Wild Space: Improve Your FPS, Matrix Shards, And Content Locusts

It’s a big galaxy out there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

Over on Red Rancor, they have been posting a ‘Video Tip of the Day’ series for some time now, but the tip they posted on the 26th really caught my eye. It’s titled, “Improve Game FPS and Performance,” and offers three suggestions to do just that. The three tips are as follows:

1. Update your graphics drivers
2. (If using Windows Visa or 7) Run TOR in compatibility mode
3. Disable GPU scaling (Nvidia graphics cards only)

I highly encourage you all to check out the video to get the full instructions on how to complete each of these steps.  Curious to see if these settings would make a difference, I tried them on both my desktop and laptop computer. My desktop has some pretty decent hardware so it didn’t really see any improvement. However, my laptop definitely saw a 10fps increase as a result of turning on compatibility mode (it has an ATI video card so I couldn’t try the GPU scaling). I call that a success!

Crewskills.net has a really interesting write up of the datacron system as it relates to matrix shards. Basically as you explore the world and acquire datacrons, instead of a stat bonus, those datacrons will contain a matrix shard. These matrix shards come in red, green, blue, and yellow varieties. The question is, what do you do with matrix shards.

As CrewSkills explains, you combine them in a special location to create a relic that your character can equip. For those who are interested in how this process works, as well as all of the possible combinations of matrix shards and their results, be sure to check out the video and write up that Crew Skills created to showcase this system.

Last up this week, TORWars has a nice write up of an opinion article that originally appeared on MMORPG.com. In the article, the author argues that design of end game content actually ruins the leveling experience and only serves to pander to a select group of games: content locusts. I like how the author defines this type of gamer:

I like to blame the content locusts for this, at least to a large extent – that small percentage of players whose goal isn’t to experience content but to consume it as fast as possible as they race inexorably through a game. The people who, driven to hit max level as rapidly as they can, then sit there and whine loudly about how they have nothing to do and how they’re still hungry. There’s no satisfying that kind of player.

It’s true. There is no satisfying that kind of player. Multiple operations, flashpoints, PvP warzones, two open-world PvP areas, and crafting are not enough for this small minority of players. Other MMOs can be seen as the cause of this, most notably World of Warcraft, that really pride themselves on end game content.

BioWare also prides themselves on the end game content that they have created, but the best thing they created for TOR, the thing that differentiates TOR from every other MMO out there is the leveling content. The story is so good, so imersive, that most players like to stop and smell the roses every once in a while. That’s what I would really like to try and convince you all to do: take your time and enjoy the story. It’s too good not to. The end game will still be there in a few months, I promise.

Be sure to check out this article on TORWars or MMORPG.com.