I was looking forward to displaying all my companions in my stronghold, but I didn't even get past my third character before it told me that I cannot display any more NPCs. This artificial limit needs lifting. If I unlocked NPCs I should be able to display them in my stronghold and not be told that "you can't do that" arbitrarily.

Read the Dev tracker. Its not Arbitrary, its there for performance reasons. If performance is OK they might raise it in the future.

It's still an arbitrary limit, and it still needs to be raised. Even my craptacular onboard video card is more than capable of displaying more characters, let alone my actual video card. They need to find another way.

Its not a client side issue, its a server side issue. Your lack of technical understanding of client/server communications and the strain a bunch of database calls can place on the server impacting everyone's performance doesn't make the limit arbitrary.

I'd love to reduce my visitor limit to 1 (my wife) and instead have the npc limit raised. Shouldn't NPC cause less strain than 'real' characters?

I'd love to reduce my visitor limit to 1 (my wife) and instead have the npc limit raised. Shouldn't NPC cause less strain than 'real' characters?

 

+1 on this really.

 

If its a performance thing can't it be limited per room or something. I'm an avid pet collector and was gutted to realise that I can have only a few pets or companions showing. I was loving my little zoo room until I ran out of npcs and had to remove most to make space for comps.

 

Also do vendors and live mounts class as NPCs?

 

I see my Ashfall Tauntaun mount has a health bar.

 

Don't get me wrong. I love the stronghold.

 

But with companions in many cases appearing naked instead of displaying their bespoke armour, and no mannequins to show the gear I have collected, I feel a little let down on how much more could be possible. I do hope there is more to come in time.

What about rep/imp guardsman? Completely static, like a chair. Why does that use up more resources then a desk?

BTW, I read somewhere that the limit is 25, but (on the Progenitor at least) it is only 20.

I won't pretend to know pretty much anything about software or performance issues or how the game works. But, if at all possible, the NPC limit should be raised.

 

This morning I discovered (much to my utter glee) that the Universal/Synthetic/Industrial fabrication droids that we get as rewards for the introduction mission look AMAZING. One of my favorite parts about the entire Star Wars universe is the droids. I am an RPer, and plan on using my Strongholds for RP reasons, and hope to create a good atmosphere for whatever setting they depict. I decided to use my Nar Shaddaa stronghold for a sort of droid military base.

 

Which is why I was so excited about the fabrication droids! I went to all of my alts and did the intro mission over and over to get more. When that was done, I jumped on the GTN and spent probably about 500,000 on more droids. But I thought it was worth it, because these things are awesome! In all, I ended up with 20 Universal droids, 17 Industrial droids, and 14 Synthetic droids.

 

I continued to build my stronghold, and everything was looking awesome, with droid guards in every room (I just used the Universal as guards, the others were to be used for other things). The main room on the first floor of the Nar Shaddaa sky palace was to be two rows of droids, ready to be deployed. I went down to the room, set all the layouts to maximize the number of droids I could put, and started placing.

 

I placed two before my cap ran out. It totally killed the vibe. I instantly had my vision of this Stronghold shattered because of a NPC cap I didn't even know existed. Additionally, I now have over 30 droids that I cannot use, about half of which I bought.

 

I LOVE the Strongholds system! And while I was making mine this morning I was pumped at how great it was looking. But when the NPC cap kicked in, it made me pretty upset and discouraged. I would love it if y'all would at least increase the cap. I know that doing away with it could make things get out of hand. But NPCs are by far one of the coolest decorations for Strongholds. To be so limited in their use is unfortunate.

 

Thanks for your time!

Compare this to SWG which allowed a ton of animated NPCs in their housing.

 

The only thing I can think of that would cause the need for network traffic or DB hits (after the initial load) would be their ability to respond to quests. That could be a push event from the server and could be limited to one active at a time. All of the animations and phrases could be client side.

 

So, if you think about a mount or companion in game. There are all of these attributes associated with them. Their artificial intelligence, their pathing, their phrases, combat stat calculations, affection.. etc. I bet they didn't code them any differently for strongholds. They just let you 'call them'. So SWToR see's you having 20 active companions and has to use the RAM and CPU to deal with all of that.

 

The solution is to make 'dummy' versions of mounts and NPCs.

 

And I do write software for a living... https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewlclement

Theirs been three or four threads about this in the pts section

Theirs a thread their still.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=757308&page=8