All In

Last week was Total Galactic War again, and I've written a fair number of posts in the past about my guild successfully conquering planets during that event. Last week was not one of those weeks though - we decided to go for a bigger challenge for once and ended up getting in over our heads, which eventually resulted in us falling behind and losing. C'est la vie.

It was still an incredible week for me personally though. Even though we eventually fell behind, we did manage to keep up with our main rival on Voss for at least a few days, and that despite of them having literally more than ten times as many players online most of the time. Being able to say that each one of my guildies is worth more than ten randoms (in terms of Conquest at least) felt pretty cool to be honest.

I also played a pretty crazy amount of hours, probably more than I did even while working on Galactic Seasons, and fully immersed myself in all kinds of activities that I hadn't done in ages: For example I did every single daily area and wallowed in the memories I associate with each. I even did uprisings with my guildies and am sad to say that I still don't find them very fun (the uprisings that is, not my guildies), but what was fun was seeing the ridiculous amount of achievements that popped up in guild chat that evening because we apparently had a considerable number of people who'd never done any uprisings before at all. (Oh, and it was fun to be the last person standing when it came to finishing off Crack-Shot Aggy in Done and Dusted because everyone else had died.)

I completed the GSF weekly on seven characters (one per day to align with the associated daily objective), playing probably close to fifty GSF matches if you assume a roughly equal win-loss ratio (though I didn't keep track). And I had fun with it! GSF occupies this weird place where I'm not hugely fond of it because I'm very bad at it and it's not really my kind of play style; but attach a significant enough reward to it and I'll be like: "All right, let's go!" Since there were special Conquest objectives for flying every kind of ship I even flew my scouts and strike fighters for a bit (despite of being terrible at them), and a few times I ran into people that were somehow even more terrible at GSF than me and managed to get a couple of kills that way.

I also completed the PvP weekly on seven characters, which required even more matches than GSF since it only counts wins nowadays. And again, it was actually great, because it had been ages since I'd done this much PvP over a relatively short period of time, and it was a great reminder of how queueing a lot means that you'll start to recognise certain names after a while. I could also feel my play improving massively on certain characters - for example I hadn't played either of my Scoundrel healers much recently, but with every match I got better at remembering to use my cooldowns and at predicting enemy movements. It was so much fun.

At the end of Total Galactic War we always do a tally and give away prizes based on people's contributions and I actually ended up in first place with over ten million points, which is something that never happened to me before (usually I'm maybe near the bottom of the top ten).

All this made me think a lot about how I've been playing the game for quite a few months now. I've long described myself as fairly monogamous in my gaming, unlike most bloggers I know, who tend to be variety gamers and like to dip into a lot of different games. I wasn't a complete purist anymore when I started playing SWTOR and also dabbled in other games from the beginning, but without much commitment. However, for a while now I've been splitting my time a lot more than I used to: never quite taking a break from Neverwinter, playing WoW with the husband, and Classic WoW with the guild I joined there. I never stopped thinking of SWTOR as my main game and home, but there were many weeks when it wasn't actually where I spent most of my gaming time.

I still think it's good to check out other games sometimes, even if like me you're mostly focused on one above all others, but I've been wondering whether I haven't been missing out on what I enjoy most by scattering my focus as much as I've done recently. Especially as there've been many times, not just in SWTOR but also while playing the other MMOs I mentioned, that I went: "Dang, this is fun... too bad I don't have enough time to really dig into this". No matter what I play, being stuck in this limbo where I'm always craving more but can't quite get it because of how much I'm divvying up my time is simply unsatisfying. I'm wondering whether it isn't time to go back to being full-on casual in those other games while being more focused on SWTOR and enjoying the perks that come with giving it my full attention.