Feedback from a subscriber and why I'm losing faith in the game.

I have sixty-five open tickets from

OP have you tried a SSD? The lag your expierencing is crazy. If your ping is good, it sounds like a packet lose issue. Call your ISP and have them test it.

The rest is spot on.

SSD will not help you when the engine is bad.

The game stops for a few seconds when I open the Legacy tab. Sometimes it lags for a second when bringing up the companions tab. Mission reward terminals on the fleet sometimes take 10 seconds to spawn. Which is silly.

*Lag*
[...]NPCs sometimes will not speak until a minute or so after I click on them. And sometimes, they may not even speak at all though they are supposed to. In Warzones, my attack animations will not be displayed for several seconds after it starts. Capturing a node in Hypergate will take thirty seconds to change the graphic that I did, in fact, take the node and for the UI to register the point gain. [...]

This is not entirely true, the recent PvP FAQ stated clearly that BioWare is not working on cross server tech and has no interest in doing so at the moment. But yes, that was quite a blow and made me lose also some faith in the future of SWTOR.

You know, if you have 65 unanswered tickets, maybe you should ask yourself "Does this really need to be sent into customer support?"

I have played MMORPGs for probably 8 years now, I think I've sent in 2 support requests.

I'm not sure how you can claim that the developers are not communicating. Communication from them right now is as high as it has ever been, if not better. .

I rarely post my own feedback about any game. For me, I do not see much of a need. Game developers are going to do whatever they want to do no matter what a majority of people say to them. But on this one occasion, I wanted to leave Bioware some feedback about The Old Republic. I am not really expecting any kind of acknowledgement (though it would be nice to know someone in charge actually listened to me) nor do I want to get in to a big argument with other players about why I am this way about a topic or that way about another. Still, it would not surprise me for this to go unread and simply fall off the forums to wherever forgotten posts go.

Before I get in to it, a little about me: I've been playing video games all my life. MMOs for about fifteen years now. I am by no means the worst player but neither am I in the top ten. I try hard even if I do not always expect to win. I have been a subscriber of ToR since 2012 with the Collector's Edition and have bought all the expansions since. I may get burn out from time to time. I do play a couple of other MMOs but I always come back since I love Star Wars.

So, first, what I really like about the game. I love the story lines. They're great. And the voice acting, for the most part, is really good. My companion's AI is really good and since companions have a story as well, I can get attached to them and feel part of a team. GSF was an excellent addition and though it took a few tries, huttball is one of my favorite Warzones. And since I am an avid roleplayer, all of my characters have their own background stories.

But sadly, there is the other side of the coin. In the last few months that I have been playing the game, a number of issues have appeared that have disheartened me about the game itself. There are a range of issues so I'll list and group them together as best as I can.

*Lag*
In my untechiness, I cannot state with any real confidence just what kind of lag I experience. Whether it's server lag, connection lag, driver limit lag (if there is such a thing,) or whatever. ToR lags. Sometimes, it is worse than other times. But it is always there. Run to a new section of the main space station on the fleet and the game will suddenly pause and then start going again often with my character having changed direction through no command of my own. While players themselves are drawn in slowly, I can wait a good twenty to thirty seconds before a quest turn in machine will appear and can be accessed. NPCs sometimes will not speak until a minute or so after I click on them. And sometimes, they may not even speak at all though they are supposed to. In Warzones, my attack animations will not be displayed for several seconds after it starts. Capturing a node in Hypergate will take thirty seconds to change the graphic that I did, in fact, take the node and for the UI to register the point gain. Planet load times are long. On occasion, even the astromech computer interface icon on the loading screen stops spinning which makes me wonder whether the game has locked up or I have been disconnected. In fairness, I've tried the usual fixes for this. I've turned down my graphic settings to bare minimum, turned off all programs running in the background, including anti-virus, and made sure all my device drivers are up to date. My computer is rather high-end on specs so running the game is no problem at all and a colleague has told me that my pings to the game servers are "more than adequate" to run the game. Yet still, the lag persists.

*My tickets are full.*
I have had this happen to me on a couple of other occasions. My tickets will fill up and I can no longer create any new ones. At the moment, I have sixty-five open tickets from 3/18/2014 for things like bugs, reported players, and other issues. Of those, I have received three confirmation emails. I don't know if that is how backlogged your GMs are. But I have come across other items that I should let you know about (like getting stuck in a particular wall in the Civil War WZ,) but I cannot because I can open no more tickets. The last person I spoke to from Bioware about this was that it was a problem within the UI itself. Bioware was aware of this problem and was working to fix it. That was in the summer of 2013.

*Hackers*
I never know for sure whether someone is hacking in the game or not. But I never just assume that because I see someone do something weird that they are hacking. However, in the last few months, I've noticed a number of odd incidents that seems awfully suspicious and have had other players say "That is a real hack." For example, the issue I mentioned above about how in Hypergate the game takes thirty seconds or more to show the fact that you captured the pylon has many people telling me that this is a clear indication that someone in the game is using a speed hack and is bogging down the server responses. If you are playing the Denova WZ and the game stutters every few seconds during combat, that means someone is using a hack for instant kills. People who recover from a stun at the very instant they are stunned or appear to be reeling from a stun and can still Throw the Huttball aren't just lucky many times in a row. And it's not just Warzones. I've seen players of Starfighter getting accuracies of 72% or more. It is usually the same people every time. And those are the same names people say again and again are using an Aimbot hack. Do I know for sure? No, I don't. And I would love to turn these folks in. But my tickets are full and I cannot create any more. I will not name names (but boy, could I,) but these kinds of players are taking the fun out of the game for me. I cannot compete against someone who uses a hack to two-shot me or move so fast that I cannot target them. And I don't want to download and use the very hacks they are using. Though it is a really easy matter for me to find these hacks. I could even list sites that allow you access to them. But again, I will not do so. Also, many of the weird things I see, like stunned players still passing the Huttball, might be lag. I can never really tell.

*Queue times*
Oh, brother. Queue times can be atrocious. Depending on what level you are, you could spend twenty to thirty minutes in queue for a Warzone. It is not uncommon to spend forty-five minutes to an hour (or more) waiting for a flashpoint to find a group. The group finder is great. And I thank Lucas's beard that we have it. But the queue times need to be addressed. Yes, I've read the articles about the Hero engine and the developer statements that cross server queues have a significant technological hurdle to overcome. But the last time I heard anything about this was in June of 2013 on these very forums. Which brings me to...

*Developer communication.*
I completely understand that a developer's time is limited. There is a lot to do and not enough time to do it. When I first started playing, the developers talked to us on a monthly basis. Suddenly, that just stopped. Granted, monthly talks are difficult and time demanding for the developers. But since then, communication dried up. Before a new content patch, the developers will make a video talking about what is coming up. But that is not communicating with us and answering our questions. How about once every four months you answer a couple of player questions? Just something that says "Hey, folks! We do hear you! Keep sending us your feedback and we'll try to respond!" That has been missing for more than a year now.

*Team balancing*
Sometimes, the WZ finder does not seem to balance the teams out. One side will have three healers while the other side has no healers. In GSF, one team can accumulate thirty two kills in less than three minutes while the other team has yet to hit five. Arenas can, and are, often four versus three, or four versus two, four versus one, or even just four and no opposition. 4 vs. 0 should cause the game to abort. Not award a free win. Oh, it's nice to get! But geez, I'd rather play than get a free victory at no cost. As for the thirty kills in two minutes, that may be attributed to the aforementioned Aimbot hack in GSF...although I have never been able to shoot someone who was directly behind me either.

I'm not trying to grief anyone or get special favors. I just want to play a fair game and have fun. Even if I lose a close game, it can still be a "GG." But so many things are going against that fun that I am starting to consider quitting. And that's sad. The Old Republic has great potential and there are only so many places you can pretend to be a Jedi without being arrested. I sincerely hope someone at Bioware reads this and addresses a few things. Having my own house on Korriban is neat and all. But if I could play a warzone without having to hit my Rapid Fire icon more than once before I see the laser firing would be a lot nicer.

I will bump this at least twice if only to satisfy myself that it has at least been visible long enough for someone out there to see it. It's that important to me.

I do thank you for your time.