epic load times

There is nothing reasonable about the load times in this game, and frankly, I've been a bit amazed that it hasn't been crucified over it.

I consider a 20-30 s load time far too long. Sure, once, to initially get into the game, but not every time I want to zone somewhere that isn't a warzone/operation/fleet/capitol planet/my ship. I actually leave planets like Tatooine and go sit on my ship when I want to do warzones, because I can't stand the Tatooine load time (Belsavis is another kicker).

And, 20-30 s is on the fast end of things. I have friends with lesser computers who sometimes have 2+ minute load times on planets like Belsavis. I think I would kill myself, from a totally first world problem perspective, if I had to wait that long.

That said, while load times used to be a tad better early on in beta, they were never great. I assume they are a limitation of the engine and that we're stuck with them, forever. I suppose the engine simply can't do the reasonable thing, and simply load much more local content when zoning into a zone, and then continue to slowly load the rest of the zone in the background.

Hopefully, SWTOR is around a while, so in 5-10 years, our gaming rigs will devour the load times down to a matter of a few seconds. Until then, I suppose the silver lining about load times is that it does push us all to just sit on the Fleet, because no one feels like dealing with the load times on any of the actual planets. Oh wait, there's nothing silver about that lining at all.

Edit: I call shenanigans on those who claim to have 5 s load times on planets like Belsavis. Shenanigans! What I would love to see is Bioware's own metrics, in a line graph, that show everyone's load times. I'm betting it would make for some crucifying comments. Because, even if there is some mythical person out there with 5 s load times, I'm pretty sure he/she would be this little dot all alone, far outside the standard deviation.

What exactly is this supposed to help? All it does is open the launcher... literally nothing else. START /d is a batch file command to simply look in a directory for the specified file. The echo off simply suppresses the DOS window messages.

I also call shenanigans on the SSD making load times drastically faster. It's been proven over and over again that load times are almost 100% CPU-dependent, and that SSDs have little to no effect on load times.

You need to take the time to understand how the game engine caches the game assets on the disk before you spout off like this. Please do some research first.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=394951

I think the internet connection does a big part on that. I didnt notice much difference copying the game from HDD to ssd. only a few seconds. Alltough i dont have that bad loading times, about 30 secs on the big planets

Which in no way backs up the claim that a SSD drastically improves load times. I have a SSD, and my laptop does not. I know, from experience, that it doesn't. As does hundreds of other people in older threads concerning load times. A SSD improvement of your load time is completely negligible, and it's almost criminal to try to insinuate that it isn't, and that people should shell out a bunch of money for a SSD, for this game, because it's simply not going to improve your load times in any meaningful way.

The one common denominator in every single previous epically long thread concerning load times is the better the CPU, the better the load time. People with really crappy CPUs, are the people with 3+ minute load times. Regardless of how good their disk is.

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried... not sure if you're being serious here.

To my shame I posted at the start of the game in a guys post about long load times that my load times were under a min for each planet, I still stand by that tho, I think they were.
Today, Ill look at the screen for 2 mins sometimes, other times it goes ok, it is (for me) definitely got longer since about 1.2
Does anyone else "hang" at around 20% for ages then finally the other 80% sweeps up in 4 or 5 seconds?

I do not have a huge computer I bought yesterday for 3k, I do have a nice year old gamers computer from Overclockers, Its not clocked or anything like that but it should be enough to load in a game in under a min.

I concur. You shouldn't need a SSD just to load in less than a minute.

Since 1.2, the load times for me have increased significantly, so much so that if a WZ pops before I zone, it will timeout before I load. This didn't happen for me pre 1.2.

So yes, now I make sure I enter before zoning, but that's not the point I am making (premptive).

I just build a new highend system with a Samsung 830 256GB SSD, and I also can't really see any difference in loading times.

Outside SWTOR however, it's an entirely different matter. My loading times have improved drastically.