When a sizeable number of lowbie PvP'ers unsubbed because this issue took so long to address.

Everyone else has covered airflow to death. So I will present my own conflicting information by recommending you do this: http://www.performancepsu.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/oil_based_folding_rig.jpg If the oil gets too hot, just make some french fries. The frozen fries going in will cool down the oil. By the time it heats up again, you will probably be hungry for more french fries anyway. You will not have to worry about air flow at all anymore. You're welcome.

Oh, but I do enjoy all the rigorous discussion! Well, most of it anyway. And to some extent, the multiple lengthy threads (even if drawn out across years) should aid BioWare in seeing where some of the larger issues (or largest perceived issues) affecting players are. Even if it's not something they're going to act upon anytime soon, there's always the chance it may come into play way off in the distant future.

Ah, good luck on that! I've had overclocked systems that survived days of Prime95, hours of OCCT/Linpack/LinX, but would crash 10-24 hours into their work in a render farm until they were clocked down some. "True stable" is pretty hard to ascertain. If your machine crashes once in a year due to the OC, do you consider it stable? Or stable enough for you? And if "true stable" is the end goal, we should probably be using Xeons with some ECC and avoid the whole overclocking discussion to begin with! There's a reason Intel bins the way they do (well, a couple reasons, but we'll pretend they don't downclock higher-binned chips to meet market demand for the lower end CPU's).

But now people can just say: "The developers recently confirmed that they currently have no plans to address the fundamental limitations of the game engine. Thus, your options appear to be (1) deal with the game as-is, or (2) send your sub money elsewhere." ...which means we'll miss out on the joys of: "its the engine" "its not the engine. u dun even no wut a engine is." "it works fine for me. problem must be on ur end." "you've obviously never tried 16-man ______" "its probably latency. that is from the distance between your computer and the server. you should fix that and the game will be fine for you then at 60fps." "engines have pistons. i'm a racecar!" "upgrade ur computer. its obviously too slow" "then why do i get 60fps in all the other MMOs that look 10x better than swtor" "like i said its the engine" "its NOT the engine" "i think its the new particle effects they added in the recent patch. things got worse for me then." "r u for real!? the game plays waay better for me this patch." "guys stop making threads about this it comes up all the time" "then maybe they should fix it?" "its too much work to fix" "other games do it" "go play the other games then" "clean ur computer" "did u defrag? that helped me. oh and update your drivers it helps!" etc... Oh well...

Would you care to cite an example of where somebody used the wrong CPU or wrong type of RAM in their motherboard? Ideally, one which booted fine (we're also assuming they didn't bend pins and cut slots to make a CPU "fit") , and resulted specifically in performance issues with SWTOR? I'm very interested.

A couple links that might help explain the discrepancy you're seeing: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/05/25/why-the-elder-scrolls-online-isn-39-t-using-heroengine.aspx http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,1034123/The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Improved-effects-with-DirectX-11-Exclusive-Tech-Interview/News/

Oh, I know. I was referring to the "changing an engine after release" bit. Blizzard made constant improvements throughout expansions. Multi-threaded OpenGL rendering during BC, DirectX11 during Cata, adding 64-bit support, etc. Numerous improvements when it came to rendering, effects, hardware support (everything from multi-monitor to fixes that affected issues on specific GPU's), and... well, you get the idea. The point was, it's certainly possible, and some engines certainly are changed/improved after launch.

Completely changing to a *different* game engine, certainly very rare after launch (I can't think of any examples off the top of my head). A switch mid-development, sure (Duke Nukem Forever being the most popular example!). Major changes/modifications to an engine though... Blizzard's made vast improvements and modifications to the engine behind WoW throughout the years. It started off as a modified version of the Warcraft 3 engine. Today it's a completely different beast.

Take a look at the CPU comparison here: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1320?vs=1543 The 6700K has better single-thread performance, worse multi-threaded performance. In SWTOR, it'll probably be "better". But not "better" to the point where you'd actually notice a difference. If you're planning on overclocking, both should make it to around the ~4.5Ghz mark (unless you get lucky or unlucky), and it could very well be a wash. --- Look at secondary aspects that are important to you. Skylake is a little more "future proofed", but the 5820K will do better if you're encoding movies/etc. If SWTOR is the literally the only concern, and particularly if you're overclocking, it really doesn't matter a whole lot and I'd be inclined to just buy based on total system cost.

Not very likely to happen. The HeroEngine never ended up with support for it (despite rumors it was being worked on, I don't believe Mac/Linux support ever came to fruition). So no changes they could even try porting over. And BioWare doesn't seem to have anyone working on the engine full time on their end. If EA were to add Mac support to Frostbite, they could possibly write a client with it. But I don't see that happening in the near future. They could license Unity or UE (both of which have Win/Mac/Linux support) and build a new client with it. How quick this would be would depend on how portable their code is (and assets are), and how much "middleware" is portable. I know FaceFX is easily integrated into those, but I don't know what other middleware they're using. It could be that something critical isn't. Either way, I can't really see them doing it. They could wrap it in Cider. BioWare's done this with other games. Performance would likely be awful though, and would close off the option for major improvements to the HeroEngine (DX10/11 stuff as an example) because Cider has a tendency to choke on certain DX9 stuff as it is. They could hire Aspyr to port it. They'd probably have to hire Aspyr to maintain it too and keep it in sync. Big undertaking though, and I can't see them shelling out the money. Really, your friends will probably just have to stick with WoW, ESO, STO, LOTRO, EVE, DDO, etc. If they're really after a Star Wars fix, Aspyr recently ported KOTOR2 to Mac/Linux which can be grabbed on Steam if they haven't played it and don't mind an older game: ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/208580/ ).

Hmm... possible opportunity for the credit sellers too, if they ever feel like actually playing on a compromised account in their spare time. I wonder if you averaged the drops, how many credits/hour it works out to...?

Would be fun to watch some other games while on the fleet waiting in queue for half an hour. Few issues I'd foresee off the hop: Development time. It's a fairly big ask for a feature that some people might sometimes use. People getting called out. If someone's underperforming, "toxic" players are often too busy to spend time ragging on them beyond a 1-liner or 2. A bystander has all the time in the world to whisper/harass them. Could potentially be addressed by having all players show as nameless, mind you (though that diminishes the ability to identify great players). Potential for a bystander to "help" a certain team ("/w myfriend I just saw a guy move into your zone and stealth - might wanna pop him". Would definitely need a playback delay if this applied to ranked, similar to LoL/etc (a huge amount of dev time to implement a system like this). Certainly not against the idea, but even if other issues were solved, I'd be surprised if they were willing to sink a high level of dev time into something like this.

Back in the day, you could take down a server with a single computer by throwing the right stuff at it (Apache fork bombs, etc). Those were standard DOS attacks, usually against web servers. Think of it more as a vulnerability that was being exploited. DDOS attacks use a pile of computers to overwhelm a server's capacity with sheer volume. Botnets are common, as are reflection attacks. The only solution to these is to have a massive data pipe and hardware that can handle the massive number of connections and high throughput. DDOS attacks are much more common these days.

1) Run the following in command prompt: notepad.exe %localappdata%\SWTOR\swtor\settings\client_settings.ini 2) Find the WindowX and WindowY values. If they're either negative values or extremely high, that's probably the culprit. Change them both to something like 100. Example: WindowX = 100 WindowY = 100 Save the file, start the game. --- Alternately, you can probably just rename the client_settings.ini file. You'll lose whatever video settings you had set, but it should go back to the default. If something breaks, you can rename it back. Find it by pasting the following in command prompt: explorer.exe %localappdata%\SWTOR\swtor\settings --- Note that I only checked this on Win7 - hopefully they didn't go changing paths on Win8 (I'm not booted into OSX right now and don't have my Win8 VM handy to verify... sorry). Good luck.