SWTOR: Random Complaint thread. F2P means P2Win

[Draygon]

I just wish I could play FFXI pre-toau one more time.

[Rulke]

This game is still so glitchy sometimes! Many of the scannable items on the maps are what my wife and I call "fakes" When we try to scan them we can't, the cursor doesn't change to the scan icon, though its a clearly marked spot on the minimap and an obvous graphic on screen ><

[vrumpt]

I know. Unfortunately i'm used to deceiving gathering nodes from WoW. Wasn't uncommon to occasionally find a gathering node under the ground, or a few feet off the ground. i guess its something they expect you to tolerate since there are tons of other gathering nodes around that work right.

[tol]

the reason this happens is someone gathers it and moves right when it finishes, sometimes ive done and i thought i had looted it but i notice i didnt and the node is still there like a "body" that i can loot right away w/o the cast bar. Im assuming people leave and dont notice and thus the "body" of the node is still assigned as their loot indefinitely until the servers get taken down for maintenance or whatever.

tldr; fuckin bugs man

[Insanecyclone]

I honestly want to play this, but not with this mess going on. May have to wait a couple months unless it gets worse.

[Lordender]

My mind is just completely blown that this is the game Bioware came up with after spending 300million $ on it. How do people even defend this abomination? Blizzard loses over 2 million subs in what, 1 year and 2 months using the same model and SW:ToR copies it almost code for code except they interject a ton of Voice acting and gets PR people to basically lie to their customers saying "our game is going to be 'heroic' unlike those other MMO's!" then blatantly show footage of WoW combat, when everything right down to the abilities is taken from WoW, just named differently, follows the SAME endgame model, same pvp model, same vendor model, what a fucking joke!

And here we thought SE made some crazy mistakes.

[mallister]

friend of mine at work plays TOR, denies the WoW resemblance even when i bring up specific instances where they're identical. it's kinda funny to screw with him. says he just doesn't see it.

[Insanecyclone]

[Lucavi]

^ There it is again! I fucking LOVE that quote!!

[tol]

My mind is just completely blown that this is the game Bioware came up with after spending 300million $ on it. How do people even defend this abomination? Blizzard loses over 2 million subs in what, 1 year and 2 months using the same model and SW:ToR copies it almost code for code except they interject a ton of Voice acting and gets PR people to basically lie to their customers saying "our game is going to be 'heroic' unlike those other MMO's!" then blatantly show footage of WoW combat, when everything right down to the abilities is taken from WoW, just named differently, follows the SAME endgame model, same pvp model, same vendor model, what a fucking joke!

And here we thought SE made some crazy mistakes.

you're really trying to say FFXIV at launch(or even now..lol) was a better game? TOR is a wow clone no doubt about it but dont get fucking crazy and try and say this shit is anything near the failure ffxiv was.

[Ambrosia]

Even though Lord Ender is mostly right in that post (minus the SE comment) and Insane Cyclone "may" potentially have one or two or fifty valid points in those pictures and Rulke yelling that the game is a glitch, to adding the cherry on top with Lucavi's Love comment... I just think you guys need to stop. You are all ganging up on SWTOR... and from my viewpoint... well how do I say... it isn't very heroic at all.


Off topic: Yeah I added that back in my sig, it's just too awesome O:

[Alderaan]

So i was bored and decided to resub after canceling after the first free month to finish off my gunslinger. Did EV and KP, only to see the same bugged out and glitched bosses are still there. Headed over to Ilum, only to see huge lag spikes on the PVE side of the map even though my ping was around 65. I'm talking 2-3 second delays here and i was nowhere near the zergfests going on.

Then i noticed the same huge drops in fps at certain times so i stumbled on this post and figured i'd link it here for anyone that may not have seen it.

Spoiler: show

After trying a multitude of fixes and routinely checking what some of the more technical people have been saying in the 'Horrid FPS' threads, I think I can put the big picture together. What I see are a couple different contributors so I'll explain those as best I can.

-System specs for testing
i7 920 @4.2
12GB DDR3
Crossfire 6950 GPUs
Corsair Force 3 SSDs (RAID 0)

Symptoms
-Terrible performance on Republic/Imperial Fleets, especially when in crowded areas
-Unplayable FPS in warzones
-Random FPS drops while questing/running around
-FPS drops exactly in half (no matter if you're sitting at 30 or 100 FPS) when opening 2D UI elements and summoning companions. Effect lasts 1-2 seconds, then normal FPS resumes
-Opening separate bank tabs or clicking the next and back pages on the GTN causes a temporary FPS drop
-Huge FPS drop followed by high FPS when starting a conversation, especially in a party with 2 or more people
-Temporary FPS drop out in questing areas when another player's character is loaded (doesn't need to be in your FOV for this to happen)

What helps
-If you have enough extra RAM (should be okay if you have 6GB or more), create a RAM drive of about 1.5-2GB. Run diskcachearena and swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor from that drive.

See this thread for instructions on setting up a RAM drive to run the diskcachearena file in memory. Credit for these instructions goes to Lemon_King.

To run the effects file on your RAM drive as well, make a backup copy of swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor, and rename or move it to a separate folder. Add this to your batch file:

Code:

mklink "SWTORINSTALLATIONPATH\assets\swtor_main_art_fx_1. tor" "RAMDRIVEPATH\swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor"

Obviously, substitute SWTORINSTALLATIONPATH for your SWTOR install folder and RAMDRIVEPATH for your actual RAM drive letter. Finally, copy this file from your backup folder (do NOT move it, copy it) to the location on your RAM drive that you just configured in your batch file.

-If you don't have much RAM, going into the assets folder in your SWTOR install folder and renaming/moving the swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor file has been confirmed to provide a large FPS gain. Note that doing this removes a LOT of effects and sounds from the game (some combat sounds, light saber blades, AoE effects, speeders, the ball in Huttball etc), so running this file on a RAM drive is preferable. If you are desperate to play, just rename/move this file to a backup folder. If you have 4GB of RAM, you can probably get away with a RAM drive of around 200 megs and following the steps above.

-There are people running the game on SSDs running into the exact same problems BUT, overall it seems that adding an SSD results in fairly large gains. If you are having any of these symptoms, upgrading to an SSD for this reason is not recommended. I received 2 SSDs as a gift, set them up in a RAID 0 and did not see much improvement. A game should not require an SSD to play correctly anyway. Your symptoms may improve, but they may also remain unchanged!

Theory
Now, what's happening behind the scenes? When I first ran into problems after the early access period, I had 6GB of DDR3. I thought, between Windows 7, my background apps and SWTOR maybe that's not enough and when the game tries to load new data it has to grab it from the system page file. As it turns out, this is not far from the truth. But we'll get back to that in a minute. After installing a new 12GB kit, I noticed the exact same issues happening. Random FPS drops from the 80+ range down into the 30s in some places. FPS still dropping exactly in half for a couple seconds when opening UI elements.

I figured, well, something is up with the data streaming in this game, they'll fix it. But here we are, over a month later still with the same issues. What about SSDs? Well, an SSD still won't be as fast at retrieving data VS something that's stored in RAM. I think that's why some people see these issues even when the game is on an SSD. In fact, see just above this. I'm running the game on SSD RAID0 and saw very little gains.

The first problem I see is this. When the game has to wait for data to load, the engine stops rendering. So here's what happens. You're running around the Imperial Fleet and a new player comes into view. The game needs to pull information for that player, so it goes to the assets files on your hard drive. While the game is waiting for that data, your GPU usage drops and the game renderer stalls out until it has that information. I haven't been able to find the source of the people saying this since it's been buried in the 'Horrid FPS' threads but it was confirmed by a few people. Further evidence is that if I just run around the outer ring on the IF, at some point my FPS will drop down from the 70s-80s to the 30s-20s. If I then stop in place and wait a few seconds, FPS climbs back up to where it was, regardless of how many people are in the FOV. Honestly, this is not acceptable and has a huge impact on performance.

Another thing is the 'arena' cache file that gets stored on the hard drive. I'm not 100% sure what the purpose of this file is but if deleted, it regenerates the next time the game starts. During periods where my FPS takes a huge hit, I notice a lot of hard drive activity on this file. My best guess is when SWTOR runs out of physical RAM, it starts caching assets to this file, almost like a second page file for TOR instead of Windows. The reason I think this is that SWTOR runs 2 processes. According to some, in order to get around memory addressing limitations.

This makes sense with what I learned about how the game handles higher res textures. They use what they call a 'texture atlas'. When a conversation starts, the game switches to higher resolution textures. I believe this is why there is a sudden FPS drop right when a conversation/cutscene starts. I also believe the diskcachearena file has a part to play in all of this.

Why physical RAM is not used for this file, I have no idea but it seems like poor design to me. Given enough system RAM, you can create a RAM drive and run this file there. That gives a performance increase in general as the game waits much less time to retrieve data from that file. But the performance drop is still there when new data is loaded. Further, I have never seen this file allocate more than about 1GB of space. I have a feeling if this data could be stored in main memory it would solve a lot of issues. Even if that file could store more cached data and we could put the thing in a RAM drive, that might help.

Another key is that every time I see my FPS tank and then recover, there is an associated increase in network activity. Mind you, we are talking about kilobytes and I'm on a very fast, low-latency connection. But this also feeds into the first identified problem. This means that if the game client is waiting on data from the game's backend servers, you will see a temporary FPS loss. This is almost conclusively proven by the phenomenon of jumping once, then opening your inventory repeatedly while in the air. Notice that your character gets "stuck" while doing this. By the time the engine recovers, you are on the ground. While your game client was busy waiting on data, the world around you and in fact your character itself keeps right on going. But the game does not render in that time, so you jump, open your inventory repeatedly and then you are suddenly on the ground after being suspended in mid-air. This is key evidence!

Finally, after looking into all of this and then examing exactly where performance falls apart, we can see that certain asset files are contributing significantly to this debacle. It's confirmed that the asset file swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor is a big part of the problem. Many game 'special effects' such as lightsaber blades, the flames from fire squares in Huttball, aoe spell effects etc come from this file. For most users, this file seems to have an abnormal amount of read activity on their computers.

See the "What helps" section for further notes on this specific file. I suspect that other asset files may have a similar effect, particularly whichever one is controlling the UI. This would explain why doing anything with the game's UI, even flipping between pages in the GTN results in a brief, but massive FPS hit.

All of these problems are also compounded by other issues with the 3D rendering system. Enabling shadows has an enormous performance impact for some reason. Bloom also seems to be poorly implemented. I can usually run with shadows on high but if I enable bloom I get an instant slideshow. Maybe these are driver related but I'm not so sure given the weirdness I've seen with this engine.


TL;DR version
The engine stops rendering if it has to wait for data. This problem is compounded by abnormal hard drive utilization on some of the game's files, mismanagement of assets, and poor utilization of system resources.

The game stutters and lurches when it has to retrieve data that's not in physical RAM. This is going to be caused by bad memory management, inefficient game data streaming, or not keeping enough data in physical RAM for the area you're in. Most likely, it's a combination of all of these factors. These reasons are the only explanations that seem to fit such a broad range of system specs (even 'uber' ones). If my FPS plumets from 80 to 20 when moving to an area with players, but fixes itself after a couple seconds even when I don't move and no players in the FOV move, it's choking on loading new data which brings everything to a grinding halt. There have been two well quoted posts by programmers in the 'Horrid FPS' threads that confirm these suspicions based on their own experience. This is not normal!

Conclusions
-Game processes are not using as much physical memory as they should
-The game's renderer flat-out stopping when it has to wait for data is idiotic
-The renderer for the game running as a separate process is a bottleneck in itself
-Management, caching, and streaming of new assets (especially fx assets) are all handled poorly, especially when it comes to accessing these resources from the hard drive
-Game executables not being compiled for 64-bit runtimes is a huge mistake (processes cannot use enough physical RAM even when plenty is available or take advantage of 64-bit efficiencies)
-Terrible implementation of bloom and shadow effects contributes to poor FPS (this is 2012 and I have a great system. I should be able to enable these!)

These contributors cause abysmal performance across the board, and are the result of poor coding and poor design.

And I know people are tired of the WoW comparisons, but think about it this way. In any MMO, there is a lot of player data out there especially in cities where people tend to cluster. For example in WoW, my main's home was Stormwind. Even with literally hundreds of players in the same space, all riding different mounts, wearing different armor/skins, running around with glowy enchants on their weapons, and randomly casting AoE spells, there is no sign of a performance drop on a high end PC.

I fully understand that there are more effects, bigger textures etc. My point is, there seems to be a real problem with the client in how it handles streaming in of new data. If those problems were fixed, crowded questing areas and RF/IF being crowded would not hinder performance as much. If WoW had such obvious problems handling the loading of new data, I suspect the exact same problems would be happening there. WoW does this just fine while maintaining steady FPS well over 100 on my hardware. Why is TOR struggling?

My thanks to:
Everyone who has stopped by here to support me in the quest to understand, and help Bioware understand the nature of the faults in this game so they can be corrected. Additional thanks to those who like myself, have spent their valuable time helping me test theories and figure out what Bioware has not been able to yet (you know who you guys are).

They can't ignore us forever. I encourage everyone following this thread and anyone who sees and agrees with it to spread the word. Other sites, hit them on their Twitter account, whatever we have to do so that they see and acknowledge this thread!

[Lordender]

Even though Lord Ender is mostly right in that post (minus the SE comment) and Insane Cyclone "may" potentially have one or two or fifty valid points in those pictures and Rulke yelling that the game is a glitch, to adding the cherry on top with Lucavi's Love comment... I just think you guys need to stop. You are all ganging up on SWTOR... and from my viewpoint... well how do I say... it isn't very heroic at all.

I am a huge fan of the KoToR series, loved Bioware games of the past which started back with Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter nights. My thoughts of SW:TOR is the same as when we heard there was going to be a new X-COM game a few years ago and it turned out to be a FPS which is utter betrayal to the beauty that was oldschool X-COM that everyone loved.

It's almost like SW:TOR came out and boom, its instantly a 7 year old game with everything taken from WoW outside of voice acting events and being able to choose how stuff plays out. Bioware only cared about the questing aspect of the game and copied WoW for everything else and did a bad job at that while flaming Blizzard for how WoW is in the process with statements like:

"mmo combat is often you have scenarios where you have multiple heroes beating on a single enemy. That isn't very heroic."
"Within a matter of minutes after playing SW:TOR you'll be doing things you couldn't do in other MMO's."

Five or six years ago, I and most likely many others wouldn't of cared if this is the game we got but how do you release something like this now? bugs aside because I believe that will take at least a few patches tops to iron-out after a MMO release. Look no further than cataclysm, the massive bleeding began just one month after its launch because it really brought nothing new to the table endgame wise, not only did SW:TOR copy that, they did a worse job. WoW isn't declining because of the story, it is declining because people have "been there, done that." What fun is it to move on to the "next tier" 5 months down the road to do the same thing to different skinned mobs and getting loot thats 20 item levels higher? That endgame model has lasted a lot longer than it should have. Multiple difficulties only made the content even more repetitive and made burnouts happen at a much more rapid pace, just because a mob adds a wrinkle or two on a higher difficulty doesn't mean its anymore fun. Maybe i'm in a minority here, maybe people enjoy a model that has been in place for years and offers really nothing new.

I can tell you one thing, if they don't fix it by content patches, this game is going to decline faster than Whitney Houston's last 48hrs.

[Dantrag]

But then Firaxis decided to release a X-Com that was based off the actual strategy game! I know that has nothing to do with anything but w/e!

[Ohemgee]

If SWTOR took everything from WoW and added voice acting, it would be a better game.

But it doesn't (yet?)

[Dantrag]

Biggest issue that the game will NEVER...EVER.......EEEEEEEVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEERRRRRR RRRRR be able to get over is the hard coded 1.5 second global cool down system it has in place. Nothing is worse than not being able to clip your own abilities to fire something else off because you're in animation from another move. I've never felt more limited in an MMO than I have in TOR. And also when you use an instant you just sit there for a good 1 second... doing...nothing.

[The Blackrose]

But then Firaxis decided to release a X-Com that was based off the actual strategy game!

And thank god they did, otherwise I would have to cut a bitch.

[Kaylia]

Biggest issue that the game will NEVER...EVER.......EEEEEEEVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEERRRRRR RRRRR be able to get over is the hard coded 1.5 second global cool down system it has in place. Nothing is worse than not being able to clip your own abilities to fire something else off because you're in animation from another move. I've never felt more limited in an MMO than I have in TOR. And also when you use an instant you just sit there for a good 1 second... doing...nothing.

What?

Did you even play FFXI where you have to wait 30 seconds to click on rampage or asuran fist? And shit, using your ability was probably taking 1.5 seconds anyway.

[Lucavi]

Yeah, we played XI, like 8 years ago. Its not cool to play a game that has a similar problem that is:

A) Designed from the ground up for PCs.
B) Just came out around 2 months ago.

Shoulda' known better; new generation of games = new generation of standards, blah blah blah.

[Dantrag]

What?

Did you even play FFXI where you have to wait 30 seconds to click on rampage or asuran fist? And shit, using your ability was probably taking 1.5 seconds anyway.

XI was not a fast paced MMO. This is supposed to be. The flashy attacks and triple attack moves basically cause you to have to wait 1.5 seconds to do something else, even if it's an instant attack. Comparing XI to TOR is probably the worst comparison there is out there.