Mores Notes From Abroad

With Galactic Season 2 wrapped up on my main server, I've been spending more time playing my mix of ancient and new alts on the other servers. On any day when I have enough time, I currently try to log into each of them in order to at least achieve the 25k Conquest point daily objective. Without any real stronghold bonus this requires some work, but it's not too bad.

However, today I'd like to focus more on my experiences on each server than on my Season 2 progress. I've been finding my encounters there quite fascinating.

Star Forge

Star Forge is probably the server where I've spent the least amount of time recently, simply because I have access to a high-level character there who in turn has access to the reputation Conquest objective, which makes getting the daily season objective done much easier and faster than anywhere else.

I did get a generic whisper and guild invite once though, but declined it because it struck me as too weird. One of the benefits said guild was advertising was a dedicated "military section on Discord" - I know Americans have a reputation for loving their military and guns in general, but is this a common thing? It just seemed very alien to me. A less weird thing they were also promoting was that they were apparently running D&D events, but I still found it surprising to see that as a selling point in a SWTOR guild.

Satele Shan

On Satele Shan, I did not decline when someone whispered my Shadow with a random guild invite, because the tone sounded more welcoming and appealing to me. The guild was smaller and fairly new (it was only guild level seven when I joined), and as far as I could tell they were inviting guildless levellers pretty indiscriminately, but I was still kind of impressed by the amount of effort that seemed to already have been put into giving the whole thing some structure. I've already seen guild messages of the day advertising Imp side events and datacron hunts.

I also played my little Guardian a bit and found that the texture of her trousers had gone missing, making them render an error message in the character window and displaying as bright pink in game. I found a replacement quickly.

I also did some heroics on her when this was relevant to a weekly season objective and was amazed by how much I struggled... I actually died quite a few times! (Note that this is the same character that made me bemoan the mindless ease of SWTOR's outdoor content a few years ago... so I got what I asked for I guess!)

After the first couple of deaths I had a look at my gear and noticed that I was wielding a cosmetic weapon without any mods in it, meaning it basically had zero stats, so I actually made a point of travelling to the fleet and grabbing some level-appropriate modifications from a vendor. This didn't prevent me from dying some more later, but it did make me feel at least a little more powerful - it's kind of wild to me how the new scaling actually gives gear a bit of a purpose even on low-level planets again.

Tulak Hord

It was immediately obvious that the German server is quite a bit more quiet than any of the English-speaking ones. The first time I made it to the fleet (which was admittedly quite late in the evening), the only real signs of life in chat were one guy angrily talking to himself about how some pug had mistreated him (nobody was engaging with that) and another person looking for one more to help them form a casual PvP guild.

The guild guy eventually ended up next to me at a mailbox and whispered me directly to ask if I wouldn't mind helping out, and I didn't, which meant that I soon became a founding member of "The Relentless Justice". The guild message of the day instantly became a long and excited statement about how much fun we were all going to have while still maintaining a relaxed atmosphere, and to please be active and recruit. I thought about leaving right away since I hadn't really meant to join this guild, but decided to stay for the time being, out of curiosity about how things would develop. A bit less than two weeks later and I'm the only person left in there besides the original GM. I wonder if I'll end up outlasting him too...

On a different note, I was low-key delighted to see several references to TeamSpeak in general chat. My own guild still uses TS for voice comms and generally limits Discord to written communications, which people always seem to find incredibly weird when they first join, so I felt oddly pleased to see that TS still seems to be a thing at least among the Germans. Unless it was all a big coincidence and I just happened to run into the two people on the entire server who still use TS over Discord.

The Leviathan

To be honest I was least excited about playing on the French server simply because I don't really speak the language. I had a few years of French in school, but that was more than two decades ago now and it was never one of my favourite subjects anyway. But hey, I've actually been OK saying "salut" and "merci" in groups. (Though I did not respond to the random guild invite someone sent me; that was still too terrifying.)

Aside from that, my first impression of the Leviathan has been that it's both kinda dead and extremely polite. By kinda dead I mean that there's only a single instance of the fleet even at prime time and it's barely half full, and despite of queueing for hours, I've only ever been able to get into a single PvP match so far, which was a 3v2 arena that we still managed to lose somehow (lol).

The politeness is mostly on display in the form of everyone being all please and thank you in general chat all the time, which even I with my limited French was able to take note of. The one exception here was the GSF match I joined, where there was a lot of chatter going on that I wasn't able to follow but which I strongly suspect wasn't all polite.

Anyway, what's really sold me on this server so far is that I really love the Sage I made here for some reason. I bought her a Cartel Market outfit and everything. Which is a funny counter to my original inspiration for wanting to play on these other servers: wanting to earn some extra Cartel Coins from seasons - well played, Bioware, well played.