Sup with orbital stations?

Korriban doesn't have a big Spaceport

Orbital stations are junk, big empty hangers are junk, they contribute nothing and with all the stupid load screens, and especially transition screens that are out of sync with the activity, actually lesson the immersion level, not increase it.

They should do away with as many empty run through buildings, orbital stations, and such while reducing the amount of load and transition screens required to move around the game world. Or at a minimum, put some options in place to 'auto skip' some of this stuff along with adding little conveniences such allowing binding at your ship, the use of speeders in hangers and stations, and decreasing significantly the cool down on the fleet pass.

It is bad enough that every planet plus our ship plus the fleet station is a separate map that has to be loaded, some taking minutes of time staring at a blue bar, but then to be forced to run, not speeder, through a bunch of huge empty transition areas, just to get anywhere is so annoying and a clear time sink with no value.

And little annoyances like this are what add up to players quitting this game. Having such little content coupled with so many bugs and performance issues is bad, add in little annoyances like this and people start saying 'f it, I'm going to play something else'.

EDIT TO ADD: It's supposed to be a social game, so where are things like group summons so people can complete group content together without all the hassles of trying to get to the same spot?

I thought I saw a set of items in one of the pre-release builds created by cybertechs that allowed for group summons, where the heck did they go?

They can still land there though!

It's an immersion-breaking feature, by the way. When I run to my ship and click on the door to enter.... it has me taking off from the place where it has been parked. But really, all I have done is open the door to do whatever.

That cinematic should only happen when I'm sending the ship to another location. So the immersion is lost. I overlook it mostly, because comments about it have been made all through beta and no developer found them viable.

So don't argue "immersion" about this particular feature...

Certainly adds to their carbon footprint!

People,

On the techinical side, Orbital stations are the only way you can fuse 8 individual instances (class ships) into a one world zone. Granted, you can do the same thing at a space port on the ground however, that's were immersion comes into play.

In the story line many of these planets are still in contestation with opposing forces. Therefore attempting to build a fully functioning ground space port would be a waste of resources as it would be constantly "nuked" from orbit by the enemy with no way to defend against such an attack. No military would even attempt this without air/space zone superiority which is still an issue on 90% of the planets.

Orbital stations can be easily defended by fighters and capital ships and are a lot easier to establish as you can build it in friendly space and tow/launch it when you get to the planet you want.

Now I realize there are some really big gaps in this from a operational military standpoint but that's because we are dealing with game developers not military logistical stratigists.

Pretty sure shield generators (that stop such orbital attacks) are a major plot line in at least one of the films (and in fact in at least one of the planet quests in SWTOR).

they used to have GTN terminals on every planet.. used to...

Of course, because everything in this game obviously follows some logically reasoning that fits perfectly into the game world.

Like the fact I have a personally holocom I can use to talk to some people some of the time, even across large distance, yet other times I have to use the one on my ship, one in a base, one I found lying around, or one at a public terminal to talk to someone very close.

Like the fact I have mail that gets delivered simultaneously to every planet in the universe WITH MATERIAL GOODS ATTACHED, yet the same mail system is unable to send and receive even basic text messages from my ship, even when its docked at fleet.

Like the fact I can post an item on the GTN at Dromond Kaas and someone else can buy it 30 seconds later at fleet and have it immediately delivered to any and all mailboxes around the galaxy, regardless of how far away those mailboxes are located.

Like the fact I can ride my speeder through the fleet station and hanger, through some planet hangers, tunnels and buildings, yet somehow it won't work in other hangers, buildings or orbital stations.

Like the fact I can bind to an arbitrary point on a planet and instantly travel there as long as I am on the planet, outside the spaceport or hanger, and only do it once every thirty minutes.

Like the fact I can instantly travel to fleet once an hour if I pay 1k credits or once every 16 hours if I'm cheap.

Please stop trying to bring logic into this discussion. It has no place as MANY MANY parts of the game already break with logic when it comes to the game world itself.

truth