Three days on The Red Eclipse and I'm actually quite happy. I can't overstate the huge quality of life improvement that is short and reliable warzone queues. Since my initial bad run of eight losses in a row, things have evened out considerably and I've seen a lot of wins too. I don't mind the weaker players on my team anymore, and I laugh when poorly geared opponents make me feel like a goddess among men. I'm also starting to see more really good players on our side, and I'm amazed at how many of them are pretty much kitted out in full War Hero. Back on Luka Sene not even the hardest of the hardcore had that, simply because even if you sat in the queue all day you only got a limited amount of matches in and thus limited rewards. Suddenly the idea of owning a full War Hero set of my own eventually doesn't seem like a complete pipe dream anymore.
Still, I don't quite feel "at home" yet - I greet people whose names I recognise from Luka Sene, but the vast majority of the masses on the fleet remain a bunch of strangers. I believe that this will improve over time though. I'm taking note of people with memorable or weird names already (such as Mr Widdlywee of the Widdlywee Legacy, or the guy who has characters called Whalepoo and Whaleballs), and the other day I had an awesome team-building experience when I ended up in a random warzone with no Jedi. Who thought that such a thing was even possible? Seven troopers and a gunslinger made for a slightly odd group composition, but we had a good laugh about it and won by a landslide. I also memorised the name of the guy who kept putting guard on me as someone to watch out for in future games who should receive healing priority above all others.
On the PvE front, I actually pugged a couple of low-level flashpoints and heroics. I was surprised by how pleasant it was, and then I felt silly for being surprised. It's easy to forget that pugging wasn't always a complete nightmare and still doesn't have to be. Funny how even a short break from pugging made my expectations briefly revert to what they were in WoW instead of anticipating more of the goodness that is TOR pugging. I think there is a dedicated term for this in psychology.
As it was, I had a lot of fun. I think my favourite bit was three-manning a Nar Shadaa four-man heroic with no crowd control and a companion healer. When we stood in front of the first pull there was a bit of an "oh crap" moment when we realised the full extent of our predicament, but we marked up a focus target and decided to give it a go anyway. What a triumph that was when we survived even the patrol that added to the pull by accident!
I'm actually kind of looking forward to the group finder patch tomorrow... maybe foolishly so, but I'm thinking that with the sheer size of the server now, it might actually have a sufficiently large pool of players to work with while still leaving people with a sense of accountability that might prevent some of the worst possible asshattery.
My guild has also felt somewhat invigorated, and we had our first one-night clear of Explosive Conflict on Friday, which provided me with some more video editing material.
Basically, all is well in my (game) world, and despite of all my initial worries I consider this server transfer a success for me personally. I'm still a bit concerned about the effect that all those empty servers will have on the influx of new players, but then there is nothing I can do about that. I'll start talking about things other than server transfers again, I promise!
(As a side note, after all the bellyaching I did about the subject, I was vaguely amused by this post by Liore about server-transferring in Rift. In some ways it's like night and day.)
Glad to hear you are taking to your new server. PvP has benefitted greatly from the transfers imo. The only thing is, I remember the days of beating the crap out of the republic, it seems that they have caught up in the PvP talent department and we are losing as many as we are winning. But it sure is fun :)
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