Design decisions and why the game engine hurts TOR

Well sorry to say you are completely wrong, the first thing the OP did prior to posting here was to send it to the Feedback email for Bioware after receiving the 'we appreciate your feedback email' Bioware sent recently to people. He wrote the post hoping the feedback would be useful to the dev team in some way. He posted the same here just in case it was useful for others. How do I know this? I am the OP's girlfriend Please don't jump to conclusions so quickly.

I have nearly the exact same setup.

Must be a bottleneck but I can't imagine where.

Good post. I think the issues some have with companions may be in some situations, they have picked the wrong one to run with the class they are playing and they donot manage them correctly. My friend is a tanking spec Trooper who is using a companion who heals some, but he has her set to dps more. My player is a smuggler who is healing spec and he uses a companion set to tank and hold aggro too because if he dies , it is ok if I can keep the rest of the group up. We both have thier aoe skills shut off and I use a CC for one elite mob. With this combo, we do 4 man heroics succesfully often.

Yes, the game needs improvement, WoW did too when it came out. All you, and the other posters like you, are doing is discouraging those who see the potential in the game. I refuse to be discouraged and choose optimism instead.

I won't play F2P games. I want the game companies to make a nice profit off of MMORPGs so they will invest time and effort to keep the thing running strong. F2P games have the same upset customers complaining about the same list of gripes.

As long as the game looks great and plays smooth, I suggest you turn off the FPS display. You may enjoy the game more and worry less about the FPS.

It looks mostly ok, but when (if ever) high res textures comes out I expect with the money I dumped into the machine (1500 before peripherals - not a ton, but enough) I should be able to enjoy it with 60 FPS on max settings. I fear that I'll dip down to 30 or so on average. Currently, I get 60 everywhere except for fleet and probably PvP. I'm befuddled.

Quote:
He posted the same here just in case it was useful for others

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If he has as you say actually given this feedback to BW then that is a good thing and hopefully some of his points will be read by the dev team responsible.

But..

How is telling others the reason you are quitting helpful in anyway?? You don't like the game, it isn't for you? why is telling me that you don't like it going to change or help my game experience?
You don't post a review of a game to the people that are already playing it, that's like giving a film review to the auditorium while the end credits are running.
I know what i think about the game, i'm playing it!
Want to do a review, go to metacritic and tell the people who aren't actually playing the game yet.

So, I'm not jumping to conclusions.

OP is reasonable and well-written. As usual with these types of posts, I agree with some criticisms and disagree with others. The game certainly has some problems. But with some of them, I don't think they're as devastating to the future of the game as posts like the OP are predicting, and with others I think they will be sorted in good time.

But at the end of the day, it's just another post from an experienced MMO player wanting SWTOR to be more like their previous favourite MMO. Many of the critical posts are like this - it's either "this game should be more like WoW (than it already is)" or "this game should be less like WoW and more like SWG".

As a general point, the warning flag for me with such posts as the OP is when the poster starts talking about "the engine", as if they knew what they were talking about. Especially these days, lots of people play games a fair amount, and do a superficial bit of reading, and fancy themselves as experts.

But really, it's just an end-user's opinion, and they have no way of knowing whether the game's problems (and of course there are some) are down to "the engine" or a host of other things.

So yes, if we cleared these kinds of posts of the pompous pseudo-expertise of "engine"-drivel, and the hysteria of "I like x, x isn't in the game, therefore the game is fail, BW are fail, and the sky is falling", there are plenty of points that BW need to address in one way or another. OP succeeds in avoiding the latter, but not the former.

The long and the short of it is that with any other MMO, these kinds of predictions of d0000m would probably have some effect on the community. But as I see it, SWTOR is going to be played mainly by people who have no interest in the opinions of MMO bittervets, bored ex-WoW-ers, wistful ex-SWG-ers, and the rest. SWTOR is opening up a new audience to MMOs. And that's why it's going to continue to baffle the neatly-cultivated, formulaic opinions of these pseudo-MMO-experts.

Because for most players of this game, the voices of these pseudo-MMO-experts aren't even on the radar.

A possible valid counter-argument to this is "well, ok, but even your supposed new audience will eventually discover the problems these "pseudo-MMO-experts", as you so rudely call them, have already found". I reply: not if BW get their act together, and so far as I've seen, they've been very active in sorting out genuine problems (i.e. not pseudo-problems arising from our pseudo-MMO-experts' dislike of the game not being more like WoW or SWG).

So contrary to the f2p predictions, I predict that the game will continue to be improved, and continue to be successful, and will probably grow moderately over the next couple of years.

It doesn't belong here.

It is in no way useful to people in general.