Day 10: Death #IntPiPoMo

Wondering what the hashtag in the title is all about? Click here. Want to know all the themes that I have used for my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots? You can find the full list here.

Time for my last IntPiPoMo post! Don't worry, thoughts on the new patch will follow next month - which starts tomorrow!

For a change of pace, I thought I'd start the death-themed post not with one of my own deaths, but instead with that of an NPC. Bioware sure allowed the player characters to run amok during KotET, letting us kill people left and right if we wanted to do so!

I already posted pictures of my guild wiping on hardmode Master and Blaster last year. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I just liked how we remained on fire here even after death, because clearly we weren't dead enough yet.

I saved this screenshot because I liked how my character managed to look somewhat dejected even in death. Damn that bonus boss in master mode Crisis on Umbara...

This one I liked because generally when you fall to your death on Esne and Aivela, you just die instantly without actually reaching the floor, so I was amused and surprised when I actually did hit rock bottom for a change and got to have a look around the scenery there for a bit.

A regular wipe on Esne and Aivela looks more like this instead. Still haven't killed them on veteran mode, but we also decided to give these two a break for a while some time ago. We'll get them eventually.

Final IntPiPoMo count: 77

Day 9: Silly #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

You know what the "silly" theme means, right? Time for some "interesting" character names and chat!

Not a bad likeness, though I'd see him as more of a Scoundrel than a Sith warrior...

Also: Full pun points for this guy.

Nothing to do with names, just an interesting thing to see on one of the rare occasions that I looked at general chat.

One time after rolling a new character I encountered two lowbie smugglers duelling right outside the cantina on Ord Mantell. Both had their Corso set to healing and were therefore unable to damage each other in any meaningful way. I just found that amusing.

This is me looking longingly after a dead mob that my pet tank knocked to its death inside a Star Fortress. Most of my guildies consider my obsession to not leave any shinies behind ridiculous, but at times like these, it's a hard life...

People who've run Eternity Vault many times will probably be familiar with the trash skipping run inside the jungle biome. I swear Bioware is aware of it as well and tries to sabotage it every so often, because I'm reasonably certain that those manka cats weren't always where they are now! Anyway, during one such run I was amused that someone had actually highlighted part of the way with some  raid markers in an attempt to prevent people from pulling adds or falling into the lava. Not that that ever works...
 

Some people might feel embarrassed when running into someone else wearing the same outfit as themselves, but not me! In fact, I was absolutely delighted when I randomly encountered this handsome chap on the fleet who just happened to wear the exact same set of gear as me and with the same dye in it as well. It wasn't even something from the Cartel Market, so what were the odds?

Trying to take selfies while mounted can lead to strange results, that's all I'm saying.

IntPiPoMo count: 72

MMOs I've Played

While this blog is about Star Wars: The Old Republic, and SWTOR is the game I spend by the far the most time on these days, I have on occasion tried other MMOs. Sometimes I've even talked about the experience on here, but not always. Either way, I thought it would be interesting to write a little summary of all the MMOs I've tried over the years. It's not that many in the grand scheme of things, because I'm ridiculously picky when it comes to even trying a new game, but there's almost always a funny story there.

World of Warcraft

Alright, so I won't say that much about this one other than that it's where it all began in 2006. My first MMO and I loved it. I played nothing else for several years. I learned what raiding was and enjoyed it. I met people and fell in love. I moved to a different country. Playing WoW helped me find a job. It changed my life.

However, by 2012, I didn't like it all that much anymore and made the move to SWTOR. I went back once during Mists of Pandaria because my pet tank gifted me a couple of months of play time (I think to spite me after we'd had an argument about pandas). In 2015, I discovered private servers and the Vanilla WoW retro experience, something I engaged with on and off again. I'm looking forward to WoW Classic now.

I also have a blog about it, where I wrote about my adventures regularly from 2009 to 2011 and where I also documented the above-mentioned MoP stint and my private server adventures.

Champions Online

In 2009, I still wasn't really interested in playing anything other than WoW, but my then-boyfriend gifted me a copy of Champions Online for some reason, so we tried that together. I created a character called Val(k)yrie and took a screenshot of her. I also created another character, a little green reptile person, of whom I unfortunately never took a screenshot. The character creator seemed pretty amazing.

Unfortunately, the game was utterly unplayable for me. In theory, my old PC met the minimum requirements, but even with the graphics turned down, the game was nothing but a slideshow and my input with keyboard and mouse only caused erratic responses, if any at all. I struggled to even move around and only made it through the starter area by basically having my partner complete all the quests for me while I clumsily tagged along. When we moved on to the next area, I fell off the platform we arrived on and somehow managed to wedge myself into a corner I couldn't get out of, not with how unreliable the movement controls were for me anyway. I sighed and logged off, never to be seen again.

It's a testament to the strength of the character creator that I actually found myself missing those barely-played characters in a burst of nostalgia the other day, to the point that I contacted Cryptic's customer service to ask if my account could still be recovered somehow. (When I downloaded the game and logged in, with the same credentials I used back in the day, nothing was there.) The answer seemed to be "maybe", but only if I created an entirely new Arc account because for some reason they couldn't link my old account to my current one. That was more effort than I was willing to go to in the end.

Warhammer Online

Fun fact: Warhammer Online was what got me into World of Warcraft. How does that work? Well, my boyfriend at the time was into tabletop gaming and introduced me to the world of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. Somehow, while reading up on these online, I came across the site for a game called Warhammer Online, which sounded amazing! Unfortunately it was still several years away from release. But there was this similar game called World of Warcraft... the rest is history.

By the time WAR actually came out, I was way too engrossed in WoW to care about anything else. Though I remember a friend of mine playing it and getting all glassy-eyed when he told me about his dwarf standing shoulder to shoulder with other dwarves to hold off an orc attack, saying it was the most fun he'd ever had in PvP.

Anyway, I did eventually get around to trying the game, but not until early 2011, by which point it offered a free trial. It wasn't easy to find though, as EA seemed to already have more or less abandoned maintaining the website at the time.

Again, my then-boyfriend and I went in as a team, me as a warrior priest and him as a bright wizard. The starter area seemed okay, though not particularly exciting. I do remember being impressed by the first public event we encountered, as I hadn't seen anything like it before, though I also remember the scoreboard it had being super confusing to me.

However, by the time we got to the next area, the population thinned out drastically, and the next public event we encountered proved too much for just the two of us. (These things didn't scale at the time.) We made a note to come back later, but then never did. RIP WAR.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

No need to go into any detail on this one, that's what this whole blog is about!

Neverwinter

Initially it looked like Neverwinter was going to be just another experiment with friends, as everyone including myself lost interest in it within a month, but then we came back to try again and since then I've never entirely gone off it. I have a blog about this one as well, though I only update it sporadically, just like I'm going through phases of playing the game a lot or not at all.

I think it complements SWTOR very well on my gaming menu in that it's completely different - not just because of fantasy vs. sci-fi but also in that its appeal lies very much in the moment-to-moment gameplay/combat, while the story is rather weak, which is pretty much the opposite of how SWTOR works. It's also the game that taught me what it's like to play something casually but still be attached to it. Before that I never truly understood how someone could like an MMO but not want to go all in with it and play it all the time. Neverwinter showed me how that can work.

Star Trek Online

I was pulled into STO by my pet tank and he more or less carried me all the way to the level cap. I wrote a post about it at the time. In hindsight it's a bit surprising to me just how positive that post ended up sounding, because in the end I left the game with a somewhat sour feeling. I seem to remember that it had just had an update, with me once again expecting my pet tank to help me through the new content, but he got distracted by something else, so I eventually just logged off with a sigh... and never came back.

While I liked the setting, I just couldn't abide the combat, whether on the ground or in space. I'd like to say that to me, gameplay doesn't matter as much in an MMO as things like setting, but STO proved me wrong in so far as it showed me that no matter how much I like the setting, if I can't log in and simply have some fun playing, even while on my own, it's just not going to last. The things I actually remember liking the most were the little mini games involved in scanning space anomalies and mining dilithium, flying around searching for good duty officer missions and chasing epohhs on New Romulus, none of which had anything to do with the core game.

Elder Scrolls Online

My relationship with ESO is weird. I have no connection to the Elder Scrolls franchise and had no interest in playing this at first, but a friend gifted me a beta key so I thought I'd give it a try for a weekend so his gift wouldn't feel wasted. And I liked it quite a lot! This was during the period when everyone was bashing it as buggy, boring and uninspired, mind you. Even though I knew that I wasn't going to play it at launch, I vowed to myself that I was going to keep an eye on it.

Some time after it dropped the mandatory subscription and reduced its box price, I bought a copy from Amazon. I didn't actually have enough disk space to install it at the time, but again I told myself that I was going to get around to it eventually.

Finally, after another one and a half years of the game sitting shrink-wrapped next to my desk, I had a chance to install it. By now, people had also changed their minds about it and were praising it as so much better than at launch! I logged in, amused to find myself gifted with a free monkey pet for having participated in the beta more than three years ago, played through the tutorial... and then logged off again, never to return.

I'm still telling myself that I'll get back to it eventually, but I just haven't felt any itch to return to it at all since I actually played the live version. Maybe all that waiting caused me to subconsciously hype it up in my head to expect more from it than it could deliver and that's why I ended up disappointed when I actually logged in again? Sometimes I don't quite understand myself.

Lord of the Rings Online

I wrote about trying out LOTRO earlier this year. We were having a reasonably good time with it, even though it was really showing its age by overwhelming new players with lots of confusing systems. I ended that post by noting that we were going to try the first dungeon next.

That's another funny story actually. Everyone kept telling us not to use the group finder because "nobody uses it". I took this with a grain of salt in the same way that "nobody" uses the group finder to get random ops groups in SWTOR - the experienced players mostly form their groups in chat, but there are people queueing through the interface too. These groups are just rarer and more prone to failure. I really wanted to see whether LOTRO worked the same way, plus I was honestly a bit shy about putting a group together in chat since I knew so little about the different classes and what sort of setup would be desirable.

The problem turned out to be this: We couldn't actually figure out how to use the group finder interface. How silly is that? Our one attempt to use it just ended up teleporting us inside the instance with only the two of us. That didn't go so well. I actually went to reddit afterwards to ask for advice and it turned out that we had used the wrong one of the many tabs of LOTRO's group finder tool. I planned to give it another try later, but then Secret World Legends came out and my pet tank was all over that instead, so LOTRO fell by the wayside. I still want to conquer the Great Barrow some day.

Secret World Legends

I wrote a first impressions post about that one as well, but unlike with LOTRO we've managed to stay surprisingly loyal to it. We don't play every weekend, but we have kept coming back to it and are nearly done with Tokyo now. I have a post in my drafts folder that details my "second impressions" of the game, which I will put up whenever we manage to finish the current storyline.

I think the takeaway from this history of my MMO experiences is that it takes a strong IP as well as social hooks for me to want to try something new, and both friends and fun gameplay to make me want to hang around. I guess with people like me it's not surprising that new games are having a hard time establishing themselves in a crowded market.

Day 8: Memorable Moments #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

This day's theme is always interesting because a lot of my memorable moments relate to raiding, so I'm always curious how much else I'll be able to come up with. I didn't do too badly this time I think.

First off, we have this simple moment of encountering a particularly interesting individual on the fleet. I'm not usually in the habit of inspecting other people's achievements, but a guildie had done so and drew attention to the fact that this guy had 100% completion on absolutely everything except Iokath, but that had only just come out a few days ago at the time this happened. I'm still amazed that someone like that even exists, considering how varied and sometimes challenging some of the achievements are. That this person was in a guild called "Not Good Enough" only added a delicious bit of irony.

Here is me mastering my very first ship on Imperial side. This wasn't even that long ago! I just don't play that much GSF, and I've hardly played at all on Imp side. However, Galactic Command has made it really attractive to play the occasional match on a character whose Command level you're trying to increase, especially if GSF is the bonus activity of the day. By now, I'm not far off mastering the rest of the ships in this character's hangar either.

Okay, this is a bad memory, but there's nothing in the rules to say that all the memories have to be nice ones. It does make for a good story though. If you enlarge the screenshot, you'll see that my team ended this match with zero kills, while the highest placed person on the enemy team finished with 99. Yes, you read that correctly, ninety-nine kills for one person in a single match! How did that happen?

Well, somehow we ended up in an incredibly unbalanced Voidstar, pointlessly smashing our heads against the wall during the initial attack round with no chance in hell of getting anywhere. At least when that happens, the second round is usually over really quickly because you get steamrolled on defense too, and the game ends as soon as the enemy breaches the first door. The problem here was that the Imps decided that they didn't actually care about the objective because they were going to win on kills anyway and instead chose to prolong the match as much as possible by completely ignoring the door so they could farm kills instead. The reason I "only" died six times is that once I realised what was happening, I went to hide in a corner instead of throwing myself into the meat grinder over and over again. Stuff like this is why PvPers have a reputation for being jerks.

This is my Sorcerer during KotFE chapter 14 and the reason this moment was memorable to me was that it was the first time I realised how to do the bonus mission in this area properly - only took me five runs or so... The bonus objective in question is to either kill skytroopers or to destroy their assembly line, and I had always felt forced to go with killing the troopers simply because I couldn't figure out how to destroy the assembly line! Turns out the problem was once again that I simply don't look up enough.

This is Shintank, the character I created on Tomb of Freedon Nadd for the Hammer Station Experiment. That was memorable! Now that she got merged into the rest of my legacy I'm actually not sure what to do with her...

Finally, this is me coming out as top damage on my dps Commando in an Ancient Hypergate! This isn't really something to be proud of because I only ended up so high because nobody else hit very high numbers and the enemy let me free-cast a lot. Still, considering I hardly ever even play as dps, that was definitely a result worth screenshotting!

IntPiPoMo count: 62

Day 7: Team #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

As always with this theme, I have to start with my pet tank. I like how this shot makes it look like my character is gazing up at him adoringly. I already bemoaned last year that his interest in the game had been waning and that he was only really logging in for operations most of the time, yet another year's gone by and here we are still. I'm not letting him get away!

Funnily enough, playing relatively little doesn't stop my pet tank from spending money on the game. I'm always baffled when he suddenly whips out a mount from the newest hypercrate. I absolutely fell in love with the Mighty Kath Hound when I first saw him on one and decided to buy one for myself on the GTN. So we've been riding matching mounts for most of the past year.

I'm so glad they included some of these group cut scenes in Crisis on Umbara, even if they sadly don't have any dialogue. Love all the exaggerated faces our characters make in them!

When my guildies and I aren't running new flashpoints, we're still goofing off in operations several times a week. I realised the other day that last month it's actually been five years since I joined my guild. Would you believe it?

This selection of screenshots kind of makes it look like I only play with my pet tank and my guild nowadays, but that's not true. However, I've been taking fewer screenshots of my random groups since I started recording videos about them (because it feels a bit redundant) and my community collaborations in the past year were all of the non-photogenic kind (being a guest on not one, but two podcasts!). Still, food for thought, hmm...

IntPiPoMo count: 56 - that's the target of 50 hit once again, but I got three more days of themed screenshots to go!

Three Cheers for Swtorista

In case you've never heard of Swtorista - maybe because you're only playing SWTOR very casually; I can hardly fathom another reason - she is one of the game's biggest community contributors these days and recently got to celebrate hitting 20,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel (which has been sitting on my sidebar under "SWTOR Content on YouTube" for quite a while now). I have to admit that I haven't actually watched that many of her videos myself, because a lot of them are geared towards new players which means that I'm not really the target audience, but it's still great to see someone be such a force for good in the community, always bursting with positive energy and being interested in what people have to say. Also, she mains a trooper. Do I even need to add anything else?

Anyway, as is her style, she celebrated her new subscriber milestone by being generous and holding many giveaways, but also with some events. Yesterday I spotted that one of them was happening just an hour before my usual ops time, an easy time to jump in and have a look!

The premise was simple: Meet on Tatooine and do the "no bones" dance together, which Swtorista says is her favourite. Since it's an emote that has to be unlocked, she even hoarded a lot of them to give out for free so people would be able to join the dancing without having to spend any money. Fortunately I didn't require one because I have most of the emotes unlocked account-wide, I just don't always remember to go in and claim them until I actually want to dance and notice that everything is greyed out. And yes, I did have an eligible character on the Star Forge, where the event was being held, because that's where my Cathar Commando from the Ebon Hawk has ended up after the merges.

I arrived on Tatooine pretty bang on time and was surprised to be put into instance five of the planet already. I mean, we all know how the game's instancing works on a basic level, but it was kind of surprising how quickly it started spawning new ones. Tatooine 5 hadn't even hit 50 people by the time Tatooine 6 started showing up.

People starting to gather in instance 5.

Swtorista herself was in Tatooine 1 of course, which was a bit disappointing for everyone who couldn't make it there. However, at one point she hit on the fact that the game would give some leeway if you were friends with a person in another instance and announced this on chat. I added her to my friends list and bingo! Immediately the game prompted me to transfer to Tatooine 1, despite of it showing as full on the map menu. Unfortunately there still seemed to be a hard cap on how many people it would let into a single instance of the planet, as I never saw Tatooine 1 go above 99, and I don't think everyone in the other instances was just that bad at following instructions.

Stalking the hostess.

I thought about saying hi, but there were so many people shouting in chat, all wanting to see Swtorista of course, that I decided things were probably overwhelming enough as it were and I was just going to "hang out" and enjoy the event. Emotes were handed out all around, though not everyone was happy: Some people discovered too late that completely free-to-play accounts weren't allowed to trade and therefore couldn't receive the emote either way. I think some of the attendees in the other instances also felt a bit abandoned, which I could understand. Obviously Swtorista could only be in one place at a time, but I didn't really understand why she couldn't send some of the "assistants" she had brought into the other instances to hand out emotes there too and provide some direction. Then again, there seemed to be talk happening on voice chat on top of all the shouting in text chat, which I wasn't privy to, so maybe it was explained there.

Either way, eventually most people in instance 1 at least were ready to do the dance, so we did! It was just a bit of silliness and didn't last long, but it was still fun to just see so many players coming together out in the world. The whole thing really highlighted the limitations of SWTOR's instancing system however - while it makes perfect sense to limit the number of people in one place at any given time to avoid overcrowding in daily areas and such, when you just want to have a social gathering it's not very fun to be forcefully kept apart. I guess Bioware wants us to stick to the fleet, which is intended to be a social space and supports much bigger numbers.

In any case, it was a memorable little event (they went on to do some more things afterwards I think, but by then it was time for my guild's ops night), so thanks, Swtorista! Here's to your next ten thousand subscribers.

Day 6: Environments #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

While we spend relatively little time in space in SWTOR, I always find the view from space, usually showing our ship(s) approaching a planet, absolutely gorgeous. Here we have the Gravestone and the Eternal Fleet approaching the Dyson Sphere of Iokath for the first time.

I really love the overgrown parts of Iokath you get to explore in KotET chapter four. It's a shame that there isn't more of that later on; it's all so pretty. (Also, only tangentially related: While I don't consider my Marauder very photogenic in general, she has a way of looking great in shots like this that focus on her silhouette. Or is it just me?)

Also on Iokath, but inside the Gods from the Machine operation. Despite of having said it many times, I'm still bad at following my own advice to look up more often. The first time I noticed this massive contraption on the ceiling of Tyth's room, I went "whoaaa" and drew the whole group's attention to it, leading to a discussion of what exactly Tyth needs a giant extractor fan for.

The ceiling in Esne and Aivela's room is similarly impressive.

Everyone knows that Alderaan is easily one of the most gorgeous planets in the game, but here, too, you can be surprised by looking up occasionally. Even if flying space whale/ray hybrids are ridiculous.

Sticking with the theme of looking up, here's my Cathar agent pausing on her way to confront her chapter three baddies for the final time to take in the chandeliers. I think that's the same or at least a similar style to what they use in the Shrine of Healing on Voss...

This was taken on Balmorra. It looks eerily pretty in a way, doesn't it? As long as you don't start thinking about the fact that the green stuff dripping from the ceiling is Colicoid goo...

Finally, it was Rav who highlighted last year that many places on Zakuul have a certain beauty to them that most people probably don't even notice while rushing through the story chapters. So I took a break during KotET chapter nine to appreciate this "indoor park" before continuing on my way to save the planet.

IntPiPoMo count: 46

Day 5: NPCs #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

I had this idea for a post called "my five favourite Nautolan NPCs" or something along those lines at one point, but then I realised that I didn't actually have screenshots of most of them and I was too lazy to go out hunting for the right pictures. One such NPC that I do have a picture of is Leeha Narezz from the Jedi knight story. She seems like a bit of a one-note character at first with her droid obsession, but later it turns out that there was more to her than meets the eye... 

 

Colonel Grezor is another interesting Nautolan, I think the only one of his species we see working for the Empire. You meet him during the introductory mission to Explosive Conflict for Imperials.

Nautolans would totally be my pick for next playable species. Aren't we way overdue for one anyway? I can't believe it's been more than two years since Togruta Day! I still tend to think of them as the new guys...

Oh, Arcann, how far you've come. The other day I stumbled upon an old post of mine where I expressed pure horror at the fact that someone had found my blog while googling whether they could romance Arcann. Why would you even want to? I asked. To be fair, I feel that during the KotFE days this was definitely the sensible question to ask. However, redeemed Arcann is a very different man, and since apparently a large percentage of players decided to redeem him, a romance actually appears to be in the cards now. How times change.

Raid bosses are NPCs too! I've said before that I don't think Gods from the Machine gets enough love, but I've been quite charmed by everything I've seen of it so far, even if we're very much behind schedule in terms of bosses released. I'm looking forward to the next one coming out soon.

I didn't even note down the name of this Twi'lek NPC on Balmorra, but I took a screenshot of her because I really liked her look. Despite of the multitude of different customisations available for the species, I find that a lot of Twi'lek NPCs look incredibly samey - always body type one or two, with cute faces and usually blue, pink or green. So I liked this Balmorran resistance fighter in yellowish tones and sporting one of the bigger body types, like my own Twi'leks. (Fun fact: I rather dislike body type one on Twi'leks. I find that they look awkwardly out of proportion when their lekku are almost as thick as their whole body.)

IntPiPoMo count: 38

Approaches to Levelling

The other day the subject of how people level came up on Twitter. Or at least it was "the other day" when I wrote the first draft of this post... by now it's been quite a bit longer already. Either way, the point was that I didn't really follow the conversation then, but the subject remained on the back of my mind and got me thinking about my own levelling.

When I first started playing and created Shintar the Commando, I would say my play style was what you could call exploratory. I wanted to see as many different things as possible, including group content and PvP, but I wasn't hung up on any kind of completionism, skipping both Taris and Alderaan in their entirety except for my class story. I figured that being over-levelled wasn't going to be very fun, and there were always going to be alts. I didn't do Taris's main and bonus story arc for the first time until I levelled my Guardian, and Alderaan on my Sage. This way I eventually explored all the game had to offer, sticking my nose into different types of content with every new alt.

Then my pet tank and I became an item, and he infected me with his completionism. We levelled a couple of characters by doing all the quests on every planet, over-levelling be damned. However, eventually he lost his taste for that and when left to my own devices I returned to picking and choosing whatever I fancied at the time, while sticking to the class story as my guiding thread. With XP gains getting buffed, I actually needed to do less and less to keep up with it, but the changes did allow me to revisit some class stories that I had already completed with relative ease. However, there were only so many times I really wanted to replay the same class story in quick succession.

Last year's Dark vs. Light event managed to reinvigorate my interest in levelling by inviting me not to care about the class story for a change and to simply chase levels. For the sake of the achievement I revelled in things like doing lowbie PvP and flashpoints, where I played with the handicap of a limited skill set and unfamiliar specs, and I had a right blast doing so.

However, in the end the whole experience also left me feeling a bit adrift. The class story always served as a sort of anchor for my levelling. I would even say that story is more important in SWTOR than levels themselves. The progression of the two systems used to largely line up, so their separation wasn't that noticeable for me, but nowadays you'll run out of levels to work on long before you've even scratched the surface of all the story threads.

What point is there then in rolling up more alts if I haven't even bothered to re-experience all the stories with my existing ones? If I did want to re-play the consular for a third time for example, I couldn't help but think of the consulars I already have and that haven't even finished their story, even though they sit at high levels. It's a bit of an awkward situation. Part of why I've been able to throw myself into my new flashpoint levelling series with so much vigour is that it's allowed me to level another character with a purpose. If I want to chase levels just for the sake of chasing levels, Galactic Command offers plenty of opportunity for that at the level cap these days.

Sometimes I think that my best bet might well be to try out alt life on another server for a bit - except that there are fewer of those around now than ever. Not having a huge legacy of pre-existing characters lends the whole exercise at least some semblance of freshness, and I suppose I could work towards getting Legendary Player status a second time or something...

What motivates you to create new alts after you've more or less seen it all?

Day 4: Missions & Conversations #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

Most of these are going to be from Knights of the Eternal Throne, seeing how that's been the big expansion since I last posted pictures for this challenge. Whatever else you want to say about it, it features some beautifully framed cut scenes that make for some great screenshots, like this one of my Marauder Arrah dreaming of a throne room in flames.

 

While this screenshot doesn't really do it justice, I was also really impressed by the intro to chapter one, with the way it shows your shuttle weaving through the space battle above Voss.

 

I even enjoy the look of simple scenes like characters just talking to each other. For example I really like the way my Guardian Fali is framed here while talking to Vette.

Not a cinematic scene, but the curing of Bergola in chapter six is one of my favourite "Easter Eggs" in recent content. If you don't know what that is about, Calph has a detailed guide!

(Sort of) speaking of pets, I purchased my first ever companion from the Cartel Market this year, and I was pleasantly surprised by how acquiring it gives you a sort of "mini quest" to talk to an animal handler or droid merchant. It's only a small touch but (to me) still much better than simply having the new companion automatically appear with no explanation.

One last KotET screenshot because I've said before that I love being able to catch people mid-flight.

And finally, one screenie from replaying KotFE on my Sorc. I hadn't even considered in advance that her lightsaber and Arcann's would be the same colour. Either way, you've got to admit that the lightsaber duels in KotFE are very cool. It's just a shame that moments like these are pretty damn awkward if your character doesn't actually wield a lightsaber...

IntPiPoMo count: 33