What happened to Q&A, testing things on internal servers instead of fire and forget and hope it works on live servers?

I have a feeling "external partners" means BitRaider.

That is an awesome idea! I whole-heartedly support this!

Wait, what? I was force-transfered from an RP server to a PVP, and now I have to pay $120 to correct this?

I have to wonder, who's in charge of Quality Assurance? Stevie Wonder?

First, let me apologize for not having read each and every single post before this, so I might be reiterating a few things. It's worth noting that the version of HeroEngine that SWTOR uses is so old that the DirectX 9.0c support is just bare bones. It's really just a DirectX 7 engine with some tacked on functions. The most tell-tale signs is that a lot of filtering an shadowing is done via CPU instead of GPU, how it struggles to handle FSAA and how it completely lacks multi core support. SWTOR tries to get around this by separating the rendering engine from the main process, but as people with state of the art graphic cards can see, this doesn't really bring much in the way of performance. Another problem is the sound engine. I confess: I have -no- idea what they use, maybe it's part of the HeroEngine package. What is obvious though is that what we get, is 8 channel stereo sound without panning between the channels. Try a round of space battles and you'll notice sound starting in one speaker and cutting out as it appears in the other, and sound stuttering when all the sounds fight for the access to the few channels available. This is like going back to the days of DOS games. Even if I'd love DirectX11 support, I'd be glad if they just patched in the new engine to get better performance, not even including anything DX11 specific. It will most likely be a night and day difference in performance!

Looks like an awesome competition, but I am _so_ tired of being left out just because I'm not living in the US.

Hey at least they're high tech! I mean they're 3000 years older than C-3P0 and yet they have human-like voices without that robotic flange sound he has.

My first thought is no, it feels unfinished and technically it's very poor, but when I think about it - yes I probably would. Given the great story telling and sci-fi theme, once I had seen it in action I'd be hooked.

The Legacy system is a fun function but as someone said before, it's not thought through at all. How will I explain Christmas meetup of a whole bunch of different species on each side of the faction? It'll make George Lucas' Christmas Special look sane! ;-)

A couple of tips: 1) Buy the power converter and learn where in the missions you have a few seconds of peace from fighters, switch from boosted blasters to shields and they charge up again really fast. If you're in a pinch, switch anyway and rely on missiles for a few seconds, as those don't interrupt the shield regeneration. ( Note: When the power converter is attached, you can press 1 to boost your blasters, and 2 to boost your shields, make sure you don't hit the buttons twice or you toggle the boost functions OFF instead. Always make sure you don't have shield boost on during fights, because it makes your blasters nearly worthless) 2) Swipe with missiles. Focus on any on-screen fighters with your blasters and do quick sweeps with the cursor to lock on to enemy turrets with your missiles. Remember: Turrets stand for a large amount of damage that you/your escort takes, so it makes a huge difference. Missiles will also launch and hit through any obstructions, so don't worry about that.

From what people have posted, it would seem performance suffers more than expected on _some_ older graphic cards, while others run more than fine. Those that come to mind off the top of my head, are the Nvidia 8800 and 8600. Yes those cards are old, but we're talking way worse than those cards should be able to deliver. Especially on a DX8/9 only single-threaded engine from 2006 like Heroengine, which is what SWtOR runs on. I just swapped out my 8800GTX for a GTS 250 and now I actually see performance changes in SwtOR when I change resolution/quality settings and it's more than playable. Do note the old card ran perfectly with everything maxed in say, Lord of The Rings Online - which looks miles better. I don't know why the team decided to go with Heroengine since it's so dated, but something isn't koscher with it right now - at least on some configurations.