Beating the dead (server) horse one last time

Don't worry, this isn't another moan about the server transfers. I just received so many sympathetic and encouraging comments to my last post that I thought I should give the people who were interested an update on what has been happening.

Basically, after some discussion and a vote on our guild forums, the majority turned out to be in favour of moving. There's still some grumbling and it's obviously not going to be all sunshine and rainbows, but most agreed that it's bound to be better than twiddling our thumbs on an abandoned server. We're looking into getting the guild reformed on The Red Eclipse tonight.

Our guild leader wants to leave the old guild up for a couple of weeks however, headed by an alt, in order to use the guild message of the day as a pointer for people who haven't logged in during the past week and might be confused about what's been happening upon returning. We'll be able to do without a guild bank on our new server for a little while.

I do have to give credit to my guildies for keeping my spirits up during the past couple of days. I did the Black Hole dailies in a group three times in three days (which is unusual for me), and there was lots of fun and laughter going around. Yesterday a guildie and I ran into another person at one point and my guildie assaulted him with a drive-by sparkle. The poor guy stopped dead in his tracks and just stood there staring at us for a moment. "I bet he's like... what the hell is this, I thought I was alone on this server!"

As a matter of fact, the Black Hole actually seemed to be one of the areas that has been the least affected by the transfer, probably because doing dailies is one of the few things that you can do at max level that doesn't require other people (with the exception of the heroic dailies). We actually had people "ninja" the button to summon Quick-Hands Quarl right in front of us and struggled to find enough boxes for the area daily. "Man, this server is way too crowded," I joked to my guildies.

The place that was undoubtedly hit the hardest by the transfers is the fleet. Again, a guildie managed to find humour in the situation as he posted on the forums: "I'll need two days advanced notice to take down all my GTN listings. That said, there's one person on the fleet at the moment... and that's me. Sooo, I'm not sure who I'm trying to sell stuff to - that's how much I love selling things!" Also, when the population counter on the fleet hit 14 last night, he immediately cried out for a party in general chat, which elicited some chuckles from people as well.

The total server population, including both factions and all levels, has shrunk down to less than a hundred even at prime time, and less than ten during the more quiet times of the day. In a way it's interesting though that those players are still around. The vast majority of them are low-level as well, so I can't help but wonder whether they are people who are happy or at least indifferent about levelling through their story in solitude, or whether they are new players who simply don't know any better and are wondering why nobody is around.

Anyway, soon this will all be behind me. No more wandering through a post-apocalyptic empty fleet while the loudspeaker server admin repeatedly tells people to bugger off already read up on the wonders of server transfers. To be honest, in the long run I would expect people to move away simply due to the annoyance of being spammed by that server admin message every fifteen minutes or so. I've only seen it five times and it's already driving me bonkers.

A Little Music Video

Remember back when I complained that there weren't enough fan-made SWTOR videos out there? Well, I've decided to take things into my own hands and start making my own! (Read: Hey! Guess who got Fraps and Sony Vegas Movie Studio for her birthday?) Unfortunately for you, I'm a total noob at video creation so the results may not be that impressive for a while, but hopefully I will learn. For now, behold a little music video dedicated to my love of playing Huttball as a Sage (and to Luka Sene's old PvP community)!

Just don't ask me when and why I ended up connecting Korean girl pop to Huttball. The internet does strange things to people. At least my guild leader conceded that while he considered the choice of music "strange", it still works somehow.



As an aside, watching video recordings of myself in PvP was quite a blow to my ego. I never thought that I was awesome at it, but I wasn't aware that I spent that much time running into environmental obstacles or just standing around not casting anything...

Server Transfer Blues

I have to admit I've been feeling a bit down on the game for the past couple of days. Nothing to do with the game itself really, but this whole server merge "transfer" business has really been getting to me. I hated not knowing what was going to happen to my server. Of course I suspected that it was going to become an origin server like ninety percent of the others, but I didn't really know. It was as if a black cloud was hanging over my usual enjoyment of the game all weekend. It feels a bit silly to get this hung up on MMO business I suppose, but in game it was a really big deal for me, bigger than even the biggest guild drama I've ever had to deal with.

Then the dreaded update finally arrived on the official server transfer thread this afternoon:

Luka Sene --> The Red Eclipse

Less than two hours after the announcement went up, I had an e-mail from Bioware in my inbox with the title "Transfer your Character Now". Three minutes after I logged into the game in the evening, a giant server admin message flashed up in the middle of my screen, raid warning style, also telling me to check out more information about the free transfers on the website. Geeze, no pressure or anything! "Optional" transfers indeed.

My heart sank as I only saw ten people on the fleet at what was usually prime time. A quick /who command revealed less than a hundred people per faction on the entire server. A couple of players were levelling alts and one or two guilds were raiding but that was it. No warzones were running all evening, which didn't really come as a surprise as the well-known PvPers had all been talking about looking forward to the free transfers for weeks. From the looks of it, a third to fifty percent of our active server population left on the first day alone. It was depressing.

I've pushed for discussion of the server transfer issue on our guild forums, and as expected opinions are split. Two or three people are cautiously enthusiastic, others like me are not necessarily completely opposed to transferring but still unhappy about having to deal with this issue at all.

My guild master is adamant that he's not going, as all of his current character names are taken on The Red Eclipse, including his main's name which is also his real life nickname. Meanwhile my boyfriend has worked himself into a rage about how stupid he thinks the entire thing is, how he doesn't want to have to deal with queues and how he's thinking about cancelling his subscription now, simply out of protest at how badly he feels Bioware has been handling this entire situation.

Really? And I'm supposed to be happy about this?

As I was collecting mail on my alts (and not bothering to relist my auctions in case we do end up transferring in the next couple of days, not to mention that hardly anyone seems to be left to buy things anyway), I spotted an out of guild acquaintance near the bank. If the game allowed for more emotional expression, I probably would have run up to him, grabbed him by the lapels of his robe and yelled "Oh my god, someone is still here!" like a crazy person, but as it was I just waved at him and asked him whether he and his guild were going to transfer too.

He said that they were all planning to go, probably even today. I replied that my guild was still undecided, adding a frowny face for emphasis on how I felt about that. He gave me a smile in return. "I think everyone will go." "See you on the other side then," I said, "... maybe. If we recognise each other after all the forced name changes." Again he seemed to be completely unburdened by worries like mine. "There's a Luka Sene chat channel!" I thanked him for bringing that to my attention and logged off.

I'm trying to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel and pray that it's not an oncoming train. I hope that my guild master and my boyfriend will come around, because anything else will leave a massive gash in my little circle of gaming friends. I still don't really want to transfer. I don't want to stop being Shintar because the name's already taken on The Red Eclipse, nor do I want to have queues upon logging in, deal with spam in general chat or fight 50 people for quest mobs in the Black Hole. But I like the prospect of staying on a dead server until it's closed and never playing another warzone again even less.

Random NPC Love

One thing that never ceases to entertain me is the way Bioware manages to make even some of the most mundane quest NPCs memorable. Part of it is the voice acting I suppose, since characters speak different languages and have different accents. It also helps that conversations aren't limited to 511 characters, so there's some more wiggle room to infuse each character with personality instead of only having them convey the absolute bare minimum of information.

More than anything it's simply creative effort though. I'm guessing the writers are quite aware that it's hard to make the nth quest to kill ten whatevers memorable, but they do pull it off over and over again. Quest NPCs are made visually interesting via facial scars or unusual species/class combinations, and every dialogue contains potential hooks to pull you in and make you chuckle or raise your eyebrows.

I was questing on Dromund Kaas on my bounty hunter alt last night, and I immediately found it striking how differently I got addressed depending on my class. On my agent, NPCs generally seemed respectful, but also at ease and happy to see me. On my Sith inquisitor, they were wary. And now on my bounty hunter, they seem to have a certain disdain for me... most of them anyway.

I actually laughed out loud when I approached Guard Kullin (aka the guy who guards the blocked off jungle road near the spaceport), and the following exchange happened:

My bounty hunter: "What's this? Shaking down travellers?"
Guard Kullin: "Heh. What are you going to do if we say 'yes'?"

OMG, I don't remember you being funny with any of my previous characters! Too bad there was no option to flirt; I could totally see this guy and my bounty hunter having a fun night out at a cantina or something. It's a shame that he only has something like three lines. I did go out of my way to be nice to him however by offering to run his little errand willingly and without asking for compensation. Because he made me laugh, it made me want to be decidedly un-bounty-hunter-ish for once.

Other NPCs were as I remembered them, but still entertaining. The paranoid Imperial who admits to having killed his own men for "suspicious behaviour" while they were planning a surprise birthday party for him still makes me raise an eyebrow every time. Talk about over the top!

I could almost make this a regular feature: Random NPC Love for a character that only has a few lines but still manages to be awesome in their own way. What are other people's favourite random NPCs?

When free transfers are not a good thing

So Bioware finally announced the first of the highly anticipated free server transfers today. I think they did a good job at trying to communicate how it would all work in advance, but forum trolls who don't bother to read are unfortunately unavoidable. I feel a bit sorry for the moderators that have to deal with all the "why isn't my server included" threads.

That said, I was still very unhappy with what I saw, as it seems that my fears in regards to transfers are about to come true: the current free transfers all offer to move characters from low population realms to high population ones instead of the other way round. This means that Bioware is trying to consolidate server populations instead of balancing them. I don't think that this is a bad idea per se, but I do think that trying to do so via free transfers is a bad move for a variety of reasons.

Even with transfers being free, it's inevitable that a lot of people won't use them, whether that's because they don't even know that the feature exists because they don't follow the news, they are only moderately active, or they like(d) their server to begin with. However, many people will transfer, and removing some of the most active players from an already low population realm is going to have dire consequences for those that remain. Server community will fracture as familiar faces disappear without notice. Warzones might stop popping completely. Guilds will crumble under the pressure of arguments about whether to transfer or not. New or returning players will find a server that's completely devoid of life. Do you think that they will all bother to read up on transfers or just quit because "this game is clearly dead"?

At the time of writing this, Luka Sene hasn't shown up on the transfer list either way, but I'm not looking forward to when it does as I expect it to become an origin server now.

The thing is, I don't think that consolidating servers is a bad idea in general. I can absolutely believe that there are too many servers right now to balance the population in such a way that all of them will offer a good play experience. But if you want to merge servers, then just merge servers. Some people will be annoyed initially if they are forced to change their name, but at least all their friends will still be there, not to mention that they'll have more people to play with in general. All this bitty transfer approach is going to achieve is the loss of existing server communities and cohesion issues for guilds. Not to mention that the current free transfers might turn out to be a "fake choice" anyway, if Bioware decides to close down the near-dead origin servers later on (as many people suspect).

Don't get me wrong, I understand that they probably have reasons to do it this way - presumably technical issues as well as a fear of bad PR - but I'm worried that this might end up coming back to bite them in the back in the long run. Actively killing off low-pop servers while leaving them up as ghost towns might not make the big gaming news, but players will be affected nonetheless.

After browsing the forums for a bit and seeing a lot of forum warriors spew hate at anyone who doesn't think that these free transfers are a good idea, I think this set of comments sums it up best:

"If they do it like was done with Warhammer, they offered the free transfers to specific servers then after a couple months they merged all the rest. By doing it this way you do not have as bad PR issues and you also are getting a more realistic view of the new servers user count based on who actually transfers."

"Warhammer? Where is that game now? LOL"

MVP Votes And You

One of the mechanics that I really like about SWTOR PvP is the MVP vote. It's a simple button on the final scoreboard, yet it can completely change your focus from annoyance at someone on your team who played badly to thinking about who played particularly well instead. I believe that Bioware copied the idea from Warhammer Online, though other games might use similar systems. I know that plenty of games don't have anything like it though, and as someone who only played WoW before I actually found the system mildly confusing at first.

First off, seeing how English isn't my first language and I'm not really into sports, I initially didn't even know what MVP means. (It means Most Valuable Player.) Secondly, being told that I got to cast a vote immediately made me wonder whether an election of some sort was going on at the end of the match, and whether voting for the "wrong" person might negatively affect other players. I need not to have worried of course, as the votes don't get tallied up; each individual vote just gives the person voted for a tiny bonus to their valor and commendations gained from the warzone. There is no election for the "ultimate MVP" or anything.

You don't get to see who voted for whom and you can't vote for yourself, so the system effectively relies on blind goodwill. For that it works surprisingly well in my opinion - there always seems to be at least one guy who doesn't bother to vote, but most people do. The actual reward is so small that it's almost negligible, however the social value of getting an MVP vote is immense. (You can tell because there are always people complaining on the forums about how unloved they feel when they don't get MVP votes.) I really love getting one or more votes myself, because it's effectively a small pat on the back that says that someone else in the game appreciated my efforts and thought that I did well - unless you're really cynical and assume that people just hit the MVP button at random, but I prefer to take a more optimistic view myself.

We'd all like to get MVP votes ourselves, but who should get ours? If you're new to the MVP voting system like I was it can be hard to figure out who to vote for at first. At the end of the day you only have a very limited view of what's happening at any point during the game, not to mention that you're probably more focused on doing your own job well rather than on scrutinising the other players' performance. However, there are some simple rules of thumb that can really help with making the decision who to vote for. (Note that this can also be read as a guide on how to get MVP votes if you look at it from the other side.)

1. Vote For Your Friends

Some people scoff at the idea of friends that queued up together voting for each other, arguing that it compromises the purity of the system when people vote for someone just because he's a friend instead of whoever "truly" made the biggest contribution to the team. Personally I think this is pretty silly. If a friend queued up with me and his presence made the game fun for me even though we lost, you bet that he was my personal MVP, even if he didn't do so well! Likewise I don't hold it against anyone else if they give priority to their friends and guildies when voting. It's just too straightforward not to do it.

That said, I personally don't believe in voting for your friends all the time. A true friend won't get mad at me for casting my vote for someone else whom I saw pull off something really cool. Choosing your friend is an easy pick, but it shouldn't become a restriction that you always have to vote for your friends, even if someone else's play really impressed you.

2. People With Big Numbers

Most people don't queue up with friends all the time, so who do you vote for if you have no clue what happened and all you have to go by is the scoreboard at the end? Well, generally speaking, voting for someone who achieved big numbers during the match is a pretty safe bet. No, it's not a guarantee that they were actually the best or always made the right decisions, but presumably they at least know how to play their class, and that's got to be worth something. Voting for the person who dealt the most damage is kind of boring, unless they really stood out in some other way as well. Sort by healing done and have a look at whether your team had any healers. People always moan about there not being enough healers in their games but then also refuse to show them any appreciation with MVP votes. Don't be one of those people! Vote for a healer today! The only people who get even less appreciation than healers are probably PvP tanks, but then they are also very rare. If you do see someone with a very high protection score, that means that they made frequent use of their guard and taunt abilities in an intelligent way, something that is definitely worth rewarding.

I would be slightly weary of voting for people solely based on their objectives score or their amount of medals, as it's still a bit questionable what counts as working towards as an objective for the purposes of the scoreboard and what doesn't. And medals are way too easy to game. I've seen way too many Sages stand at a node doing nothing but spam Noble Sacrifice on themselves, just so that they could then heal themselves and get healing medals.

3. People Who Impressed

Voting for whoever got the highest damage, healing or protection is a good way of getting used to the system, but it gets boring quickly. Another relatively easy option is to vote for someone whom you noticed doing something particularly helpful, even if it was just one thing. Of course this requires you to pay at least some attention to your surroundings.

Some potential candidates for this are: someone who guarded a deserted node all match even though it was quite boring; someone who continuously interrupted enemy caps; someone who used their crowd control, slow or knockback abilities to great effect; someone who came to your rescue when you were under attack; someone who scored in Huttball; someone who planted a bomb in Voidstar. These are all little things that may not necessarily make someone the "true" MVP of the game, but they do matter, it's relatively easy to notice at least one of them during the match, and it helps to make your vote feel more meaningful.

4. People Who Talk

This last one is quite interesting because it actually has nothing to do with the player's gameplay performance, but it can still influence people's votes, both positively and negatively. For example I make a point of never voting for someone who spends time moaning in chat about how our team has bad gear or the enemy is overpowered. I recommend that you don't give them your vote either, unless you want to encourage that kind of thing. On the other end of the spectrum however, it is definitely noteworthy if someone repeatedly calls incomings in chat or simply provides some pep talk during the match. I always tend to notice the names of people who do this... and it may be in my head, but I swear I always get tons more votes if I say something like "good try at least, we did our best" in chat at the end of a loss. Again this is something that some hardcore players might look down on as a voting criterion, but I think that the power of using words to (de)motivate your team is something that shouldn't be underestimated.

Day 5: Gear

This is the fifth post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.

I have to admit, I'm a bit anxious whether Njessi will approve of this post. I'm talking about fashion! Sort of. And I'm not really qualified! Oh no.

Anyway, let's get cracking.

I have established before that I'm a full armour fangirl. With that in mind, it feels kind of like a naughty confession to admit that my Jedi knight is wearing an orange belly top (not the one pictured above, but one that uses the same model). Worse, it's not the right armour type for her either; I made a conscious decision to sacrifice some armour for looks (at least while levelling) as a heavy armour equivalent doesn't currently appear to exist in the game.

It started out innocently enough when I first found a green chest piece that used the same model back on Tython. Initially I scoffed a little at how skimpy it looked but I wasn't too concerned with it at the time. Over time, it even grew on me... and when I got my first robe, I wore it for about ten seconds before discarding it again. Robes can look so unflattering on the larger female body types, it's not funny. Back to showing off my twi'lek's toned green belly it was!

In a way I still feel a little bad about the outfit because it is more than a bit ridiculous to go into battle like that. However, my knight is a bit of a daredevil, so I can absolutely see her taking unnecessary risks for no reason. The force protects her more than any armour anyway, right? Most importantly though, every time she force leaps, I think it looks less like an attack and more like some sort of gymnastics move. And for that, a light top like the one she's wearing is simply perfect.

I have to admit I've been really slack in terms of min-maxing and haven't bothered to get lots of crafted gear to enhance my stats with augment slots. My current tier gear serves me fine. With one exception... the helmet, which looks like someone draped a sheet over their head and drew a face on it (link goes to the tanking version, since that's the only one that has a picture on Torhead right now). Fortunately, a guildie crafted the above for me, a Tempered Laminoid Helmet (screenshot on Torhead is inaccurate). Most of my guildies actually think that it's hideous and that I'm mad for wanting to wear this "bike helmet", but personally I love it. I think it looks sleek and Star Warsy and matches the rest of my gear. I even had a second one made for my PvP set, since I'm not too keen on the trooper helmets featured there either. And I did get one guy randomly whispering me in a warzone once to tell me how awesome he thought my helm looked. So nyah!

Lastly, we have my operative modelling the Cademimu Sharpshooter set, minus the helm - she's wearing Flexiglass Battle Headgear in the head slot instead. Anyway, funny story behind this set: I'd been wearing the same chest piece for thirty levels or so because I had never seen anything that I liked more than my Black Talon Operative's Jacket. Then I was boosting my boyfriend's marauder through Cademimu one day, and the last boss dropped the above chest piece. My dear man had just rolled greed on everything, but I paused to preview the chest for a moment. Could it be...? Finally something that looked cooler than my Black Talon jacket? I've got to... - and zap, my graphics card spazzed and my screen went black before I could roll need. D'oh. I was so pissed off by this that I then spent the rest of the evening soloing Cademimu until I could get the jacket to drop again. Took me five or six tries I think, but it was totally worth it.

(Also: they totally nerfed the Elevator of Evil in Cademimu! It doesn't stop at the useless random platforms anymore but goes straight to the bottom now. Kids these days have it so easy.)

Trying to make sense of the E3 announcement

So Bioware unveiled a new trailer at E3 to give us a sneak peek at what kind of new content we can expect to see throughout the rest of the year, after 1.3.

(As a slightly snarky aside, for a company that has created such a cinematic and story-driven MMO, they sure make some pretty boring, bullet-pointy trailers for its patches. Why not give us little glimpses of story instead, something to make people go "ooh, I want to see how that plays out" instead of simple feature checklists?)

Anyway, not to sound ungrateful, but most of the things they advertise sound pretty par for the course. A new space mission, a new operation, a new warzone, a new planet - that's all good stuff and I'm looking forward to it (the operation in particular looks really cool in my opinion), but it's also pretty much what I expect to see in regular content updates for an MMO.

Some of the more unusual bullet points have me more baffled than excited though, with the biggest one being the announcement of a new level cap. I like levelling well enough, but raising the level cap and obsoleting endgame content when the game is still less than a year old seems like a bad move to me. I can only guess that this is related to the continued story quest progression. As you level up, the stories imply that many months pass over the course of your level gains, so it would be consistent to add more levels as the overall story of the game progresses. Still, I'm not sure that this consistency is worth the sacrifice of so much endgame content so soon.

Then there is the addition of the Cathar as a playable species. I'm not surprised by that, as they pretty much struck me as the most likely candidate for such an addition, and I'd personally be quite happy to play one (if I had more character slots...) However, presuming that they'll become available to both factions... well, that's just going to be weird. The Mandalorians nearly wiped out their entire species once; I can't really see them being very friendly with the Empire now! Not to mention that I played through Imperial side Taris only recently and all the "kill the Cathar" quests there are still freshly on my mind. I can't imagine just how weird it would feel to play an Imperial Cathar and be sent to kill members of your own species while the NPCs make degrading remarks about them throughout. Pureblood Sith going to the Jedi Academy strike me as positively quaint in comparison.

More importantly though... it appears that the Cathar announcement has actually been edited out of the official trailer linked above at the time of writing this! You have to watch this video of the official press release to see the Cathar ad, between the mention of the new companion droid and the note of the level cap increase. I wonder if they got cold feet right afterwards, fearing that they wouldn't actually be able to make the Cathar release for this year and should thus take it out? That would be pretty embarrassing, right after they made such a big announcement about it. Or maybe it was the other way round and they edited it in for the press release at the last second? Would be weird not to put that same version up online then.

Anyway, these are just some initial thoughts. I'll probably have more to say about this in time.

My first pug operation

There I was, having just completed Lost Island hard mode with some guildies, when I returned to the fleet and saw a call going out in general chat that someone was looking for a healer and a dps for normal mode Eternity Vault. It wasn't exactly as if I felt a particular urge to go pugging, not to mention that it was way too late in the evening for any sensible person to embark on an adventure like that, but well... I couldn't help thinking that it would be nice to get my Sage alt into EV, and more importantly, the person doing the asking was someone whom I vaguely knew to be a very nice person. So I volunteered, and dragged a guildie's gunslinger alt along with me to fill the last spot too.

Interestingly, nobody checked our gear or asked how much experience we had. We were just implicitly trustworthy. I have to admit I sort of assumed that someone putting an operation pug together would probably be fairly experienced themselves, so I was quite surprised when it turned out that my guildie, another gunslinger and me were actually the only people in the raid who had done all the fights before. My guildie expressed some worry to me that this could potentially end up taking longer than expected, but at the same time we were happy to share our knowledge of the fights.

We were quite pleased when the first boss went down on the first attempt, and I couldn't help being slightly amused by watching the more inexperienced players in action. Usually you expect someone who doesn't know the fight to stand in the fire or something, right? With these guys, you could tell that most of them were PvPers because they didn't - instead they ran away from anything that looked even remotely dangerous, even if it wasn't. PvP doesn't have enrage timers, but it certainly teaches you to do your damnedest to stay alive.

The loot distribution featured an unpleasant surprise as the third gunslinger in the group rolled need on everything. I have to admit I immediately found myself wondering whether he was a current WoW player. There was some angry muttering about how you shouldn't need on anything you weren't going to use, but we moved on. Nonetheless I was annoyed, especially as the ninja had managed to prevent both me and the other Sage from getting our Columi gloves. My guildie vocalised what I was thinking when he said that he wasn't going to keep going if it was going to be like this all night. Since I noticed that the ninja was from the same guild as our raid leader and a couple of others, I whispered the former to gently remind him to make sure that his guild mate played nice. He apologised profusely for the ninja's behaviour and promised to take care of it. It wasn't a problem again.

Gharj was once again sort of humorous to watch as people flailed around in the lava and died to being stomped whenever the boss jumped. Fair enough though, some mechanics you have to see in action before you really "get" them. Once again our pug didn't let us down and the second attempt was pretty much perfect.

"The next two bosses are really easy," I commented afterwards, trying to sound encouraging. My smuggler companion immediately reprimanded me for getting overexcited. And he was right to do so, as we actually managed to wipe on the Pylons after one of the inexperienced players started the fight way before people were ready, one group got wiped out just before they could finish their side, and then the whole encounter "timed out" and reset. I didn't even know it could do that.

Again, the next attempt was smooth sailing, as we made sure to have an experienced person do the puzzle on each side so that we didn't have to explain the whole shebang to everyone there and then. I suppose at the very least it taught some people one of those unspoken rules of raiding: that it's never a good idea to press any buttons if you're not sure what they do. (Same goes for speaking to strange NPCs, or running in before the tank.)

The Infernal Council at least was pulled off without a hitch right off the bat. While a couple of people were quite slow, everyone finished off their mob in time so that was good enough.

Soa was the big question mark, as he's a lot more complex than the rest of the encounters, and we didn't have any voice chat. My smuggler friend gave a quick rundown of the most important abilities while immediately saying that he fully expected us to wipe at first. We marked up the experienced people and advised the newbies to stay close, and then we pulled and hoped for the best.

All things considered, I thought that we did very well. One or two people inevitably fell to their deaths, but it could have been worse. We actually made it all the way down to the bottom and only died to Soa's enrage eventually. Our second attempt was pretty similar, only that this time too many people got caught in mind traps at the end. The third time was the charm however. Our main tank had died to fall damage again, so the experienced gunslinger from another guild somehow ended up tanking, and he pulled Soa under every single pylon without fail. Gunslinger tanks, you heard about them here first.

I suppose in many ways this wasn't a remarkable pug, but considering how much WoW's pug raiding culture had deteriorated by the time I left, it still felt like a breath of fresh air.

Nobody was obsessed with other people's gear or performance, as long as it was "good enough".

Veterans were happy to coach the inexperienced and share their knowledge around.

The ninjaing issue was resolved calmly and without any drama or needing to remove anyone from the raid.

And most importantly, at the end of the night, everyone had got something out of it and had some fun.

Explosive Conflict Completed

This past Wednesday my guild cleared Explosive Content on normal mode for the first time. After we spent all of Sunday night wiping to Kephess over and over again, often missing out on killing him by just a smidgeon of health, it felt well-earned when we got him down on what was only our second attempt on Wednesday.

I have to stand by what I said in my early impressions of the operation, specifically that story mode feels considerably overtuned. Again this isn't really a personal complaint as I enjoyed the challenge level that we came up against, but we were already mostly Rakata geared when we started. I just can't see any raid group going straight from Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace story mode to EC and having any success there. I think this is definitely a case where Bioware either needs to nerf the content to bring it in line with story mode progression, or they need to redefine what exactly the progression curve is supposed to be. However, requiring clears of the previous hard mode to get into the newest story mode strikes me as sort of defeating the point of having a story mode (that is to say, a decidedly accessible one) in the first place.

I suppose for now I can only recommend that if you are in a guild that is struggling with normal mode EC, try going back and getting some Rakata drops from hard mode EV and KP first. (You don't necessarily have to clear the entire place on hard.) I know it's called hard mode, but with the current design EV and KP don't really require any more skill on hard than on normal, only more gear - which is what you should have accumulated naturally after successfully clearing both on normal mode first.

Minor story spoiler ahead I suppose: at the end of EC's one-time operation quest, you briefly get to meet the same bad guys that indirectly caused Karagga to go rogue through their expansion into Hutt space. I wonder if the next operation will feature them as bosses, whether they are going to be built up as a threat any further by causing some more trouble from a distance first, or whether it will be about something completely different.

I really like how Bioware seems to be tying it all together, even if all those little connections might be slightly wasted on people. I mean, after playing all these different characters week after week (remember, the game encourages alting), who can remember every little detail of every quest? I had actually completely forgotten about the connection to the ending of Karagga's Palace myself, but then I got to do the one-time KP quest on my Sage on Friday and had an aha moment when I was reminded of how it all fit together. Really, it's all interconnected so well that you probably don't just have to play all the different classes to 50 to get the full story, ideally you would then have to do some of the first ones you did all over again, just to take note of all the things you missed the first time.

Another fun note about the baddies at the end of EC was the fact that when they first appeared, I had the following conversation with my boyfriend:

Him: "Uh, I know those guys."
Me: "Oh? How so?"
Him: "I was the one who set them free. On my Sith."
Me: "That's what you get when you let people play Empire alts..."

Just more evidence of the interconnectedness.

I suppose it's just a shame that the 1.2 operation didn't last us longer than a month on normal mode, even with a very limited number of nights devoted to working on it. With 1.3 not containing any new raid content, PvE endgame will be a bit dry for the next couple of months.

On the plus side though, I expect the group finder to invigorate interest in flashpoints and the first operation tier, so it will be a good time to get some alts geared up. And well, in terms of progression my guild still has nightmare EV and KP left, as well as EC hard obviously, which is supposed to be very tough. It's not the same as getting a new story, but chasing after Campaign gear should tide us over for at least a couple of months.

We might even be able to get some 16-man raids going, though I'm not holding my breath for that. It's kind of funny, because from what I can tell the game currently offers zero incentive for going for the larger group size... but there is this other guild on our server that seems to be really keen on teaming up with us to do 16-mans anyway. I suppose we're just that awesome. And well, if we do get the people together for it... I guess there is little harm in at least giving it a go.