I swear, I'm warning anyone who sees this, you should definitely consider reading the SWTOR Technical Support forums before considering your subscription. I purchased the game at the end of December and enjoyed it quite a bit. I played for about a month before my little nightmare began.
Shortly before my subscription was official, and money taken from my account, I had been running the game pretty well on my computer. The same computer that runs Bioshock 2, Bad Company 2, and many others was running SWTOR perfectly without issues.
The game was patched before my account had been charged. One night, out of nowhere, the game performance and frame rate dropped down to 4-5 fps. This was post-patch, almost 24 hours after, when I started seeing this. I waited about an hour to try again, and nothing had changed. For the next few days I checked back every day, waiting to see if there were any updates.
I eventually started posting in the Technical Support forums, trying to get answers and ask others if they had discovered workarounds. Multiple threads started popping up about poor frames per second, or random intervals of lag. These numbers grew, and while the posting increased, there was no comment from any developer or support folks. Bioware support only mentioned that 5% of users encountered such problems and it was a user issue.
I had been running the game perfectly fine on my PC for weeks so I was a little irritated to hear that comment. Many of the users were and the numbers have grown since. I checked back every day for almost two weeks now and no developer has acknowledged either in the forums or on their blog that these issues even exist, meanwhile individuals are becoming more vocal.
My support tickets are the cream of the crop when it comes to outsourced and useless support. While noting I had ran the game perfectly for weeks before the issue came up, I submitted my diagnostic documentation per their request. My ticket sat for almost four days before I received a response.
The advice from the technical guru:
"Update your ATI Driver." -TICKET CLOSED-
I was sort of amazed. Not only had my drivers been updated, but the game would run one moment and not the next? Let alone the time it took for a reply. The game I had bought was on a 6 month subscription that I purchased based on my experience with new MMO's. They typically have issues that are given workarounds or developers will inform the community of fixes.
Buyer beware on this game. While you may have it working one minute, if it stops working for whatever reason, you'll not get the support. This blog is my way of informing you of the $140.00 nightmare. As of this evening, the game still does not run properly at a speedy 10 fps max, and I still have not seen anything solid from either a developer or tech support. I highly recommend all Giantbomb users read that Technical Support forum before buying the game for your PC. While it might work fine now, you certainly don't want to pay for it down the road the way I have.
I'm currently fighting to get my refund on the subscription.
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