This matches my experience, at least people where able to play in the first month. I've seen MMO where it took months to become stable.

I'm wondering how much the Star Wars franchise cost, I'm sure that wasn't cheap too. But so far gameplay isn't bad for me, nothing stopped my leveling experience and no game crash. That's already lighyears better than other games I've gotten this year. And most MMO I've dealt with. One game I got took from November to January to release a fix for a bug in the career mode of the game. Until then no one could progress past a level. That is a real game killer and it wasn't as complex as this game.

Basically they released the game once it was playable. That's a business decision, some disagree and feel they are guinea pigs but dev teams probably practice incremental development. They could have spent another year working on the game but whitout direct customer feedback they could have continued doing the wrong thing for another year. They probably feel it's better to have people hammer at their stuff and see what works. A longer beta might have been a good idea but missing xmas would have cost them a lot of sales (at least the common thinking goes in the Game industry). Would you all prefer a finish game that sucks or one that has issues but also potential to grow into something good?

Except you are also making **** up. Your search and replace function in your IDE isn't going to fix racing conditions between threads or graphics glitches that give you 0 debug output. (If you've never done graphics before, welcome to the black screen of nothing) In fact your search and replace function won't fix sorting strings instead of ints. It's probably in someone bug queue as a really low level issue compared to the rest he has to fix. Hopefully he'll learn to unit test small things like that in the future. EDIT: hell the bug might not even be in his code, it could either be the widget he's using to create the table with sortable columns that's missing a way to tell it how to sort each column. (Hell that could be in the engine even and require a new build of the engine to fix). Or at the point where it was taken out of the DB and should have been coverted their instead of everywhere that level number is used. The list goes, it's simple to see what the issue is, the fix might not be so easy. Don't assume anything. Please tell us the last time you wrote a UDP server that can handle millions of packets per second. You also assume that all bugs are worth fixing. I could care less if my guild list sorting ability is broken when the rest of the UI has far worse bugs in it. You present a really naive view of software development. Like comments and indentation would catch all bugs, I mean seriously? You really believe this? The lack of understanding of how large software development project work in this thread disturbs me. Here's a link to those who would like to learn instead of complain: http://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0759285780/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329313409&sr=8-1 Showstopper will give you an idea of how it's done. It's dated but still very relevant. And the short beta is not the dev teams fault, it's a business decision and you should blame the business not the actual coders. In fact I'd say it was probably a good bargain, most of the industry assumes that missing the xmas deadline is going to kill your sales.

That thread is pretty hilarious (aside from the jerk tone in the OP's post). You guys do gloss over a few things, maybe that patch is already done but hasn't been in one of the testing builds yet. I'm assuming they don't just shove everything in each patch (they probably have a few branches, unstable/testing/PTS/gold) And also the guy who wrote that code probably doesn't work there anymore (as large game companies like EA have 1 year turnaround time). So who ever has to fix that code probably has to find where the heck that code is and then will probably realise everything around it is a crappy as that one line and needs rewriting entirely, at that point the guy is probably going "do I make a band-aid fix of fix the whole issue" and now he's a couple weeks in development fixing the interns bad code ;p Or it's just an oversight and it's chilling in the bug queue waiting to be read by the dev if it has been sorted already, could be in the wrong guys queue .... the list goes on. Large project like that can get quite messy. On bug means nothing.

The general forums for any game is to be taken as a joke and will always be just a joke. I suggest you avoid this forum like the plague if you don't come here to laugh. Some have had good points in their posts but they have all been said before anyway and the trolling that goes with those post make them useless. Imagine you were working for BioWare and needed feedback would you even consider reading this crap? I sure wouldn't, it be wasting my time I could be putting into fixing stuff after the launch of a massive product.

I agree completely. Here's a recent example: I played STO(2010) at launch, OMG is this game so much better in every aspect of launch than STO was. At least the 0-50 experience here was good. STO had 0 content on the Klingon Side. Most quest were so generic it wasn't even funny. They finally managed to get something good going by opening the quest creation tool to the player base and letting them create quest and episodes. I have to say I was suprised that this game worked in it's first week at all. All the other MMO launch I've seen that was not the case.

I dunno, Rift's franchise was brand new, SW can't be cheap to get (I'm assuming part of that 200million people talk about went to that). No one I've seen so far has said that the leveling experience in Rift is better than what we have here. They put their budget on different things for sure and it shows in a lot of area where I find SWTOR more fun.

So I was in the shower this morning and had this brilliant idea. Forget bug fixing and new content what we really need is a new class. The R2 unit class. I mean this would be so awesome. I hear people already going, how the heck does it do damage. Well aside from shocking you and shouting lasers from it's freakin head I'm sure the rest can come later(maybe bite you like a shark?). For companions I think the first one should be something like a jedi knight you find in a cave, I mean JK are kinda dumb anyway so story wise it should work. Then second one should be a protocol droid on your x-wing lookalike ship. Third is obviously a pink droid masseuse... I mean the dialogs would be so cool: "would you like to save or kill this guy" "bleep bleep bloooopeeweee" SHOCK Ok I'm done. Never taking a shower again.

I agree, I wouldn't mind spending 15$ a month for some good and regular story updates. I do enjoy the other MMO aspects like PvP and raiding but they have something with the story no other game currently offers imho.

I quoting all of your post because it's completely on target (I also develop software for a living). A game this size is huge to patch and patch quality is going to be inversely proportional to how fast they can push them out. All we see on these forums is people complaining of how long it's taking to fix things. You can't have it both ways. Another thing I'd like to say, developers can't really tell how certain things are going to behave until they are released. Sometimes you just have to put it out there because replicating the load of a million people hitting buttons at the same time is really really hard.

I'd say: You guys did good with the limitations you had (EA ;p), 200 millions looks big but when you compare that to millions paying 15 bucks a months for 7 years it looks tiny (I'd like to know the total cost of WoW over the years). The story is good just extend it a little longer and don't read the forums, all there is in the forums is impatient folks who don't understand the scale of building a game like this. (ok I'm done with my apologist comment, I just have to support other software devs when I can ;p)

As far as overheating I've never had that experience but ATI cards are currently a little better in some benchmarks than others but it won't make that much of a difference really and I have to agree with Darkhosis, developers prefer NVIDIA because they do a better job reaching out to them and I personally also prefer them as I develop visualization software and have had less issues with NVIDIA cards and drivers. You did select a good card, you won't regret it if you go and get that one. EDIT: also a little more details on your type of use (only windows games, using linux..., 30 inch monitor ) would help us give you better comments.