Exitusx Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 (edited) Alright, I am posting this thread here instead of customer service/bug reports because BioWare will not and has not responded to peoples' questions. Here is the problem more than a few players, including myself, have been experiencing: The longer they play the game, the more problems the game has. These problems normally consist of (but are not limited to) game choppiness and/or fps drops, game crashes, and having the desktop lockup when trying to quit. I have been doing extensive research by checking other peoples' experiences with this to get a general idea of what is going on. More than a few people suggested it may be a memory leak, as the game slowly but surely uses up more memory as you keep playing. Some people experience it differently and have had to find "workarounds" including exiting the game every few hours. How long it normally takes before the game acts up seems to depend almost entirely on how much memory people have. I myself run my computer at around 4GB, and it normally takes 1-2 hours of gameplay before the game inevitably either crashes, or locks up my desktop when I try to quit. But if I exit the game any time before then, it exits fine. Other people who are experiencing a similar issue running at 8GB of memory seem to have to play quite a bit longer before they experience any issues (with the average being 3-5 hours). Seeing a pattern here? Now a few smart people have actually tested this, and they have found that the game actually does start to use up more memory the longer they play it. Here are a few example threads: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=470605 http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=439425 http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=542298 Those are just a few threads on the issue, but there ALOT more. Everyone's time seems to be different. Some people have to play for hours and hours straight before anything happens, whereas people with less memory (such as myself) only need to play an hour or 2 before experiencing any issues. I seriously cannot play this game a single day without it crashing or getting choppy after just 2 hours of play time. And every single time I play for an extended period of time, my PC locks upon exiting. There are just as many threads, if not more, addressing the issue of people's PC locking up after trying to leave the game. http://www.swtor.com/de/community/showthread.php?p=5451169 http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5402474 Then my own thread: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5055549#post5055549 All I know is that more than a few players are experiencing symptoms that are VERY SIMILAR TO A MEMORY LEAK. I am NOT saying that is what it is 100%, but it definitely looks like it. But in most threads in the customer service forums, when the player posts their DXDiag as requested, no employee gets back to them after that point. Or if they do, the problem continues to persist. Has anyone at EA/BioWare ever considered that it isn't their PC with the problem? What I do know for sure is that forcing my PC to shut down so many times from this game has forced me to run a Chkdsk because something got corrupted on forcing my PC to turn off every time I have this issue. NO, THE DRIVE WAS NOT ALREADY CORRUPTED, THIS IS VERY RECENT after forcing my PC off so many times. Basically, if this problem persists, I can't play the game anymore, because I WILL NOT risk damaging my PC because of a broken game. Don't get me wrong, I love BioWare and the games they make, and SWTOR is no exception. But they're busting my butt here. That is why I seriously want to resolve this issue. But if the issue isn't resolved, I can't play the game anymore because I can't risk ruining my PC. If anyone has experienced similar issues, MAKE IT KNOWN. Don't continuously try to fix the problem yourself by screwing with your computer or needlessly upgrading your hardware when it is likely not even your PC that is the problem. No player should have to find their own workarounds for a game they paid for. No player should have to post these issues on the forums with very little to no information as to why the problem is occuring. No player should have to be forced to check if their PC or game is running correctly after playing a game they like, because THAT ISN'T THEIR JOB. It is the DEVELOPERS' JOB. Some people still subscribe to this game, essentially paying you 15$ a month FOR A BROKEN GAME. This is NOT in any sense of the word OKAY. Listen to your players. Respond to your players. You owe them at least some kind of information and what plans, if any, you have to fix this. EDIT: BIOWARE HAS FINALLY GOTTEN BACK TO ME ON THE ISSUE, GO TO PAGE 10 OR CLICK HERE http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5601580#post5601580 Edited December 19, 2012 by Exitusx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Exitusx Posted November 22, 2012 Author Share Posted November 22, 2012 bump.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yerune Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 You're right. It's been like this for a year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valethar Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 They licensed an incomplete version of the game engine, then cobbled together their own code to fill in the gaps. It will probably never be optimized properly because all of the custom additions likely mean they can't update/upgrade the engine. At least that's the story they gave us in Beta. As many times as they've outright lied to us about things, I wouldn't be surprised to find out this was one of them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Exitusx Posted November 22, 2012 Author Share Posted November 22, 2012 You're right. It's been like this for a year. for me it's been around since the 1.3 patch. This leads me to believe that maybe a patch got downloaded wrong. I might reinstall the game and see what happens, but I don't want to go through the process without at least some more evidence to suggest that it may work. After all, not everyone experiences this issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darvus Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 This has been an issue since beta. I too wish that they would fix this. I too have experienced this issue on both of my machines. I have one with 8 gigs of RAM and one with 16 gigs. It also appears that the game does not actually utilize the RAM on video cards, or very little of it. This may also be connected to the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Exitusx Posted November 22, 2012 Author Share Posted November 22, 2012 This has been an issue since beta. I too wish that they would fix this. I too have experienced this issue on both of my machines. I have one with 8 gigs of RAM and one with 16 gigs. It also appears that the game does not actually utilize the RAM on video cards, or very little of it. This may also be connected to the problem. That would make sense, but how can you tell it isn't utilizing the RAM from video cards? I'm not being rhetorical, I actually do mean How can you tell? And this has been around since the beta? This problem has only started for me since the 1.3 patch. Before then this has never been a problem. No fps drops, no PC lockups, no choppiness, no crashes. I could play for hours and hours on end with no issue. Then 1.3 was released and WAM! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthBandeth Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 It'd be nice if they just acknowledged it "Yeah, sorry, we screwed up." They're not gonna lose subs by owning up to their mistakes, lol. If that were true they'd lose subscribers at every patch because bugs were fixed. "OH LOOK. THEY MADE MISTAKES AND HAD BUGS. /UNSUB" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LonHawk Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 I have heard about these issues since day one, its not recent. But I wanted to post and say that if you think something is wrong with a download you can do a repair on the game. When you open your launcher, if you click the cog for the settings, I believe its one of the options in there. I have had friends do this when they've had problems and its fixed things for them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scourn Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 while this game does have memory leaks it isnt the issue causing the constant every couple of hours crash to desktop. I have been testing myself and this game eats up WAY to much ram to begin with when it shouldnt. If you run a real time memory cleaner you will see what i mean. Clear your ram and your disc cache it will drop your ram all the way back down to less than a gig of ram being used even with everything on max for settings. But still even running the game at as little as 8 or 900 megs of ram the game will still lock up and crash and become unstable. There is a huge sticky thread on this exact issue in the customer service section titled crashes to desktop so they are well aware of it. The fact though that not one dev post is spoken on a severe issue that a lot of the community is experiencing speaks volumes about what this team is about now. Just a simple we are trying to fix the problem would help out this community a ton since they have not addressed this issue for many patch cycles. Everyone who is experiencing these serious issues like memory leaks and crashes need to cancel their accounts until this gets fixed is about the only way to force these idiots to actually do their damn job. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Exitusx Posted November 22, 2012 Author Share Posted November 22, 2012 I have heard about these issues since day one, its not recent. But I wanted to post and say that if you think something is wrong with a download you can do a repair on the game. When you open your launcher, if you click the cog for the settings, I believe its one of the options in there. I have had friends do this when they've had problems and its fixed things for them. I tried looking for a repair option and couldn't find it before. I'll go look for it again with your directions and give it a try. Because I don't want to have to reinstall the game just to at least say I did. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobinator Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 Sadly it'll never be fixed. I am positive it's running a skeleton crew. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alec_Fortescue Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 The longer they play the game, the more problems the game has. These problems normally consist of (but are not limited to) game choppiness and/or fps drops, game crashes, and having the desktop lockup when trying to quit. damn, and I thought I am the only one having this! It has to be fixed :/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alec_Fortescue Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 "Turn off your shadows." /thread Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grammarye Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 (edited) Probably a heck of a lot more to do with the fact that they're still running a 32-bit client, and I would speculate that their allocators aren't doing a good job handling address space fragmentation rather than an actual leak. Genuine leaks usually crash the application they're in (after a certain time), reliably, all the time they occur. They do not mysteriously cause FPS drops, Windows to lock up, or your hair to turn blue. All those linked threads basically say is 'oh look, I started with the game using 1.5GB RAM and now it's using 2.8GB of RAM, the sky is falling!'. This is nothing special. I do wish people who haven't programmed & tested a memory allocation strategy wouldn't make rampant speculation over a number they don't understand increasing. Games use RAM all the time. What's more, thanks to significant virtualisation technology in the average OS, the amount of physical RAM in use doesn't necessarily bear any resemblance to what the application's address space is doing. Concentrate on the problem - don't waste time speculating about why it happens. If after 3-4 hours you have choppy performance, care about that, complain about that - it is a much more productive use of your time. If after 3-4 hours you have more RAM being used but the game is fine, that is what your RAM is for. Did you get lots of RAM for it to sit idle doing nothing? I doubt it. I empathise with those having issues - please just focus on the actual problems that need addressing rather than inventing them. Edited November 22, 2012 by Grammarye Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zangaboing Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 (edited) Game getting clunky and slight fps drops after 2-3 hours of playing has been an issue for me since launch (and even the few beta test weekends i participated few weeks prior to release).My pc has 4gb RAM atm. Its sad that there's no word from bioware about it. So far it hasnt gotten so bad that i had to manualy reset/reboot my pc, its just annoying that after a few hours i cant alt-tab anymore, or if i try to quit the game it crashes after having a black screen for about a minute. Noticed that loading times are somewhat longer after a few hours too, so i have to spend thirty seconds to a minute on loading screens between warzone matches, or even worse, traveling through orbital stations. "Turn off your shadows." /thread They've been off (or to the lowest setting anyway) since release. Try to be constructive at least... Edited November 22, 2012 by Zangaboing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mcky Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 Hey bros, I can play Swtor for 8+ hours and I have zero issues with frame rate or lag. How do I join your club? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zangaboing Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 Hey bros, I can play Swtor for 8+ hours and I have zero issues with frame rate or lag. How do I join your club? For starters post your gaming rig so i can see what i can afford to buy myself - or if you really want to join i guess we could trade PCs. Im sure you'll enjoy the club. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grammarye Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 (edited) Out of curiousity, how many of you are running 32-bit OSes? They've been off (or to the lowest setting anyway) since release. Try to be constructive at least... Without putting words in his mouth, I think he was being sarcastic re the traditional reply... Edited November 22, 2012 by Grammarye Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andryah Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 It's system/OS dependent. If you want to have a sensible discussion (yet again) on the topic, please be kind enough to specify system and OS. I have never had a problem with memory leaks, nor crashing (I have had one crash since launch, and I think it was a system issue not the client). System: Win7-64/i7/6gig/460M/Mfg-certified-drivers. I have a memory monitor in my system tray and I find the client uses less then 5% more memory after 6+ hours of play then when I first log-in. As with all system/OS dependent issues, they can be a lot harder to isolate and fix on the developer side. It's much easier to find/fix something that affects everyone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zangaboing Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 Out of curiousity, how many of you are running 32-bit OSes? Without putting words in his mouth, I think he was being sarcastic re the traditional reply... I guess he was... Anyway, im running windows 7 64-bit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gomla Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 I'm suffering from memory leaks ... fix me. Seriously, I keep forgetting things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andryah Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 Probably a heck of a lot more to do with the fact that they're still running a 32-bit client, and I would speculate that their allocators aren't doing a good job handling address space fragmentation rather than an actual leak. Genuine leaks usually crash the application they're in (after a certain time), reliably, all the time they occur. They do not mysteriously cause FPS drops, Windows to lock up, or your hair to turn blue. All those linked threads basically say is 'oh look, I started with the game using 1.5GB RAM and now it's using 2.8GB of RAM, the sky is falling!'. This is nothing special. I do wish people who haven't programmed & tested a memory allocation strategy wouldn't make rampant speculation over a number they don't understand increasing. Games use RAM all the time. What's more, thanks to significant virtualisation technology in the average OS, the amount of physical RAM in use doesn't necessarily bear any resemblance to what the application's address space is doing. Concentrate on the problem - don't waste time speculating about why it happens. If after 3-4 hours you have choppy performance, care about that, complain about that - it is a much more productive use of your time. If after 3-4 hours you have more RAM being used but the game is fine, that is what your RAM is for. Did you get lots of RAM for it to sit idle doing nothing? I doubt it. I empathise with those having issues - please just focus on the actual problems that need addressing rather than inventing them. qft. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spatology Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 just restart your game every 2 hours Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zangaboing Posted November 22, 2012 Share Posted November 22, 2012 just restart your game every 2 hours Do you have this issue? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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