Day 1: Bugs #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the first of ten screenshot posts I'm making this month, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is... bugs!

One thing I noticed while compiling these was that the vast majority of them fell into one of two categories: issues with terrain or character display oddities. I don't know if it's a sign of a mature MMO that its bugs tend to be less random or whether it's just that those two types of bugs are most likely to be visually striking enough for me to bother screenshotting them.

From the first category, we have the classic "stuck in falling pose". This one was kind of impressive to me because there wasn't even any obviously problematic terrain around, my character's foot just touched a nearby holo sign or something?

Fortunately SWTOR's /stuck command is good at helping you extract yourself from most situations of this kind, though it does have a cooldown and I've definitely been in positions where it took me several minutes to escape my predicament. I suppose this is the kind of thing no MMO can ever be 100% foolproof against, but it does seem to me that I get stuck in SWTOR's terrain a lot more often than in other games.

Here a guildie appeared to have sunk into the floor visually, though I don't remember whether he was actually stuck too or our game clients were just confused about his position.

Something that has only happened to me very rarely but always amused me to no end is falling through the terrain. Here a leap by my Guardian during a Novare Coast match had somehow resulted in her crashing straight through the ground and disappearing into the aether... hang on, I even have an animated gif of this one somewhere for the full effect:

The final item from the terrain category is visually broken ground:

Here we found a very noticeable gap in the floor of the Huntmaster's room in Nature of Progress. I only saw it on that one day though, I submitted a bug report form for it and the next time I checked it was already gone again.

For the character display oddities category, we have this shot of us fighting the last boss in the Divided We Fall uprising. The issue may not be immediately obvious, but if you look at the enemy targeting window, you can see that Commander Kallin was the invisible man and had no face! And it wasn't just in that window either, we did look at him up close over the course of the fight and he was invisible "in person" too, so to speak.

This one on the other hand may have been an issue with just the targeting window, but I still thought it was funny. Was this Sage too short to reach all the way up to the camera? I'm not sure where exactly this was, but I'm thinking it was probably the Boarding Party flashpoint.

Finally, one bug that was slightly unusual but for which I like the story associated with it: Basically, at the end of the Kaon Under Siege flashpoint you need to have a group conversation with an NPC called Melarra, and as per the way group conversations work, everyone needs to stand within a green circle around the NPC. The problem was that people didn't always see Melarra in the same place - she was supposed to be on a raised platform as visible in the screenshot, but for some players she would appear on ground level, making it impossible to initiate the conversation properly. It wasn't a huge deal as there was a simple workaround that worked almost all the time, which was to have the player who saw her in the wrong place leave the instance and come back in, but considering that you spawn back in quite far away from the conversation location, it always wasted a lot of time.

Well, my guildies once set themselves the target to figure out just what was causing this bug and were soon able to reproduce it reliably: Melarra starts running up to her spot once you reach a certain checkpoint yourself, and if anyone was still on the ground floor at that time, that's when Melarra would spawn on the ground floor for that person too. Basically, it was a lesson in not running ahead and leaving people behind! This bug was fixed in patch 6.3.

IntPiPoMo count: 7