Funk

Recently a commenter expressed worry about the game's (and presumably my own) well-being, based on my recent (relative) silence on the blog. I'll admit it: I'm in a bit of a funk.

It may not be obvious, but the regularity with which I've been putting out posts on here has been a fragile thing for a while, as I've had less and less time to both play and write over the years, first going from working part time to full time, and then adding a long commute to my job every morning. There've been many times when my posting frequency wavered, such as when I was ill or went on holiday for a while, but I always managed to get back on track.

This past month however, I've been hit by what you could call a perfect storm:

First off, I'm in one of those phases where I'm not super excited about playing SWTOR. This isn't really unusual by itself as I always have my ups and downs with the game and times when I want to play more or less. It does also tend to reduce my desire to write about it, but usually I've been able to compensate.

However, this time about a month ago also saw the launch of WoW Classic, a game that I was very much looking forward to and which to be honest has me more excited than anything MMO-related has managed since 2011 (when SWTOR launched). So not only have I been feeling a bit down on SWTOR, all my free time has gone into thinking about, playing, and writing about another game with the sort of enthusiasm I only get to experience about once a decade. (If you are at all interested, those posts have gone onto my old WoW blog.)

Part of me has been feeling a little guilty about letting my routine on here slide because of this, but ultimately it's all meant to be fun for me, so I should be able to do what I feel like, damn it! Mind you though, even as I say this, that nagging little voice at the back of my head has been insistent enough that I felt the need to at least sort of explain myself in this post.

So where am I with SWTOR at the moment? I don't really see myself going anywhere. I'm still excited about the expansion and love all my characters. However, I do feel like I'm in a bit of a holding pattern until Onslaught's launch.

Four months ago I was excited about getting ready for the expansion, but while I achieved some of the goals I set myself surprisingly quickly, others haven't really gone anywhere. I was really hoping to kill Dread Master Brontes on master mode for example, but that doesn't look like it's going to happen now (I might go into more detail about that in a separate post), so now the main things I keep thinking about is that I should be spending all those character-bound currencies before they go away, but there isn't really anything I want to buy with them so I'm not particularly enthused about that either.

Not even my beloved guild of nearly eight years has been motivating me to log in lately, for a variety of reasons. No big drama, just the sort of thing that makes you think: "I'd rather not deal with that right now if I don't have to".

I'm still logging in and doing things on a smaller scale though. For example I'm still selling off small amounts of old crafting mats from my legacy cargo hold day after day to increase my credit count, though I'm not sure for what purpose exactly as I already have more money than I know what to do with. This week the Pirate Incursion event also made another unexpectedly quick return, which means that I'm working on more pacifist adventures, yay!

However, that level of engagement isn't really enough to inspire a blog post every three to five days right now, which used to be my target. I'll have to decide on a new routine that works a bit better for where I am right now - maybe posting once a week? (I'm not one of those people for whom it works well to just write whenever they feel like it.) We'll see.

Anyway, none of this is indicative of any problems with the game from my point of view. Even though I discovered that I wasn't born to be a PTS tester, I do try to keep an eye on the dev tracker, where Eric and Dan keep posting really insightful updates about what's happening on there and respond to people's feedback. I also finally went back and read some of the more recent news articles posted on the official website, such as about the making of Onderon and Mek-Sha or "Behind The Scenes Of World Design", which were all really interesting and made me all the more interested in the expansion.

How about you all tell me what's been keeping you engaged and interested as of late?