Companions are in no way "half" of your damage output. I'm a Gunnery specced Trooper who's been lucky with repeated drops in Hard Modes and Ops, so my Aric Jorgan is decked out almost as well as I am--and if we were to attack separate but identical mobs, I'd kill mine far faster than twice the time it would take him. From the get-go, we have known that companions will be nearly necessary for soloing. Unless you're the king of CC, you're going to get a lot of mobs thrown at you at once. This isn't WoW where you fight one creature every time, MAYBE two--it's more like City of Heroes, where you get three, four, five, even six guys dumped on you at once and are expected to pull through. You kind of need a little helper there. The OP complains about Bowdaar, a tanking pet, needing to heal between fights on his Gunslinger. Well, yeah, Bowdaar is a tank, and Gunslingers are not healers. If Bowdaar keeps the enemies off you, he's done his job. The seven seconds it takes to recuperate him up or dismiss/resummon is not a ridiculous amount of downtime in comparison to other MMOs, especially at launch. Everyone likes to compare to WoW, so I'll do it again; downtime for non-healer classes in WoW was ridiculous for years. People have also complained "soloing isn't anywhere near this hard in WoW" as a healer or something--sure, maybe if you're talking about Cata or late WotLK. I remember launch WoW, and healer-specced Priests and the like were absolutely abysmal for soloing, and this was still before the days of dual specs. So you're a DPS class and your tanking companion isn't helping you out. Use your healing companion. It seems to me that DPS characters use Healing companions (as a tank comp. will struggle to keep aggro off them), Healing characters use tank companions and off-DPS (since their DPS rivals DPS comps. anyway and they'd probably just pull aggro onto themselves), and Tank characters use DPS companions (since they have no problem surviving themselves, but killing quickly is an issue).

The thread title and first post raise the question, "Is this thing causing performance drops?" No one knows, but these forums will (and have already, apparently) assume "yes". When did the SWTOR forums become FOX News?

The first couple of complaints would require a roll-back to day one or earlier (for early accessers), so that will never happen. Your Ilum complaints are already being addressed in the latest patch up on the Test Servers--Ilum dailies and weeklies will now have a "defeat X enemy players" component to ensure that factions are actually fighting each other in Ilum instead of trading. Also, the sky is not falling because some people have PvP gear. It's not particularly hard to gear up even if you never look at Ilum or Tatooine boxes.

Wikipedia is an introduction to primary sources, not a primary source itself. You don't use it for academic papers because, hey, if you're an academic, you're supposed to have specialized knowledge on this subject--Wikipedia is not specialized knowledge, since anyone can load up a page on X and find out the extent of what you know, if what you know is all that's on Wikipedia.

Do you, by chance, recall the days immediately after the launch of BF3, where many people with computers just like yours or even better were having performance issues? Because it happened. And now those people don't have those problems. Because they were fixed. Big games always have launch-time compatibility problems. This is nothing new to PC gaming. It's why a lot of developers prefer consoles; they know exactly what is in every system, which makes bug testing and fixing remarkably easy.

The people claiming problems with high-end systems aren't all lying. You can have legitimate performance issues due to some obscure configuration of hardware/software. It happens with every new game. Just look at Skyrim, Arkham City, Battlefield 3, and so on--plenty of people had issues running those games at launch even with top-shelf components, and it wasn't until a few optimization patches and new drivers came out that they were fixed. That said, it's still a vocal minority claiming that "a majority have problems," because a majority do not. The majority of people who meet minimum specs have no problems, and the majority of people who greatly exceed them still have no problems. But of course, confirmation bias rears its ugly head--clearly, if 5% of forum users claim it, 5% of the entire userbase must have the problem too, right? Except no, that isn't the case--people who don't have issues don't feel the need to talk about their lack of an issue. Recognize that if you one of the people with a great system and poor performance, you're probably just unlucky and have some weird system configuration that's causing problems--it's rare, and it will take time to narrow down and fix. You will better help yourself by providing specific information about your individual system including all of the drivers you're running, dxdiags, and other system information print-outs than you will just posting GPU/CPU/motherboard/RAM, and you will have better luck doing that in the places specifically set aside to receive those kinds of bug reports--not General Discussion forums. I'm sure a mod will be along to lock this shortly with a link to a thread where you should post all that technical stuff.

You can't compare the Jedi of the movies and the books to all of the other Jedi; they were all the best of their lot or important for other reasons. There were plenty of guys you never heard about who got killed off at every turn by mundane blaster fire from some guy who was just firing randomly. You see Jedi just dying all over the place to droids, and while you might think this makes sense because a robot should have perfect prediction and accuracy and its mind unreadable to a Jedi's force powers, in the SW universe, the majority are actually really fallible bipedal GameBoys. All of the programming went into making sure they don't fall over and can speak 30,000 languages, not shoot stuff--even the battledroids, apparently.

Jedi and Sith in the Old Republic timeline were kind of everywhere, and not all of them were very good at their jobs. Yeah, Force users can jump real high and have weapons that kill everything in one hit or can choke people.. but they still run from thermal detonators, overwhelming blaster fire that can't be parried, and so on. You're also forgetting that I, as a Trooper, am the Commander of Havoc Squad. Every other Trooper is, too. We are all the single best soldier(s) in the whole of the Republic military. We're kind of really freakin' good at our jobs, and again, not every Jedi really is. Smugglers have no excuse though. I like to think that Smugglers are secretly Force sensitive and just don't have any conscious control over it; it just passively curves blaster fire around him. And lightsabers? There are materials that resist lightsabers. That's why we're all wearing sweet gear. Dudes in the movies have cotton robes on or space denim--not phrik.

The game runs poorly for some people that should be able to handle it because it's new, unoptimized, and there isn't much driver support for it yet. This has been the case for every big game that's come out recently, and to just name a few: Arkham City: big performance issues for plenty of people who greatly exceed the specs at launch. Some optimization patches, some drivers, fixed! Skyrim: big performance issues for plenty of people who greatly exceed the specs at launch. Some optimization patches, some drivers, fixed! Battlefield 3: big performance issues for plenty of people who greatly exceed the specs at launch. Some optimization patches, some drivers, fixed! The PC gaming scene has so many parts and software/hardware configurations that it's quite impossible to make sure everything works 100% before launch. There's just no way to test for every possible configuration, and beta pools are only so large. It takes time to get everything working correctly, and sometimes that means people that aren't part of the game development company (like the GPU manufacturers) have to come out with updates, too. This is all normal. Just because you don't have issues with the game with a spec-meeting rig doesn't mean people who blow your computer out of the water can't have issues with it, too. However, the other side of that coin is that just because you have issues with the game while exceeding the minimum specs doesn't mean that a great many people, or even the vast and overwhelming majority of people, don't. There's nothing deceptive about a claim of 95% of people don't have issues. The game has two million subscribers last I checked. That's 1,900,000 people whose computers can handle this, and just 100,000 who are having some issue--not necessarily one that prevents them from playing entirely, but any sort of slowdown that is annoying. That's not bad for launch month. Someone above said he can understand why this stuff would be "on the back burner." It's not. Performance and playability issues are always the #1 priority, because they prevent people from playing the game as intended. However! Just because you don't see fixes for these things come out every other day doesn't mean they aren't being worked on. This is a process. It takes as long as it takes. Complaining about it further and constantly demanding an "addressing" of the issue does not speed this process up in the slightest. The causes of these peformance issues are many and nebulous, and it takes time both to narrow them down, patch them, and ensure they will not ruin the performance for others in the process. It's time-consuming. Even if BioWare doesn't remind you every time a thread pops up that they're working on it, they are, because no game company this size doesn't--if you think otherwise, go sit in the corner with the other tinfoil-wearing conspiracy loons. Everyone has to understand that optimizations take time and may not be entirely in BioWare's control. The volume of posts you see on the forums are not indicative of the overall performance of the game; you're falling prey to confirmation bias because you will subconsciously ignore the posts that say "I don't have this issue," and you never even see the posts from thousands of others who have no problems whatsoever and thus have no reason to even visit the forums. Go download some beta drivers for your cards, especially if you have ATI. That's been a big help for a great many people. Otherwise, just wait for patches, as stability and performance improve over time.

I'm so glad I have at least 16 days more to enjoy your wonderful posts, Ganadorf. To the OP, always report in-game if you can.

This strikes me more as him not wanting to talk about stuff that isn't his department. He has to make the statement, but it's on a subject that is not his domain--better that everyone in the relevant departments agrees that X is or isn't the case first, than he spout his mouth off with something that wasn't what they meant. Has no one worked on a team before? Sheesh.

Democracy is even more unwieldy than the most dysfunctional dictatorship. The Republic Senate has over a thousand planets who want to be heard.

I can take a stab as to why, from a design and testing perspective, (ultra) high res textures might exist but not be put in: Compatibility testing and narrowing down issues. There's a sizable number of people reporting slowdown right now for one reason or another. Maybe it's only in Warzones, maybe it's only with shadows on, maybe it's only with certain cards or hardware configurations.. but to fix any one specific problem for these people, you've got to rule out all the other causes so you can find what is actually the problem. If we had textures twice the size of what's currently in, live, I would bet you cash-money that there would be more people complaining of graphical bugs, slowdowns, crashes, or just an inability to play the game. It'd be terrible. Only some of those would be the cause of the increased texture resolution, but for anything else, an immediate response would be "have you tried lowering your graphical settings", even if the issue winds up having nothing to do with that. From a debugging perspective, the fewer potential causes you have in the mix, the easier it is to figure out what's wrong. High and ultra-high resolutions are just more potential causes. You might think you're smart enough to know when the cause of your particular problem is textures your PC might not be able to handle, but remember that there are two million other people playing, and some of them are probably idiots or liars. Pulling everything back to bare bones graphics, fixing what issues remain, and putting in the improved graphical capability only once you've ironed out the existing kinks means you can iron out the new ones even faster. There are already people complaining that they can't run the game in its current Medium texture mode without slowdown, despite having computers that should chew Crysis 2 up and spit it out. They're all over the forums. They can't wait for a driver update and are demanding BioWare fix that now; can you imagine if there were even more of them? The focus of the game should be on stability and performance for the largest number of people first, not graphical quality. Thankfully, that seems to be the tack BioWare is taking. I'd rather deal with some muddy textures for a month or two and lose the weirdos who are so off-put by any period of graphics that do not mirror the stuff they see outside their windows, than I would with playing this in Ultra High and losing a great many more to performance issues or other game-breaking bugs.

If they'd waited through one more year of beta and launched there'd still be something that requires polish. Every MMO launches with things that are lacking, whether it be stuff their predecessors have had for a long time but they do not (WoW and RIFT having LFG, for instance) or things that no one has had but most will come to realize were good additions later on (like when WoW added Dungeon Finder). All told, SWTOR has had perhaps the best launch of any MMO to date. They get better each time (generally speaking..) so this was to be expected, but there were no terribly game-shattering bugs such as those that plagued previous releases. People who think SWTOR's was really all that bad were either part of a relatively small few who encountered some unfortunate issues, which happens with any game, or are misremembering the launches of previous games through rose-colored glasses or simply don't recall them at all. Anarchy Online, for instance, had people falling through the world for weeks. En masse. This was not the exception, but the norm. One might have said that if you were on normal ground at this point, YOU were bugged. World of Warcraft had criiiiiiippling server stability issues that had many people up in arms. What was the point of a stress test, they'd ask, if apparently no changes were made to deal with the stress of launch? Servers crashed, stayed down, crashed again, and those that actually managed to stay on a server were plagued by horrible lag and an inability to loot creatures for hours at a time (consider: looting X Warthog Eyes from creatures was a primary method of completing quests in WoW). Age of Conan.. let's not even touch it. In comparison, SWTOR has had remarkably few launch bugs. Server stability was actually pretty strong. Lag was the exception, not the norm. I don't recall servers dropping out of the sky. The biggest complaint was excessive queue times on some servers (reaching several hours). Warzones lag for some people, having shadows enabled caused slowdown for others, but other than that.. very little that stopped people from playing. And only two quest hiccups that prevented the progression of class quests.

I have determined my forum times are screwed up. :x

Oh, I'm not trolling, I'm just trying to inform some people who seem misguided, may have misinterpreted some stuff, or are ignorant of certain realities facing game design.

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I don't think you can really compare ArenaNet's art team to anything else in the MMO industry. There were games that came out years after Guild Wars that still paled in comparison. GW and GW2 are incredible exceptions and do not make the rule.

You bring up an excellent point, but let me add something: when Steven posted, it was already today, the 10th. It was only yesterday for people living in on the west coast. I'm looking at his post right now: "Today , 01:22 AM" It's possible the response will come Wednesday, the 11th. The 10th may still be today in the context of his post. We are not yet in tomorrow.

So sorry, wouldn't want to disturb your self-referential pity party. I'm sure this issue will be fixed much sooner if BioWare takes a look at page 72 of this thread and sees nothing but the same six people patting each other on the back and marching in lock-step to the tune of "we'll unsubscribe if textures aren't fixed next week" without anyone telling them they're being silly. I'm sorry that my posts have delayed your resolution to this most critical of bugs.

Holy cow, it hasn't even been a month from launch. February 21st, 2pm CST. Patch day, two months post-launch. If high res textures aren't in by that time, please, resume complaining to your hearts content. I won't tell you you're being ridiculous and inane and repetitive and wasting your time spamming up the GD boards at that point (though you will still be wasting your time--they'll fix it when they fix it). I doubt it will even take that long.

Right. So we know the high res textures exist and could be put back in at any moment. When they'll work for everyone. From a game design perspective, I would rather have people complaining about low res textures I can fix at any time, than I would to have people complaining that their systems can't handle High mode (when they should) due to some obscure optimization bug or insufficient drivers from GPU manufacturers. You only have to look at a third of the other posts in the GD forum to see the complaints of the latter. "MY COMPUTER WAS FORGED IN THE FIRES OF THE SUN BY HAEPHESTUS HIMSELF, AND I HAVE SLOWDOWN IN WARZONES! FIX THIS OR I'M UNSUBSCRIBING!" I don't know who's more ridiculous--them or "I'm unsubscribing if my graphics don't look as pretty as I know they could right freakin' now."