Peace and Presents to All

I hope that everyone is getting to enjoy the holiday season in some form or another. Until last year I worked in retail, where this time of year meant more work, plus bans on the ability to take time off, so I definitely don't take it for granted to be able to spend additional time with my loved ones.

I got a nice game-y Christmas present this year too: an Android tablet. Sadly this doesn't offer any direct benefit to my SWTOR playing, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to use it for things like checking up on blogs during my lunch break, leaving me with more time to actually play in the evenings. I'll also have to start paying more attention to the multi-game blogs that I read - until now everything related to mobile gaming pretty much made my eyes glaze over as I don't own a smartphone, but now I'm obviously open to recommendations for my new tablet.

In SWTOR I haven't been doing much for Life Day, but I do have to say I'm kind of enjoying how they seem to be expanding on it slowly every year. Not every event has to be about doing quests. (In fact, designing all events by following the same formula runs a big risk of making them too samey.)

I like how they expanded on last year's snowball throwing for parcels with the "Overheated Gift Droids" on the capital worlds, which have a chance of giving you one of four Life Day tree decorations when you throw snowflakes at them. It's kind of funny to watch people move around en masse, pelting the droids with snowballs and then trying to find the next spawn as soon as possible. After getting the one hundred parcel achievement last year, I felt a bit burnt out on throwing snowballs this time around, but I still managed to get several of each of the new decorations already.

Bioware's Cartel Market offerings for the season seem to have become better as well, and their new Life Day Bundle is great. I think it shows that strongholds were a good investment for them in terms of the Cartel Market because the introduction of decorations makes it much easier to create "themed" items, without having to reach quite so hard to come up with a suitable speeder or outfit. I mean, how awesome is that wampa rug? If I could buy that separately I would carpet my whole stronghold with wampas. (I'm joking... or am I?) The only disappointment in my opinion has been the "12 days of SWTOR" sale that they've been advertising on the forums, mostly because it includes nothing but Cartel packs, and even those don't exactly have huge discounts on them. But oh well, I guess we can file that one away as another one of their "sales tactics experiments". (Then again, looking at Dulfy's comment section, it might actually have earned Bioware a nice amount of cash already.)

Happy Life Day, everyone!