Happy 2nd Blogday to me!

Aaand like last year, my "happy birthday, SWTOR" post is immediately followed by me celebrating the anniversary of me starting this blog.

I've talked about how the game has been doing in general in my last post, so let's have a look at how I've been doing within the game, or at least what sort of stuff I've been writing about:

I started the (blog) year by writing about how I celebrated Christmas raiding with my guild and spent the holidays bickering with a guildie (who would later go on to become my "pet tank" and a very important person in my life).

In January, I participated in a ranked warzone for the first time and it didn't go very well. Pet Tank and I went to Ilum shortly before they revamped it for the Gree event and I mused about what a strange experience it was. PvE-wise, I was wiping in EC NiM and I made a silly video about it which people in my guild like to reference to this day. ("Medpack!")

February was an exciting month. I attended the SWTOR Community Cantina in London (a real life adventure, oh my god), though it wasn't actually that amazing. After lots of wiping I finally got to kill some bosses in EC NiM, and made a silly video about that as well. I realised that after all the duoing I'd done, questing on my own drove me up the wall. The Gree Event was a thing for the first time, and I wrote about it both during the event as well as afterwards. I also had a heart-warming encounter with a known PvP rager who turned out to not be a complete jerkwad after all.

March saw me getting the "Drouk Hunter" title at last, only three months or so late compared to many of my guildies. Bioware started to run double XP weekends in the run-up to the first expansion and I complained about it, outing myself as a levelling hipster. So while other people were racing their newest alt to the level cap, I kept myself busy doing silly things like playing with the /boogie emote in warzones.

In April, Rise of the Hutt Cartel was released, and my first impression was that Makeb was pretty, but Imps ganking me in their undies were less so. We engaged in a silly little guild adventure fighting a world boss that isn't really a world boss, who also happened to be bugged at the time and spammed the entire zone with giant red error messages. When I visited my family in Austria (oh noes, more real life stuff), SWTOR gave me an opportunity to reconnect with my brother.

In May I was suffering from some Operations Blues, while also conceding that I didn't completely hate the new achievement system implemented with RotHC. More than a month after expansion release I also finally completed the Seeker Droid and Macrobinocular quest chains, and found the heroics at the end surprisingly fun.

June saw me trying out the tanking role and going a little crazy in the process. I also encountered SWTOR's first poo quest.

In July I began giving some more thought to how to dress my companions for the first time. More double XP weekends led to my pet tank and me playing our max level characters almost compulsively, leaving us with the feeling that we had pretty much "beaten the game" when we finally ran out of quests. I mused on just how badly some level fifty flashpoints have been nerfed over time, and whether free to play had really changed the game in any significant way.

In August I blogged about "The Other Shintar" for the first time, the guy to whom I lost my name during the server transfers. A new recurring world event was added, Bounty Contract Week. I went absolutely nuts with it, played alts until I had enough tokens to max out the associated reputation and haven't been back since. We also went back to EC NiM and finally killed Kephess - better late than never.

In September I experimented with dressing my companions so that they looked like actual players and gathered some data on just how badly the Republic was losing in warzones on my server. The answer was: quite badly.

October saw me trying out arenas despite of my initial scepticism about the feature, and I didn't have too bad a time. Nonetheless I haven't done much PvP since then. Galactic Starfighter was announced to most people's surprise, and I completed the last of the class stories.

In November, I complained about Bioware sending my characters too much junk many "goodies" and rejoiced when I finally found a way to reliably take screenshots of the game.

Finally, this December I've been comparatively quiet for personal reasons, but I did write about how awful I was at Galactic Starfighter once it released, and how I tried to have some fun with it anyway.

Let's hope the next year will be just as interesting!