/signed

Not necessarily, it reduces the work of the driver, if the driver is not the bottleneck, then it changes nothing.

If i remember correctly, did bw announced that a 'same gender romance option companion' should be part of makeb in the first place?! That was the fuzz about the new 'gay planet' expansion complaint.

And this is just sad, that such simple things are obviously done wrong.

Chat bubbles can be done by extending the unit nameplates ... but even such simple things like unit nameplates are for some people a major performance problem...

Don't be naive, cartel market generates revenue, rewriting stuff 'that works' does not. And with the current trend of the released content, revenue is more important than a good product and happy costumers.

Won't happen, optimizing and/or rewriting the engine wont generate revenue, so its against the ea cash grab doctrine... On release of SWTOR a Dx11 version was 'considered' (proof here http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,767634/Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic-Bioware-considering-Direct-X-11-in-the-future/News/ some stuff in that interview is also not true, like multicore stuff and support for a broad space of hw configs), but after the massive fail, not a single word about it ... (btw a dx11 version would not help with the poor performance, the root of problem is a poor core design).

To make it clear what they use for the UI: scaleform / flash ( its listed here http://gameware.autodesk.com/usage/games/?show=scaleform ).

/sign

The current implementation is even less secure than previous one, each pw email contains the account name. So if the email account gets hacked, the hacker will get the login name and can access the account w/o any problems. So nice one bw...

/sign

He didn't say that at all. He also don't mention, that swtor bases on a very early version of the hero engine, with no updates from the hero guys since then (read http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/ ). And for example, if you start to dig in the running process with some debug tools, you will see that the rendering backend stuff starts with a 'bwa' (BioWareAustin?) namespace (prefix), and that indicates that large parts of the (client) side is different from the original hero engine. So you cant compare the 'hero engine' with the 'swtor engine' which bases of the very early hero engine, its like you blame quake 1 and quake 2 engines for problems of the half life 1 engine. And it is the engine, the first indicator is the second process that handles the rendering, no one does that, and for good reasons. An other indicator is the massive memory usage, that constantly crash the game on 32 bit systems, because the os runs out of memory. I believe the main problem is that the game is too script driven (or the scripting engine is not optimized well), and that's the reason of the massive memory and cpu usage on the main process.

You should take a look at the launcher log. My play button didn't worked after os reinstall. In my case the launcher was unable to download the dx9 redist, but only reported this on the log. And after i found the cause at the log, the fix was easy, installed the dx9 redist manually and the launcher stopped trying to load the dx9 redist and the play button worked again.

Using Win 8 here too, swtor runs slightly better on it (no wired height cpu consumption, in contrast to vista were some scenes are cpu bound...). As for Win 8, the 'New UI' / 'Metro' is crap, it may work on smartphones and tablets but for an PC it's just inconvenient. But under the hood, lots of optimizations were done to lower the resource consumption, so everything gets faster.

"What is holding back SWTOR the most?" Simple answer, the devs. They talk too much and say nothing. The talk too much and do nothing. So they should shut up and start to work.