You obviously didn't spend enough $$$ I'm glad I got the only thing that interested me, the Gundark mount, for 1 M credits off someone after I shouted WTB in /1 No wonder BioWare can get by with less and less content if people are more than happy to send hundreds of cash for some pixels

SOON™ "Soon" does not imply any particular date, time, decade, century, or millennia in the past, present, and certainly not the future.

E.A finally decided to shut down this game for good

NEVER let your game specific Nvidia Control Pannel setting on "Adaptive", always on "Maximum Performances". It's common knowledge. The nvidia cards tend to hover at around 400-500 MHz thinking there is not much to render (I.E. as if you were browsing random internet forums) while there is in fact some to do. Not all the time but Adaptive (default setting) is the most often reason when your card is underused and your framerate tanks. Well except in SWTOR as the GFX card almost doesn't matter. Unless you run with High Shadows + 2048+ shadow resolution and Very High Shadow Cascading + High Shaders + Bloom, you won't probably notice the difference between Adaptive & MAximum Performances (unless you also happened to have MSAA x16 or some other gpu hungry options turned on in Nvidia Inspector for ex) SWTOR is super ultra CPU heavy, that's why you can get almost the same framerate on a crappy macbook with an integrated intel card as a computer with a 800+ series card so long as you got a decent enough i5 or i7 @ 2.4 + GHz. (unless you turn all graphics options on ultra ofc)

With a decent rig (I.E. an i7 or even i5 with 2.4 GHz + and some random 2GB VRAM GFX card with some decent capabilities) you can play the game at 1280x800 everything on lowest settings OR at 1920 x1080 with everything on ultra (maybe with shadows de-activated as they can take a major dump on your framerate tho) AND IN BOTH CASES the framerate will drop to 15-25 fps in Warzones during combat. Oh, and unless you run MSAA X16 + some other GPU hungry options in your Nvidia Control Pannel, those options don't matter. You won't magically attain 60 FPS in Warzones even with all the performances settings in it

It's funny cause the auto play next video after the one you linked is also yours ( where you showed your Warzone stealth capture and node defending tricks while playing on your 4770K CPU and STILL couldn't get higher than 25 FPS AT BEST when there was almost no action going on, 17-19 fps otherwise Also, the video you linked, you dropped from 90 FPS to 60 FPS just by being alone in a room and spamming animations. Shows how broken is this engine :D Meanwhile with a similar rig I can be on Medium - High in Guild Wars 2, with amazing graphics in comparison to SWTOR AND being at 70 ~ FPS no matter what I do

Say thanks to BioWare for their Hero Engine. Feel free to google it. Even if you had a 4.4 GHz cpu you won't get more than 20 ish fps while in Warzones during bloated combat sequences. The game is just coded like this. That's partly because of the dual 32 bits .exe processes that require ginormous amounts of CPU raw power to load and swap textures, FXs, animations, sounds and whatnot in combat, on the fly, and it makes even NASA's super computers down to their knees. Don't listen to people claiming they have 60 (or 110 without Vsync) FPS EVERYWHERE, you can, except during combat. And you can't do a damn about it

What content?

Give this man a medal

Exactly. Don't forget that stuff die in 5 seconds in 2 or 3 abilities, meaning you can't even 'train' your rotation. Learning when to use defensive cooldowns (and how each one measures against each other when you got no idea what this stat or that percentage means in actual survivability) is pretty much impossible unless you pull 20 mobs maybe lol

Best part is players when they're under lv 50 being put into those super mega story spoiling flashpoints :D

LOOOOOOOOOOOOL at screenshots when you're idling by. Anybody can get 60 (or 110 when not turning on Vsync, which is weird not to but to each their on) FPS when doing nothing. Even with 20 people around you. I have 60 FPS in those situations as well, with everything on ULTRA minus shadows, at 1920x1080. It is WHEN IN COMBAT (or just using any ability, unsheathing your weapon, mounting / dismounting, opening up a menu, thus why when pressing the hide UI keybind the framerate jumps back to full FPS LOL). The moment you engage in combat, the framerate will tank. Even if you have an i7 4790K @ 4.4 GHZ And your CPU & GPU won't hover above 50% usage and 50-60 °C if you're on a desktop either. There is some really funky coding with the dual 32 bits exes making it so ANYTIME the game has to load on demand animations, FX and sounds and whatnot (prevalent in Warzones when that happen 24/7 unless you're AFK'ing in spawn point ) the game WILL drops the fps to 20-30 at most (and jump back to max). Except if you're any good in Warzones and don't die and stay in action permanently from start to finish, your averaged fps will hover between 15 and 30 (averaged at 22-23 for me over an entire warzone, so, including those 60 fps respawn moments or solo node defending, meaning when in combat with the entire enemy team (hello Ancient HyperLAGate) your FPS will drop to as low as 13-15 fps)) I demand some screenshots WHEN you are in combat with 2-3 players while having some other players from your team around, and not as a ranged dps being 50 yards away, huh, but being close to the action focus. I can bet my arm off you won't have more than 30 fps. If lucky.

It seems for some people (who obviously didn't press CTRL+SHIFT+F and even less went ahead and 'install' FRAPS or MSI Afterburner or equivalent to monitor framerate variations ingame, along with temperatures and cpu/gpu usage for the latter) the framerate can drop to 20 or 30 an they won't notice it LOL I guess they must have played WAYYYYYYYYY too many 30 fps locked console games cause even without an ingame fps counter it's quite blatant that the game tanks your framerate pretty BADLY during Warzone combat situations (not when idling at spawn point huh)

I was exactly thinking this earlier on... With all the staff in BioWare Austin that has been laid off or giving notice over these years, plus the latest E.A. job announcement about an open world RPG... But they're probably just gonna screw it as they love to, as they did with Battlefront recently Or latest Dragon Age games... The new E.A. BioWare is just not in control anymore, they got release schedules and deadlines pushed on them, since they're part of E.A. now. That's why and how they manage to release buggued and incomplete products lol They're gonna do the same with the new RPG in the works and release the rest of the content in DLC

Another great post from you, as always I agree with 99% of what OP talked about. Frankly, I'm not sure there is any point into discussing the flaws (and merits) of this game anymore, it doesn't take a genius to see they're cutting on costs everywhere to squeeze any $$$ they can any more, the game is on life assistance mode at this point. Only thing I could add, and I know 100% they won't fix it since it would be sooooo not cost efficient: The Hero Engine was a terrible, terrible idea. If it weren't for this crap, Ilum (and PvP in general) would have been much more fun. And since instead of having 15-25 fps during combat it could have been so much better with any other engine (probably wouldn't have been more costly or longer to develop an in house one either at that point!) they would have probably have a MUCH higher retention rate initially (and thus more subs and more ROI). Sadly, no matter how powerful your CPU can be, pvp combat performance will never be as smooth as WoW's or heck even FF XIV. And that blows.

Please look forward to it

Please look forward to our next Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Knights of the Fallen Empire© Story update!

Wasn't that the case during early 1.0 though? IIRC the profit was barely 300 credits per mission but it was there and abused plenty until they nerfed the crap outta it Reminds me of my BioChem which was awesome (hello 10K Smash crits in PvP with my Battlemaster gear + reusable adrenals and stimpacks ) until they nerfed them into not useable in PvP at all and / or converting reusable into one time use

Add in the fact that new players will also struggle more and more just to find people to do said operations with, if more and more people actually quit the game lol (Coming soon™)

THISSSSSSSSSSSSSS And don't forget that back in the lv50 early release days, playing as a Marauder, even with that white knight know-it-all Quinn sucker, you could still get as low as 20-30 % HP (or get rekt if you didn't pay attention / were a baddie) when you got randomly engaged by a couple of Elites in packs (two golds = barely doeable; 1 gold and 1 silver was annoyingly long to deal with, 2 silvers and some random mobs was annoying but safe though). . . Nowadays, :D :D

Oh there is, it's just several expansions old and you do it over and over again. On the other hand, with KOTFE they didn't even introduce new Flashpoints or anything like that, so there's no "midgame" content anymore either. ;D ^ QFT Is this real life? A constructive and helpful post from bran!

^ this @OP Great post, I enjoyed reading it. wish you the best. Always sad to see dedicated players get disappointed and have to leave, no matter the game. Cheers.

You don't need to be a game developper or investor to realize that E.A is cutting edges to make more profit and BioWare had no clue whatsoever about completing the Hero Engine (since they bought it before completion in 2005 to cut - yet again - costs on development ) and even less about making a successful MMORPG up and running (lol at the idea of making 30 minutes worth of cutscenes on a month release schedule when people can just unsub for 6 months to wait for content to pile up, as if people didn't do that already in WoW or FF XIV) You don't need to be an athlete to recognize one's merits or flaws either. Every paying customer is ENTITLED to criticism, if they wanna express it, so be it. If developers don't (or most likely by budget constraints, can't) act upon those, so be it.

lol @ people thinking they got 60 or more fps in Warzones during combat. I can bet my arm off they don't have FRAPs' fps counter or the ingame one displayed (CTRL+SHIFT+F), or any other FPS overlay. There is NO WAY IN HELL, even with a 4.5 GHz CPU and 32 GB of RAM, a SSD and /or SWTOR Unleashed (since loading times are better from RAM than an SSD or 7200 RPM HDD, right) to get 60 or even 50 FPS in Warzones while being in combat with 1,2;3 or more players. It's just not possible. It's an I/O issue from the Hero Engine BioWare bought in 2005 while it was uncomplete and heavily modified by them by sadly they failed at it. As you can see from the gigantic amount of results about SWTOR's awful Warzone (or Illum back in the day) performances. ( You can have 60 or even 110 FPS, everywhere, on planets, on the Fleet standing still along 20 players. No problems. But THE MOMENT one guy uses one skill, the FPS will drop down harder than a rock (and jump back to full 0.5sec later). I wish I knew and searched about it before blindly resubbing, as I thought it was my crappy computer that was holding me back back in the day... FPS will be locked at 15 to 25 FPS in Warzones depending on how many players are nearby and actively using skills. You can't have more than 25 ish FPS in heavy combat scenarios. I ran many FRAPS benchmarks, and even with the 'back-to-full 60 FPS' phases while in respawn for ex, or defending a node alone 50 meters away from action (still visible on the horizon thanks to BioWare removing the draw distance slider and disabling the effect in ini settings as well trololol) the AVERAGED FPS will still never vary much: 22 to 24 FPS (averaged on 10 minutes sessions) Meaning you have some heavy drops down to as low as 13 fps sometimes during heavy combat occurences (Hypergate anyone?) And if people can't notice it, then good for them I guess. But for any people used to 60 FPS gaming, even and especially on much prettier games, much more recent games, well this blows and is obvious when you notice some 0.5sec delay on some things (refered by some as ability delay) In fact, some theorized that the Server to Client delayed responses (latency spikes at some times) is the reason the client can't render at more than 25 fps during heavy loads in combat. --- Here are some videos from just searching "SWTOR Warzone performances" on either Google, here or Reddit All of these videos feature MSI Afterburner or equivalent FPS, CPU & GPU % load usage and temperatures. You'll see healthy 60+ FPS before the Warzone starts and how the INSTANT someone uses a skill the FPS will drops. WZ Ancient Hypergates 30 May 2014 - FPS Test SWTOR 3.0 - FAIL FPS / LAG / PERFORMANCE in Warzones + Operations (December 16th 2014) Although this game is CPU heavy and doesn't care for graphic cards (I was able to get the same crappy performances with a 2010 macbook with an Intel HD Graphics and a i5 Dual Core 2.3 GHz), the game does heavily lag no matter how good your CPU is. Feel free to read up on the 180,000 Google results about this issue, I cleared my brower history so can't find the one Reddit thread that explained how and why the dual 32 bits .exe processes failed to load animations and textures etc and that's why the game was severly underperforming, even with an i7 4790K @ 4.4 GHz (and can't be arsed finding it again)

THIS AND THIS ! ! ! :mad: