Going Digital

Via Oldrep.de (warning: German!), I found out that it's currently still possible to upgrade from the standard edition of the game to Digital Deluxe for only €1.99. Looking at my own account page, this turned out to be £2.99 for UK customers (~€3.8 at the time of writing this - guys, you're doing this currency conversion thing wrong), but I still decided to go for it.

You might find it surprising to hear that someone who's continuously been subscribed to SWTOR since the beginning and who loves it enough to maintain a fan blog about it only owned the standard edition of the game until now, but I don't have a lot of money in real life and was brought up to be extremely frugal. Needless to say that paying extra for a game just to earn some in-game item that I might never use, or to obtain real life swag that will only end up gathering dust on a shelf has never appealed to me.

For three quid though, knowing that I do enjoy the game and with the added bonus of some extra cartel coins for the upcoming F2P conversion, I decided to go for it. The main reason I wanted to upgrade was actually the wristband to get access to the VIP lounge on the fleet, which is a feature that has been bugging me for a long time. While statistically most people I meet should only have the standard edition of the game like me, I somehow kept running into lots of players who had one of the upgraded versions and were constantly flaunting that fact in my face, whether intentionally or not. (Quote: "What do you mean, not everyone can take the lift up here?!") Not to mention that time when I found out that the cantina jukebox for the fleet can also only be accessed from the VIP lounge. Cruel!

Yes, I know that you can buy access via a stupid amount of credits in game, but I don't have that many virtual millions to throw away either. Paying three pounds to get automatic access for all my characters was definitely worth it.

After I scooped the Digital Deluxe goodies out of my mailbox on the first character I had logged onto after making the purchase, I immediately took the lift up into the lounge and the following conversation ensued between me and my significant other:

Me: "Finally I, too, can access this mysterious lounge from where silly people like to throw themselves to their deaths on the fleet below! Aha, there is a vendor over there... oh right, this one's only for CE owners. Oh well."
[I jump down onto what looks like a piece of tarpaulin spanning the cantina below.]
Him: "What are you doing now?"
Me: "Nothing."
Him: "That doesn't look like nothing."
Me: "I just want to see for myself."
Him: "What was that about silly people falling to their deaths?"
[I try to make the jump to a ledge that looks safe, miss it and fall to my death.]
Me: "Shut up."