I did. For two days, actually. Combat-wise, TERA is inferior to Spellborn, because it includes lengthy non-interruptable combat animations for almost everything. And, for everything else from questing to scenery to UI to story to music and soundbites, TERA is atrocious. A plague on the MMO world, frankly. About a textbook example of everything that should be avoided at any cost. A friend of mine summed it up quite nicely : after two days, the one salient point of TERA is that it is a korean MMO. This is *not* the first thing a game should be remembered for.

Confirmed bug, I checked it on several different companions for several different characters. Extremely annoying. I submitted a ticket and could reach online support. Looks like the bug is known and has been escalated for "further investigation". No ETA for resolution :/

I've had the same issues. Loading times are worse than before, while mission start time seems earlier, resulting in, say, you entering the Impossible Sector mission in the middle of the first minefield. Sound has been screwy all over the board since 1.2

As far as I can tell : - she's a compulsive liar. What I don't know yet is whether it is simply her way of doing things, or a way to protect herself. - she likes it when you play tough, but she does not want to be on the butt end of one of your tough acts. She likes it even better if you can handle bluff and irony and play along, knowing it's all pretense. - she bears grudges. In the end, she sounds exactly like the girl who would say "I was not born a *****, men like you made me that way" - or, more specifically, would never say it but would act like she meant that exactly. But, as I said above, I still cannot say whether there's a complex person that hurts inside, of she's a conniving ***** down to the core.

Meh. As a rule, I don't like "events" when they are not fully integrated in the game setting, both cause, development, and consequences. The cause is integrated, but the development and consequences are not - it's a "mad rakghoul entertainment day" kind of event, and that kind of event irks me. As a general rule, I don't like events so much as world changes. Rakghoul plague outbreak is OK - it should start one one planet, and maybe progress to others as days and weeks go by, go back and forth. Each evolution step should modify conditions, with quests added or deleted on a weekly basis, with corresponding quarantine zones added to existing planets if needed. but an event that only affects players while the rest of the setting stays as it always was except for the occasional NPC bursting out of its clothing and spewing acidic spit ? Sorry, it's just like Halloween entertainment : a transient fad uncorrelated with the ongoing world at large. And I concur with another poster : rewarding people who *spread* the plague is stupid beyond belief as far as I'm concerned. Not impressed in the slightest. It's even worse than I expected, and I was not expecting much.

Agreed. If you want "minimum" class balance, you must balance according to what a perfect player can do with the class. If you want "functional" class balance, you must balance according to what a perfect player can do with the class AND what an average player can do with the class. If you want a "good" class balance, you must have functional balance at each of the various level ranges and gear tiers. In order to achieve that, you have to step up the automated testing quite a bit. My guesstimate is that you would need about 100k hours of simulated combat to achieve balance. Which is not that much, if you consider that the immense majority of it can be completely automated and run 24/7, pausing only to analyse the results and tune the input parameters. The problem with balance right now is that it relies far too much on random sampling by human testers in undefined environments. In other words : you get numbers but have no idea what parameters led to those numbers. You can get parsers of static combat (target dummies), but even then you do not know the rotation used, the deviation from the perfect rotation (which *can* be simulated to model an imperfect player), and any time you want to actually know how it works in a real game environment, everything crumbles because you don't have any parameters. Sampling is OK to find bugs after regular testing campaigns are over. But for statistical analysis, its a very poor method.

Yeah, right. Because taunts work exactly the same in PvE and PvP, as we all know :/

The problem with space combat as a group activity is that it's not built along the same lines as ground-based group combat activities. Ground-based combat as a group relies on combo dynamics - tanking, CCing, healing and DPsing. The more people you add, the more convoluted the combinations and the more specific the roles. Single-player ground combat is usually built on whatever you can come up with (combination of any of the above by a character and his companion of choice). Now space combat - you have no tanking, no CCing, and no heal. It's pure DPS and passive mitigation. Multiplayer space combat would be similar to a group activity with four DPS characters. Which means that you have to come up with something different - the trinity does not work anymore. It requires some thinking, and for a game that has been built on "traied and proven ideas", it is easier said than done. It can be done, of course. But does it meet the expected ROI that all new developments are screened against ? That remains to be seen.

Especially since you don't get fleet tokens from "regular" space missions anymore - you only get them from daily quests now. Which means that even with the best of intentions, 2000 tokens will require at least three weeks worth of daily quests. In three weeks, your alt character will have outlevel all the inheritance gear. The whole thing is completely off the mark.

I would tend to agree. This is not a case of a SW bug in a convoluted feature - bugs happen, even with all the testing money can buy (and even with all the testing you don't need to buy, hello, PTR testers). This is a case of configuration control blunder. It does not shed doubt on the development part of the production cycle, rather on the image building part - and since image building should be completed *before* testing is completed, it means that the image that was deployed today never saw regression testing - a critical mistake (there is no way a feature rollback could escape regression testing). It is a process failure, not a design error, and as such, is much more worrying because it underlines a lack of maturity in the corresponding process and a tendancy to rush content out - probably because the production teams are understaffed and work under too tight a schedule as a consequence. In the end, the source cause is probably in the upper levels of project management. Which makes it almost impossible to root out.

Même avec un petit effort d'imagination, je me demande quel est le problème de "technologie". Toutes les caractéristiques des objets sont mises dans des bases de données, donc le modèle BD a dû être mis à jour pour pouvoir intégrer les nouveaux objets. Je suis vraiment surpris qu'ils n'aient pas fait la migration des anciens, parce que là, ça les oblige à garder les deux modèles, l'ancien (avec le bonus de set sur le squelette) et le nouveau (avec le bonus de set sur la modif d'armure). In fine, c'est d'autant plus dommage que ceux qui auront accès le plus facilement aux nouveaux objets sont souvent ceux... pour qui l'apparence est secondaire par rapport à la performance. Alors que ceux qui sont dans le cas inverse sont souvent ceux qui "farment" moins le contenu SOTA, donc qui vont rester le plus longtemps avec les sets Tionese/Columni / Rakata. C'aurait été moins grave si le "story mode" des nouvelles instances avait été accessible... en story mode (donc, faisable sans avoir farmé le columni), mais apparemment, le niveau d'équipement requis pour le story mode de la nouvelle opération correspond grosso modo au hard mode des anciennes. Mais bon, ce n'est pas le premier jeu qui se focalise sur le "prochain développement" et laisse les friches actuelles... en friche. C'est même pratiquement le stéréotype du MMO moderne, où la consommation de contenu est entretenue et encouragée : oubliez le passé, c'est devant que ça se passe

Sinon, ACT (Advanced Combat tracker) a un module SWtOR, et la plateforme est assez stable vu que c'est un parseur multi-jeux.

If you play a DS Bounty Hunter, I guess you are stuck with Mako, who is not overly ruthless and malicious either. Less devout, but soft-hearted anyway. I do not think you can turn Nadia Grell to the Dark Side (or Iresso, for that matter). Which means that DS Consulars are stuck as well. Conversely, try going Light Side and goody-two-shoes and gain affection / romance Risha. It's a pain. Corso is a similar pain for DS female smugglers. I think you could say the same thing for all romanceable companions : if you go their way, they're okay. If you find yourself at odds with them, they are not. The only exception, I think, is the male Sith Warrior, who can turn Jaesa DS or "keep" her LS (and note that if you play a female SW, you do not get that choice of "flexible" romanceable companion, Malavai Quinn is all you get). But *that* is the exception, not the SI. The SI companions are in line with the others. I think most people are so hell-bent on playing Dark Side SI and so used to seeing things bend their way that they have difficulty admitting that, as a general rule, companion NPCs (among others) in the SWtOR universe are extremely set in their ways

Actually, I wonder if that would be a good thing. Being able to shift other people's opinion is nice, but in a RPG, the key with NPCs is that they are not playthings. Some can be reasoned with, others cannot. Some are gullible, others are hardcases, headstrong, stubborn or simply devout enough to ignore what you try to convince them of. That's part of what make them characters and not clay pets. After all, you have the option of having your character shift to the light side, if you do not, why should she bend over for you ? My problem is, as a dark side character, you might see no reason to keep her as a companion beyond the clearly OCC "five companions is better than four". You get that problem with at least one companion per class - Tanno Vik or Elara Dorne when you're trooper, Kira/T7 or Lord Scourge when you're JK... the list goes on. there's always at least one in the bunch that does not seem to fit. And, ideally, you should be able to choose which companions you keep and which you don't. That would have been possible if they had set the maximum number of companions you can send on missions to 3 instead of 5 - that would have made two companions "redundant", which would have allowed you to weigh their tactical interest against their obvious psychological mismatch. Right now, you cannot even try and get rid of them (thank you, beta testers :/) and if you do, you are at a net loss. But I find that a minor hindrance. Qyzen Fess and Zenith never leave the ship except for missions, Lord Scourge only rampages archeological fields, and Tanno Vik does his dirty deals from the ship's cargo bay. I ignore them. But if they could all be convinced to become what I want them to become, they would have no character of their own - they would be flesh drones, pets in every way. Until we can get rid of them, I'd rather leave them how they are.

The nice thing about probabilities is that they often go against "common sense". Let's take a simple case : coin toss, heads or tails. If you plan to toss the coin twice, your chances to win the toss at least once is 0.75 (1.0 - chance of you losing both). You lose the first toss. by "common sense", your chance of winning the second one should have increased, right - so that the initial probability remains ? Wrong. Your chance of winning at least once actually went down - from 0.75 to 0.5. You chance of winning precisely the second toss is exactly the same as before : 0.5. Every roll you win - and every roll you lose - is in the past. It *does not count anymore*. If you won, your chance of scoring high overall actually improved, since you already scored points. If you lost, your chances of scoring high overall actually went down. What Bioware is planning to do in 1.2 is to de-randomize the RNG-based mechanisms so that they are *less* random and actually take the past into account to skew future results. They aim at balancing results in a small time window (that of "reasonable human perception") instead of letting things even out "naturally". Smart move, as far as I'm concerned, because RNG is never satisfying in the long run. But far less "random" than it is currently.