<But then you have a few where the Light option is to let someone who's sworn to destroy the Empire go free, rather than kill them. It's nearly the exact opposite of the previous situation; only a complete idiot would let their enemies walk away just out of a sense of niceness when it can only serve to make the Republic stronger. So going pure-Light or pure-Dark just doesn't make a whole lot of sense, given this disparity.> I'm ostensibly lightside but I can't bring myself to commit tactical absurdities for the points. Also: my female agent is still ominous and murderous even at "full" lightside. She's occasional compassionate or sensible. Bioware's writers are good but imposing hippie/villain dichotomies on everything is baby-think. With all the characters, I think motivation and roleplaying is a problem. Does my Sith Lord lust for power or is he a monster? Does my agent have some philosophical reason for hating the Republic?

Kaliyo bugged out for me on a heroic boss fight too, it was charming. I ordered her to attck and she...didn't move. I couldn't un-summon her because we were technically in combat. So me and two other guys are getting nailed by a champion, I pull out of cover to retreat (back to where Kaliyo is standing uselessly and not moving)--and he attacks Kaliyo, bringing her into the fight. We finally beat him Everything worked out great.

I have a trooper on an underpopulated server and it's indeed pretty bad--hard to get groups, GTN is depressingly dead. I would like some kind of merge or something. Since planets can be "sharded," having 200 imperials on Dromund Kaas won't hurt the imperial sides of the merged servers. "-.15%" week over week looks natural to me, as the game is played a little less since its release. If you're saying the game's supposed to expand through some explosively viral word of mouth, seems unlikely. That doesn't happen much with anything (with movies it's almost 1/100, with "Paranormal Activity" and "Titantic" and perhaps certain tiny art films being the only time word of mouth has ever demonstrably expanded sales.) If EA's banking on "explosive word of mouth" filling up those servers in months to come, this is foolish. It's possible traffic will in fact expand and the game might flourish and grow, but not to a point where merging the undertrafficked servers now would be problematic. Am I wrong? People on undertrafficked Republic servers are getting a crappier experience.

Well you're right about Skyrim. Sold like 6 million copies or more. But Bioware didn't want to develop another game with Lucas where Lucas gets half the money. The "Mass Effect" series was Bioware's way of saying "it's our brand that made KOTOR." And "Mass Effect" wasn't as good, story-wise, as KOTOR, but it was good. MMOs have the *potential* for 10X the money of a 2 million seller, so the potential money is all that got Bioware and Lucas together again. Every retail sale on KOTOR made Bioware $15-20, I believe, is how the economics work out. Every month of subscription on an MMO is $15 straight to the developer. Why do you think they're developing them? One month of paid subscription + retail sale is 2X the money to the developer. 2 months of paid subscription is 3X the money to the developer, etc.

Sorry Fattie. There's a lot of stuff you CAN do in the game, like "get diabetes."

I can only speak for myself, here, I've played this game constantly since pre-release and have several alts: Don't care. Don't care if you use a money cheat on Simcity either. Maybe they could conceivably "disrupt" the GTN by gearing up all your companions with your fortune (like the game sort of encourages you to do,) but I have a Republic character on an underpopulated server and there's no way to get a worse GTN than that. There's no good trooper gear whatsoever--found some decent earpieces and implants ten levels previous and that's it. I change the filter to 1-50 and there's still very little.

Go ahead and tell my Mom I used the "no carryweight" cheat in Skyrim, genius. Who cares?

"storyline in mmo's [sIC] isnt [sIC] top priority, bioware screwed up big their."[sIC] Not a top priority to you--I wouldn't be playing without it. "Mass Effect" might be a passable shooter or RPG, but I wouldn't play or anticipate it without the story. Online shooters are the only gametype where narrative doesn't matter to me-- But playing Call of Duty campaign levels without "narrative" isn't conceivable. You're inextricably bound to "role-playing" and narrative when you play CoD single-player, and almost any contemporary game that's not competitive multiplayer sport. Bioware screwed up by not infusing all multiplayer content with Bioware stuff. Black Talon flashpoint is a lot of fun.

I just did this and definitely noticed the surrounding terrain on Dromand Kaas popping in at extremely close range. I've been looking for changes like this that noticeably make the game look like crap, for better performance. Also didn't notice much of a framerate improvement (still rocking 15-30 in motion and idling with nobody around,) sure warzones and heroics and the fleet are 3-18 FPS like always.) Could be they took this option out because the performance boost is so miniscule. Not sure.

I saw your post and said "wait for it...Jedi Knight...wait for it..." and then it came near the end. The main problem here is that you're a Jedi Knight. Look at the Jedi Knight class forums (although the first mobs on Alderaan actually killed my trooper unexpectedly, but it's just the first quest where difficulty seems ratcheted up.) PvE is hardest in the game for the Jedi Sentinel without a healer. When you're on-level you have to approach every mob carefully, and do the exact right thing. Many players recommend outleveling content when you're a Jedi Knight. There are definite PvE imbalances, or at least the class is most complicated to use right. As an indication of how busted PvE is for Jedis, Bioware shipped the game with the final boss being close to literally *impossible*, and they just recently patched it. Whoops! Guess it's good the rest of the Jedi Knight PvE sections are so well-balanced.

I wish you people would stop posting about how populated your server is. That's great for your server. You say it like it contradicts the fact there are underpopulated servers. I just wish they'd merge some of the underpopulated servers--so we could be on populated servers too. They were probably a little over-optimistic.

Some people can't find groups or play heroics or flashpoints. There were 8-15 Republic people on Alderaan on 4PM, Saturday Afternoon, a month after the game was released, on my server. I'm assuming Bioware designed their servers hoping for 1.5-3X the players and equal factions. A while back I wouldn't even try to find a heroic group without 50+ people on the planet. Now I'm begging when there's 20 during primetime. It's mainly people on under-populated servers playing Republic having trouble, but I can't even find any good gear for my trooper on the GTN, really. Via the GTN I sold some purple gear--to a player I'd grouped with already; then she sold some gear to me. We were amongst a small handful of people in that level range using the GTN at all.

Problem with this dynamic is that every mob is calculated to be somewhat challenging. If they rush in to grief when you're mid-combat (I was a trooper so I use a lot of AoEs) they're guaranteed a win, since you and your companion are somewhat damaged already. Saw an imperial player on Tat, we warily regard each other. Then she rushed into me fighting a mob (it was the Czerka base where both sides share a quest,) triggers my PvP and nails me. Satisfaction came when I kiled her one on one a few times independent of mobs--but then flagged for PvP, I got blindsided later by another player while fighting a mob (neither fun nor funny.) After I'd already sent the agent packing (sorry, Imperial agent, I'm not gunning for your tank--me and Aric are comin' for you.) I thought it was kind of a fun change of pace, personally--but I would have preferred a straight fight. I almost left the planet without completing that Czerka base quest. Stalking a player fighting mobs is obviously lame as compared to requesting a duel or something.

My DPS rotation on Sith Sorcerer looked a little like this once I got the no cooldown on "Force Lightning": FORCE LIGHTNING, FORCE LIGHTNING, SHOCK, FORCE LIGHTNNG, ELECTROCUTE, FORCE LIGHTNING. The "shock" and "electrocute" are mostly for fun, you can just use force lightning tho. And whoever designed the class took "POWEEEERRRR, UNLIIIMMMMITTTEDDD POWEEERRRR" seriously since you only run out of mana in boss situations where you're healing for three minutes and fighting a war of attrition.

I got drawn into a fight on Tatooine too. No idea what was going on, the enemy runs into a mob I'm fighting and suddenly I'm fighting them because my PvP flag is on. Then I respawned and wiped the floor with them 1 on 1 several times. Then my PvP flag was still on and I got blindsided again fighting a mob. Stay classy, sith lords. Pretty minor annoyance considering how rarely you run into other players, but still--bad design.

Don't know why no one's saying it, since it's the single most effective thing Bioware could do: If the engine coding is whacked and low-framerate-y beyond easy repair, how hard is it to implement 640 resolution? I played Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, Skyrim and Call of Duty in 640 resolution (not exactly unheard of for a AAA game to offer it in 2012)--and those games run 30% smoother--at least--than they would at 800x600.

<While there certainly are problems with some hardware configurations, it's safe to say that 90% of people are experiencing no performance problems (and it was in fact said by Bioware).> You should post in "Old Republic" thread in the Mensa forums, and just forget about the morons saying this is a abysmally-performing game on low-end systems that nonetheless run every other AAA modern game serviceably.

This is literally the worst-running AAA game since "Crysis" at its low settings. I'm talking about having a wimpy computer and trying to get a good framerate turning down graphics. Black Ops at 800x600 was unplayable in multiplayer for me, but that was because it's a twitch game--I easily could have played if it were an RPG. All warzones are unplayable for me in TOR (and Modern Warfare 3 runs at 35-40 FPS at 640 resolution, which they put back in.) TOR design team was semi-oblivious, since they didn't implement 640 resolution (like in Mass Effect 2, Skyrim and Modern Warfare 3.) If they could implement it now, it'd be the single-most effective way of helping out players with bad framerates.

I bet you'd tell my Mom that I used the "no carryweight" cheat in "Skyrim" too.

They should have just beamed bombs over onto the Borg ship.

Some people got a 15-25% framerate drop in the last patch. For me, that meant my "crappy, horrible" framerate became an "utterly unplayable" framerate. If you have this specific problem, do what I said and the other thread says about getting back to your normal, crappy framerate from before the patch.

If you had a 20-30% framerate drop after the last patch, do exactly what I said and what the other thread says about deleting those two files. It actually works, it's not nonsense. Your framerate will be how it was before the patch.

My Republic side server is dead. "Assassins of Sion." Rarely more than 30 people on the fleet. The GTN is dead, too, there's almost nothing cool to buy. Maybe I shouldn't have rolled Republic on an "assassin" server. I wish I picked a more populated one.

Decreasing my already abysmal Crysis-like framerate to "unplayable" and forcing low-end players to do DOS Autoexec.bat editing-type stuff does not seem like a smooth or smart patch strategy. Actually I could probably still write a DOS ".bat" file that would delete those two files for Bioware's next patch, if that would help.

I had this problem. Framerate went from 25-30 (best case scenario) to 15-20, made the game unplayable. And yeah, I changed the graphics settings back to lowest, but framerate almost made me cancel, since the game suddenly became unplayable. Some kind stranger told me to do this, and the framerate bounced back to normal: GO UNDER /USERS/[YOUR NAME]/APPDATA/LOCAL/SWTOR/SWTOR/SETTINGS and delete "client_settings" and "graphics_mirror." The guy who told me to do it told me to back those files up first, so I did. Then the game will recreate those files when you launch it again, and your framerate will be how it was before. No idea why this works, but it worked.