Following The News

I've realised that for someone who's enough of a fan of SWTOR to maintain a personal blog about it, I'm pretty bad at keeping up with news about the game. For example it was on Massively of all places that I read about the fact that access to Rise of the Hutt Cartel content will be given to subscribers for free from now on. I'm kind of wondering how that is going to work in practice. If you're on Makeb and let your subscription lapse, will you get booted off the planet?

Of course there were the usual complaints about how this is a slap in the face of the people who did pay for it, yadda yadda yadda, though there was a surprising amount of reasonable opposition as well this time around. Yes, seeing something drop in price compared to what you personally paid for it is always a bit disappointing, but it's also something that happens all the time, not just in video games. Nobody goes around complaining to real life shops about how they dare to drop their prices over time (or at least I hope nobody does). Anyway, RotHC cost very little to begin with, and weren't we going on about how subscribers should automatically get access to all the content anyway? Better late than never I say.

What was I talking about again? Ah yes, news. Back when I played World of Warcraft, I basically just followed WoW Insider and that provided me with everything I wanted to know. Whatever else you want to say about that site, it's comprehensive in its news reporting about the game and offers a good balance between news and opinion pieces. Unfortunately I haven't really found anything comparable for The Old Republic. I think TORWars has been giving it a good go, but it's a bit hit and miss in its reporting (which I can't really blame them for, it's run by what, two people) and I have to admit that I'm not very fond of the site's layout.

The game's official communications channels are actually pretty good: I like the articles on the website, including the more whimsical ones like the recent interviews with Baron Deathmark - bonus points for choosing a quest giver from Ord Mantell to be the interviewer! I just don't like how they tend to send you back and forth between the official website and places like Facebook and Twitter. Who has time to keep up with all of that? The only time I regularly check the official Twitter feed is when it's server maintenance day and I want to know when they'll come back up. And of course there is always a lot of interesting information that they won't report on the official site.

Lately the official forums have contained some very interesting stuff as well, what with the whole election of class representatives and the class Q&As. However, who genuinely wants to read the official forums all the time? So I only ever hear about updates on there when a guildie decides to tell me.

How do you keep up with the state of the game?