If you’ve been thinking about buying a copy of Star Wars: The Old Republic and joining the online multiplayer Jedi awesomeness, it might be a good idea to hold off for a little bit. At least until Bioware works out the current problems. Michael writes that on his wife’s computer-a $4,000 Alienware gaming rig, no puny nettop-the game keeps crashing. Checking online, she found that this is happening to a lot of other people. It’s even happening when the game isn’t running. People having this problem have different video cards and different computers, but what they do have in common is SW:TOR.

My wife is one of a few million gamers who’s been playing the new Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO since it launched last month.

After Bioware bungled the launch (not giving some players who preordered the game time to actually receive and install it before cutting off their grace period), we thought it would be smooth sailing from now on. But, not so much.

Lately, my wife’s computer has been crashing while playing SW:TOR. After checking the settings on her $4000 AlienWare gaming rig, we could find nothing wrong. Then it started crashing when the game wasn’t even running – some Googling turned up a lot of these problems with various video cards, even with the latest drivers installed. This is only happening to people who have SW:TOR installed.

After going back and forth with Bioware to alert them to this issue, they posted some “helpful” tips on the game forums today. The bottom line is that the developer is blaming the millions of end-users who bought the game, essentially trying to justify everyone’s performance issues by saying “It’s you, not us.”

The response has been swift and furious: 51 pages and counting [now it’s at 69 pages. -Ed.] of customer rage. Many, if not most, of these folks (like my wife) have gaming computers that vastly exceed the minimum requirements to play the game. Yet the game has managed to not only not work as promised, but is somehow damaging the end-users’ computer performance in general!

I’m hoping that bringing this problem to a wider audience will finally get this problem solved.

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