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

I don't know any tech but I do know SWTOR uses loading screens way too often for my liking when travelling from 1 place to another.

I find that having to go through loading screens so often - especially if they take quite some time to load - takes away from that fundamental aspect of an MMO - a seamless, persistent world. It's really undermines that MMO atmosphere where the player feels like he's part of one single unified universe.

Perhaps, if technology (and costs) allow it, SWTOR could be better if they just allowed de-instanced inter-planetary travel - this means no load screens from the point where you enter your ship till you disembark.

In fact, it would be best if they would allow us to use our ships to travel freely throughout space; we should get greater control over our ships - even more than what we can do in space missions - to the point where we can literally manually pilot it from any point in space to another.

Oh thank god it's not just me! Really since 1.2 my graphics card constantly sounds like a roaring tornado! Even when I turn down the graphics settings.

As for the loading screen discussion, I'm looking at the positive side - I've been using that time to get caught up on past issues of "The Economist".

On thing that kind of surprises me is that, with how litigious American society is, we haven't seen more about how this game's "minimum" requirements aren't enough to render the game playable.

My last foray in to programming was BASIC on an Apple IIE. So I have no modern-day programming knowledge.

But I've been gaming for far longer. So I know my games. Certain game companies are known to me. And sometimes, when I hear who is making a game, even if I don't know the game, I know whether the game will be good or not. But I consider myself an impartial gamer and will call a spade a spade. In other words, I'm not a "fanboi."

Does ToR have load times here and there? Yes. Mostly between planets, to and from your ship, and to the fleet. While on a planet, I can go from zone to zone, from quest to quest, even on a speeder bike and do not have slowdowns or lag. Nice stuff.

Do load times bug me? Naw. Every game has them to some extent even if it is only done in the background. I'll complain about load times if they lock up and prevent me from playing the game. Does it take twenty seconds sometimes? I wouldn't know since I don't bother counting down the time that passes while the progress bar advances. I don't start worrying about that unless a good amount of time passes and the bar hasn't moved.

My computer is rather high end. I saved for while to upgrade my system with an AMD Athlon II X2 245 2.90 GHz video card.and four gig of RAM. I wanted my gaming to be high quality. At the time, that was pretty darn good. I'm sure there are more powerful items out there now. And in a few years when I upgrade again, I'll repeat the process and deck my system out again. But it does what I want it to right now. And that includes playing ToR, which it does quite well. Yes, I do have brief pauses sometimes in a Warzone. But pvp isn't really my thing in ToR yet. I find the story and quests more interesting right now. Perhaps as I get closer to level fifty.

How's ToR working for me? Just fine. Do I wish there was a better player selection method in the game so I could don't have to work around a companion to click on another player? Yes. Do I want to see a better method of finding a group to run a flashpoint? Yes. Am I unsubscribing because there is a loading screen when I go from Coruscant to the fleet? No. Heck, WoW has the occasional load time. It's gotten faster over the game's lifetime. I see ToR doing the same. I am not calling for the game's death after four or five months of it's launch. But that's just me.

Crysis 2 max settings: no noise
SWTOR on high: as if I am vacuuming
:/

Loading times in TOR are not a function of the client having it load resources from the server. Those resources are already present on your HDD. The reason it takes so long to load certain planets is because they are very large. This is why there is no loading screens once you are on the planet (unless you jump from one end to the other via QT or holocom). Even transitioning into an instanced section of the game (the green "doors") does not cause any loading. This is also why loading up your ship or the station goes much faster. Less assets to have to load from the HDD.

As for general graphical performance, it would seem that SWTOR is rather taxing on the GPU despite not having "high end" graphics. This could be due to the density of objects that are rendered on a screen at once... particularly other player models. Patch 1.2 proved that further optimization could improve TOR's overall performance, so perhaps there is still more tweaking to come.

Yeah, it's a throwback to the late 90's. What I hate are the triple/quadruple/quintiple zoning you have to do. I want to go from the fleet to Ilum Zone to hanger, zone to ship, travel to ilum, zone to airlock, zone to orbital station, zone to planet. After having played so many games in the recent 5-10 years where zoning is minimal, this is something in SWTOR I would really like to see reduced.

What´s even worse is that all upcoming MMOs (here´s top 5 list http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsMxgdVT_JY) have far more detailed worlds and better graphics features.
There will be a lot to do for the TOR team to catch up and make this look like a 2012 title.

Well written, but pointless. No one significant from BW is ever going to read this.
So if you wanted to just showoff that you know something about game dev, you win I guess.

ps. Average pc gamer already knows that this game is hardly optimized. Looks at all the whine about how their rig can run game X in 60fps but not swtor.

Quick question, I'm not incredibly technically minded, but how do I check on my GPU temperature whilst running SWTOR?
I have checked the CPU usage and whilst not too high, I did notice that SWTOR opens two processes which take up a fair amount of physical memory, which is strange.

That's because even U.S. courts don't reward self-entitlement.

Fact: The game is playable and it is playable on a broad range of computers.