BioWare: "most" people aren't having SWTOR performance issues

"Most" Star Wars: The Old Republic players "aren't really having performance concerns", game director James Ohlen assured Eurogamer this afternoon.

He estimated that around five per cent of the MMO's million-plus player base had problems. Those problems being plummeting SWTOR frame rates, as reported earlier this week.

Ohlen said these problems were often related to gamers with low-end PCs.

His response came when asked whether there was a deeper SWTOR performance problem than BioWare was letting on. So far, BioWare has been content to issue a stock workaround each time low frame-rates are questioned on the SWTOR forum.

"The thing is, for the most part, 95 per cent - oh I can't give you the exact percentage - most of our players aren't really having performance concerns," James Ohlen told Eurogamer.

"However, we know that it's important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower end machines that are having problems in some areas. And one of the most important things for us to grow our service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines.

"So we have a client team, a team of programmers, whose entire job is to optimise the code, find out where some of the issues are, and then fix that up.

"Most of the performance issues are localised though," he added. "They're things that we can track down. I would call them bugs."

BioWare has been speedily rolling out bug fixes for SWTOR since launch. These hot fixes will often be separate to content patches, which will take weeks to assemble.