Sound issue with 1.2

I called customer service. Went through every troubleshooting step they gave me. Including a silly memtest86 they asked me to do 6 times and didnt bother to tell me it would take 6+ hours to complete. Its not for people that dont understand computers either. Some of the stuff they ask you to do is to prove that its your computer and not the game itself. I also had a technical agent and cs agent confirm that everyday since the free 30 days i played would be considered free until they have fixed this issue. They agreed. All i had to do was the most useless troubleshooting that pointed fingers at me and not their game. Perhaps every customer with this sound issue should take the time this Saturday to call tech support and discuss the sound issue and request the free time until its fixed. I'm sure when they get a report that thousands of players are demanding free time they will get off their butts to correct it(of course this assuming they aren't trying that hard due to the silence and ignoring the issue). Not trying to start an uprising or anything but the only thing that matters to these big companies is dollar signs. They cannot justify paying 15 dollars a month while these sound issues exist. Hell my PLAY button only plays the sound after a patch. Any other time i open the game no sound from the Play button at all. That right there just shows how bad it is. If it only activates after a direct patch something seriously is wrong with the game itself. Anywho, i also unsubscribed due to the sound issues but i have like 140 days of playtime and the free time since the date of the my phone call after the 30 days were up. I hoped unsubbing and putting the info in there would make them think "oh ****" but clearly they need alot more people calling tech support and reporting it directly so it gets escalated to development.

The fact they removed static sound stacking from the known issues thread and have not even bothered to put it back into known issues even after multiple reports that its still there shows incompetence.

Oh and be wary. After my computer passed every test they gave me and 3 weeks of troubleshooting with these "top tier teams" i still ended up getting an email after EVERYTHING they had me do telling me to "please repair your launcher". That was the last straw for me. They were still trying to blame me at that point. Some of their tech support won't even read the previous notes and it seems you get a different tech guy handling your case every night. At that point i stopped calling since repairing the launcher was in the first steps of troubleshooting with them. I also reinstalled the game after the first repair for them to get that out of the way. I couldn't believe they told me to repair after a fresh install with the same issues. Oh and i run repair after every single patch hoping it finds the sound corruption. Which i also told them in my first few calls that i do.

Next step they want me to complete is doing a clean boot and running the game. Along with trying the PTS and see the bug exists on the PTS(even though it was reported to development as being on the pts before 1.2 by many people). #2 is going to be hard since noone plays warzones on the pts and they cant transfer my lvl 50 sith inquisitor over there to test it. Just more "its you not us" requests. I really feel like refusing the PTS test on them since, like i said, it was reported before 1.2.

I'll do the Clean Boot test for them from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796. Again though thats alot of time and work for me to find their problem. I'll still do it to get it out of the way though.

*****NEED OTHERS TO CONFIRM THIS*****

1. When you open your launcher do you get the "play button loaded sound" that has been there since beta? If you do not get the sound confirm it in this thread. Also go to your swtor directory, rename the launcher(example fakelauncher.exe), click fixlauncher.exe and then boot up your launcher. Your launcher will then get an update patch and the play button sound will work no problem. After this reboot launcher again and voila. Play button sound disappears until the next patch time. They cannot explain why this is happening even after a fresh install of the game and i advise everyone to test it to see if its linked.

2. When you boot up the game, on the initial splash screen(before it goes to character select), do you hear a brief looping wind tunnel sound. It almost sounds like one of the spaceships from the server selection screen just looping over and over. Then when your character select screen loads(unless youre in queue for a server) it will stop the wind tunnel sound and then load the character select music for you.

TEST THESE AND REPLY

Yeah, both of your examples are confirmed on my end. No 'play button sound' and I have had the 'swoosh' sound at the first splash screen since the 1.2 patch.

The thing that annoys me is the combat sounds being muffled to the point where they are almost inaudible. Since 1.2 debuted, I can no longer hear my Rail Shot proc on my Powertech. It used to be a chuckle that the character would make when your Rail Shot procced off of cooldown, but now he makes no noise (actually he does, but it is so muffled to the point where you cannot hear him at all).

The same problem also affects common things like combat sounds that enemies make when they take damage or die. Just go into a WZ and start killing people and dying yourself, you will notice that you can't hear death cries that people used to make pre-1.2. There is no way that they can't reproduce this on their end, is there? hehe

The problem that people report with the dialogue going out seems to happen after a few hours of continuous play, while the above examples occur as soon as I log into the game. They do get progressively worse as time goes on, though, to the point where sometimes even blaster fire will become muffled.

I ended up cancelling my account, but not because I was really dissatisfied with the content (I still wanted to check out the other class stories). I cancelled because it annoys me beyond belief that this thing hasn't been fixed for such a long time now, especially because it is such an important thing like sound. And the fact that it is not on the known issues list is the straw that broke the camel's back.

Posting on the forums doesn't get this fixed since the CS team said they can't issue bug reports for people here. We gotta figure out the common problems for everyone report/call them ourselves. Too many people in the game have the attitude "oh bioware know about it and will eventually patch it" lol 6 weeks later and nothing.

Yes, these bugs exactly. I actually mentioned both of these in a previous post 40 or 50 pages back, but its buried.
Another bug I've noticed is that I have NEVER ONCE heard a WZ queue pop audio cue when tabbed out of the game. Yes, I checked the box to play sound while tabbed out. I can hear idle sounds on the fleet, my speeder while it idles, etc, but NEVER the auido cue for a WZ pop. What's the point of tabbing out then?

Yeah the 'wind' sound that was there before 1.2 is now gone. I don't hear it anymore. The play button sound no longer comes on except on rare occasions after an initial patch download and only then.

I've noticed that using the Spike ability on my Assassin will stack a never-ending static sound at the source and it gets louder and louder the more people use it until the sound completely erodes and ambient noises fade. Cutscenes have no voice-over or any mouth movement and footsteps start losing their noise. The sound for opening/closing inventory items, maps, crew skills, etc. will be gone and companions don't talk.

This is extremely annoying and can only come back after a game reset. It's been weeks since this issue and every patch after 1.2 has not have a fix. Something needs to be done and it needs to be done fast.

Bio Ware are incompetent at memory management. The bug is clearly a memory leak and the patch 1.2 code is what started it. Something really STUPID was done in patch 1.2 to make huge memory leaks in sound and that is it.

But Bio Ware blames all this on our computers again and again and again.
Like I said imcompetent programmers at Bio Ware are the problem.

They have posted in threads, and there are 20 some threads on this issue, they know about it. They just can't seem to get it fixed and keep pointing fingers at us like its all of our systems all with different sound cards, drivers, OS and so on causing the problem when the common denominator is the game!

This seems a lot like a driver problem. But only a few people have even posted what sound cards they are using, so theres not a lot of useful information here.

If you want this fixed you need to start posting information they can actually use, not just pages and pages of crying for them to read through :/

They have gotten hundreds, maybe even thousands of tickets and DXDiag reports from users around the world.
Both from this thread, and this thread.
It is not a local, user to user problem. Its a server sided issue.

Finally a little confirmation from BW: