Going Commando

Reasons to play a trooper

2012-03-04T23:38:00.003Z

After hitting 50 it actually took me several weeks to complete my class story, even though there wasn't that much left of it. It's interesting that despite of the great advances that Bioware has made with the questing in The Old Republic, I'm still having the same issue that I always had in WoW: I struggle to continue questing after the level cap. It's not even that I don't enjoy it anymore, it's just that it doesn't feel like the natural thing to do after logging in, you know? I actually have to tell myself specifically that, okay, today I'll take care of those quests that I still have left in my log, or else I'll just end up going off to do some random PvP, dailies or a flashpoint with friends. Am I the only one with this problem?

Anyway, after finally finishing my class quest I wanted to spend some time reflecting on trooper life in general. While it's hard to make fair comparisons to the other classes' stories, seeing how I haven't completed any of them yet, I do think that I have enough of a vague idea to have noticed some differences. No major spoilers.

One thing that I really like about trooper life is that the relationship with your companions feel a lot more natural than it does while playing most other classes. I don't think I'm spoiling much by saying that they all end up being members of your squad, so it makes sense that you fly around on the same ship and go on missions together. I haven't really got similar vibes from any of the other class stories so far, where a new companion joining you mostly seems to come down to: "I like you or at least want to follow you around all day for some other personal reason." That's a fairly typical storytelling trope really, but compared to the simple logic of the trooper squad it strikes me as inferior.

From a practical point of view I've also come to realise that troopers are really lucky to already have three companions by the end of Nar Shadaa who cover all three roles of the holy trinity. You might not necessarily like their personalities, but at least you won't be stuck with a companion that's completely unsuitable for your playstyle for long (unlike a lot of other classes apparently).

Also, I think the trooper is the only class whose entire set of companions uses the same main stat as the trooper him- or herself. This is great because you can basically create a chain of hand-me-downs from your favourite to your least favourite character, which makes gearing easy and even your worst companion should never be completely useless. You can even make them wear spare pieces of tier gear that you don't need! (Personally I have a lot of gearing up to left to do, but for some reason the RNG keeps blessing me with pairs upon pairs of unneeded gloves.) The only downside is that you might start to feel slightly jealous of guildies who ask "Can I need on that for my companion?" on pretty much every drop because you never really have that excuse.

As far as the trooper class story goes, from the starter areas I've seen so far I thought that the trooper had one of the best tie-ins to the main plot of the class story's Act I. With other classes I often felt that the starter planet was a self-contained mini story that had little to no relevance to the main plot that was dropped on my head immediately afterwards, but for the trooper the entirety of your starter experience is pretty much a powerful set-up for what comes later.

Otherwise I think the main point that stood out to me over the course of the trooper story is that it's a story about being a hero of the people. When you start out as a Jedi of either flavour, you're basically being told that you're special from the moment you arrive on Tython. You may not have done anything remarkable yet, but people can tell that you're extraordinarily strong in the Force and that by itself is amazing. As a newly created trooper on the other hand you're being told that you're being given a chance to join Havoc Squad due to past achievements, but otherwise you're pretty much a normal person who just happens to be both smart and strong and is slowly working their way up.

This gives the trooper story a very "down to earth" feeling in my opinion, something that I personally liked, but I could also see why someone might find it unappealing. You get to kick butt, but probably not quite as much as a Force user. You're also a soldier, which means that you'll always have superiors bossing you around to an extent. Unlike a smuggler for example, you're not just your own (wo)man - you have a duty. In that regard, I don't think that the trooper has a true equivalent on Imperial side either - Imperial Agent is probably the closest, but they still get to live a considerably more independent life due to the nature of their assignments.

How hardmode Esseles kicked my butt - and I kicked back

2012-03-01T12:40:00.001Z

There's been some interesting discussion about the difficulty of hardmode flashpoints in SWTOR as of late. I'd like to add my own impressions to the mix, though I'll also state up front that I'm not laying claim to any objectivity.

As isn't unusual in many guilds, we've had players progress at a very mixed pace. Some people had already run dozens of hardmodes before others even hit the level cap. That's how these things go. Being one of the somewhat slower players myself, I was slightly worried about setting foot into a hardmode flashpoint for the first time, because I didn't want to be the weakest link and make a fool out of myself in front of more experienced players if possible.

As a result I was delighted when a tanking guildie whispered me last week to ask whether I wanted to do HM Esseles and we ended up with full party of "hardmode noobs". We didn't really have a clue what to expect, but since we were all in the same boat there was no real performance pressure either. Why the Esseles by the way? "I've heard Esseles is the easiest hardmode and the best one to start with for new players."

I'll give you a moment to recover from laughing. If you're not laughing, it's probably because you're not aware that the Esseles is actually considered one of the hardest flashpoints currently in the game. But at the time we didn't know that either.

So we ventured forth happily, learned that trash was easy but still hit considerably harder than on normal mode, and then wiped to the first boss within a matter of seconds. Oops? In hindsight, the fight isn't even particularly complex or anything, but as it turns out there are still a lot of things that you can mess up if you don't know any better.

- The boss absolutely has to be turned away from the group at all times. I know this is a standard boss fight trope, but there are also enough fights where it doesn't really matter so I can't blame anyone for not doing it automatically. It does matter here however, because otherwise the boss's frontal cone AoE will shave off half your party's health in one hit. Ouch.

-The adds that he spawns at regular intervals also vexed us for several attempts. At first they just ran past the tank and mauled me. Another time I used my AoE knockback to get them off me, but then they were so spread out that our damage dealers couldn't kill them in time. Another time the tank chased after them and the boss ended up turning around... and I refer you to the previous point.

-Finally we had agreed for the tank to keep the boss right where he spawns and do his main AoE move every time an add wave spawned. Now we had our dps unleashing their own AoE too quickly, so the adds turned around and hit our scoundrel all at once - splat.

Eventually we managed to get everything right, with the boss standing in the right place, adds getting picked up and nobody pulling aggro. We hit the enrage timer but still managed to kill him, and much cheering was to be heard on Mumble.

Then we moved on to the next boss, Ironfist... and seemed to stand no chance at all. We must have had another dozen attempts or so on him, but we made very little progress and eventually it became late and people had to stop for the night. The problem was mainly that he needed a lot of interrupting, while at the same time having a bit of a habit of knocking people down and away (and thus out of melee range) - not to mention that our group contained two Commandos, the only advanced class without an interrupt. Woe. The only thing we knew for sure at the end of the night was that we really wanted to kill First Officer Haken for yelling "Get us out of here!" non-stop every time we arrived on the bridge.

Still, there were no signs of annoyance or bitterness as we parted ways for the night. At worst our tank seemed a bit confused by the difficulty, considering what he had heard about the Esseles being easy. None of us really had a problem with it though, and everyone agreed that failure was expected the first time and that we'd eventually come back and kick Ironfist's butt.

The other night a group for the Esseles formed up in guild again, not consisting of the same four people, but it did include both me and the aforementioned scoundrel. We had both received a couple of gear upgrades since the last time though, and were quite looking forward to getting our revenge.

The first boss went down really quickly. Ironfist made everyone a little nervous since nobody had made it past him before apparently, but he too died on the first attempt - though he enraged at the very end and two of us were hugging the floor by the time he died.

The bonus boss was a complete pushover. The third one was a bit harsh on our two melee dps since as far as I could tell there was no way to tell when exactly he was going to activate his red aura of death (one of them died to it too), but he still went down without too much difficulty.

The fourth boss was the only one that wiped us once, as there were too many incidents of people not moving out of the purple lightning in time and the damage became too much. We quickly identified the problem though, namely that the damage started ticking pretty much a second after the purple circles appeared on the floor, so if you were waiting for them to appear before moving, it would inevitably be too late. On the next attempt we kept running in circles non-stop like a bunch of loonies (not a happy situation to be in for a Commando healer, let me tell you that), only pausing briefly every now and then just after he had placed his circles and people hardly took any damage at all unless they were targeted by his sabre throw attack. He enraged, but our tank hit his cooldowns and managed to tank him for another ten seconds or so, which was enough to get him down. Flashpoint completed! This was certainly a very satisfying experience, and I now feel confident in my ability to tackle all the remaining hardmodes that I haven't seen yet.

So for me personally, the difficulty of hardmode flashpoints is pretty much just right, and while I know that that's very subjective, I do wonder how much of the annoyance I've seen in comments on the subject actually comes from misguided expectations. This isn't current day WoW, where heroics are just a low stepping stone for raids. This is basically Burning Crusade endgame version 2.0, and that means that hardmode flashpoints are an alternative to raiding, not a precursor. They do drop the same quality of loot as normal mode raids as well.

Of course not all raid bosses and hardmode flashpoints are made equal, and again that's very much a reflection of WoW's Burning Crusade endgame, where getting a drop off Attumen in Karazhan was a lot easier than getting anyone to kill Kargath Bladefist in heroic Shattered Halls. However, I don't actually see that as a bad thing - it means that players are able to choose their own difficulty, depending on whether they feel up to a challenge today or just want to tackle something relatively easy. It also means that large group content isn't the only thing to do at endgame, as you can make progress both in terms of gear and skill with your smaller group of friends as well. Last night for example we didn't have enough people to run an operation, so we just did some hardmodes instead and still got equally valuable gear upgrades.

I guess the biggest problem with this system is simply that it's not exactly very transparent. Many people coming over from WoW might simply be put off by the initial shock of small group content being this challenging, even if they are perfectly capable of handling it if they work on it. And of course making the most of the variable difficulty relies heavily on people looking for information from third parties to find out which bosses are easier and which ones are harder, and that information might turn out to be wrong as well as my little anecdote at the beginning shows. It's certainly very counter-intuitive for the Esseles, the first and easiest flashpoint that players encounter in the game, to have one of the toughest hardmodes.

My journey to 50 in review, part 3

2012-02-28T18:56:00.000Z

It's been a while, but I did not forget!

Part 1
Part 2

Hoth

Hoth is another really iconic Star Wars planet and invoked similar feelings in me as Tatooine. I loved the wide open spaces, even if it took ages to get from one place to the next. I was just a bit surprised by the amount of wildlife we met in the snow, as it almost seemed like a bit much considering the extremely hostile environment. Still, at least it gave my boyfriend and me excuses to take turns squeeing at the sight of familiar creatures. "It's a tauntaun!" "It's a wampa!" "It's a blue dude!" (That's what I called the Ortolans, they were adorable.)

I also really liked the quest where you get to cooperate with the Imperials for a brief period of time to defeat some pirates, and I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like from the other side. Finally, we picked up our last companion on this planet.

Act 2/3 Transition

The trooper class quest at the end of Act 2 is another exercise in boarding an enemy ship, but you actually get to take your entire squad with you this time, sort of. I was honestly pretty awed when they all charged in guns blazing at the start, though you're then forced to split up for gameplay reasons. It does make you wonder whether there's some potential extra gameplay to be had from being able to control multiple companions on special occasions.

Act 3 opens with two class missions in space in a row, and the second one was quite remarkable in that it confronted me with what was probably the hardest decision I had to make during the entire game. It's probably the most talked about trooper quest on the forums, and for good reason. You get to decide about whether people live or die throughout the game all the time, but this quest truly made it difficult, and even though I thought that I had made the right decision in the end, I still felt genuinely bad about the negative side effects. Kudos to Bioware for successfully tugging at people's heartstrings there.

Belsavis

I thought that this was another visually interesting planet, what with the contrast between snow and jungle. Surely I can't be the only one who thought what a complete waste it was to turn a planet like that into a prison of all things? I mean, potential swimming pools and opportunities to ski right next to each other? What else could it be but the perfect holiday resort!

I liked the quests on here alright, though I was a bit disappointed that they didn't do more with the prison theme. Considering how many powerful enemies I had captured over the course of my levelling until then, it would have been nice to meet one or two of them again, but I guess that would have become too complicated in terms of tracking of storyline threads. Still, a bit of a wasted opportunity.

This was also the first time I felt that either the quests were becoming a bit predictable, or I was simply becoming too good at reading the minds of Bioware's writers - what else was going to happen after that guy made a point of emphasising three times just how upset he would be if anything bad happened to his little lady helper...?

I do kind of wish they hadn't picked this place to make us come back for dailies over and over again though. I'm getting tired of the loading screen with the ugly monster on it by now.

Voss

My first impression of Voss was: it's Azshara! Visually it has a lot in common with the classic zone from World of Warcraft, what with the serene landscape perpetually basked in autumn colours, but the lore behind the area soon turned out to be quite different.

I'm guessing that this planet must be a lot more fun if you're a force user of some kind, as the Voss are heavily steeped in mysticism and a lot of their quests feel just plain weird when you do them as someone who's supposed to be just an average Joe in terms of psychic ability. However, this also highlighted for me why I really love the conversation system even when the dialogue we pick doesn't make a difference to the outcome - I simply felt a lot better for being able to respond with confusion and disdain to everything the Voss asked of me, even if I did end up doing it in the end.

Weirdness aside, I did quite enjoy the quests on this planet. It's also the first place where I noticed that the game does actually have at least some phasing in the open world as well, when a little cliff that had been abandoned earlier became inhabited by friendly NPCs after I completed most of the missions in the area.

Corellia

It didn't take us long to hit max level by the time we arrived on Corellia, and in fact I still haven't finished the planet, so it's hard to fully judge it at this point. However, one thing I do think it's safe to say is that this might've been my favourite city planet so far - not a favourite overall, but at least I can see the sky and there's a bit more variation in the environment. The tram also makes for a very different mode of transportation, and every time I ride it I feel a bit like I'm on a rollercoaster. The only thing that bugged me a little is that it felt to me as if Bioware tried a bit too hard to portray the Corellians as an entire population of Han Solos, which feels a tad strange to be honest.

In summary, while the journey to 50 is very linear in terms of questing, I still felt that the available content overall was varied enough to allow me to choose between different options. I did all the normal mode flashpoints up to Red Reaper at least once while levelling, and skipped two and a half planet stories, not to mention all the bonus series except Tatooine's. There is plenty left for me to explore at max level as I haven't even touched Ilum yet, and my alts will also have plenty of opportunities to try out content that I haven't seen yet.

Sixth Screenshot Meme

2012-02-24T18:34:00.004Z

Most appropriately, I typoed the title of this post as Sith Screenshot Meme at first.

Anyway, the sixth screenshot meme is still going around and spreading across different gaming blogs - I already did it for WoW, but now I got tagged by Liore and Njessi to do it on here as well!

Unlike my WoW folder, the one for SWTOR screenshots is still pretty small simply because I've only been playing the game for two months, so I'll actually stick to just posting the sixth screenshot in there. It's this one:

... and it shows me interacting with some guildies for the first time in a run of Hammer Station.

Usually I'm not one to tag other people to do this kind of thing, but I'll at least try to pass it on to a few this time. How about:

Telwyn from GamingSF (when he (she?) comes back from AFKness)
Maldwiz from Shades of Grey (to coax another post out of him)
DraconianOne from Get the girl, Kill the baddies

Three is half of six, that's got to count for something, right?

My first operation!

2012-02-23T03:44:00.003Z

Today I got to participate in my first operation in The Old Republic. Even though I initially had my reservations about whether I wanted to raid at all, I was completely stoked about getting to join the action tonight. Previously the days and times set aside for organised guild activities always happened to be times that I couldn't make, and the more often I found myself unable to raid the more I wanted to. Funny how "playing hard to get" works even for computer games.

I was really grateful when the guild leader finally picked a date and time that I could make (probably not purely for my benefit, but I still appreciated it) and became quite excited as the evening approached. Me? Excited to raid? You'd think that after four years of doing it every week it would be impossible for me to get this excited about this kind of thing, even if it happened to take place in a different game. Raiding is raiding, right?

Even funnier, I actually began to feel a little nervous as the starting time drew closer, inspecting the remaining blue mods in my custom gear with a critical eye and mentally chiding myself for not having tried harder to upgrade them before. And our Sage healer had already done, what, four raids at least? Sooo much more experience than me, and my AoE heals suck, and oh god, I hope I won't be dragging us down... it was completely ridiculous! Fortunately I needn't have worried.

I thought that the intro to the Eternity Vault was one of the coolest starts to a raid I've ever seen, and I was kind of surprised to find out that it was located on Belsavis, as I hadn't actually looked into the details of the whole thing before. I made sure to make it over to the spot on the snow where others were already assembling, worried that I was late and holding people back, but fortunately about half the raid only arrived shortly afterwards, with our raid leader showing people the way (as I wasn't the only one for whom it was the first time). Incidentally, despite of the newness of the content the whole experience had a certain sense of homecoming to it for me, as said raid leader also used to be the leader of my WoW guild when I first joined nearly five years ago. Listening to him explain fights again was just like old times!

I didn't really get what the "trash" leading up to the first boss was all about, as I assumed that the turrets were being tanked but I still got shot a lot and was then told to move, which sounded like I was being targeted due to proximity? I'll probably look it up at some point, but right now I'm too lazy.

The first boss was a very straightforward fight with a little "run from the marks on the ground" phase and a brief "everyone hide behind the pillar" phase, which we one-shot easily. It really made me wonder how I could have so much fun with something so simple, obvious factors like newness and good company aside, and after brief contemplation I came to the conclusion that it was due to my character's limitations. If I had to heal the same encounter with my priest from WoW, it would be a total snoozefest simply because after three expansions of power creep I would only have to hit three spells that are just right for the fight and the raid would almost heal itself. Compare that to my combat medic who has a grand total of six healing spells, three of them have a cooldown, and only one of them is a (very piddly) AoE, and suddenly even simple mechanics such as keeping people alive while on the move or multiple characters taking damage at once become surprisingly engaging again.

I won a glove token from this boss, and thought that the way the loot system basically rolls for you automatically is pretty interesting. This seems very pug friendly to me as it makes it impossible to argue or ninja, however I can see it becoming annoying once you get to a point where people might not need every drop anymore, if the system keeps assigning them loot over someone who could actually use the item. I assume this will still receive some fine-tuning.

After this boss there was some trash to kill, which wasn't really particularly challenging or interesting in any way. I suppose that's a fair approach to trash (after all, people tend to complain if it's too hard compared to the boss or takes up too much time), but I do think they could have made these packs a little more interesting. Our raid leader actually described some of the mobs as "nothing but massive bags of hitpoints". Fortunately people were chatty and it felt like we were killing things reasonably quickly.

"How do you kick a droid in the nuts anyway?"
"Well, droids have a lot of nuts and bolts."
"..."
"That was terrible!"

I really liked the scenery too. Even with only eight people in the operation, everything felt massive and epic. Sometimes size does matter. It's telling that they give you a speeder ride for the run back after a wipe, and it still takes ages to make it back to the final boss.

I also liked the varied environments. It felt slightly weird to go from frozen technology to a lava-filled cave to a lush bit of jungle to what looked like a laboratory, but the planet's lore does support these kinds of zone shifts so it's all good.

The second boss felt slightly harder than the first one, though not by much. We wiped once, mostly because people seemed to get a bit distracted by the adds and forgot to move off the dissolving platform in time. On our second try we either got extremely lucky with the RNG or the boss bugged a little, because it took him ages to move, which gave our raid a lot more time than usual to go all out at dpsing him.

The next encounter wasn't a boss per se, but a little event that involved fiddling with some pylons while waves of adds attacked. I was tasked with handling one of the pylons at the start and was a bit scared when I first looked at it, but in the end it turned out that all I had to do was focus on a console on the ground and click it over and over again every time it lit up, which eventually led to the "puzzle" solving itself. It did feel a bit weird to just use that console a few times, throw a couple of heals around and then be done already. Our scoundrel, who was managing the other pylon, managed to "break" it so that when the encounter completed the symbols on his side still weren't lined up correctly. We joked that he had just sliced it and cheated, typical smuggler.

The fourth "boss" was again not an actual boss but an encounter, and a rather strange one at that. Everyone just got to pick one of eight mobs and had to kill it on their own, without interfering with anyone else's mobs in any way. Think Leotheras the Blind in SSC back in the day, only without an actual boss encounter, just that mechanic. Unlike Liore's guild, we gave the two mobs with the lowest hitpoints to the healers, and I think I'd struggle to kill anything with more health in time. Not that my mob ever really threatened me, healer dps is just incredibly slow. Since we had three tanks (as that was who had signed up, sometimes you have to work with what you've got), one of them had to take a mob intended for a damage dealer, but as it turned out our Shadow tank did insane dps anyway.

In some ways this encounter was weird and didn't really feel like a boss fight, but in other ways I liked it. People complain about not being able to measure their dps without damage metres... go do this encounter and see how you do. If the mobs reset because you're too slow, you need to work on your performance, if not - peachy. It was pretty interesting to see who killed their mobs first, and that our Shadow tank actually finished before our newest and somewhat undergeared dpser. It kind of makes you competitive. And what better motivation to work on your dps than everyone who already finished standing there and cheering you on (to please, please finish in time)?

We actually had to retry the encounter several times, even though our damage was more than sufficient. Only the first time did we truly fail because there wasn't enough dps, but that was because we had put one of our Guardian tanks on a dps mob, and he ran out of time with the mob having a sliver of health left. At least there's no dying when you "wipe" here, it just resets. After that we put the Shadow on damage duty, but we ran into a problem as someone had got the debuff you get for helping someone else and now couldn't damage his own mob either. Another time our dps Commando disconnected briefly mid-fight and again that was just enough to mess things up. We got there in the end though.

The last boss was the only one we didn't beat, as he felt like a significant step up from the previous four encounters, but that's fine by me. The last boss should feel more epic than the rest, and this way people still get to gear up from the first four encounters while working on him. He's still not too bad really, but there is a lot more going on, people get many chances to fall to their deaths, and timing matters. On our best attempt for example the raid pushed him to the point where he destroys the second platform just as he was whirling me through the air, so I got deposited on empty air afterwards and went splat. Oops.

I was quite impressed with the overall design of this encounter though, as I think it manages to inspire awe by utilising all three dimensions without being an annoying 3D movement fight (in my opinion anyway). I don't recommend looking down a lot though if you have vertigo - I don't and it still made me a bit dizzy at times as we jumped down across the floating platforms.

I'm definitely looking forward to my next visit to the Vault. What are other people's experiences with SWTOR operations so far?

Early Impressions of the Belsavis Dailies

2012-02-21T00:58:00.006Z

I can't actually remember how I truly felt about dailies when they were first introduced in WoW. I think I didn't mind them, but I never did them religiously either. I vaguely remember having fun with the repeatable Ogri'la quests, and that they were a good way of accumulating cash for the epic flying skill at the time. However, with each new expansion the incentives to do dailies increased, and so did the pressure to do them or be left behind in terms of gear and achievements. By the time I had finished Cataclysm's Molten Front, I never wanted to do another daily quest ever again.

Keeping this background in mind, I was less than enthused to hear that SWTOR's endgame would include dailies as well. However, one evening I decided to putter off to Belsavis anyway, just to see what all the hubbub was about. I wasn't even sure whether I'd be able to do anything, as I had heard that you needed to finish your class quest first to unlock the dailies, and I still haven't done that. I found no clues about where I was supposed to go, but after simply exploring the regions of the map that were still unknown to me, I eventually ran into a Republic base where I was offered a quest to kill some Rattataki and one to steal some relics from the local Sith. I figured that they might be a lead-in to the dailies and got to work, if very slowly, as questing as a healer is still slower than as a damage dealer, even with companion assistance.

Once I had handed them in I was surprised to see a greyed out quest symbol appear over the NPC's head, indicating that I'd be able to repeat the experience tomorrow. But... they hadn't been marked as dailies! I continued on to a new quest which had just been unlocked, to collect venom glands from the local wildlife.

As I climbed a little hill, I suddenly saw someone zoom past below me. My guild leader! I greeted him happily and he asked me whether I was there to do dailies too. "I don't know," I said, "they don't say that they are dailies, but it looks like they might be." Next thing I knew I was grouped with him and another guildie, frantically clinging to his Jedi coattails as the two of them dragged me along for a wild daily ride. I barely had time to take everything in, but it was good fun.

The quests appeared to be arranged in a very linear fashion, with each completion unlocking one or two follow-ups. At one point we ran into a hitch as I suddenly couldn't pick up the last couple of quests anymore. Turns out that in the second base, there's an unrelated non-daily quest which you have to do once before the other ones unlock (the one to cure or kill the Gen'Dai). With my luck, I didn't realise this until the others had already completed everything else for the day.

Fortunately for me, I saw someone LFM for the heroic quests that I was still missing mere minutes later. Turns out that this group had another guildie of mine in it, a guy who has the uncanny ability to always show up in pugs when you least expect it. We had a very sub-optimal group setup with two healers, a melee dps and a companion tank, and we died several times in the heroic area but in the end we got the job done, not to mention that we managed to have a good laugh about it all. We also learned that letting one party member go AFK in the middle of where you just killed a group of elite mobs is not a good idea. And that's how I ended my first day of Belsavis dailies.

The next day, I saw someone forming a group for them in guild chat pretty much as soon as I logged on and I immediately joined in again. This time we had three healers and a damage dealer, but one of said healers was a guy who had been among the first in our guild to hit level 50, so he had been going through the motions for quite a while already and knew the drill. Now the speed at which this group went through the dailies made the previous "wild ride" look positively mellow. I was actually surprised when people wanted to pause to do the group conversations instead of simply having one person pick up the quest and then share it, but apparently everyone wanted social points. However, I was immediately chided (in a friendly way) for not hitting my space bar and thus holding everyone else up. But, but... I never use my space bar unless it's to skip the cut scene at the beginning of the Voidstar!

Still, I went ahead with it as I didn't want to annoy anyone, and fortunately my guildies' silly banter on Mumble more than made up for any missed NPC chat (not to mention that I had seen it all the day before). It also made me reflect on the fact that nearly all of the daily quest givers for the Republic are aliens that don't speak Basic. I wonder if that's intentional because it feels less weird to interrupt alien gibberish than someone actually trying to talk? Probably not, but it helps.

Either way, the heroic 4 area was quite fun with this group, because the perfect coordination of our crowd control was beautiful to behold. However, it also seems that no matter how good a group you have, nobody wants to actually kill the mobs in front of The Stasis Generator, and people would rather sacrifice themselves a few times instead to quickly push the buttons without killing anything. I don't quite get it, but who am I to complain about other people liking to attempt crazy stunts?

Anyway, after all this rambling, what is my early verdict of these dailies in SWTOR?

The main thing that struck me was that they didn't really feel like they were designed to be dailies. You can easily write a quest in such a way that it makes sense to repeat it, but for most of these it made no sense at all. I haven't been to Ilum yet, but one of my guildies joked about how a pilot there keeps crashing on the same spot every day apparently. The voiced conversations definitely don't benefit from daily repetition either, encouraging liberal space bar abuse. Again I find this strange, because SWTOR does have some written quests which you can just pick up at a mission terminal - wouldn't it make sense for dailies to work that way too? It almost feels as if these quests were never intended to be dailies, until someone decided late in development that omg, they needed daily quests somewhere, so they just took the last chain on Belsavis, made it repeatable and added some special rewards on the way.

This doesn't really feel like good design to me, and maybe it will turn out to be annoying in the long term, but in the short run I have to say that it actually kind of works for me regardless, because it means that the dailies don't feel like dailies (and thus annoying). Instead they lend themselves to treating them like a flashpoint, with no pressure to actually do them every day just because you can do all the solo stuff on your own. Instead you just assemble a group whenever you feel like it and time allows it (because there are those heroic quests at the end, which are the ones that give the best rewards) and then go nuts. I think I can live with that.

Though to be fair, ask me again in a couple of months. I might have changed my mind by then.

Just another day in the warzone

2012-02-18T02:13:00.001Z

I was a bit wary of stepping into warzones at max level, since I was highly aware of the fact that there would be no more bolstering, gear suddenly mattered, and I would start out at the very bottom of the totem pole. However, I'm very glad that I dared to give it a go eventually, because it's been oodles of fun.

Yes, I did feel very powerless at the start. The combat medic's lack of mobility still annoys me sometimes. In a frantic PvP battle, the ability lag that so many forum posters are complaining about and that I never really noticed in PvE is apparent even to me, though I'm not sure whether "ability lag" is even the right term for it. It just feels like animations and gameplay are a bit out of sync in some cases, so a cast might not actually go off even though it looked like it, or you might find yourself stunned or rooted with no real visible indicator of what's going on (this one happens to me a lot).

And of course, at the worst of times, you might find yourself sitting in the warzone queue for a long time, just to be thrown into a match where your team is several members short (one of the "perks" of playing the less popular faction) and you end up getting farmed near the spawn point while the enemy semi-premade owns you at Huttball. Been there, done that.

However, I do love the overall feel of warzones. I'm generally not a fan of playing melee classes, but I love to watch other people's Jedi whirl through the air and slash the enemy with their lightsabers. I love how each warzone has all these ramps, tunnels, nooks and crannies that reward strategic positioning, and I'm still learning new tricks every day.

I love the goodie bags that I get from the daily quests. I've been told that gearing up for PvP is grindy and annoying, but seeing how I'm not really that focused on it, every quest reward simply feels like a welcome bonus. Getting at least a couple of pieces with expertise on them isn't that expensive either, and every little helps.

But most of all, I love the feeling of community that I see developing in the warzones. TOR PvPers are certainly no angels, and I have seen the occasional moan about how this or that enemy class is overpowered or how people aren't paying enough attention to the objectives. However, for each of these negative comments I've seen about ten useful or simply positive ones. People greet each other and talk strategy. Incomings are called out and reacted to. Enemy healers are identified and marked up by the ops leader for easier targeting. Congratulations and cheers abound when things go well. And this is all in pugs!

In the last couple of days alone I've had some particularly awesome games. There was the Voidstar where our ops leader immediately complained about the system making him leader again, and then led us to an amazing victory against what was a pretty strong enemy team. There was the Huttball game where we were 0-2 down within the first couple of minutes but then ended up turning things around and into a 5-2 victory. Or the Civil War game where I guarded the left turret on my own for the entirety of the game, but every time I needed help and called out, the same trooper came running over to rescue me and then thanked me for doing such a good job defending. I could go on and on.

I have to admit that I was a bit dismayed when I read in last week's Q&A what sounded to me like a hint that Bioware intends to introduce cross-server queuing for warzones in the future, even if they were kind of vague about it. Since PvP isn't the main focus of the game for me, I certainly wouldn't rage-quit over it or anything, but the notion does make me a little sad. I reckon that now is probably the best time to get into SWTOR PvP, balance issues and all - because I don't know how long this enthusiasm and community spirit will last.

One thing that bugs me about heroic quests

2012-02-16T13:57:00.004Z

I've mentioned repeatedly that I love love love The Old Republic's group content. However, I've discovered that I have one small gripe with the heroic quests out in the open world. (Gasp!) Namely, I wish that Bioware hadn't put any of them at the very end of a planet's story progression.

You see, when I just got started on a planet and I run into a group quest... I'll give a quick shout-out about it in general chat, but if nobody responds at the time, it's not that big of a deal. I'll just continue on my merry little way and keep an eye on chat for when someone else inevitably ends up looking for a group for it. It's no real problem to hop on the nearest taxi and backtrack a bit. Basically, I have a pretty big time frame to find a group between when I first get the quest and when I'm done with the planet.

However, the further I've progressed along the planet's main storyline by the time a heroic quest first shows up, the smaller the window of opportunity for group-finding before I leave the planet again. The issue is exacerbated by some people presumably leaving without actually completing all the quests, meaning that the pool of players even looking at the early heroics is bigger than the number of those picking up the later ones.

In practice this means that I haven't had any trouble getting groups on the alts that I'm levelling solo - except for when a heroic 4 quest is thrown at me more or less at the same time as the very last storyline quest on the planet. I end up doing a quick "LFM" in chat, if nobody responds I just do the single-player quest - and then I'm done with the whole planet. Even if someone contacted me via LFG later, there is little appeal in going back just for that one green heroic quest. And I think that's a shame, because I really would have liked to help that lady retrieve her invaluable records from the heroic area!

Of course, one way to sort of circumvent this problem is to respond to any shout-outs for heroic quests in chat, even if you don't actually have the heroic in question yet. Bioware was clever in that regard and made sure that all the heroic stories are stand-alones that can be shared, so it's technically not an issue to jump ahead a bit for a group quest.

However, this system still has multiple downsides:

1) You miss out on the dialogue with the NPC, as quest sharing just gives you a brief written summary of what you're supposed to do. This is not a big deal if you're on an alt who has done the quest before, but if it's your first time the thought of missing out on the context is kind of unappealing. The conversations are after all one of the game's main selling points.

2) While it's technically not a problem to jump ahead for a quest that you haven't picked up yet, geography can kind of get in the way, if the quest is on the other end of the planet and you haven't discovered any of the taxi routes yet.

3) To a new player, agreeing to join for a quest they don't actually have yet is simply completely counter-intuitive. Putting "quest can be shared" into your LFM request helps a little, but not much.

Fortunately I haven't had this problem too often yet... but still often enough for it to be noticeable.

Companion Personality vs. Utility

2012-02-13T23:15:00.000Z

When playing with other people, we're probably all familiar with the issue of personality vs. skill. I'm pretty sure that we've all known someone who was great fun to have around on a personal level, but who sometimes drove you up the wall because they just couldn't grasp the concept of not standing in the fire. On the other end of the spectrum, we've all probably met more than one person who appeared to be really good at what they were doing, but if they ever opened their mouth you immediately regretted grouping with them because they were just that obnoxious. And of course there's all kinds of degrees between those two extremes.

By making companions in SWTOR almost as powerful as real players and infusing them with believable personalities, Bioware has managed to introduce this conflict into the player-NPC relationship as well. Skill isn't really an issue since it's probably safe to assume that all companions operate using the same basic AI, but instead there is the issue of utility, since each companion can only fulfill one role, and you can't tell them to respec. So you might suddenly find yourself struggling to choose between a companion who is fun to have around in conversations but has no synergy with you in combat, or one who gets on your nerves whenever they open their mouth but complements your skills perfectly. It's an interesting conundrum. (And yes, I know you can solve this problem by switching every time you do something different, but that can be a load of hassle as well.)

I haven't really had any major problems with this on my trooper, maybe because I rarely felt that dependent on my companion to begin with, considering that I'm pretty much always playing in a group. However, on my alts things have been trickier.

My Jedi consular for example is a heavily light-side oriented character who tries to follow the Jedi code at all times. Her first companion is Qyzen Fess, a Trandoshan hunter. The game makes it clear from the start that your friendship is slightly unusual, and it shows. While it helps that Qyzen places a high value on honour, he's not a fan of taking prisoners or constantly helping out people who can't take care of their own problems, which obviously creates conflict. I didn't dislike him, but I was still looking forward to hopefully getting another companion with whom I'd get along better.

Then I did get my second companion, and he turned out to be a healer. A healer with a healer companion? I did it for one quest, and it was just awkward. Come back, Qyzen!

The other night my consular quested her way through Tatooine, and some run-ins with a couple of nasty Gamorreans really made me rethink my relationship with my pocket tank. In particular there was one quest where I accidentally let Qyzen die (oops) but figured that I should still be able to finish off the already heavily injured Gamorrean - nope, the bastard ended up kicking me every time I tried to heal myself and I died! The shame.

After that I took another long, hard look at Qyzen and realised: He's letting some Gamorreans kick him in the nuts while I stand in the back and throw rocks at them, and yet he never complains. He taunts things off me without needing any prompting, and his "sayings" during combat are all in a language I don't understand, so they never get old - they just provide a sort of comforting background grumble. I think... the old lizard-man might be growing on me after all! His performance in combat softened my attitude towards him and made me forget our personal disagreements.

In contrast to this, we have my Imperial Agent and her companion Kaliyo. I knew that she was going to be bad news from the moment she joined me. Yes, she does make me laugh sometimes and she tanks like a boss, but one of my agent's defining characteristics is that she's a patriot, and one of Kaliyo's defining characteristics is that she hates patriots. Whenever she frowns at me for saying "for the Empire", I want to kick her in the shins. Oh, and did I mention that Imperial Agents don't get a second companion until the end of Alderaan? /twitch.

When I finally did get my second companion, I was at first relieved... until I realised that he was a melee dpser like me, and I kept dying on every other pull. Not the best synergy. However, I haven't given up yet, as I'm sure that there's a way to make it work. I'm even considering respeccing to healer just for that purpose. Am I crazy? At first I thought so, but then I heard in a recent episode of Mos Eisley Radio how one of the hosts had respecced his Jedi Knight to tank purely to give his questing with Kira better synergy.

What's your attitude towards companion personality vs. utility? Are you putting up with an annoying companion just because they get the job done? Do you prefer to take out the ones you like even if it's less than optimal? Or do you actually swap companions every time you have a conversation or are about to get into a fight, trying to min-max the benefit you get out of your companion's company at every corner?

How to use SWTOR's LFG system and /who

2012-02-10T21:11:00.005Z

You know, I told myself that from now on, I was going to stay out of this whole debate about whether SWTOR needs a dungeon finder or something similar. But it really annoys me when I keep seeing people make arguments that are flat out not true. Specifically, two claims that I've heard brought up both on forums and in podcasts recently (by people who you'd think should really know better) are that

1) SWTOR doesn't have any kind of LFG functionality at all, and
2) that this functionality (which apparently doesn't exist in the first place) only works in whatever zone you're currently in.

I'm all for making improvements to the LFG system, but let's get our facts about how it works right now straight at least, right? So, without further ado: a brief guide on how to use the current system.

First off, open your social window (O) and click on the "who" tab. On the bottom of this tab, on the left side, you'll see a ticky box to indicate that you are looking for a group. Selecting this won't put you into any kind of queue or auto-grouping system, but it does add an indicator to your name that makes it easier for other people to see that you are looking for a group.

On the bottom right of the same tab, you'll see an option to update your LFG comment, which opens a new window if you click on it. If you've flagged yourself as looking for a group, it will be set to simply say "LFG" by default. It's more helpful however if you add which content you're looking to group up for and what role(s) you can play.

Now, at the top of the tab you'll see a text field called "search terms", which will by default show your current location. Underneath you'll see a list of people who fit this search term, that is to say who are currently in the same zone as you (up to a certain maximum). People who have flagged themselves as LFG will be on top of the list and have a little purple icon next to their name. The column called "LFG comment" might cut off a good chunk of a person's actual comment, but you can see the whole thing by hovering over the purple icon next to their name.

If you want to see everyone on the server who is online on your faction and has flagged themselves as looking for group, simply replace the current search term with "LFG". No, it's not limited to the zone you are in at all.

Now, since few people actually use this system (probably in part because everyone keeps saying that it doesn't exist), you might not find what you're looking for among the people on this list. Fear not, however: many people are actually quite open to grouping up even if they haven't explicitly said so. You have nothing to lose by asking.

Fortunately you can use the search field to find all kinds of people. For example, let's assume that you're at the fleet and want to form a group to do Hammer Station. This flashpoint is designed for players of level 16 and up. Where would people of that level usually quest? Just use "Taris" as your search term, and you'll see a list of a whole bunch of potential group mates. If you don't know which zone matches the level range you're looking for, you can simply enter the level range itself, e.g. "16-19". If you're just looking to fill a specific role, you can also filter by (advanced) class, for example "Jedi Sage 16-19" to see people who might be able to heal. Send out some whispers and with any luck you'll soon be ready to go!

None of this is new stuff really; I know that WoW's /who command at least has worked this way since vanilla, but maybe people never familiarised themselves with that either.

My journey to 50 in review, part 2

2012-02-08T19:11:00.004Z

Part 1

Tatooine

Tatooine was the first planet that really blew me away. It helps that it's one of the iconic Star Wars worlds and that they managed to really make it look like in the films, but I also appreciated the greater freedom it provided. For the first time the terrain didn't make me feel like I was just being funnelled from one place to the next, and I was truly free to go wherever I wanted. It felt kind of liberating to just cruise across the dunes at random, though I definitely wouldn't want to be stuck on Tatooine without a speeder.

This was also the place where my guild killed its first heroic world boss, Trapjaw. It was nice to have a reason for people of varying level ranges to come together, and I ended up winning an epic chest piece. Though I have since replaced it, I've kept it in my bank as a reminder of that very first "raid" with the guild.

From a healer's point of view, I also found the Trapjaw fight interesting because it made me curious what SWTOR's endgame raiding might have in store for me. The boss is pretty much a tank and spank fight with a bit of AoE damage every so often, but as it turns out even something as simple as, oh, not having any strong AoE heals, can be enough to make even that an exciting challenge.

After we had completed the main storyline, we headed back to the spaceport and ran into the quest giver that starts the Tatooine bonus series. We were enjoying the planet, so we thought: sure, why not! However, it ended up being the only bonus series we did. I'm glad that they exist, to give people more options in regards to how they want to level, but we were already outlevelling things as it was, and completing an entire bonus series only made things worse. Not to mention that helping farmers kill ten dozen sand people felt like a bit of a let-down after the epicness of the planet's main storyline.

Alderaan

Due to the experience boost from the Tatooine bonus series, we had once again pretty much outlevelled Alderaan before we even got there. The quests and mobs hadn't turned grey just yet, they were still green, but we still decided to limit ourselves to our class quest only and then jump straight ahead to the next planet.

This was a bit of a shame, because visually Alderaan was another stunning planet. I loved the green meadows and the backdrop of blue skies and snowy mountains. In some areas you could almost forget that there was a civil war going on, and the lush scenery seemed like the kind of place where you'd want to go on an afternoon hike or a camping trip. I'm looking forward to exploring the story behind it all on an alt.

As far as the trooper story went, I rather enjoyed the chapter on Alderaan and how it focused more heavily on politics than blowing shit up, and the "rescue mission" quest was fairly amusing. I just wish that I could have adopted the House Organa prison guard as a companion, as he seemed like a very nice chap. (Why yes, "being a nice chap" is a perfectly fine criterion for deciding whether someone should join the Republic military or not.)

End of Act I

After this I got to storm an enemy spaceship as the end of my class story's Act I. It felt like a worthy ending to the story to me, though my experience was somewhat spoiled by the extreme bugginess of the whole thing at the time.

The transition between acts strikes me as interesting because you basically get told something along the lines of "well done, enjoy a bit of a break on the space station", and then immediately get sent back to your superior to start Act II. I've seen people complain about this pointless back and forth, but personally I'm willing to forgive it because it strikes me as an indicator that Bioware is really committed to treating the class stories as an ongoing thing and has been developing them that way from the start. If future acts are released one by one, it makes sense to be told to take a break while you wait for the next chapter to be released; it's just that the first three acts were all bundled up and included with the base game at once.

Balmorra

Act II started off with the promise of two more companions, the first of which we'd pick up on Balmorra. Somehow, even though we had just skipped Alderaan, we were already on the higher end of the level range for Balmorra as well. Must've been all those flashpoints. Again, we decided to just do our class quest... but then ended up accidentally sabotaging our own intentions.

As we left the space dock above Balmorra, my boyfriend pointed out that we might as well pick up the quest there, because it was "just a breadcrumb quest" to go to the surface. Big. Mistake. There are no such things as breadcrumb quests in the Old Republic. Or rather, maybe there are, but with the way accepting and completing quests works, you can't just complete one and then not accept the follow-up, one automatically flows into the other. So, as we talked to the guy on the surface, he immediately sent us off on another quest, after we completed that there was immediately another one, and so on and so forth. It wasn't possible to abandon the chain either, so our only choices were to complete it to the bitter end or to let it "clog up" our log pointlessly. In the end, we ended up doing both our class quest and the planet's main storyline, only skipping the side quests.

The Balmorrean trooper story ended up being pretty annoying to be honest, as least from our point of view. You basically get sent on a wild goose chase to find this guy, and every time you get to where you were sent, he's already gone but the local guys won't let you continue on your way until you've helped them out first. It was a small comfort that Bioware seemed to be aware of how annoying this would be and at one point has your active companion initiate a conversation just to complain about it.

Of course it didn't help that neither me nor my SO were particularly keen on getting this particular new companion. A trooper's first three squad members are all pretty similar in general attitude, very pro-Republic and all about following the rules. This suited us just fine because of the types of characters we played, though I feel bad for anyone wanting to play a sassy and ruthless trooper - they're pretty much bound to receive nothing but companion disapproval until at least level 35 or so! Anyway, the companion you pick up on Balmorra is the first and only real "rebel" in your squad, and we didn't really care for that.

In summary, Balmorra was a kind of frustrating experience due to circumstances more than anything else: getting ourselves "locked" into doing the planet's main storyline even though we hadn't meant to, and having to deal with a companion that we personally thought was kind of annoying. I'm looking forward to giving the planet another try on an alt, hopefully without the associated emotional baggage.

Quesh

I don't have much to say about Quesh, other than that I'd love to hear Bioware's reasoning for why they made this planet the way it is. There's nothing wrong with it, it's a nice little planet, but why is it so small? I don't understand why they made every planet cover about five levels or so, and then they made this one world that has a comparatively small amount of content and only covers two. It's just random.

And that's it for part 2. Part 3 will cover everything else up to me reaching the level cap.

Part 3

To raid or not to raid

2012-02-07T01:03:00.006Z

(Yes, I know they are called "operations" in SWTOR, but I refuse to talk about "operating" as a verb, and "running operations" feels unnecessarily clunky. "Raiding" it is.)

My guild had its first official raid the other night, our occasional killing of heroic world bosses while levelling up not included. I wasn't attending because I had... prior social commitments, but the fact that raids are already happening in the guild really made me thoughtful. The thing is, I'm not entirely sure I actually do want to raid in this game, at least at this point in time.

I didn't start raiding in WoW until I had already been playing the game for nine months or so. When I first started to play I had no idea about the game mechanics of an MMO, not to talk about any kind of understanding of concepts like endgame, so raiding simply wasn't a concern for me. There were plenty of other things to do.

However, when I did finally get into raiding, it did feel pretty natural at the time. I was playing with friends, and there were more people in the guild that I didn't know that well and that I wanted to get to know better. What better way to be social with a large number of people than to actually participate in activities that are designed for a large number of people?

I raided for four years, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. But when it ended, it wasn't pretty.

Not again!

One of the main reasons I'm weary of getting into raiding in SWTOR is simply that I feel burnt by WoW's raid game. Blizzard made something that I enjoyed, and then they changed it and changed it and changed it some more, until it had become something that I didn't enjoy anymore. Now Bioware has made a great game, and I actually feel grateful because they managed to bring back so many things that I enjoyed in the past and that WoW did away with... but only time will tell whether they are willing to stick to their guns or whether they will also fall into the trap of constantly changing things for the sake of change.

I'm actually pretty optimistic that their solo and small group content content will remain good, but in terms of raiding I'm a little sceptical, largely because they already copied some of the more recent features of WoW's raid model that I didn't particularly like, such as each raid coming in two sizes, or the normal / hard mode split. This makes me very worried that they'll try to copy current-day WoW too much in this instance, which would eventually end up making the content unappealing to me.

Let me in!

However, when my inner pessimist is done talking, I look at what's out there and right now, the idea of raiding in SWTOR seems just plain fun. Hutts with top hats piloting giant droids? Yes, please!

I'm once again in a guild full of nice people, many of whom I'd really like to get to know better, but with a group size of four, the options to do so in small group content are limited. Operations once again seem like the natural step up.

Oh, and did I mention yet that my SO did get to join in last night's operation? I tried to avoid looking over his shoulder all the time, but I did get to hear him talk on Mumble and I was just so insanely jealous. Not to mention that he got to hoover up all the trooper loot. Some of that was supposed to be mine, damn it! It's been months since we last raided together in WoW, and it would be so nice to be part of something bigger together again.

Too soon, Executus?

As if I wasn't feeling conflicted enough on the subject yet, there's a third voice in my head which basically thinks that raiding is cool and that I should get into it eventually, but that it's simply too early for it right now.

I mean, it looks fun and all, but there are so many other aspects of the game that I haven't explored yet! I only hit the level cap a few days ago, for goodness' sake! Do I really want to devote my limited play time to concerns about gear, consumables and ability rotations already? Again, those things are fun in their own way, but the problem is that once you start thinking of the game in those technical terms, it becomes hard to go back and simply enjoy looking at the scenery and listening to the quests again. I don't think I'm ready to make that step up yet; I'm enjoying levelling and immersing myself in the world way too much.

There are also practical concerns to consider. I'm one of those increasingly rare gamers who have no problem with devoting several nights a week to gaming on a schedule, but there's still a limit to how much I can take, and right now I'm still committing two nights a week to WoW. It's dead to me in pretty much every other regard except interaction with my guildies, but those rated battlegrounds are still damned fun and I enjoy the company. More importantly, this fun pretty much has an expiration date built in since I don't intend to purchase the Mists of Pandaria expansion once it comes out, so I don't really want to "waste" what time I have left to play the game I enjoy. (God, that sounds so melodramatic!)

In the end, it's a tricky question, with social ties tugging me both ways simultaneously. Either way I suspect that I will take part in my first SWTOR raid fairly soon, but I'll try to take it easy for now if possible, and I'm not entirely sure where I'll end up eventually.

I'm usually not a big fan of posts like this...

2012-02-04T00:07:00.009Z

... especially if the author doesn't post anything but the screenshot and it's their sixth alt anyway. But hey, you only hit the level cap in a new MMO for the first time once, so let's go for it! Ding!

As you can see, I was in the middle of Mortar Volley-ing a group of mobs on Corellia, and Elara was just butting in about some diplomatic mission. Later, please! For the curious, it took me a bit less than seven days of /played time, but to be fair that included quite a bit of "downtime" of me just idling at the fleet, levelling my crew skills and chatting with guildies. You can probably do it faster.

The minutes just before the ding were vaguely amusing, because while I wasn't in any particular rush to reach endgame, I still started to feel a certain suspense about my experience bar creeping closer and closer to the end. My boyfriend and I hadn't managed to stay perfectly in sync, but we were pretty close - only about 10k XP apart, which is more or less one quest hand-in at that level. We kept talking about hopefully dinging at the same time once we completed a certain amount of quests.

Eventually the Republic symbol flashed up over my fellow trooper's head just as we completed a bonus quest, but nothing happened for me. My bar looked as good as full, but upon closer inspection it turned out that I was just 1k experience points off. Killed another group of mobs - nope, still a hundred XP off! Talked to an NPC for a quest... nope, it was one of those that only counts as advancing the quest, not completing it, so no experience! When I finally dinged from killing mobs for the next mission we were on, I felt stupidly relieved - slowest 1k XP ever.

We "celebrated" our newly acquired max level by running Kaon Under Siege, the rakghoul / zombie flashpoint introduced in patch 1.1. It was very atmospheric, if very... different for Star Wars standards. I'm looking forward to the second part.

Though bloody hell, some of the trash was a nightmare. If you see any mobs called mercenaries, watch out! They have tow cables that stun you and the stun doesn't end until they get interrupted! I think during one of our most impressive wipes we pulled a bit too much and basically the entire group ended up caught in tow cable stuns and unable to do anything as we slowly died from the associated damage, since nobody remained free to break anyone else out.

It was all worth it though, as one of the bosses gifted me my very first level 50 purple. To be honest that's not something I expected to see in a normal mode flashpoint, but I'm certainly not complaining - especially considering how many more times I died than anyone else, what with nobody ever noticing the healer getting towed to death.

Up next: completing act three of my class story, doing all the flashpoints I haven't seen yet on normal mode and doing some gearing up for hard modes.

My journey to 50 in review, part 1

2012-02-01T17:01:00.003Z

No, I haven't actually hit 50 yet. I seem to be a bit behind a fair chunk of the blogosphere in that regard - not that I'm in a hurry or anything, but my boyfriend and me playing flu-tag over the last two weeks hasn't exactly been beneficial to our shared progress.

However, that doesn't mean that I can't get started on writing this yet, as it's going to be long enough to require splitting into several parts anyway. Basically, I want to talk about my levelling experience in general terms: which planets I liked, how I felt about my class storyline, which moments stuck in my head as memorable. (Flashpoints not so much, since I already talked about them a fair bit previously.) This way, I can look back on it later and be reminded of how I felt about my first time through the game without any distortion of memory, and maybe other people will find parts of it insightful too. I'll try to avoid story spoilers, so I'll only talk about quests and story in either very generic or mechanical terms.

Ord Mantell

I don't actually have a strong opinion on the trooper starting planet either way. I mostly remember it having a blue sky and lots of rocks. To be honest, I think I was a bit distracted by my excitement about playing this new game and trying to take everything in at once. What does this button do? What do these icons on the map mean?

I don't recall any of the quests being particularly outstanding in terms of story, but with SWTOR's unique way of presentation they still felt excitingly different from the standard MMO fare. They also gave me a good first impression of what life as a trooper was going to be like, forcing me to choose between doing what others told me to do and what I myself considered the right thing to do, which wasn't always the same.

One of my most memorable early moments was questing on Savrip Island and meeting my first champion-level mob. I didn't have a quest to kill it or anything, but just having it there was like an open challenge: Can you take me? Of course our little trooper duo had to try, and we just about managed it, though it was a close call at the time, what with none of us having many abilities yet. After a lot of kiting and aggro-swapping, the Savrip Champion finally fell to our might and dropped a blue gun. It felt very satisfying, and I immediately recalled fond memories of taking down elite mobs in the open world in WoW, back when they, you know, existed.

The second most memorable moment on Ord Mantell was trying to do a certain trooper quest. Up until then my significant other and I had run our class quests in parallel but solo, since doing them together if you're both the same class tends to drag things out a bit, as you have to do each quest twice, once with person A's decisions and once with person B's decisions.

However, this one we just couldn't complete. It required us to kill three mobs at once, with at least one of them strong I believe, with no crowd control, healing or companions. It was almost comical how we both kept dying to it over and over again. At one point I thought that I was close to getting it, since I had killed one of the trio and he hadn't respawned when the group reset after my death... but as my timer on the medical probe kept getting longer and longer, they started respawning faster than me and eventually both me and my boyfriend just went back to the medical droid and decided to try tackling the quest together. It was funny just how much of a breeze it turned out to be with the two of us together. To this day that low-level mission remains the only class quest we had to team up for.

Coruscant

Ah, the Republic's capital and the place where everyone gets their ship. It's almost embarrassing to say it, but I didn't actually like this planet very much. The Senate Plaza is gorgeous, and the Senate Tower is the first place where you really get the sense that everything in this game is absolutely huge, which is something that I love despite of the increased travel times it creates.

However, the places where you actually quest... are pretty meh. Somehow they all end up looking like boring grey tunnels and platforms. Maybe city planets just aren't for me. The quests also weren't hugely inspiring. There were definitely a couple of fun ones, but the main storyline felt very repetitive to me, as you were just clearing out one nest of thugs after the other. I feel that the Empire got the better end of the deal as far as capitals go, as Dromund Kaas offers a much more varied environment and questing experience at that level.

Around this level I also felt that experience gains were starting to run away from us a little. If you love doing flashpoints, and I do, they'll give you a fair chunk of experience. Then you get your ship, and being the curious sort I tried out space battles. I didn't really get that into them in the end, but I did do the first couple of missions, which yielded another hefty amount of XP. Level ten is also the point at which you can start running warzones, which gains you yet more experience. I don't remember the exact number, but we must have been getting close to level twenty by the time we finished Coruscant.

Now this is where something interesting happened. Our class story branched out into two parts, one to continue to Taris and one to Nar Shadaa. I didn't really look into the details of it at the time, but simply assumed that they were pointing you towards two alternate levelling zones, and we picked Nar Shadaa more or less at random. This turned out to be a bad idea, since they are actually consecutive zones, and Taris comes first in the levelling progression. While we were high enough to do Nar Shadaa right off the bat, the end result was that by the time we were done with it everything on Taris had already gone grey.

Nar Shadaa

Nar Shadaa itself, or "Hutt Vegas" as Scott Johnson calls it so aptly, didn't really impress me that much either as a zone, which I guess confirms my theory that I'm just not that into city planets. Sure, it was slightly more interesting visually, but in the end I still ended up spending a lot of my time traipsing through grey corridors.

This planet also featured our first and so far only encounter with a quest that was so bugged at the time that we couldn't figure out how to complete it and eventually just gave up. I don't remember the name, but it was a bonus quest to defend some sort of defensive turret. I wonder if they've fixed it by now.

I did love my class quest on this planet however, which netted me a new companion and had multiple laugh-out-loud funny lines. If you're a trooper and you didn't find this story entertaining, you have no heart!

Taris

After Nar Shadaa we went back to Taris briefly just to progress our class storyline. I was pleased to see that this planet looked a lot more alive and open, though I still felt like I was being "funnelled" a bit too much, as we kept running into dead ends in the ruins while trying to make our way from one sub-zone to the next. It felt very unnatural to just ignore all the quest givers, but we didn't really see the point in fighting all those grey mobs. There are always alts with which to see those quests.

Still, being so heavily overlevelled for that bit of our class quest definitely took some of the fun out of it. Everything died way too easily, and we probably spent more time just running back and forth between one trooper phase and the next than actually killing or talking to things.

After completing our class quests on both of these planets, we got a trooper mission on a special space ship, something that seems to happen every two planets or so (there was one after Coruscant too). This was one was really weird though, because it consisted mostly of a... puzzle? I was reminded of Dragon Age: Origins and how random the bridge puzzle in the Temple of Andraste seemed to me at the time; it just didn't fit. I got similar vibes from this quest, though it was a lot more straightforward. Also, it included an NPC conversation that featured a major continuity error and confused me big time until I looked it up online and saw other people pointing out that it was indeed an error and that I hadn't missed anything.

Let's conclude part 1 here. Next time: Tatooine and how things started to get a lot more interesting...

Part 2
Part 3

Oh dear, customer service

2012-01-29T03:51:00.004Z

I've been hearing stories about Bioware's customer service being terrible, but I didn't pay them too much heed. Some people always complain about customer service, and anyway, I'm willing to cut the company some slack for being new at handling this particular beast. When my trooper was bugged out and I couldn't play, it would have been nice to receive some help, but I figured that they were probably swamped with tickets at the time - and hey, in the end I did figure out a way to solve the problem myself.

However, today's experience has me a little bit worried I have to admit. It wasn't even anything big - I just observed an inconsistency in a quest chain about three days ago, and submitted it as a bug report. Without spoiling anything, due to my choices the quest ended one way, but the follow-up I received in the mail talked about a different outcome that didn't match up. So I thought I'd be helpful and submit that as a bug report. I kept it fairly curt and just described the quest in question since I couldn't remember its name. My ticket was a total of three lines long and I expected them to just forward it to whoever handles these kinds of bugs and not respond to me at all.

However today, three days later, I received the following response:

"Greetings [name],

I am Protocol Droid U3-F6 of Human-Cyborg Relations...

I have received your transmission regarding unscannable gathering nodes."

Wait, what? I tell you about a bug with a quest and you come back to me about unscannable gathering nodes? You couldn't even read three lines of text?

Since the message also included a request for more information, I wanted to give the guy the benefit of the doubt at first, thinking that maybe he had just copy and pasted the wrong "please provide more details" message, but when I tried to update the ticket with more details (courtesy of Torhead, which apparently has more information about the game than the average customer service rep), it just came back with an error message. Everything I had written just disappeared and I gave up.

At least the end of the message contained one of those "give us feedback about our service" links, which I followed and filled out. Sorry, U3-F6... I did give you full marks for politeness because I really can't fault you in that area, but everything else was a big fat negative. It's a real shame because I wasn't even expecting a response to a simple bug report, but if you do bother to reply, the very least you could do is talk about what I actually wrote instead of some random stuff about gathering nodes.

Lessons of the day

2012-01-27T00:10:00.000Z

Heroic pugs, hand in together!

Generally my pugs for heroic quests tend to disband pretty quickly once the quest is done, and I'm okay with that - however, I do wish people wouldn't all leave before we've even had a chance to actually hand in the quest. If they just stayed in the party for two more minutes, we'd all get a massive experience bonus and maybe some social points too! I reckon that a lot of people simply aren't aware of it because they haven't done enough grouping yet, but if you are one of those early leavers, be aware and spread the word!

Same faction PvP is weird

It seems that the Empire dominates on my server after all, because I did some warzones on Empire side last night and it turns out that they do in fact spend a lot of time playing Huttball against each other.

Being pitted against people of your own faction has some strange consequences. Specifically, I noticed that a Sith did a /spit emote on me as she killed me, something that annoys me somewhat because for all the casual ways in which some players use this gesture, it projects a mental image of an action that would be very offensive in real life.

I contemplated whether it would be overreacting to whisper her about it (since we were on the same side and all), when the next match actually threw us onto the same team. Seeing the offender right next to me, I couldn't resist whispering her. "Funny, last match you spat on me and now we're on the same team." "Terrible, isn't it? I'll love you know though." And then she did a /love emote on me repeatedly, which made me chuckle and any leftover annoyance dissipated immediately. It's an interesting situation though, fighting people who could end up in your team on the next match, and something to keep in mind before you get too much into the spirit of hating the enemy.

Directive 7 is bugged

The latest flashpoint we attempted was Directive 7, and I say attempted because we ran into a bug that prevented us from completing it. Specifically, there is a boss that creates a copy of a party member every now and then, but apparently there is a bug with it which can cause it to spawn near endless copies of certain party members, and it mostly affects Mercenaries and Commandos (gulp). So yeah, we got quite close to killing it once, but eventually we always got overrun by an army of evil Shintars.

Supposedly there is a way to skip him via use of a combat res or stealth, but in the end we were too tired to even bother. Bugs that affect gameplay as badly as this remain a nuisance, but I have to admit that there was at least a certain element of humour to dying to an army of evil mes.

Colicoid War Game

2012-01-26T02:14:00.004Z

It's been over a week since I did this flashpoint, but I still wanted to write about it because it really left an impression on me. I would describe my first experience with it as both hilarious and horrible, and I immediately found myself wondering whether it would turn out to be the SWTOR equivalent of WoW's Oculus back in WOTLK, a.k.a. an instance that took you far enough out of your comfort zone that most people ended up hating it and avoided it like the plague.

Obviously in discussing the details of the flashpoint, this post will contain spoilers about what happens in it, but I don't think that there's any reason to worry too much about it - there isn't really any story beyond what Master Satele tells you at the start, which is this: The Colicoids have lots of weapons for sale, but instead of simply handling trade like normal people, they want any potential buyers to go overcome a deadly obstacle course in order to prove themselves. What a ridiculous idea, why do we have to bother with this again? Oh, the Empire has already agreed to participate and we can't let them win? Sigh... I wouldn't be surprised if Imperial players got told in turn that they have to go because the Republic's already doing it.

Anyway, our group entered the flash point, saw some friendly Colicoids, entered the competition area... and was presented with four gun turrets in the middle of a field.

Nooo, not a vehicle fight!

Funnily enough, it wasn't actually that... vehicular? You just had to aim the gun at the enemies and it would shoot on its own. Silly us actually sabotaged ourselves on our first attempt because we expected there to be more button pushing, so we kept clicking and mashing keys, which just caused us to get dismounted over and over again. I even managed to make my gun turret disappear completely and we had to reset the flashpoint to get a new one, because three guns simply weren't enough. Take note, this is the first flashpoint where you definitely can't supplement your group with companions, you absolutely do need four real people.

Now, even though the gun firing turned out to be extremely basic, we still wiped on this encounter three or four times. How hard can it be to shoot a bunch of slowly advancing unfriendly Colicoids? Harder than you'd think, apparently. Specifically, there are some that start shooting from range, and if you don't target them fast enough, they'll seriously mess you up.

Anyway, eventually we finally got a message that we had apparently passed this trial, with me dead and everyone else on low health but alive.

Phew, let's move on... to another four gun turrets. Let's do the same thing again, only harder! /facepalm. Fortunately the encounter didn't actually seem to be that much harder, and we managed to beat it on the first attempt - though lots of enemies were still alive by the time the completion message came up, and they ended up killing all of us except our Shadow, who had the good sense to vanish when we got overwhelmed.

Still, that was the gun turret part of the flashpoint done. Next we died in a corridor full of rock-hard droids that wiped us until we made sure to use proper crowd control.

As we emerged from that corridor, I found myself reminded of... Huttball? What? Don't worry, they didn't actually make us play that in there, but the scenery with all the ramps and fire certainly bore a certain resemblance to The Pit. Some droids were patrolling the area too, so we pulled the first one... and learned that they all have a knockback, as more or less the entire party went flying into the lava below. This would quickly become a theme, because even though we knew about it now, it was still easy to accidentally get too close while trying to avoid the fire. Fortunately the rule of people falling down being funny still applied, but it was happening at such a high frequency that it came close to actually grating on some people's nerves.

All these things were just distractions though, as the real obstacle of the area were a bunch of linked forcefields that could be disabled if someone held a button down in a certain place. The idea seemed to be something like: one person holds down the first button, which opens the forcefield to the second button, so someone else then goes to press that to open the forcefield to the third button... it wasn't really too complicated, but I couldn't honestly claim to remember the details because I found that the droids and the fire were quite distracting. We only really muddled through because someone else managed to keep a clear head and figured out what to do in what order. It didn't help that the droids appeared to be on a short respawn timer as well, so someone caught on their own between force fields could suddenly find themselves facing a droid too. Good times.

Just like with the gun turrets, once wasn't good enough, and the Colicoids made us go through the whole spiel twice. At least it was smooth sailing after that: just a light side/dark side choice that was actually quite entertaining, a couple more mobs and then the last boss.

All in all, I had a lot of fun, but I have to say that I'd definitely be weary of pugging this one for a while. Vehicle fights, rapidly respawning droids that kill with knockbacks, and force field leapfrogging take a certain amount of patience to appreciate.

Heroic PuG Stories

2012-01-23T13:47:00.005Z

Everyone loves pug stories, right? (Un?)fortunately I don't have any bad ones to tell so far because everyone I've met has been quite friendly and considerate, but it's still interesting to see how each group turns out differently.

[Heroic 4] Crushing the Jedi Freedom Fighters

Doing this heroic quest on Nar Shadaa Imperial side has been my favourite pug experience so far. Our team consisted of two operatives, a Sith Assassin and a tank companion, which meant that we were a full stealth team! We darted around the area unseen, picking and choosing our targets carefully, and everyone used their crowd control effectively without needing any marks or other prompting. It felt great. Incidentally, the other operative and I seemed to be very much on the same wavelength, as we kept typing out the same suggestions at the same time; it was almost freaky.

Eventually I couldn't resist making a comment about what an awesome stealth team we were, which promptly resulted in someone walking around a corner unstealthed, pulling a whole group at once and wiping us. We laughed about it.

The last boss of the quest chain was kind of amusing as well because he kept spamming an AoE effect around himself that appeared to be undispellable and uninterruptable, so since we were all specced melee, we spent a lot of time standing at range and attacking with our worst abilities. I'm not a fan of overdoing it with the acronyms, but I did think the Sith Assassin summed it up very aptly when he said "FML lol".

After we were done, the other operative and I still had a nice chat, and she invited me to join her guild. I only declined since I mainly play Republic side and I don't want to be dead weight that never logs on.

[Heroic 4] Fall of the Locust

I ended up putting a group for this quest together on my Jedi Consular after I had just completed a Heroic 2 mission with a random Jedi Sentinel and since it had gone very well I was willing to try something more difficult. When I asked for more people in chat, another consular and a smuggler (forget which type) joined us as well.

Our group makeup was interesting since we had no dedicated tank (though the sentinel sort of took point) but two healers. I also seemed to be the only one who knew how to use her crowd control, and the smuggler kept breaking it by throwing grenades. Sounds bad? Well, somehow it wasn't. Sure, every pull involved a lot of flailing around as me and the other consular expended all our force barely keeping people alive as everyone got shot at by something, but except for one wipe, we always came through.

The group also seemed very... spirited, for lack of a better word. I actually cheered when the other consular felt inspired by my example to also try using his crowd control and we ended up with two mobs force lifted at once. And when I asked the smuggler to please stop throwing grenades that break the crowd control, he actually did so. I wonder whether I taught these players something new that day.

On a side note, I mentioned in my last post that the heroic quests are mostly very light on story, but this one is actually an exception that has a fair bit of story progression and multiple bits of dialogue. I liked it.

[Heroic 4] A Pound of Flesh

Another Imperial group quest on Nar Shadaa, this one made for an interesting experience as we had several rather awkward moments but in the end everyone always came through.

It started after we had just got everyone to the heroic area, and one of the two Sith needed to go AFK to look after his baby (which gave me funny mental images I have to admit). The rest of us tried to keep ourselves entertained by dancing with each other and trying out our racial social abilities. I had completely forgot that emotes could actually serve a purpose (i.e. passing some time and building group cohesion even as you're not progressing). I have to give people a lot of credit for never moaning about the wait, and nobody said a bad word either when the Sith returned after about ten minutes and said that he had to go because the baby needed some more attention than he had expected. We just wished him well and decided to try with the three of us, and the bounty hunter pulled out his Mako for heals.

We did quite well with me and the bounty hunter using our crowd control, and him also off-healing a bit when things got hairy and it looked like Mako couldn't quite keep up. As it happened, we finished the main quest at the same time as stage one of the bonus series, but as someone immediately said "thanks for the group", I took that as them not wanting to bother with the rest of the bonus. Since it just consisted of clicking on some items in the area, I decided to do it on my own anyway.

As it turned out, there was a stage three which once again consisted of simply clicking on another set of items, and as I did so I noticed that the other two players were actually still around, in different corners of the area. "Oh, so you're doing the bonus too then!" "Yeah, I only just noticed..." I thought it was funny that we were all doing our own thing, thinking that the others weren't interested. We got back together as a group and finished killing the champion level mob that was the last stage of the chain.

On our way out, Mako managed to run into a big group of mobs and aggroed them on everyone else. I have to admit, I was tempted to stay in stealth, but in the end I decided I'd rather risk dying with my fellow party members than leave them to their fates. With a lot of frantic off-healing we made it through with no deaths.

[Heroic 4] Friends of Old

This mission on Dromund Kaas was probably my "worst" grouping experience simply because it was kind of bizarre. When I looked for other interested players in chat, I only got one reply from a Sith Inquisitor. I suggested to give it a go with just the two of us and he agreed. As it turned out, we managed to complete it just fine, though we died a few times towards the end, due to getting sloppy mostly.

The thing that made the whole thing weird was that the Sith Inquisitor didn't actually have the quest. I could see from his quest log that he was on the stage just before the heroic quest, which simply required looting a couple of items from some nearby droids. I told him as much, repeatedly to make sure that he hadn't just overlooked my comment, but he didn't reply. He could clearly see chat though, as he did respond to a couple of other things. At the same time he was already running ahead towards the heroic area. What's a girl to do?

I was glad to get my quest completed, but I did feel kind of guilty afterwards. In hindsight, maybe I should have been more insistent and should have pestered him some more to make sure that he got onto the same step of the quest as me. But where do you draw the line? As I said, I had already tried repeatedly and he had simply ignored my objections. I just don't understand why someone would ask to join for a group quest they didn't actually have.

Five tips to help you get into groups while levelling

2012-01-21T01:04:00.007Z

The game's barely been out for a month and already people are clamouring for a dungeon finder. Oy vey. I can't comment on what it's like at max level right now, but while levelling I've had no problems getting into groups. I wish I could share the secret of my awesome group-finding powers, but I'm afraid that I'm not quite sure what it is myself. However, I do have some more obvious tips for asocial people that want to increase their chances of successful grouping:

1. Bring your own friends. Even just one!

Socialising online not your kind of thing? Okay. However, surely you must have at least one friend in meat space that is somewhat interested in gaming and could serve as your gaming buddy - maybe even a significant other? Even if they usually aren't into this kind of game, it could turn out to be a surprise success!

It's not necessarily a matter of having to play together all the time either (though that can make for an awesome experience) - the point is that it's simply nice to have someone around whom you can ask for help if you need it without feeling shy. One of the great things about SWTOR is that due to the way the companion system works, two people are enough to tackle pretty much all levelling group content, even if it's advertised as being designed for a larger group (more on this later).

If you do decide to look for help from outsiders after all, having a buddy by your side is also a great way of attracting more people. It's the principle of the first follower at work. By signalling to others that you already have a group, just not a full one, you'll immediately look more trustworthy and likely to be successful. Think about it, if you were looking for a group yourself and saw two different people advertising in chat - would you be more likely to respond to the one saying LFG or the one saying LFM?

2. Look around you!

No friends want to play with you? Okay. All is not lost, even if you don't want to join a guild or don't think that you'll be making long-term friends in the game. However, you won't be able to avoid talking to people entirely. I've been utterly baffled by some comments I've seen where people stated in the same breath that they had trouble finding groups but that they were also ignoring the chat window and the LFG tool. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but how do you expect to find out about grouping opportunities then, or for other people to know that you would like to group? Magic? Sorry, but this game doesn't have a magic insta-group button.

I find this attitude particularly fascinating because in real life I can't think of a single situation where anyone would consider it even remotely acceptable to expect help from other people while insisting that they didn't want to talk, see or otherwise interact with those same people in any other way. I reckon this kind of thing is why gamers have a reputation for being weird...

Anyway! The point is, you might not want to read all the rubbish in chat, but it's really not that hard to at least keep an eye on it every now and then to see whether the name of a quest you have pops up somewhere. The current LFG system is quite poor, but you might as well flag yourself as available anyway. It takes little effort and you never know who might look! I hear that some servers also have user-created LFG channels already. Just keep an eye out. A lot of what we commonly call good luck is actually simply people being aware of their environment and spotting opportunities where others don't pay attention.

3. Take the initiative!

I know most people don't like to lead. I don't, really. But being the one to put a group together is not the same as being a guild or raid leader. It requires minimal effort and no particular leadership qualities. Unfortunately, most people still prefer following, all day, every day, and that becomes a problem if there aren't enough leaders around.

This isn't something that came with the dungeon finder either. I remember back in my TBC days in WoW, certain guildies were always whining about not being able to get heroic groups - but they never did a damn thing to get one going either. Duh, people!

So next time you'd like to get a group quest or flashpoint done and nobody else has brought it up in a while - why not try speaking up? At worst, nobody responds and you continue on your merry way. At best, you get to be someone else's hero for doing something as simple as initiating the formation of a small group. It's a pretty sweet feeling.

4. Be flexible!

I understand that people have limited time to play and may want to spend it according to certain plans. But really... it's a game, where else are you going to permit yourself to randomly go off the rails and do something different? Yes, that storyline you're working on right now is interesting, and the group quest for which someone was just looking for more in chat is on the other side of the map, but you did want to do it, right? Go on, hop on a speeder or quick travel or whatever, and off you go! The other stuff will still be there when you get back to it later; those other players might not. Don't wait around for the perfect opportunity that might never come; work with what you have. (This is a piece of advice that applies to many aspects of real life as well by the way.)

On another note about flexibility, don't be afraid to supplement your group with companions. Yes, real people are obviously better, but the companions in SWTOR are more than just glorified hunter pets. In terms of strength and throughput they are pretty close to player characters, with their main limitations being that they have fewer abilities and not the greatest AI. So basically, replacing a player with a companion in group content is like having a dpser who doesn't know how to CC, and a healer who stands in the fire. Not ideal, but I'm sure we've all been in a group that had one or more of those and still got the job done! I facepalm every time I see someone spam chat with "LF1M [4-person quest]" for ten minutes instead of simply pulling out a companion and actually getting started. In any group I join and that isn't full yet, I immediately encourage the other party members to get going with companions if we can't fill that last spot within a couple of minutes. Most of the time it works just fine.

5. Don't be desperate. Relax.

In a way, this is the least practical but also the most important advice I have for anyone looking for a group. I shudder every time I read a post by someone where they mention "spamming LFG for an hour" (or more). I always hope that they are just really fond of hyperbole. Nobody would really do that, right? It sounds horrible. I've done a lot of grouping in my time, not just in SWTOR, and I've never done that. I wouldn't want to, and to be honest, I wouldn't be keen on grouping with someone else who does that either.

The thing is, putting a group together involves social skills (if not many); it's not some kind of achievement that you're bound to get if only you grind hard enough. Treating it as if it is, is only going to make you look weird. People want to group with players who seem like fun to hang around, not with awkward spammers, even if they wouldn't consciously express it that way. You might turn away more potential party members than you end up attracting!

Not to mention that sitting in one spot all day and stubbornly repeating the same message in chat over and over again is going to burn you out. You're going to get worked up about your failure, until it feels like grouping in this game is just impossible and damn, it sucks. This isn't fun for you or anyone!

So, if you're one of those people, I say: relax. I don't know what it's like at endgame (that might be a post for another day once I get there), but for levelling content, Bioware has managed to strike a wonderful balance between solo and group content. You can see all the good stories by playing on your own if you want, all the way to the cap. The group stuff is completely optional, and from what I've done so far, very light on story (with few exceptions). If you just want an excuse to play with other people, it's great, but if you don't feel like grouping, you don't miss anything important.

Sometimes there simply isn't anyone around who wants to do Hammer Station with you. So what? Do something else and try again later. Try again tomorrow - not for hours, just a quick shout-out before you set out to quest some more. And if it still doesn't work out... well, this game is really encouraging you to level alts, won't it be nice to have some content to explore on another character, content that you haven't seen on your main yet?

Some thoughts on warzones

2012-01-19T17:30:00.004Z

PvP seems to be a pretty hot topic in regards to SWTOR right now. Wah, the patch broke Ilum! Faction imbalances ruin everything! Sith sorcerers are overpowered! The bolstering system doesn't work! Etc.

I'm happy to say that I don't really care about any of these things. Well, except for the bolstering system maybe, which I feel does work pretty well, especially now that the fully geared out level fifties have been shunted into a bracket of their own at least. Generally speaking though, I'm still levelling so anything happening at max level right now doesn't affect me yet, and I'm also pretty casual about PvP, which means that even if something bothers me about it, I usually don't feel qualified to give any useful criticism about it. In other words, if I get force-lightninged to death by Sith sorcerers a lot, my first thought is not to post on the forums about how they are OP, but that I clearly still have a lot to learn about how to PvP in this game.

For what it's worth, I've quite enjoyed running the occasional warzone to break up the questing (as enjoyable as it is). The main thing that's kept me from doing more of them is not wanting to outlevel my significant other (or on my alts, too much of the other fun content in general), as the experience gains per warzone are pretty significant.

Generally speaking, warzones are a lot like WoW battlegrounds. The Alderaan Civil War is like the Battle for Gilneas, and the Voidstar is Strand of the Ancients only without vehicles (phew). Huttball is... weird, but amusing. It's also the only warzone that puts people into teams regardless of faction, with the idea being that there'll always be something to play for both sides even if the factions on your server are massively imbalanced. Of course the result is that instead of complaining about long queues, players complain about being forced to play Huttball all the time. C'est la vie. I only get it fairly rarely myself, which probably means that our server is pretty balanced - or that Republic is simply the place to be. For all I know the Imperials could be playing Huttball amongst themselves all day.

There are some more things that I found to be different in an interesting way, coming from WoW PvP:

First off, I feel a lot weaker as a healer. Now, some of that might be due to my choice of class (trooper), some of it is probably me simply needing to learn to play, but it's hard to deny that the odds are stacked against dedicated healers in many ways. For example everyone has a mortal strike type debuff on them in warzones at all times. Your heals just do thirty percent less, period. Considering that it can already take five or more casts of your biggest heal to fill a person's health bar in PvE, results in PvP are pretty piddly, at least in the levelling bracket so far. Not to mention that everything has a long-ass cast time, which makes healers very vulnerable to interrupts and makes it very hard to get away from an attacker alive, especially as many offensive moves can be used on the run.

Sounds pretty frustrating? Well... yeah. But I actually got used to it. The best advice I've received so far is to stay as far behind as possible and to not be afraid of running and hiding. That might sound a bit like "healer 101", but in WoW I got quite used to being able to keep myself up against one or more attackers without too much of a problem. In SWTOR, it currently feels like I don't even stand a chance in a 1v1, so I run and distract. At best I get away to live another day and support the next wave at attackers, at worst I can at least serve as a distraction. (I'm always happy when people chasing the ailing trooper to her death results in a stealth cap behind the enemies' backs.)

Another thing I find notable is that warzones are same-server only at the current time. I never got to experience WoW's battlegrounds before the introduction of battlegroups, but I was always curious about what it would feel like to meet the same people on both sides over and over again. I haven't really played enough matches yet to take note of my opponents' names, but on my own team I usually end up seeing the same names several times in a row, and it's... nice. You actually learn to remember who is a healer, who is good at stealth capping, who gives good tactical advice etc. I can see this being community-building in the long run. I hope they keep the same-server restriction, but with only two brackets (levelling and level cap), I think they can get away with it.

I was also surprised to see how much Bioware tried to keep the warzones immersive. In fact I suspect that the main reason they don't have a Capture The Flag scenario right now is that they couldn't think of a good way to make capturing a flag for your team make any sense in a warzone. I still remember my very first battleground in WoW, back when I was a complete noob - it was Arathi Basin, and I had no idea whatsoever what was going on. Okay, blue and red markers on the map, what? Numbers on top? What is this all about? Capturing nodes? What for? To gather "resources"? Like gold, or crafting materials? What is all this even supposed to mean? (I know, it's not rocket science, but it's still quite a lot more abstract than most PvE gameplay used to be.)

Of course it's impossible to make an entirely fair comparison to SWTOR because obviously I'm not a complete noob anymore now, but I still thought that the whole thing seemed a lot more intuitive in TOR. Both sides have a ship in the sky. Here are three guns. Whoever aims more guns at the enemy ship for a prolonged amount of time shoots it down and wins. It just makes sense!

That aside, if I was a complete noob to PvP in SWTOR, I'm sure I would have a much easier time at it because they really make an effort to explain it to you. The loading screen for each warzone basically contains a summary of how each of them works, though depending on your computer's speed, these instructions might disappear too quickly to actually read in full. Still, once inside, everything gets explained in full again by a helpful voice-over that explains what's going on and the basics of what to do. To be honest, I would even say it gets a bit repetitive if you play a lot, and I wouldn't mind an option to turn the whole feature off for more experienced players, but in general I think it's great that these explanations are there.

What are other people's experiences with warzones in SWTOR so far?

Everyday Hero

2012-01-17T12:02:00.005Z

The Imperial Agent stalks through the shadows of Nar Shadaa in search of insurgents. Well, technically they are all around her already, but these are hardly worthy targets.

Surprise stops her dead in her tracks as something - no, someone - flies past her. Going by his attire, he's a Sith, and he's also on fire. He crashes into a group of nearby barrels, and while he immediately scrambles to his feet again, it's obvious that both his body and spirit are nearly broken.

Following his panicked gaze, she sees the man's problem: a brute that's easily got twice the Agent's body mass and who now seems to be going in for the kill.

She frowns. While Imperial Intelligence and the Sith may not always see eye to eye, this is unacceptable. Just before the brute can land his killing blow, he finds himself paralysed by a vibroknife to the chest.

The Sith's eyes light up in happy surprise at this unexpected turn of events, and his courage is restored almost instantly. The brute goes down in a flurry of knife attacks and lightsaber blows.

The Agent resheathes her weapon with a smile and disappears into the shadows once more. She's still got some karma to work off, but every little helps.

Early Flashpoint Impressions

2012-01-13T00:36:00.000Z

Back in WoW, small group instances used to be one of my favourite pastimes in the game for years - until the dungeon finder slowly sucked the fun out of them for me, that is. Unsurprisingly, SWTOR's more old-fashioned flashpoints make me very happy, and I've run all of them up to my current level at least once, some of them multiple times. It's been an interesting ride so far.

Difficulty-wise they seem to hit a pretty sweet spot for me. Trash is mostly very easy, but there are patrols to watch out for, mobs of different strengths to consider, and sometimes enemies surprise you by entering the scene unexpectedly. Personally I feel that this creates a nice atmosphere where most of the dungeon is fairly laid back, but not mindlessly boring, as you still have to watch where you're going and what you're pulling. The bosses tend to be a bit harder, and I've had quite a few deaths and even wipes at the hands of some of them. They all have a couple of mechanics each that you have to pay attention to and that can't be safely ignored, but there is some margin for error so the fights don't exactly feel twitchy either.

Interestingly enough, I've already had two runs where our group failed to complete the flashpoint because we simply couldn't get past a certain encounter. This felt a bit strange and surprising to me initially, as I haven't experienced anything like it since my party found it impossible to kill the last boss in Grim Batol when we ran our very first heroic five-man after WoW's Cataclysm launch. In SWOTR, the two offenders that had us running into a brick wall were Athiss and Taral V. On Athiss, we just couldn't get past what was I believe the last trash pull before the final boss, which contained two elites that both had AoE attacks and were wearing our group down faster than I could heal it up again. Since we were on the lower end of the level range for the place, nobody in the party had their long-duration crowd control abilities yet either. On Taral V, we first died a few times to the bonus boss before giving up on him, and then failed to kill the last boss too as he wiped us out within seconds every time he hit his low-health enrage (which was promptly patched out two days later, which is telling). In both cases we came back with another level or two under our belts and completed the whole thing easily. At the end of the day, the initial failure wasn't actually that terrible, as it just spurred us on to come back and get revenge together, not to mention that it provided some unforgettable memories to bond over.

Another thing that I found noteworthy was that most flashpoints seem to reward both explorers as well as people who've honed their crew skills. The former was particularly evident for me on Taral V, where the way through the instance is fairly straightforward, but there are plenty of hidden nooks and platforms that contain bonus objectives and chests. Both times I've been in there, our group had fun clearing out as much of the place as we could, and one time we even found a purple item in a chest. The runs took a lot longer than strictly necessary, but the whole experience felt very rewarding and fun.

As far as crew skills go, there seem to be a lot of little bits and pieces in many flashpoints that provide you with small bonuses if you take the time to notice them. On Athiss for example you can go into a side room and use scavenging to repair a broken droid, which will then follow you around and act as a combat pet for a bit. On Hammer Station, you can use crew skills to drill a hole through a wall to create a shortcut to the first boss. None of it is even remotely necessary, but it's a little something that feels fun. I was reminded of how I used to be grateful for someone who could pick locks in WoW's Shattered Halls so that we didn't have to go through the local sewer to get to the first boss. Sometimes it's the little things that make all the difference.

Finally, I found it notable that there's a huge stylistic difference between flashpoints. The first one you get access to on either side (The Esseles / The Black Talon) feels very creative and exciting. Lots of moving around, multiple conversations with NPCs, multiple light/dark side decisions that really make you feel like you're influencing the story. I found it to be quite different from what I usually expect to find inside an instance, but in a good way.

However, after that the next couple of flashpoints honestly felt like a bit of a disappointment. Hammer Station, Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders, Cademimu... there's nothing wrong with them, but they don't utilise SWTOR's unique selling points nearly as well and feel a lot more like classic dungeon crawls. Yes, there is a bit of voice work, and at some point there's usually a light/dark side choice for you to make, but it tends to feel a bit tacked on. Hey, there's a room full of innocents over there, want to save them or kill them? At their heart, these four instances can easily be summed up as "go kill some bad guys and then kill their boss", detailed story be damned. Still, this is only a problem when you compare it to what came before. Truth be told, I'm perfectly happy to do a classic dungeon crawl with some friends. I mentioned our fun little adventures in Cademimu before.

Interestingly, just as I was going to accept that the Esseles and the Black Talon were obviously outliers, the game threw Taral V and the Maelstrom Prison at me, two separate flashpoints that are part of one continuous story. They are not quite as interactive as the Esseles, but the story is considerably more involved, and at the end of the Maelstrom Prison we were rewarded with a hugely satisfying boss fight and a massive lore revelation (which might not actually mean much to Republic players without much prior knowledge, but fortunately for me I had just played through Dromund Kaas on Empire side, which had conveniently provided me with some context for events).

At first I was a bit bewildered by the way some flashpoints are so story-heavy while others aren't, but after doing some research on it, I think I understand the reasons for it. Basically, the difference seems to come down to whether a flashpoint is faction-specific or the same for both sides. I remember listening to a developer interview where the guy confessed that originally, they had intended to make all content shared between the factions to save development time, but the resulting stories were pretty dumb because you can't really make a very compelling quest that both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader would find equally engaging (as the dev put it). So maybe those flashpoints are leftovers from early development, or the developers simply decided that they could afford to have at least a couple of group instances with a comparatively weak story, especially considering that they would be repeatable content at endgame, at which point the story fades into the background anyway.

All in all, I've enjoyed myself enough that I'm definitely looking forward to exploring the flashpoints that I haven't seen yet, and so far there hasn't been one that I wouldn't be happy to rerun.

Armour, I can has it

2012-01-10T14:33:00.007Z

The debate about sexism in video games and ridiculous female armour goes ever on and on, and while it's nice to see people becoming more aware of the issue, it can get tiring sometimes when it feels like we're not really making any progress. Personally, I'm not too bothered by the occasional unnecessarily bared midriff here and there, but I have felt turned off by games that emphasise this kind of thing too much.

With that said, I'm really happy to say that SWTOR is a game that gets it absolutely right.

I love my trooper and the way she looks. She's a proper soldier, armoured from head to toe. No bare belly, exposed cleavage, high heels or other such nonsense. I don't think the chest piece even qualifies as "boob plate" because while it is slightly moulded to the shape, the curves are very small and subtle and I didn't really notice them until I zoomed in close to check.

Other classes don't get to be armoured quite as awesomely due to the nature of their gear (jedi robes etc.), but the ladies still get full body coverage all around from what I've seen. Thanks, Bioware.

If you are a fan of making your character look "sexy", vendors sell at least one outfit that pays homage to Leia's slave bikini in Return of the Jedi, and in warzones I've seen more than one female twi'lek that did decide to sport a more revealing look, but that's a conscious choice to go after those special items and completely optional. I just wish that more companies would follow that example.

Companion Affection vs. Social Points

2012-01-06T04:05:00.005Z

After writing about just how social an experience SWTOR can be, I finally managed to discover one area of the game where grouping actually has a negative side effect. A-ha! This area is companion affection.

It took me a little while to notice, but it really became apparent once I began to seriously level my first alt. On my trooper main, I've been trying to make friends with my first companion Aric for a while. At first I found him annoying, but he's really grown on me over time, and he and my trooper actually end up agreeing on a lot of things. (Except when she flirts in front of him, which always gets a -1 of Shame, but I can forgive that because it amuses me. It feels like playfully winding up a friend.) The problem is, my increased affection for him is not reflected by Aric's affection for my character in game. At first I thought that it was just a naturally slow process, but once I started to level an alt I was immediately taken aback by how much faster she gained affection with her companion. My Imperial Agent is only 19, and her companion Kaliyo can't stand her patriotism (I reckon that I get about three -1s for every time she approves of something), and yet her affection is already soaring.

Then it finally hit me: it's because my trooper is constantly duoing, so she only gets to talk about half the time during conversations, and you only gain companion affection if you win the conversation roll. So that's my affection gains already halved, but if I get unlucky on the important rolls it can be even worse. There was this one quest where our little squad agreed to do something really goodie-two-shoes - but while my boyfriend got to cheer about massive affection gain with his companion, I was left with nothing, even though I had made the same choice and I knew Aric would've loved it. Sadface.

I kind of wonder whether Bioware could be convinced to change the mechanic so that you gain affection based on your conversation choice regardless of whether you get to talk or not. It wouldn't make any sense from an immersion point of view, but then you also gain light/dark side points based on what your character wanted to do instead of what they actually let their group mates get away with, so I don't think it's that much of a stretch.

I suppose the bright side is that even if they leave it as it is, it's unlikely to matter in the long run as the game seems to be designed around gaining huge amounts of affection via gifts anyway. (If you think Vette liking snark fifteen times more than she dislikes receiving electric shocks is odd, just wait until you give one of your companions an epic shiny and they'll pretty much forgive you for killing innocents three times over.) Right now it just kind of feels like my dear cat-man is really dragging his feet, considering how well we've been getting along.

Social

2012-01-04T16:41:00.002Z

Late last night I decided to hop onto my Imperial Agent for a bit and knock out a few quests. One problem with playing alts in SWTOR is that if another character's story captures you, it then becomes hard to decide which one to work on first!

As I was doing my thing on Dromund Kaas, someone piped up in general chat that they were looking for more for a Heroic 2+ quest that I had in my log too. In fact, I had tried to solo it the other night - because I'm an Operative, I have a companion and stealth, surely that must be easy, right - and had subsequently got my arse kicked repeatedly. The thought of getting revenge on those mobs was quite appealing.

So I sent a quick whisper to the guy and started trudging over to the quest area. (Maybe I'm missing something here, but for some reason that I can't quite fathom, Dromund Kaas has a lot of flight paths that aren't actually connected, forcing you to walk between a lot of them either way.) I immediately told him about my attempts to solo the quest and how badly I had failed and he laughed. As it turned out, he was a Bounty Hunter.

Once I arrived in the quest area, we immediately set to work and I got to admire the Bounty Hunter's AoE abilities. Even though they are supposed to be an exact mirror of my main class, the trooper, the abilities had a very different look and feel about them. At least I never get to set that many things on fire.

When we got to the first group of mobs in the heroic area, I let him take care of the weenies, based on what I had just seen, while my companion and I did our best to stab and lock down the hardest one of the mobs. "Oh, this is so much easier!" my fellow Imperial exclaimed with delight once the first pack was down. "Admit it, you tried to solo it too," I teased him. "Yes, and I almost died on the first pull."

We proceeded to stab and shoot our way towards the final quest objective, where we were jumped by two packs of attackers spawning right after each other, and then a boss-level mob. "Whew, that guy was quite tough," I commented afterwards. I'd never even made it that far on my solo attempts, but I knew that I definitely wouldn't have been able to take both the waves of mobs and the boss guy on my own.

Afterwards my Bounty Hunter friend muttered something about a nearby datacron - I said that I didn't know anything about it as this is a part of the game that I haven't really looked into in detail. He tabbed out for a minute to look it up online while I watched his back. As it turned out there wasn't actually anything in the area, so we made our way back out of the canyon while joking about bad lift safety in Star Wars. As it was really late by now, I bade my group mate farewell after handing in and went to bed.

Now, there isn't anything unusual about this story, and I'm sure people are having similar encounters in SWTOR and other MMOs all the time. However, after coming at this after years of playing WoW, even a random encounter like this left me feeling extremely delighted. I don't care if I never see this guy again, we worked together and had fun. But I might see him again. I had almost forgotten what it was like.

It's funny because I have moaned about many of WoW's more recent changes, such as the introduction of the dungeon finder and the raid finder, but at the end of the day I still accepted them, used the new features and moved on. Things may have felt a lot more hollow, but I still got things done, right?

Playing SWTOR, in terms of grouping, has been like a massive throwback to my early days of WoW, and it's been wonderful. I shouldn't have believed those people who claimed that before the dungeon finder, everyone just spent all day sitting in chat and spamming LFG messages and it was tedious. I should have known better because I was there.

Suddenly I get to experience people treating each other with decency again. In each starting area, people were constantly exchanging buffs on the road (and considering that it's quite possible to die to a bad pull, every little helps). Multiple times while I was out questing on my own, I got myself into a pickle and some random stranger jumped in and saved my life just as I thought that I was done for. In a group, nobody blows a gasket at someone else being a bit slow or needing some help.

Part of it is probably simply that "new game smell" where everyone doesn't quite know what to expect, and with fewer expectations it's harder to get mad at people for not living up to them. On the other hand though, it definitely feels to me like SWTOR is actively trying to get people to be social. The conscious decision not to include a dungeon finder, group quests everywhere, social points - all of it seems to say: "I know you can do this on your own but... look at the people! Talk to them! Play with them! Have fun!"

It's made me very thoughtful, because I know some good people who really don't like this kind of thing and are big fans of systems like WoW's dungeon finder. I suppose at the end of the day it comes down to preferences, Bartle types, whatever you want to call them. I was looking back at this old post by Syl the other day and was once again surprised by my own test result in the comments. I'm not an achiever.

Things like an automated grouping system are great for achievers because it means that they can get things done, no matter the circumstances. They can say that they killed the boss and show off their new shinies. Me, I'd rather fail to get to the end but make a new friend on the way. If we do get things done it's a bonus, but it's not the most important thing.

From that point of view, I feel that SWTOR is a great game, and I do hope it stays that way. Giving people the opportunity to achieve is all fine and dandy, but there comes a point where even those who really love achievements start to wonder whether it's something that's worth sacrificing everything else. I was undecided myself for the longest time, but after being reminded of just how nice it can be when a game supports people simply being social and forming a community, I honestly wouldn't want it any other way anymore.

Bugs Suck

2012-01-02T01:18:00.000Z

I'm firmly convinced that MMOs will always have bugs, at the very least some minor ones. A game that only just launched less than two weeks ago is bound to have some more, even if it's very polished overall.

On the whole, my experiences with The Old Republic have been very good in this regard. I have encountered a fair few bugs since I started playing, but mostly they were minor display issues. Sometimes they were actually quite amusing - but at worst they were a minor nuisance, such as when I tried to talk to a certain NPC on Coruscant and every time the camera was supposed to show me his face, I saw the flickering skyscape beyond the walls instead.

However, yesterday the game rang in the new year in a fairly painful manner for me. First I began to suffer from the silent companion bug. Your companions are supposed to give you a primer whenever they want to have a conversation with you in a private place, but there's currently a bug where this primer will keep appearing and disappearing, so you're constantly taunted with the promise of story advancement which you're then not actually able to access. There's a thread on the official forums about it which is currently sitting on 39 pages. Still, while this is a bit more annoying as far as bugs go, it's still not game-breaking.

Then I got to go on the final class quest for my trooper's first story arc. Without spoiling too much I think it's safe to say that it takes place on a hostile ship. From the design of the environment it quickly became apparent to me that enemies were meant to receive reinforcements out of side doors every now and then, as I'd seen it in several flashpoints before. There's nothing wrong with that, it makes the fights a bit more interesting... problem is, on this particular quest pretty much all the mobs seemed to be hopelessly borked one way or another. They popped into existence out of nowhere, awkwardly "skating" around, evading, vanishing, and not necessarily in that order. And we're not just talking about one or two evading mobs here, it was very much a systematic problem. Though the one guy who seemed to be stuck under the floor and chased me across half the ship shooting from where I couldn't target him definitely stood out. The droid boss who could shoot through closed doors was memorable too. It was quite annoying.

However, I would have been able to immediately forget all of that, had I been able to actually complete the mission. Unfortunately, just as I got close to the end, I turned around to leave a room, had the little speech bubble pop up over my head to indicate that I was about to enter a conversation... and then, nothing. I just stood there, rooted in place and unable to move. Trying to use /stuck or any abilities resulted in a prompt telling me that I couldn't do that while in a conversation. Trying to hit escape to exit the conversation, as you do, just brought up the main menu however - apparently I wasn't conversing quite enough. I quit the game and restarted. For a moment I thought that I was free, but as soon as I hit a movement key, the bubble was there and rooting me in place again. I opened a ticket to ask for help and complained to my guildies about my predicament for a while but eventually figured that my chances of getting a GM response any time soon probably weren't very good, so I logged off for the night, disappointed that I couldn't finish what I had started.

The next day, I came to log in around lunchtime, still stuck in the same place and with my ticket unaddressed. However, something I had seen while prowling the SWTOR customer service forums had given me an idea: immediately upon relogging there was a moment when I wasn't completely stuck and could use abilities - so I could use my Emergency Fleet Pass to get off the ship and start over.

Unfortunately all the trash mobs appeared to have respawned when I returned to my class quest's phase, and I ended up getting massacred by more awkwardly skating mobs and through-the-wall-shooting. Frustrated, I quit without even reviving my character and went to work.

Tonight, I sat down calmly once again and decided to give it another try. This time I took things very slowly and carefully, trying to give all the mobs a chance to get all their evading and general weirdness out of the way before even trying to move on. As it turns out, the mobs behind the droid boss hadn't respawned anyway, something for which I was very grateful. Finally I approached the last quest hand-in, the speech bubble popped up - and the conversation actually started. I was so relieved.

I don't think this negative experience will colour my overall feelings about the game - I'm still enjoying it way too much for that. But running into such a giant cluster of bugged mobs was a bit of a shock - did no trooper in the beta complete the first act and report on this?! And the "stuck in conversation" bug is just horrendous. They really need to implement some way to let players extract themselves from that kind of situation if they can't click on their buttons. I feel lucky in that I managed to activate my Emergency Fleet Pass during that brief period of not being completely stuck after relogging, but I'm not sure everyone else is lucky enough to get that chance - I did see several people reporting on the forums that they had the same problem at different points in the game, sometimes even on their ships, and still hadn't received any help after being stuck for days. I think that being unable to even move your character for so long would be majorly off-putting.

What other notable bugs have people encountered in the game at this point?

People falling down is funny

2011-12-30T00:33:00.001Z

... as long as nobody gets seriously hurt in the process of course. But in general, the image of someone slipping on a banana peel is considered humorous, and if you've ever watched one of those funny home video shows on tv, they seem to consist to ninety percent of pets and toddlers falling on their faces or adults running into doors. We love it when people are clumsy.

People falling down in a video game is even funnier, because it's a hundred percent risk free (nobody actually gets hurt), and you can fall down in new and imaginative ways that wouldn't even be possible in real life. Every WoW player could probably tell you at least one story of how they died from fall damage in some surprising and absolutely hilarious way; personally I could probably fill an entire blog post with them.

Now, the Star Wars universe has a long history of having extremely bad health and safety standards when it comes to preventing people from falling from dangerous heights. Where are the safety rails?! Randomly placed on slightly elevated decks, it seems... I was very pleased to see that The Old Republic stays true to its source material in this regard.

In the Esseles, I had my first accident by walking right off the walkway leading to the droid bonus boss. When we returned later, we had no less than two Jedi warriors die in the same area by force leaping through the floor. Admittedly this was slightly less funny since it was due to a bug and not mere clumsiness, but still.

Hammer Station presented us with the giant tunnel of doom that is crossed by a bridge which disappears and reappears on a timer. Again, I saw more than person fall victim to this unsafe contraption and fall to their deaths. Red is bad!

However, the highlight of hilarious accidents so far has been our guild's Cademimu run last night. Things started off well when our Vanguard accidentally autoran off a platform early on, but what really had us in awe was the elevator we encountered later in the instance. It's without a doubt the most nefarious example of its kind that I've ever seen. It slowly descends across four levels, with each of those levels containing nothing but a small, useless platform that doesn't lead anywhere. So obviously, our party's first mistake was to get off on the first platform because that's where the lift stopped. We then ran back and forth for a bit, looking for somewhere to go, until we realised that we had got ourselves stuck in a dead end. The lift, meanwhile, had continued its journey downwards without us.

We waited for it to come up again, and our Vanguard wanted to jump on it as it did so... except that we then discovered that, for no discernible reason, it goes upwards at about four times the speed at which it goes downwards, so our poor party member walked right under it as it soared past his head and fell to his death again. The whole group was in stitches, and I was actually shedding tears of laughter in front of my screen; it was just too silly.

The three of us continued down while the Vanguard ran back, and engaged the group of mobs at the bottom. "Make sure to actually step off the elevator," my significant other reminded me... and I did, but then I also took a step backwards again when I saw that I was getting too close to the mobs, and before I knew it I had fallen down, presumably underneath the lift that was now rising again. I couldn't really tell, all I knew was that I couldn't move and that lightning was crackling all around me until I died. Fortunately the other two managed to finish off the mob pack on their own with no problems. Mobs are easy. Lifts are hard.

We then had a couple of wipes on the last boss, and as it turns out, you have to use that devious elevator every time you run back in. Every. Time. Eventually it caught our Jedi Shadow off guard too, going down just as he tried to jump on it, and he went splat as it halted on the second or third level.

I'd really like to meet whoever designed that lift and ask them what they were thinking. Though I would also like to thank them for creating something extremely entertaining. I wonder how many more wonders like that are just waiting for us to fall off them?

The Elevator of Evil

So many things to see, so many things to do

2011-12-29T01:36:00.004Z

I feel kind of funny creating a new blog and then not actually updating it for a week, but I've been busy with work (retail right after Christmas = bleh) as well as simply enjoying the game for its own sake.

My trooper hit level 31 today after a bit less than two weeks of playing, which almost feels a bit fast, but I think part of that is due to the fact that I play grouped the vast majority of the time and group bonus experience is simply insane. Our little trooper team outlevelled an entire world pretty much by accident (weren't we supposed to go to Taris? oops), so we only popped over there briefly to do our local class quest and pick up our newest companion. To be fair though, we did do a lot of random mob killing and flashpoints in-between... either way, that just means that whenever I level another Republic character, they'll have an entire planet of adventures ahead of them which I haven't even seen yet.

I think it's interesting that a lot of bloggers seem to have concerns that even if they are enjoying the game right now, they'll probably run out of things to do a month or two from now. I definitely can't see that happening to me. For comparison, I played WoW for over nine months before I even started to raid, and I played a lot. Somehow there always seemed to be something to do back in the day, whether it was doing extra quests, exploring, gathering money for an epic mount, working on my professions or running instances with friends. Just from what I can see now, SWTOR seems to be shaping up to offer a similar kind of experience to what I used to love back then, and I think it will keep me busy for quite a while. I do think the guild that I'm in intends to raid eventually, but I'm not too bothered about that right now. We'll see - there are definitely enough other things to keep me occupied.

First off, there's my class quest to finish. Considering the way it has been progressing in relation to my level so far, this will likely happen some time after I hit the level cap.

Then there are my companions, whom I'd really like to be friends with, but I've made very little to no progress with that so far. I'm currently taking Aric everywhere and he's starting to grow on me, but still, he only just gave me his first companion quest. The others simply get to hang out on the ship and receive the occasional gift, but the feeling's not really there. I reckon that getting to know them properly is going to be a time-intensive process. I've also caught myself wondering what it would be like to level another trooper and make another companion my "main" who gets to go places with me, because I'd like to see how that changes the quest experience.

Then there are my crew skills. I've been trying to level them as I go along and on the whole it's been working well, but some of them have started to fall behind a little, and catching up will take time as well - quite literally, as missions and crafting take longer the higher your skill gets. Apparently there are some things about the system that are kind of wonky right now, but I think it's a fun enough mini-game, and the ability to reverse engineer everything into blue and purple versions of the same item may have limited usefulness but is a completionist's dream. Got to discover them all!

Money matters, which is something that I've found really refreshing. I've actually had to sometimes decide to put certain things on the backburner for a bit in order to afford something else that I wanted; for example I temporarily stopped training new skills and running crew skill missions at level 20 to save money for my first speeder, like the little helpful "beginner's tip" window suggested. Incidentally, that was incredibly well timed, because I started saving as soon as it popped up at 20 and ended up with pretty much exactly the right amount for my speeder plus training once I hit 25. Uncanny. I can already see a lot of money sinks that I can't afford right now but that I will enjoy working towards in the long run, such as more bag and bank space.

Finally, exploration also looks like it will be incredibly rewarding in the long run. I haven't really focused on it much right now, just making sure that I uncovered all the major areas on the map on each new planet, but I've only seen two holocrons (hidden items that give permanent stat boosts) so far and I'm sure that there are much more. My brother back in Austria, who plays too, actually talked to me on the phone about this one holocron on top of a sandcrawler on Tatooine and how you had to jump off a balloon to get it and I was just like... "What?" I hadn't even been to Tatooine yet by that point and had no idea what he was talking about; it just sounded mad. I still haven't looked into the details yet, but I heard someone talk in Tatooine general chat about how he and a Sith Warrior were staring each other down on the balloon and it just sounded funny. It feels like there's a whole world of crazy holocron-hunting hijinks out there, waiting to be discovered.

And then of course, there'll be flashpoints with friends. The other night I actually went back to the Esseles to help out a low-level friend and an alt who didn't have a single healing ability between the two of them. It wasn't exactly a boost, but I was certainly too high level to get any great benefit out of it - still, it felt good fun and I got to mock the goodie-two-shoes Jedi for trying to reason with a Sith. I mean, really? It's nice to experience group content for the fun of it again instead of grinding currency with strangers, and I expect to get a lot of mileage out of that even past the level cap.

There's a lot to look forward to in this galaxy far, far away... what are other people's long-term goals?

How much of a solo game is SWTOR anyway?

2011-12-22T20:23:00.008Z

I've been following blog posts about people's first impressions of SWTOR with interest, and as was to be expected, there are both features that people love and things that they hate. That's fine. However, there's one little argument that I see coming up every now and then that bugs me because I feel that it's truly based on nothing. The latest instance of this was in this post by Tobold, and even though several of his commenters already spoke up about it, I'd still like to dedicate a whole post to the subject regardless.

"SWTOR is just a big single-player RPG."

I'm not sure who originally coined this phrase, and to be fair, to a certain degree it's a fair assumption to make. The game was always advertised as being a lot like Bioware's single-player games, and if you've ever played any of those you're likely to think of features such as having personal conversations with NPCs and companions that follow you around because you're going to save the world together... surely that can't work well with other people around?

Well, yes and no. It is a bit weird that every trooper in the game potentially has the same cat-man following them around as I do. However, it's something that's easy enough to ignore, as it's not as if you get to listen in on everyone's private NPC conversations, and over time, people acquire a variety of companions that they can dress up in different outfits, so after a while they tend to look different enough that you hardly notice the similarities anymore. Not to mention that from a roleplaying point of view, different companions do kind of evolve into different people depending on how you treat them. My boyfriend's little helper may be called Aric too, but while his is a very happy fellow because my boyfriend's trooper does a lot of things he agrees with, mine is rather grouchy because he doesn't approve of the way I sometimes sass my superiors.

Talking to NPC quest givers in a group was also solved in a (in my opinion) very elegant manner - when I first saw this in action in a gameplay preview video, that was the tipping point that got me from "completely uninterested in SWTOR" to "I might just have to check this out". You basically pick what you want to say, dice are rolled, and whoever wins gets to speak and decide the outcome. If you are really concerned about possibly being subject to someone else's decisions, you can always chat with the NPCs separately, but personally I wouldn't want to because it's just so much more fun in a group. It tends to shine an interesting light on your fellow players' characters, as whether they decide to save or kill some innocent bystanders says a lot more about them than a 3000-word character biography ever would, and if people disagree with a decision it's always a good conversation starter. ("I can't believe you killed those engineers, you jerk! We're not in that much of a hurry!") You also earn a currency called social points, which is only good for some cosmetic rewards as far as I'm aware, but adds another layer of friendly competition to wanting to win conversation rolls.

Anyway, so far I've only detailed how two of the things that you would consider strictly single-player features aren't all that at odds with grouping, but more importantly, voiced NPC conversations and personal companions simply aren't all there is to the game!

There are optional group quests that are actually challenging in pretty much every sub-zone, and they can be repeated on a daily basis, so if another friend needs help with them the next day, you can help out and get rewarded again. (Keep in mind that this is different from daily quests, which are designed to make you repeat them.) Today my boyfriend and I were playing through one such area which had some pretty tough mobs in it and required some fighting back and forth, so when he spotted another group of players working their way towards us, he exclaimed: "Thank god, other players!" I laughed and asked him whether he could remember the last time he felt like saying that in a multi-player game.

Likewise, the flashpoints (instances) are very fun too, both due to the challenge and due to the group conversations. Conveniently, they all start with a shuttle from the fleet, which allows players to naturally congregate and form groups there for pretty much anything.

There are world raid bosses available across all levels. Our guild wanted to kill one of them last night but unfortunately for us he had already been taken down.

Also, I don't know how this will play out at higher levels, but at least during the lower half of the levelling game so far I've noticed that even though the game embraces the holy trinity, it's quite easy to plug holes in your group with an appropriate companion, as long as people play intelligently and are willing to compensate a little for the not-so-clever AI, so you can mostly work with whatever you have without having to worry too much about grouping with the "right" people.

Other than merely being fun, grouping also provides experience bonuses, and since most mobs actually put up a decent fight, forming a party makes things both more efficient and safer for your characters. At the same time the levelling speed seems close to Vanilla WoW to me, which means that you don't have to worry too much about outlevelling your friends by accident if you do anything at all without them, which gives both of you more freedom while still allowing you to play together continuously.

In conclusion, can you play SWTOR to the level cap completely on your own? Yes, but that's hardly news, is it? I believe that there was some outrage about this when WoW first did it in 2004, but this is 2011. The more important point is that there is still plenty of group content, and even the things that can be soloed are generally more fun to do with company (something that I don't find to be as true in current WoW anymore, for example). I don't know about you, but to me that's not un-MMO-like... in fact, it's exactly what I think a good MMO should be like. However, even if you don't agree, I would think that at the very least this kind of setup is anything but unusual and strange.

Introduction

2011-12-22T20:06:00.004Z

Hello, I'm Shintar and I used to play WoW and talk about it a lot - still do in fact, but not as much. For now, my imagination has been captured by Bioware's new MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and that's what I'm going to talk about here.

You have my significant other to ~~blame~~ thank for the awesome blog title, as he's English and they just love their puns. For those not in the know, Commando is one of the two advanced class options for the trooper in SWTOR, and what I'm playing as my main character right now. More specifically, she's a combat medic, because I seem to love healing no matter which game I'm playing.

The blog's layout will most likely still receive some tweaking, though I generally do like to keep it simple anyway.

Welcome!