Your technology needs help... lots of help... lots and LOTS of help. :(

Lol, I have TOR installed on a sata 3 SSD and it still takes the best part of a minute to load some planets. Where as on something like skyrim I can load the entire world in about 10 seconds or less :P

The system resouces and network traffic this game uses is ridiculus. The engine they are using is terrible, I don't understand why they picked it when there are MUCH better ones around. They even used the unreal engine for Mass Effect 2 and 3 :/

I guess the reason will become clear in about 3 years.

No offense but this game doesn't look that great graphically. It literally is like a slightly shinier xbox original title. I'm neither a fan boy or a hater of this game but I am a realist and this game suffers some massive problems. I'm on the EU Red Eclipse server and on the fleet while at peak time (200+ people) the frame rate drops to an abysmal 5 fps.

My PC is spec'd very highly although I only have 8bg of DDR3 RAM. (pffffttt only) I have a a GF GTX580 card that handles even the most complex of textures without issue. Internet wise I have fibre optic broadband that never goes below 30mbs. TOR insists on self destructing and crashing every time there is any sign of people on planets. During the Rak event on Tatooine my computer needed to be restarted several times.

It's a poorly optimised game to say the least and I'm greatly disappointed that corners were cut that really do effect the playability of this game.

Just posting my support for the OP. This guy knows what he's talking about and it's a shame he isn't in a position of more power, game development wise.

I think they have about 8 more weeks to square this away. They can salvage the game and subscribers. I also recommend enhanced WZ servers and ops servers that lower latency like wow does. This has to be done and in time for the 6 months subscribers to see and believe.

Thanks for the behavioral analysis on the OP. Every post on this forum has multiple motives and reinforcers behind that behavior, to include your response to OP. Now I have demonstrated that I know something too, but the real dynamic here is your negative tone.

I for one appreciate the OP taking the time to detail something that he understands well for those who may not. The forums get read, and if this has any chance of helping the dev team even by acting as a reminder of their existing task scheduling, then it was worth while.

It's not the graphics that impact loading times, it's how complicated the map is to render and how far out the game is rendering the map that impacts loading times. What I mean is, for example, when I was reloading map in the spaceport on Balmorra, the game was loading the map well beyond the city itself when I was still in the spaceport. Plus, there were a lot of individual boxes and parts that were loading layer by layer, so it's not the graphics that are the problem, it's the complexity of the map which includes the number of layers being rendered and how far out the map is being rendered. I ended up turning shadows to low and AA to low to combat the problem of the game trying to render shadows that fell across the entire map from a cliff or massive building on the other side of the map.

-Yes, more polygons are not free of course, but even characters are pretty low poly compared to most games.
In the end all meshes and lowest MIP texture in a level/planet need to fit into the lowest memory requirement for the game, so there's really only so much non instanced stuff you can put into a planet.
An MMO will always have lower polygon counts and texture res than regular games, and should run a lot smoother.
Regular games render between 2-4 times the amount of data on your screen at once.

-I forgot about the lighting yes, that's been for me one of the worst issues too if cranked all the way up.
By the looks of it they're either using real time lights which would be really slow, or some hybrid light with baked shadows for the enviro that still renders realtime shadows for dynamic objects (characters).
Whatever they use, it's baaad and probably part of the reason indoor instances always run worse = more light sources than outdoors.

-The database stuff, all of their dice rolls happen before the actual animations ie: if you use an attack with a very slow animation you'll notice that the damage done will be substracted from your target the moment you hit the button, not when the animation plays or anything (the dmg numbers will be shown to you later too tho).
That's how you sometimes get nice finisher moves, as the game knows beforehand if your hit is gonna kill the enemy and can play a different finisher animation instead... same with blocking etc.
My guess is that the database takes advantage of that, so while your animations are still swinging and your mob's still haven't switched to death animations, the game is already ready for the loot table.

Why thanks, your OP made me smile as given their current problems it seems like a very believable scenario.

I think the years they had and 200mil in development are resources enough.
Plus BW has a great name in this industry, they could hire any talent they want, the only reason they wouldn't do this is if they thought the project would be child's play for them and they're too sexy for their shirts.

Looking at their net code issues, engine and lack of optimization resulting in poor performance for many, kinda gives the impression that they had a lot of headless chickens running around.
It is very common when a studio expands to promote people internally. They may not know jack, but if you've been there long enough and you know how to make Jira tasks, you got the job, congrats.!

I've been running our current project (100+ people in total) without any technical artist or other similar leads at my side for almost (or over?) a year now.
It is a ton of work and running around putting out and preventing fires, but at least we don't run down ambiguous paths where nobody knows if things will work or not and nobody that should, can give a precise answer or can take some initiative and follow up on things. There's no blame game either.
I've been trying to fill out other roles for quite some time, but your average experienced technical artists are still asset-minded people that can't look at a level and break it down into it's issues. If you can rig an asset and put it into the engine and can exchange 4 words with a random programmer, you're a qualified technical artist !
And Art leads are usually just managers these days, know little about anything but making tasks.

Then of course, each department HAS to blame the next one because they simply wouldn't understand what's wrong with their own department's work. Looking at perf graphs or complex material / particle settings alone will be like studying hieroglyphs for them.

People and their incompetence make game development a challenge, noting else.
Whatever the hurdles of their project, they had all the resources needed to deal with them, however, it takes smart people to be aware of your team's limitations. Without knowing that, you won't know who you need to hire.

I happen to know some people that worked on the game, some work at our studio now, and some went to work there from here when their development started.

He claimed to be trying to help the devs with the game, but he's posting on the forums instead of telling them directly. The original post before being changed was extremely unhelpful and antagonistic towards the devs, as well which is why I stated he wasn't actually intending to help the devs, but rather vent. What I said was hardly negative even if you wish to claim and continue to claim it is.

Simply reading from the disk, even if there is no one else using it, causes latency.