Summed it up for me. Thank you Oddball. I see no value in grinding for something just to say 'oh look at me' - I'm not that insecure. If I'm going to invest time, I want it to be worth something to me at the end.

I like these ideas. Overall while I'm liking Strongholds as a first iteration, having been conditioned to good companion design by Bioware in the past, I was surprised that companions and my alts were so poorly represented. The Legacy system underpins a lot, and yet the family tree part seems tacked on and meaningless. As just one example, in Mass Effect 3, my companions come across as wandering the halls of one's ship, even having the occasional conversation - it's scripted, so it's not a direct comparison of a potential MMO feature - but even so, I was hoping to have the group of companions I'd got to know & influence actually be more than static holograms or stuffed animals in my stronghold, my 'place of power'. The same goes for the virtual set of friends, allies, and enemies that I'd built up in my alts. The KOTOR series had more inter-companion interactions as well. Being able to at least put real companions, not holos, in a given emote pose, and potentially my alts as well, means they're not just static blocks taking up space, but you could do something like Vette and Andronikos playing at a casino table. Call them Decorations all you like, but at least they'd be interesting decorations that approximate real activity.

"if people in real life posted as poor as these posters they wouldnt make it week on job, yet we have to read such drivel" Here's a thought - become less clueless yourself about how to post a constructive statement, with paragraphs and occasional use of the new line character. Your current posting style suggests you expended so little effort in thinking about it that it doesn't feel worth trying to figure out what the heck you're on about.

This is... actually not an unreasonable idea. Therefore by usual forum standards, it will rapidly descend in popularity, disappear from the first few pages, and never get read or implemented Perhaps a small flame war can be started around page 3 to keep things interesting until a dev sees it. More seriously, it is a bit curious for some stuff what ends up on walls and what ends up on floors. I would assume that in this case though it'd have to be a different item due to hooks. This begs the question, for decoration expansions (we'll almost certainly have them) what should such projectors display...

It's a nice sentiment, but almost all MMOs go through this. They launch a little ropey, some people have fun, some people leave, and then if the dev team have their act together, they expand and add more content, and slowly improve. Some people then come back, others give it a try. I had a rule a while back not to try any MMO until it had been receiving a year's polish at least. Lets' not kid ourselves. Not a single MMO in business today had all the features it does now at launch. There are plenty of WoW vets who will wax lyrical about there being only a certain amount of stuff at launch. Nostalgia and rose-tinted spectacles are terrible, but very human, things. If we're going to wax nostalgic, really, I think TOR launched ok - it was the most stable launch I think I'd ever seen, and that was with about 2 million players bashing on it (just unfortunate they didn't stay). It had a bonanza of stories available, some of which I still haven't completed. Sure, there's an instant gratification crowd that space-barred their way to max level on day 4 or something like that, but you can never stop players from doing that with any and all content. If the devs made mistakes (and lets' not forget how 20/20 hindsight is), it was hugely fragmenting the population on servers, not having enough content ready to go for a month later, and a questionable engine choice that continues to visibly make life awkward today, more so than other equivalent MMO engines in use. It's easy to say that this was Bioware's first MMO, but they supposedly had MMO vets from other games on the team. I just find it sad that that experience wasn't leveraged well at the time. It's a classic software lesson that gets repeated a lot - a few key architectural decisions can make or doom a project. I'm just thankful TOR is still going despite one or two awkward ones.

Quote of the week.

Rain is a bloom effect... now I have heard everything. This would explain why turning bloom off in other games... oh wait, it's still raining. I hate you Hero Engine (though I'd lay money that some dev in Bioware is saying the exact same thing).

Well, while we're busy trolling each other - why is it always SWG? I mean I could go on about great MMOs that got closed down or quietly died off. Lots more than just SWG. Hey, there was this great MUD back about 25 years ago, open world PvP, in-game events, the structure of the world changed according to player actions, and it had so much depth. Even dying was interesting, because you had to go back to your corpse in the spirit world, which wasn't just a delay like those pansy corpse-runs - there were actual ghosts in it that could attack you while you're dead! Grappling with a high level spirit on the way back to your frozen corpse, knowing that every second is one where some jerk will loot all your stuff and you'll be back to square one... Oh.. the heart pounding, the palpitations... Game kept running for about eight years too. The above paragraph is best quoted with the phrase 'True story bro', by the way. Man those were the days. Don't see me always complaining that that great game is gone forever, and some new game doesn't have one of its features. Hey, if we want to talk about how we will never forgive game companies, how about NCSoft, Tabula Rasa, and screwing over Richard Garriott? You may say 'but I hated that game' - well, I didn't particularly like SWG, welcome to the world of the subjective - they both got closed - that's the objective bit. Genuine question: for the people that get hung up on SWG - was it your first MMO? Everyone knows the first time is something special, so it might be that, rather than the game per se.

You had me up until it started to equate being casual with lack of preparedness. See, here's my version of me as a casual player in the above. I have very little free time; sometimes I even wonder if I ought to be bothering with an MMO with the time I have. However, my fiancee has more free time, and uses a lot of it to research and understand TOR (though she detests raiding grind). So in the first instance, if I want something in TOR given to me as an informed precis, I'll ask her. That sounds pretty casual to me - maybe enforced casual because I just can't dedicate the time to researching all that stuff - I have enough reading around to do for my real job outside of supposed work hours - well, that and being on call. It does not make me totally unprepared. First time on Xeno, I asked her 'so what do I need to absolutely do or not do in this?'. One quick rundown later (took maybe 30 seconds of talking), and I know the basics. I'll remember them next time too. There are players that stand in the circles of incoming damage - I've been playing MMOs for enough years to know this is a thoroughly stupid idea. The list goes on. Don't mistake a player who lacks a basic piece of information for an idiot - there is a distinction between uninformed and clueless. So, I agree with the spirit of your post, but I think it wandered dangerously close to 'you casuals are ruining the game' which is just as unfair a generalisation as 'you hardcores are ruining the game', and usually forums oscillate between the two. Edit: It's intriguing that there's an implicit assumption in some posts that hardcore == regular raiding. Sure, it's challenging content, but if you know all the details of TOR, can quote meaningless trivia from back in the beta, and graph damage with the best of them, but you never raid, are you still not hardcore? I have no idea if, for example, Dulfy raids or not, but if they didn't, would we truly argue Dulfy isn't hardcore?

My giant wall of text above probably obscures this in trying to reply in detail, but I agree - the performance limit is there for a good reason, even if we have no idea what it is technically (though I'd still argue most big data systems hit the same class of problems). Hopefully as Strongholds settles down and load balances out, they can tweak it later. It's unfortunate that TOR lacks more flexible scaling, but most of the stuff I was talking about really only became viable at scale in the last year or two; some are still in beta. It's unreasonable to suggest that TOR should already be using them - but we can hope for the future You never know; all this hubbub might prompt someone to look into it.

As another person who writes software for a living (albeit somewhat cynical as a result), I think the reason for this is fairly straightforward. What gets a feature out with boxes ticked in as short a time as possible? Who hasn't worked with product managers and executives who don't want to hear anything other than 'we'll have it ready in a few weeks'? All signs point to 'get it out there; we'll make it faster later'. Not entirely an unreasonable strategy, though I think they've erred a bit far from the fast side of the spectrum. TOR is, alas, saddled with design decisions that were poor before launch. Most of the devs that made those decisions are gone. The new devs are doubtless doing their best with outdated concepts, a bunch of hacks, and probably large areas of the code marked 'for gods' sake don't touch this, Bob wrote it back in 2009; nobody knows what the hell it does but all the NPCs start to rotate if you even move a semi-colon!'. We've all been there; Bob is responsible for much pain. That we get weird effects of sound & image bleedthrough across instances points to a fundamentally buggy design; either the server data isn't well separated or the clients all get the full instance data and filter it, again badly. In fact, it's practically a visible race condition where something hasn't caught up with all the necessary data. None of this bodes well for scaling that problem out further, short of each player getting their own host (and that would be most wasteful, unless they moved to an actor/container framework like Docker). Cloud scaling could help if all they needed was to throw more CPU at the problem (and I note that Firefall is built on AWS for that reason), but I suspect the problem is more a data-handling one. I work with AWS & big data on a daily basis, I should add, but not in gaming. As speculation, most of what the code will be doing is DB queries (hopefully cached, but how far away?), DB updates, client request/response, and if they have any sense, the edge servers handle some/all of the decision-making load for an instance. The NPC limitations don't feel like a pure 'moar hamsters' problem - they feel like 'oh god, the DBA is giving me that look again'; something where just getting the data from A to B is being bottlenecked. Pure speculation, mind you, but I'm arriving at that based on the notion that the limit isn't just for you; it's for all your noisy neighbours on the same host, which more typically is a network problem of getting all the data they want to them in a timely fashion. Adding more hosts & CPU is relatively easy, and it's not like they're streaming textures in real-time like some engines. Fixing a fundamental data scaling problem that gets worse with more hosts added is harder. Changing a fundamental design where you can't split load across hosts; even harder. While it would terrify me no end to discover that one beefy machine is running every single Kaas Stronghold entry because they can't split an actual map for load, only put different maps on different physical machines, it also wouldn't surprise me. Eve Online has the same problem after all. It does feel like something where I'd immediately want to throw a bunch of AutoScaled EC2 instances and Redis/memcache at it just to see if that solved the immediate scaling problem, but I'd bet if it were really that easy, they'd have done it by now. This brings me back to my original thought - all of this sort of re-engineering takes a huge amount of time, effort and money, and it's just not being spent. EA want to see a return on their investment, not more investment.

Hope does indeed spring eternal. I am merely jaded and cynical There's a tiny part of me hoping that quietly some team at Bioware will go around fixing all the little things that have been annoying for ages (Laiov mentioned a few others), but I have a feeling this is transference from my own job where I'd love to do the same and get told it's lower priority than some new feature that will go out half-baked and never touched again because of some new feature that will go out half-baked and...

This might be a timing thing - I regularly meet players on Eclipse and the map numbers tend to be in the 60-100 range, but like any MMO it depends what times you're on vs the bulk of the playerbase. This is why I said population control in MMOs is hard - you can't force people to log in at a time to suit you. A different set of people complain that the current worlds are too small, that they felt boxed in by all the walls & exhaustion zones. Much talk of 'just taking a speeder out on the endless dunes of Tatooine isn't possible', mostly from the SWG crowd. It was a popular entry in the 'why I'm quitting TOR' threads back maybe four-five months ago. Again, something Bioware can't win. People have always complained that the planet size isn't big enough or small enough for their individual needs. More to the point, it's all very well complaining about planet size, but what can Bioware do now about it? Nothing. It's easy to blame stuff with hindsight, but this is harder to balance than people give it credit. Believe me, I'd like TOR's planets to feel more alive, which is why I raised the idea back in beta, but we do have to deal with the present. I'd like to think it's relatively easy, if time-consuming, to overhaul NPCs, but player population is a very fickle beast to try and manipulate.

Funny, I always remember being really irritated when I played Inquisitor between beta & launch at how Kallig's own look changed from really sinister (hood + mask) to rather silly (bald metal head). I was never sure why they changed that as it worked really well in beta, at least on an NPC. A new Cartel Market item might be an intriguing solution. That said, I imagine a thread like this to have about a 0% success rate in getting a response.

There was a real poll a while back (post-Makeb) where 'more class story' came out very strongly as a requested feature. I think EA know it's desired. I think they also don't care until people start leaving due to lack of story, because it makes them significantly less money than churning out re-textured armours in the Cartel Market gambling packs. Can you see extra fully voiced class story, all eight of them, turning up, for free, from EA? Bioware (mostly now long gone from the company) marketed TOR as 'story: the fourth pillar', but unfortunately, EA are busy branding TOR as 'TOR: the failed Riccitiello experiment - the search for more money' and are seeking to recoup as much money as possible. The only real way you'll get EA's attention is by unsubscribing en masse and telling them it's because of the lack of further class story, and even that won't matter, because they're busy counting all the money from gambling they're raking in. Quality has long since fallen to quantity. I wish it were not so, because I feel like TOR's 1-50 content tapped something we hadn't really seen before; it spoke to a whole segment of playerbase that really hated MMOs up until now. A visionary company would see that as a new market opportunity. EA aren't visionary - they're good at taking existing brands and churning out yearly tweaked sequels because that's a reliable bottom line.