Duke Togo

I played half the demo (well, I think it was half) which was essentially the opening sequence of the game. I didn't want to play the next portion because it seemed like it might be somewhat spoilerish (takes place on another world). It's Mass Effect, what else can you say? I'd ready for it!

I have the demo installed on my PC but haven't gotten to play it yet. I'm hoping I'll have some time tomorrow.

First trailer for the movie based on the book. It looks absurd, but the subject matter is enough to have me atleast pay some amount of attention.

Can I put up the old animated version of mine? BTW, LOVE the banner. I'd vote for keeping it up permanently.

Lookin' good!

I've sadly not seen many Pubs outside of WZ's. I have 9 world kills to 2 deaths--much less than I expected to have at 50. As it stands now, Ilum is a place where the two factions get together to trade objectives for easy daily and weekly mission completions; even then, I generally only see a couple of Pubs in the zone. Thankfully our population isn't too skewed, and I only get Huttball as a WZ about half the time. I loved my class story as a Sith Warrior; simply excellent writing and voice acting, with only only one real misstep along the way. I've done every mission available to me--without space-baring though cut scenes--with the exception of two Heroic 4's on Hoth and one Heroic 4 on Corellia. The only planet I really loathed was Imperial Taris, and Imperial Balmorra went on a tad too long for my tastes. I've done my share of space missions and have a fairly well geared-out ship (Grade 5 and Purple upgrades). I've done every FP up to level 40 (The Foundry was the last I did) and spend some time every day in the WZ's. Right now I'm just waiting for some more folks in my guild to catch up so we can start running hard-mode FP's (and hopefully finish out those Heroics I need). We currently have three 50's and three more members in the 40's.

I used to play EVE Online; I'm not sure you can find a more hardcore sci-fi MMO.

Very much so. They won't lose any players over it, but it will "color" their opinion of the game.

Time frame seems to be a few months. Also, they are going to expand space combat.

The Blasters have been placed on the Davik's Estate server. That's US PvP East.

Everybody did.

Well, they're taking the extinction of their race pretty well, I'd say.

It's not about what computers are capable of; it's about not punishing those who are at a disadvantage because of their connection. What you are advocating for is what is known as "action based" or "twitch based" combat--this does not work in a large MMO environment because of the disparity in the latency among users.

Dual-specs are coming, just not at launch. If SWTOR was an "instanced" game world, it would essentially be a single-player game. There is no way around that. I don't play MMO's to play by myself in a world devoid of other players.

Ok, maybe I missed this, but what happened to the rest of the Thundercats? Are our band of brave adventures the only ones to survive a genocide? There was a huge city teaming with cats, and they all seem to be gone. I have a feeling I missed something about them being taken for slave labor or escaping into the hills. Or maybe they'll all just dead?

I win: I was getting 9 FPS during the dance off! If there was one thing 6 years of WoW has taught me, no class remains the same for long.

What is somewhat bothersome are those who didn't play this weekend chiming in on the forums saying, "Well, my hardware is 'X', and I was getting 100+ FPS." When you ask them if it was this weekend, they always say no. I have yet to see a single person with capable hardware post they were getting the numbers we had seen previously during the final beta this past weekend. Passing along a rumor: someone stated that Bioware re-enabled the in-game AA this weekend. I didn't see an option for it, but considering the issues they had in the past with it, I would not be surprised. However, I had AA enabled through CCC, and that would have overridden any in-game setting--meaning I *should* have been immune if that was the cause.

Bioware is actively investigating the issue.

This beta build they have us testing (on 6 NA servers) has some serious performance issues. Where previously I was seeing 90-110 FPS (unnecessary, obviously), I now average around 30-50--and never above 70. At times I dip as low as 20 FPS.I had to turn on vsync to correct some other graphic issues that have cropped up, so I'm capped at 60 now, anyway. This is very disappointing, to say the least. I have the hardware to run this game at max, and then some. I do hope they resolve this in the next few weeks. Edit: Bioware created what is a quickly growing thread on the tester forums because of this issue (currently at 26 pages). Servers are currently down and a new patch was rolled out; hopefully this fixes it.

Seems I've been invited, along with small group of testers (some of who are in regular beta), to test a new build of SWTOR starting tomorrow. No end date was given.

Though I can't really disagree with Shane, from my point of view his approach and how he handled it (and himself) was complete out of line--up until Sophia walked out of that barn. Totally changed how that entire episode looked.

No, you offered up some examples of concepts it contains that are like all MMO's (except for Guild Wars, apparently), and then you made some rather lazy and uninformed comments about its combat system and how it looks. Nevermind this flies in the face of all the other feedback given in this thread (or that can be found online, for that matter). You want to talk about GW2 and how awesome it looks, more power to you; create a thread and have at it. What would I consider legitimate and valid criticisms of SWTOR? The character creator needs to be more robust, the UI needs more customization options, lack of addon support (I'm 50/50 on this one, actually), lack of macro support, lack of "Target of Target" window. I can't speak to CoH, but WoW definitely does not have a system like this.

I completely understand what you mean, but if you see how Blizzard is backpeddling on flying mounts now, you can understand why. Being able to fly over the landscape and drop into mission areas trivializes the design of the world. Land-kill mobs--take off; rinse, repeat. It's not something I really missed, and it makes the game world seem more alive because it is populated.

Lots and lots. Speaking of, I STRONGLY recommend you read about the Smuggler's Den on Tatooine and the 24-hour a day active warzone on Illum. A PvPer's dream.

Well, it is an MMO. If you want to play it solo, certainly you can. You will be missing out on chunks of content. I know MMO's aren't for everyone, and I noticed much of what you played leaned toward the "sandbox" style of play (I put a chunk of time into EVE, so I can definitely dig that) which is very solo-friendly. I won't try to sell you on a game that might not be a fit for you. What I can tell you is that there are 8 distinct storylines in this game for 8 classes, and each one is probably longer than the total story in KotOR.