Especially on skin tones. The shadows and shading cast on skin seems a bit too dark, often causing noticeable banding of colors (where you can see and obvious point where one color changes to the next, rather than it being smooth and natural) Im guessing it was a tweak done during the new facial animation tech, since its only visible with HIGH shaders.

What about Bounty Hunter?

This is more of a gameplay mechanic response. Im more intrested in the storyline immersion and lore feel of playing through it. Even if its more challenging to do so.

Ive been a long time subscriber, and have access to the last years worth of storyline content. Im also sitting on a level 60 character boost that I havent used yet. My main character is a Smuggler. Enjoyed the hell out of him. However for this newer content, all the story trailers, and lore and themed settings seem to be very heavily force/lightsaber oriented. It just portraits this feeling that a force oriented class is more thematically suited for doing this content (not from a mechanical stand point, but from lore/storyline perspective). For those that have played through it all (no spoilers please), do you feel that a specific class provides a more fun and interesting play through of the content? Again, im not talking about how easy it is to play through, or which class is the most OP to play through it. Im going for purely a storyline immersion perspective. With the class storylines so far, they have been catered to each specific class. Smuggler quests have been very smuggler like for example. With this new story arch, it seems that the storyline is more a "1 size fits all" situation.

Maybe its because something like the view distance is something you have to deal with EVERY day you play. The game being down on the other hand, is temporary, and will ultimately get fixed. When the game is back up and running and you are back to playing the game, you arent gonna be sitting there griping about how you cant play. Or, maybe its just the fact that Im stuck at work, so the game being down isnt affecting me, allowing me not to be so short sighted by the need to be instantly gratified that Im able to focus on a much longer term issue thats been plaguing me, that is now partially fixed/improved.

Render distance in this game has been a huge pet peeve of mine. Thanks so much for taking one step towards improving it with the grass improvements this patch. I hope that the devs are working at putting in the options to increase the tree rendering distances as well.

Something that I think that has been greatly overlooked: Right now, with 12x xp, I can play every class from 1-50 without ANY repeat content. And its amazingly great. No 2 class stories are similar. Forcing planetary stories into the list of missions that must be done to level, removes this aspect. It means that when I play my next alt character, half of the things I will be forced to do, will be repeat content (planet storyline that I did with the last character I played). THIS IS NOT GOOD OR FUN.

Pretty sure the reason is this: (based on other info posted in these forums) A single 32bit process in windows cant have a memory footprint larger than 2 gigs. (Ie: it cant take up more than that much ram). Bioware seems to have been unable to get the games swtor.exe process to run within these limits, thus, the need to create 2 processes. The second process basically feeds data to the first process when its needed. Its sloppy. Its like making an engine thats too big to fit into a car, so you put 3/4th of the engine under the hood, and then put the rest in a side car attached to the outside of the vehicle.

Have you leveled a Smuggler or Agent? Why/why not? Yes, ive got a 50 Sniper Did you enjoy the story? Very much. Did you enjoy the mechanics? Why/why not? I like the concept, but not how the mechanics actually work. Cover feels like having to fight with one arm tied behind your back. Players should WANT to use cover, rather than feeling FORCED to use cover. It should be more of a "Favorable" to use it, rather than a "have" to use it mechanic. In its current state, cover is HORRID for pvp. SW canon or not, you dont see many snipers in PvP compared to other classes because of this. Are these classes an important SW fantasy to you? Snipers/Agents have a very "imperial/empire" feel to them, the opposite side of the coin of the Sith, so yes. Do you still play the class? If not, why not? No. The current mechanics of the class involving cover are horrid, and seriously keep me from having fun on the class now that im done with the story. There are other classes that are simply more fun to play because the mechanics dont feel so restricting or gimped, even if their stories arent quite as good. Anything they could do to encourage you to try one if you haven't, or play the one you have? Snipers currently are just "speed bumps" for most other classes in pvp. And for some, they are practically free kills. They dont need to be made OP. They just need to be brought up to the same level as some of the other pure dps classes. Cover is too restrictive and our dps/burst doesnt gain additional benefits from this restriction. IE: its not properly balanced. In PvE, it feels a bit better, except when it comes to boss fights. If the fight has ANY amount of moving around as part of the mechanic, your DPS is going to take a SERIOUS hit, unless you are lethality (which really isnt very sniper like.) Sniper mechanics were a cool idea in concept, maybe even better for a single player game. However, with the elements commonly found in a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER game like PvP and Raid boss mechanics, the cover system continues to fail and be a huge limiting factor in the overall fun of the class. Give more benefits to using cover, because right now, cover has all the negatives with none of the positives.

ME3 is mostly a single player game where as ToR is mostly a ... oh wait

I play a 50 sniper Bioware claims that Agent/Smuggler pops are low because they arent "Starwars enough" in feel and theme. Im sure that is partially true. Im also sure that a GOOD part of the reason is that compared to Agents and Smugglers, most of the other classes feel pretty over powered in a lot of aspects of the game. People dont just play the classes they are drawn to. They play the classes that seem "The best", and since the games release, Smuggler/Agent have never seemed like "the best". No Gabe, you dont have to make Agents/Smugglers vastly over powered to get people to play them. You just have to make them equal to the state other classes are currently. Right now they are just a class design and balance failure, one that your own data shows to be true. Here is a tip to get you started: Cover Currently - "Oh sheesh, I HAVE to use cover... oh joy" Fixed: Cover - "Awesome, I get all these cool things when im in cover! sweet!" Players should WANT to use cover because of the cool things you get from using it. Right now, Cover is simply a "You HAVE to do this, just to do your basic functions." Its more of an obstacle, than a benefit or bonus.

I doubt many people with a 1.5 ghz machine are trying to play ToR. Not enough to mess up the data from a poll like this. Besides... if the results show say 80% of the people have performance issues, then we could say that 5% of those people have the 1.5 ghz machines. So in a sense, bioware would be right. 5% of the people having performance problems, have low end slow machines that cant run the game. Maybe thats what they meant.

Bioware has basically said the following: - They always have people trying to improve performance (this is a pretty generalized statement, like saying "there is always room for improvement") and - They have a new "Strike force" dedicated to improving performance. Again, thats not admitting they know there is a problem, or that they even know there IS a problem. Just that there is a team that is dedicated to work on that part of the game. Im sure there is an Art team, a music team, a voice team, a storyline team, a warzone team, a Flashpoint team, and Ops team, and so on as well. Does that mean there are problems with those things? No. Its just standard development procedure to assign developers to work on parts of the code. Performance, is a general part of ANY code. Game, application, Web, etc. Regardless of ALL of the above, the point of this Poll is to let bioware know that their 5% number they pulled out of thin air is completely BS. They dont KNOW real numbers because they havent done a Poll. They can only base it on people who have sumbitted issues, and to assume that EVERYONE, or even 50% of the people WITH issues, have submitted a ticket, is just ridiculous. They wouldnt be in business today if they actually thought that. If you get good performance, prove bioware right and answer the poll showing that you get good performance. Otherwise, sit down, and play the game.

Go here, http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=4f3e6dd2c2e1b0e407aac294 Simply answer one question. Good OR bad performance in warzones/ilum. Let Bioware see that its more than just 5% of the people who have this issue. Last results gathered show: 645 people answered 580 people = low performance 65 = good performance Lets try to drastically increase the numbers of total people answering (good or bad).

SWTOR just isnt one of those games. Nothing about SWTOR says "New and high end graphics pushing the limits of even the most up to data hardware" SWTOR is based on DX9, and cant match a beat with some of the other "moving forward games" that are also out on the market. The reason SWTOR requires a beast of a machine to play is due to one thing. Poor optimization. For the layman, that means they didnt do a good enough job programming it to get better performance with less horsepower. There are other 3d engines out there that not only look better than SWTORs engine, but are capable of handling a much bigger workload, all while on lesser hardware. Ive got at least 10 major "technological moving forward" games on my system including "SWTOR". 9 of them look better, and run better than SWTOR does. Sure, I could throw money at getting even more bleeding edge hardware to make up for one bad developers code. But why? All that does is encourage game companies to take short cuts and do bad job coding, if they can just further tell us "Buy better hardware". SWTOR IS the man out in this situation. The one game out of a handful of new games, that runs like garbage. A shame too, because I enjoy the game, I just wish it performed better.