know how people assosciate the two. Roleplaying is simply acting as if you were someone else. You can't pre-write everything in a roleplaying game. Your story emerges as you play it. Make some additional friends, is all I'm saying. Games that have strong legacies and are remembered fondly (EQ) are the ones that get players to work together. Games that allow a person to play the whole thing alone are not well remembered and people are always chomping at the bit for something better to come along.

I think nescessary is too strong of a word. I also think it's a bit absurd that in a massively multiplayer game, a game specifically designed around you playing with other people, that anyone can truly say they *need* to be completely self-reliant. Make friends. Have fun. And I hope the game weeds out the people who just absolutely refuse to make friends. There are all kinds of other games for those people. MMOs like this should do the exact opposite and encourage social bonding.

MSI's manual and site shows it as a 2.0 slot.

Sure does. And yes, either of those cards will fit your motherboard. Just make sure they also fit into your case, since you have a mATX motherboard I assume you also have a very small case.

No it would not. It would be worse.

I couldn't find a manual at Acer's site for the 3400, but it looks like the rest of the X3 series is a half-height or low-profile shaped case. In that case you have a couple of things working against you - the weak PSU, and the low profile requirement. Additionally I should warn you - even with cards that do not require extra power from the PSU, they still do increase the power requirements of your system. When a system is low on power, you will get crashes, dramatic slowdowns, and eventually a burnt out power supply if you run it like that all the time. Power supplies lose efficiency with age as well, so you can count on it being pretty weak if you've had it for very long. The best you could probably do is something like this http://ncix.com/products/?sku=64362&vpn=EAH6570%2FDI%2F1GD3%28LP%29&manufacture=ASUS That shows a half-height card with a full-height bracket on the end, but the box should include a low profile bracket for you to swap it with - that's why the blue VGA connection is detachable.

Wouldn't help much. 13" late 2011 MacBook Pro only has Intel graphics, which just don't cut it for games.