The Hero Engine - the answer for everything

Someone on the forums asked the question why we needed the fleet as a hub and the posts that followed mostly agreed that the fleets were stupid.  This was my response:

I have a feeling using the capital cities as hubs was their original thought then they realized they needed a place to gather that took up fewer memory resources. The reason I feel that way is why else wouldn't they have a speeder go from the Dromund Kaas Spaceport all the way to the Citadel. There's a natural chokepoint between the two and I think the designers originally envisioned this as a gathering place. Also think about the quests after each chapter where they send you to the fleet and then your next quest immediately sends you back to Dromund Kaas.

If you've never experienced it the quest after each chapter is a 30 minute time waster that consists of catching a speeder, running through town, catching another speeder, running through the spaceport to your ship, exiting the planet, loading the fleet, running to the quest objective, getting a quest taking you back to Dromund Kaas, running back to your ship, reloading space, reloading Dromund Kaas, running through the spaceport, getting on a speeder, running through town, getting on another speeder, running to the Citadel, and finally talking to the guy who gave you the quest in the first place.

Wouldn't that design decision make a lot more sense if the Empire's hub was on Dromund Kaas? Despite what many think the games designers aren't stupid. They wouldn't do that if there wasn't a really good reason and that's because Dromund Kaas was initially the Empire's hub. By the time they realized they needed to add a fleet it was too late to change the quest design (I'm pretty sure talking to the guy on the fleet activates your account's legacy when you finish the first chapter with your first character).

I get the feeling that late in the design phase they realized that Dromund Kaas took up too many system resources and if you had more than 15 people in the city player's systems slowed to a crawl. So they added patchwork answer of using a lower resource intensive fleet instead of capital cities as a gathering point. As someone else mentioned, everything in the game is meticulously crafted but the two fleet hubs are almost identical and it is almost like they were quickly put together.

Almost every issue in the game goes back to the fact that they 1) made the worlds too big with too much information and 2) the games engine gets bogged down. Every design decision is based on that.

• Why don't they have mods? Anyone that has played wow knows that too many mods slow down the game.
• Why don't they have an ingame dps/threat meter? It will slow down the game.

• Why are planets dead? They can't add random NPCs to add flavor as it would slow down the game.
• Why is Ilum world PVP gone? PVP battles on that planet turned the best PCs frame rates to single digits.
• Why is there a fleet? It was a design decision to allow a place for hundreds of people the meet.

They have never said it but I'd bet they have a big team working on making huge changes to the engine so that at some point (probably the first expansion), they won't be hamstrung by the engine and the designers can fully develop the game as they first envisioned. It is pretty much the reason for everything.