Agreed. Our group all left because we couldn't get in the door. It is needlessly complicated and above all NOT FUN. So much of this game is incredibly frustrating, why does Bioware enjoy making things so incredibly hard work?

Regardless it is a clear insight into the manner in which Bioware runs this game and a damning indictment of their QA. Think about it. Without simply setting up any test accounts to see if the form worked, they emailed everybody. Then, even though hundreds of people are reaching this form and are unable to action the transfer there is no communication, no subsequent email, just their default position of no communication. I am not even playing the game at the moment, it had honestly lost interest for me. But I saw the email and thought bringing my characters over may motivate me to get back into it. The complete and utter failure of that process only reinforced in me that I made an excellent choice and that my time is better spent elsewhere. Even if the content were good, such incompetence is not worth my time.

I believe they planned this. The character transfer information was deliberately vague from the start. Why else do you think they were not releasing any information so that guilds could plan which server and which characters to transfer etc? Because they never intended on allowing transfers so soon. I believe this is a misguided attempt at allowing new players who didn't import the game to "catch up" and have everyone playing on a relatively level playing field. I also think this is a cash grab, an attempt to convince customers to keep their subscription and thus their eligibility for transfer until April. I think Bioware need to learn from Valve. Honesty, communication, respect for your customers and some common sense in decisions being made and I think it would go a long way to building trust back up with their community.

^ This. It is also somewhat backed up by a comment Bioware made in a post in which Stephen Reid describes the performance issues they ran into with regards to high-res textures: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=162569 To understand that I've got to get technical for a minute. When a character in the game is 'seen' by another character - ie, gets close to your field of view - the client has to 'draw' that character for you to see. As the character is 'drawn' for you there are a number of what are known as 'draw calls' where the client pulls information from the repository it has on your hard disk, including textures, and then renders the character. Every draw call that is made is a demand on your PC, so keeping that number of draw calls low per character is important. With our 'maximum resolution' textures a large number of draw calls are made per character, but that wasn't practical for normal gameplay, especially when a large number of characters were in one place; the number of draw calls made on your client would multiply very quickly. The solution was to 'texture atlas' - essentially to put a number of smaller textures together into one larger texture. This reduces the number of draw calls dramatically and allows the client to render characters quicker, which improves performance dramatically. So with this in mind. You can imagine what they did to improve frame rates in fleet. They reduced the total amount of possible variations (think unique textures / unique texture atlas files) that the GPU had to load into memory and needed to draw at any one time in fleet or a warzone or Illum etc. This is one of the main reasons everyone looks the same. Sure technology has come a long way but SWTOR is built to accommodate the lowest recommended specifications and is not necessarily good at scaling to high-end (or even current generation) systems. You can further find evidence of this in the "There is no medium, that was a bug" mess that was also related to high-res textures. Now as for possible solutions? As usual, a solution is often to allow choice, if you want all the bells and whistles in any of the AAA singleplayer title but don't have the PC to run it and it runs slow? Its your problem. Of course you can still choose the highest settings and run it like crap, not even BF3, where EA took away the ingame menu system and turned into a browser at least allowed you to set High res if you wanted. Bioware have taken a different approach, they reduced the choice, actually taking on the performance burden of the client side as their issue which isn't their domain, their domain is the server-side. It's an odd decision really. Solutions? Reminds me of when I was trying to learn java programming recently, in Java there is object orientated programming concept and stuff called classes. You have classes and subclasses inherit properties from the master class, getting more unique and specific as you go down to each sub-class. I'm surprised developers / programmers didn't think in this way. I envision a solution as something like this: Right now everyone has the same PVP armor, it looks the same, loads less textures etc. Call this the Main Class of the armor for each AC. You continue to have a main class of armor types, let's call them SITH, HUNTER, IMPERIAL, JEDI etc. The wearable items fit into all of these master classes. All the variations and colours and basically anything that requires unique texturing is a SUB-CLASS. So you could have HUNTER-POWERTECH-RED-TANKBONUS or some crap to define a unique item and texture set. Now, how it works is on the client end you have the client either automatically when Selecting "LOW" graphics or manually by selecting "Display Only Grouped Armor Textures" or something that basically makes a the client draw maybe 10-20 variations (sub-classes) as the master class. So those with under-powered systems continue to see the same stuff we have in-game today and don't take a performance hit to draw all the variations that are in reality being worn by players. However, those with decent machines that can support more variations don't have that option set and simply know to draw the sub-classes, you see the beautiful variations of armor and players get the same choice they got in beta. Win/Win for everyone! I typed this hastily as I'm about to rush off to a meeting but I hope this made sense. Cheers,

Seems to be when I received the curse of Ops Leader. It's like the game is still trying to load companions for everyone in the Op but can't. So the leader gets spammed, continuously, all day, while PVPing..

How is that fair? I posted in a forum for people who would be experiencing this spam like I am. You really want my thought process to be "Oh no, that's the PVP forum, better LEARN ALL THE THINGS before posting a single word in there." So you were born knowing this information? Did I claim to be a PVP expert? Just new to the game finding my way like plenty of people. I am watching a youtube now on setting things up a bit differently, I hope that helps you sleep at night that there is potentially one less 'clicker' and 'keyboard turner' out there. Wow, mmo geeks are pretty elitist huh?

I found this guide for other new players like me, really helpful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPkcrr1JGfA

Such an awesome community. So helpful and welcoming to new players. I shall go investigate a better way to handle my hotbar / keybindings so that I am as awesome as some of you clearly are.

That's fine, I'm a casual player and play how I want. If I learn a better way that suits me I'll pick it up. Anyone who thinks they are awesome because they've set their toolbar up differently on a video game is so far beneath me in life it's actually a compliment I'll take a look at what I assume is keybinding instead for actions? Thanks for the advice

Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. Your companion was dismissed because the group is full. SINCE BETA http://i.imgur.com/fBuEW.jpg