This post is a few days late because I briefly forgot that September only has thirty days and then figured since we were already in October anyway, there was no rush anymore to get it out as soon as possible. I once again didn't have any interesting links to share in August (in fact, when I opened my draft at the end of the month it was literally empty), but in September my link-collecting endeavours were more fruitful again.
- Earlier in the month I promoted my appearance on Ivano 1337's PvP podcast, and on the day of recording he told me that he was actually already about to talk to his next guest that same evening. That episode released a few days later and had him talking to - what shall we call him... controversial personality Snave. I have no love for Snave myself - I played Republic on The Red Eclipse before streaming became super popular, and being stomped by Snave's Imperial premades and then being publicly ridiculed for losing on his stream was generally enough to make me stop queueing for the evening. And that's without even going into any of the other reasons most major content creators won't go near him... but I will say that his chat with Ivano was interesting. They also recorded themselves playing a couple of warzones at the end. Funny thing is that for all the reasons to dislike Snave, I actually agree with him about objectives in warzones.
- In the blogosphere, commenter Yeebo (who also has his own blog) finally got around to publishing the two posts about SWTOR he'd been telling me about for a while. The first one is about the "Knights of" era and the months that followed immediately after, and how that content put him off the game for a while. The second one is about how he came back to SWTOR at the start of this year and was pleasantly surprised by the new content he found, and how he thinks the game is actually in a much better place now. Happy ending! (For the time being.)
- The second variety blogger I saw writing about SWTOR last month was Bhagpuss, in a post titled "Back to the future", which was at least partially inspired by reading Yeebo's posts mentioned above. However, he was a lot less enthused and immediately lost interest again as far as I can tell, as there was no follow-up. Still, I appreciated his perspective. I thought it was interesting how disconnected he felt from his characters upon returning for example, when usually people cite feeling more connected to their characters as one of SWTOR's strengths.
- Finally, the SWTOR subreddit actually yielded a couple of posts last month that I found particularly amusing/interesting. On the amusing front, we had this post by someone whose Alderaanian trees were going bonkers - I've got to admit I quite liked the idea of in-game wind moving the leaves (even if it probably shouldn't look quite like that).
- On the "just interesting" front, we had this post by a now deleted user who talked about how transferring from Satele Shan to Star Forge was a complete game changer for them. The topic of server populations has been on my mind a lot after my experiences with doing seasons on all the servers and seeing how dramatically different things can be from one server to the next. You don't have to agree with everything the poster says, but I thought there were some interesting conversations sparked in the comments.
Thanks for the shout-out. I haven't abandoned my return to SWtOR but there's a lot going on in gaming just now and I haven't been able to fit in another post. I have played a couple more sessions though and I think I need to change tack and get back to the class story again because whatever questline it is that I'm in the middle of right now is really not very engaging.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem isn't SWtOR in particular. It's more that these days I'm finding mmorpgs in general very time-consuming in a way other games don't seem to be. I'm finding it harder and harder to commit the hours needed to get anywhere in any of them. I'm starting to think I might finally have hit my limit with the genre after a quarter of a century.
I think it's very easy to feel disconnected from SWTOR characters because the game doesn't provide any summary of the character's story. Most people are so busy and distracted these days, they don't remember a lot about the story of their characters when they return.
ReplyDeleteIt's like watching half of a movie and then a year later trying to watch the second half. Most people will probably want to start over from the beginning. That might be fine for a movie, but it's pretty daunting for an MMO to start over with new characters. Players put a lot of hours into their characters, so it feels like they are wasting a lot of time to start over.
I think all MMOs have this problem, but SWTOR suffers from it more because the story is the main focus of the game.
It does though? Both on the loading screen and in your quest log... Granted, that's fairly basic and easy to miss, but still...
DeleteFor me the loading screen goes by so fast, I often can't even read it all before it's done loading. The quest log only has a description of the current mission, not anything about previous missions or major choices that were made during those missions (light vs dark, was someone killed or spared?, etc.).
DeleteThanks for the bump!
ReplyDeleteI saw that thread on the SWTOR reddit as well, and found it a bit puzzling. I am on SS and it seems fine to me. Based on the post I assumed I must be on the "good server" but when I checked it turned out that I've been playing on the "dead one" since January. The other one must really be hopping, but so far I have only logged into Star Forge to check on what outfits my characters are wearing. All my toons from launch area happen to be on Star Forge, but when I came back briefly for Onslaught I wanted a *really* fresh start.
SS does still have a solid population, so it makes sense that you wouldn't notice anything as someone who primarily plays solo. For people doing group content, the difference between a 10 minute queue vs. a 30 minute queue (just as an example) is very noticeable.
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