So Much To Do, So Little Time

I’m suffering from a wealth of riches where my online gaming experiences are concerned, but the choices are too rich for me to handle. I really want to spend more time playing Defiance, especially to see how the game and the T.V. series come together with its premier. I have got to make some time for it this weekend, but I have this wonderfully new and shiny content of SWTOR’s planet Makeb pulling me away from any other leisure time activities. Sadly, my poor Rift character languishes and my dimension building is on hold for now.

Oooh Ha! Ha Haaaa! Envy my portable Hutt teacher

Makeb is really well done, well worth the cost of my pre-order, especially with the early access time and my lovely Hutt holo-trainer. My main complaint is that it will be over with far too soon. The flow of the quests and the experience of gaining these new five levels is so smooth. For those who gobble up content too quickly, it is almost too smooth, but it is clear that the game has taken game design improvements to heart. I feel that sense of excitement and wonder that I had when I first started playing Old Republic. I’m trying to pace myself, I’ve only touched the initial quests Empire side and I’m only half-way through Republic side, but it is hard not to keep playing and staying up late. I have yet to even try out the new mini-games they’ve added with the seeker droids and Shroud content, but I will try it out once I get to 55 on my Consular.

Happily, we have two very different story experiences we can have on the planet. I won’t spoil it, but you really need to play both a Republic and an Empire character through the planet to see how different your entry to the world and the story arc is between the two sides of the war.

Can you say Ubiquitous vendor trash…

I would say my only dissatisfaction is with the crafting side of the expansion. Maybe it is worthwhile to people who really love building different looking mod-able gear, but I’m much more practical in my crafting needs. I want gear I can build to help me with entry into Operations, not cosmetic gear that does nothing but look pretty. With the cartel market, even augmented gear and some of the cool looking cosmetic gear just doesn’t earn back my credit investments. So far I’m very disappointed with how much time and credits I’ve invested in my crafting and the lack of tangible benefit to having invested them.

I suppose that is my feeling about crafting in general though, not just in the expansion. My advice to you, sell your 450 crew skill missions for any of the gathering skills on the GTN. The credit cost and time your companion is away on the mission is not worth the materials returned by those. You can gather the same number of materials in a fraction of the time just wandering around the initial zones.

Kudos to the writing and design team at Bioware on this one. They’ve done a fantastic job with the visuals and the ambiance. Companions have new dialogue and HK is much more interactive now. I feel sad for the people who didn’t pre-order soon enough or at all. Many in our guild want to run the old content but have no takers, as those of us seeing the new world are far too engrossed.

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Blog Neglect

Yes folks, I’ve been guilty of blog neglect. This isn’t more than a fluff piece, hello to you all, screen cap, quick update toss up though, sorry.

Mage plus plate = nifty look

I’ve been playing SWTOR and Rift a lot lately. My husband and I finished up the Bounty Hunter story quests with levels to spare. We’re both only 46th level and couldn’t have done it without helping each other out on the Corellia quests. Man, I wish I’d been on the ball to screen cap some of my memorable cinematic moments of the final quests of the Bounty Hunter. Escape pod locks will never be the same again.

I’ve been playing with a 4 person group of RL friends on Sunday afternoons pretty regularly, Empire side. We have all 4 classes covered and wreak havoc across the galaxy. While I haven’t quite finished up my class quests, I did hit level 50 on my purple-lighting darlin’ Inquisitor. I promptly built some upgraded armoring and hilts for her, only to realize that I could immediately get most of her gear from PVP and Tionese starter packs. It was weird. While I’m happy to not have to run another set of gearing up FPs for her, it also felt a bit odd after doing it the hard way for my other 50s. I kind of miss the custom look I had for her which I exchanged for some set piece bonuses.

We’re starting a couple of Jedi Knights to play together. He’s going dark side, but I decided to play some light side for a bit since my Bounty Hunter and Sith Inquisitor are nasty evil types. It will be interesting.

We’re also playing Rift on the occasional evening and have been slowly leveling toward 60 in Storm Legion. I’ve been working on some crafting with low level alts and let me tell you, trying to run through high level insto-kill zones and climb mountains to avoid high level mobs has made me really appreciate the lack of falling damage that has been put into the game. While it is a bit odd to fall off the top of a mountain unscathed, I’m glad not to add that death to the ones handed to me by the mobs I’m trying to dodge.  But I WILL turn in that crafting workorder though it kills me (again and again). I’ve added a screen shot of my Mage, whose wardrobe gear I happen to really like right now. I  love not being stuck wearing a dress/robes for my caster. I sure wish I could put a cosmetic overlay like this on my SWTOR characters.

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Hype and Fun and Games

Maybe we should go back to the harbor

I love thought-provoking talks via Twitter. They make me want to write and they help me put my thoughts in order about things percolating in my mind. Today’s brain brew is all about game hype, game expectations, why we love some games but don’t love their successors as much, game success and failure, and what I’m thinking of as the perfect storm for failure that has plagued several games lately.

I’ve come to one conclusion that MMOs that are based off of very popular single-player games or popular books are probably doomed to failure. I can’t say that for sure because the future remains unwritten, but it seems very possible. You can’t recapture in an MMO the same arc and satisfaction that you got from a single-player RPG or a well-written series. It is like having a book that you love so much that you re-read it, then turning that book into a story that has a start, a middle, but NO END. You can’t recapture the hero’s journey in an MMO because the journey never ends and no one is a unique flower.

Why did people love Knights of the Old Republic so  much, but those same people don’t love the game that expands upon its world, Star Wars: The Old Republic? Maybe because by its very nature as an MMO, the SWTOR story/world can’t take you on the same journey. It is the song that never ends. It is played by people with MMO expectations. It is also played by Star Wars fans and while it captures the adventure, humor, flavor, and much of the essence of the IP, it doesn’t have a happy ending because it doesn’t have an ending. I wonder if that makes sense to others the way it does to me. The game is unsatisfying to the Star Wars movie fans in the same way that a book or movie without a definitive end is. We finish up our epic journey and then we putter around at loose ends. I don’t think people’s excitement over the game was unfounded, I just think their excitement over existing  within it as an MMO was. It has much better re-playability than most MMOs, but a surprising number of people don’t want to play more than their one archetype.

Now on to that whole “perfect storm” concept. The current environment for the games I love is full of storm clouds of turmoil, social media challenges, financially strapped customers, a likely aging player base with more real life responsibilities (I don’t know if younger gamers are a big demographic or if they are too busy playing social games on their smart phones), emerging technologies, trolls who ruin reputations without a care, heavy competition, and long-standing games that their loyal customers refuse to leave. It seems to be more than the usual environment of heavy competition. Players have very high expectations and a thunderously loud voice in which to share them. Production costs versus what people are willing or able to pay just don’t seem to mesh. In general, it is more turbulence than most companies could have foreseen a few years ago. Gale force winds have come upon them rather quickly it seems and I wonder if they saw any red skies at night.

There are evolving social issues that players grapple with in their daily lives, pitfalls in the social media revolution that topple companies and even political regimes, and those social challenges hit game developers too. People have billowing expectations and surprisingly broad reach and the skies the limit in their potential sphere of influence. Players are connected to each other and to the companies that build games in ways that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

Blizz and WoW built their massive player base during calm skies and they’ve managed to hold onto it so far. Their giant cruise ship has been able to weather the rogue waves that have swamped some of the younger games trying to ride the storm in much smaller boats.  Years ago developers saw what WoW was doing and thought, we can be successful too, we can bring that kind of fun to our players, and we can give them more/different/better. Sure, assuming the players they seek are willing to allow them to do more/different/better instead of clinging to their comfort zones. And assuming we didn’t all start to spiral into a cycle of long term unemployment, high gas prices, high food prices, and all the other pressures that compete for increasingly limited resources.

While I’m grateful we have so many fantastic ways to escape from reality, I’m almost overwhelmed by them. I never keep up with all the things I’d like to do and see. Some really entertaining things never get my attention, no matter how good they might be.

I really enjoy cooperative game play and some of the mechanics of MMOs. (I also almost equally dislike some of the mechanics of MMOs and some of the side effects of massively multiplayer environments. I don’t like being reminded that the world is full of rude people, especially when that happens during my fun time.) But despite some really stellar moments in several of the MMOs I play, most especially in SWTOR, I’ve never enjoyed story in my MMOs the way I’ve enjoyed it in my single player RPGs. I’ve never “read” my game story content the way I enjoy reading books, even though most of the games I play have a wealth of written information. SWTOR tries very hard to blend the awesome elements of a good book or a good RPG, but I wonder if by its very nature as an MMO, it won’t be able to fully satisfy its readers, viewers or its RPGers who are trying to recapture a very different experience.

Deciding on the quality of games that exist in this highly complex environment isn’t easy. I think people judge games on criteria that are overly simplistic at times. And really, the future of several  of our games, both the highly successful and those in their infancy, still remains unwritten. I don’t envy them being born under such stormy skies.

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Shrinking Pains

Change, oh how we loathe it sometimes. I’m writing this to say farewell to the glory days of SWTOR’s endless servers and the concept I had of how my legacies and character concepts would work, and to grumble about it.

Farewell to Z’ha’dum and Krath

In the early days of long queues and many servers, we had this idea of splitting Imperial and Republic between multiple servers. Thus began my orderly Vorlonn and strength-through-adversity Z’ha’dum legacies. It made sense for my fierce red-skinned Sith Warrior to go by Z’ha’dum from Babylon 5. My cooperative but manipulative and secretive Smuggler made sense to go by the inscrutable Vorlon name and thus was born my two primary servers. One would focus mainly on Republic goals and characters while the other would explore the Empire side of things. Each would give me the option to try two versions of each class in each faction, one dedicated to the dark side and one dedicated to the light side. That was then…

This is now… With shrinking populations and a much smaller player base, decisions were made that didn’t take my concepts into consideration. My thought processes weren’t shared by the game decision makers. Someone decided, hey, lets give people more slots and then smoosh them all together onto crowded servers where they get to fight each other over daily quests and world bosses like children squabbling over pinyata candy. But, rather than smooshing them in such a way that they could play light side dark side of every class, lets only give them 12 slots instead of 16. And rather than letting them pick which servers they get squished onto, lets just take that pesky choice  out of their hands and only make it to suit our own needs and desires.

Time and energy invested here

The initial step to consolidation left me with characters stranded for months on a dead server. I deleted characters and moved Imperials over as I could, but still had some remnants of my Imperial glory left behind. That would have been the perfect time to give me options. Instead, I was given a carrot on a stick, which I couldn’t fully take advantage of due to a lack of available character slots, and then left to wonder what would become of my hard work and legacy? What would become of the crafting skills I laboriously built to support my characters?  I still wonder what will become of the XP bars for each of my Legacies when one is forced to consume the other later today.

It would have been nice to be able to preserve my legacy by moving it to a RP server, thus giving me the freedom to pursue my idea of seeing the classes from both sides. If I want to explore new options, I have to start over on a RP server. Now I’m stuck without legacy perks or crafting skills that are duplicated and wasted on my brave new mega server, because I wasn’t given choice or options. That more than anything else makes me mad. I’m a victim of the MMO market overflood, but have been a loyal paying customer from the day the servers opened. I sure don’t feel like that now.

So farewell Krath and Z’ha’dum. I suppose I went there and died.

(Update: post merger, my level 23 legacy still has the same XP as before, so none of the merged legacy XP was added in.)

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SWTOR Event Goodies

I hope to update this over the next few days to share a few of the goodies from doing the latest Star Wars: The Old Republic’s live event. For now, I had to share a picture of my good fortune from yesterday’s kick off day. I’m not sure how often these little guys will drop from quest objects, but I got this one out of a smuggler’s crate while hunting for pieces of the Vandrayk’s Tuning Apparatus on Nar Shaddaa. They  normally cost 250 of the event tokens, so I’m really excited to get one as a random drop.

I’m not much of a social gear person, but I may link some of the sand people gear later. I didn’t get a full set for anyone, just bits and pieces that I’m waiting to equip once I mod them up. I’m not of a level to use the bowcaster yet, but I’m looking forward to using that on my Trooper later.

Think it might explode?

And then we come to the vehicle that you could buy for 120 tokens. I rushed to complete the quests on the last day with my Jedi Knight and since I had enough tokens to buy one, I got the speeder. I think I got a lemon. This bucket of bolts looks like they pulled it from the hidden transit system, and in fact they did. This is the speeder that you ride for one of the quests and take a leap of faith off a high platform while riding;  Smoke, sparks, bent stabilizers and all. This kind person tried to fix it up for me, but as you can see, there is no hope for this beat up fossil. I just hope its tougher than it looks.

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Enough With The Armchair Game Developing

Enough with the armchair quarterbacking and back-seat driving regarding MMO features at launch or even at the early stages of a game.
I do it myself, wondering why X feature, which is well known to be a popular one, or Y feature, which That Other Game has aren’t in my current game of choice. How could Rift and SWTOR possibly have released without guild banks, didn’t they know that we’d want and need them?!  The answer is that yes, I think all of these missing features are well known as desirable features and that any good MMO will have them, eventually. The key word here is eventually.

Yes, I believe that game developers create lists of game features and pay attention to what other games have added over their many years of development. I think they analyze most requested features and learn from games that have gone before. People refuse to acknowledge the “many years of development” part of the equation. There is a finite amount of money available to create a game. That money gets spent making a playable game, not making a game with 5 years worth of development time spent adding quality of life features and other non-essential content. That’s right, I said non-essential. I think we as players need to look closely at what is essential and what we just want and think we should have right now.

We have to stop arm-chair developing game content. If a game is good and lasts, then we can expect that money will be spent adding all of the features that make MMO players happy. Frankly, the game has to persist and make enough money to provide an incentive for putting more time and money into developing those features. To expect a game to release with all of the features other companies spent years coding is unrealistic. Sure, they aren’t re-inventing the wheel, but they are still paying people to write the code, test the code, integrate the features, create the UI to interact with them, and all the little nit-picky parts that go into making a feature actually work within a game.

Yes, I think guild banks are a no-brainer where an MMO is concerned and I was very surprised when Rift and SWTOR didn’t have them out the gate. However, not having them didn’t stop me from playing their games, didn’t stop their games from functioning, had nothing to do with how my class or story played out, didn’t interact with any of my quests or NPCs, and were not essential.  I’m glad they got added later, but I would not have traded a guild bank for being able to ride a speeder. No way! I’ve considered some of the things that other games I’ve played managed to add to their games, many years into their games being profitable, and I find I’d rather have more content and events than guild perks or web tools.

I think we as players need to get over the expectation that a new MMO should have a fraction of the features that some other games have added over time. We should instead expect that like those other games, we’ll get new features and quality of life functionality once the game bugs are worked out, the new content is added, and the games make enough money to fund the hours of coding time spent putting them in. They don’t magically appear just because we know they exist in another game.

So sure, we can be disappointed that dollars didn’t go into them, but we shouldn’t quit a game or call it junk over non-essential features. As we are seeing from bored end-game players in SWTOR, content is greater than features. Content locusts only bitch about the features when they’ve devoured all the content. If you quit a new game because it didn’t have all the features at release that the game you played for many years (and got bored with despite all its shiny features) had, you might want to re-think your expectations.

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Are MMO Players Just Too Fickle?

I’ve had various thoughts going through my head lately regarding my current MMO, Star Wars The Old Republic. Thoughts about vanished guildies, low populations, MMOs, grind in games, end game content, etc. I’ve had a few Twitter discussions about what an MMO should aspire to, what it means to be an MMO, MMO vs single player games, and where SWTOR fits into that big picture. I’ve thought about the upcoming patch and some of the fixes it will bring, and whether the fixes offered will really stop the downhill slide yet. The end result of all of this pondering is that this is a really complicated picture.

It seemed like an auspicious beginning!

Lets talk server transfers and what I will do with that option when it becomes available. I currently have two servers that I play on. The first server is The Harbinger which is one of the higher population servers. It has always been high population, even too high at times, which is why I have several characters and a legacy on a second server, Krath. So here I sit with one server that has a maximum number of characters on it, where I have a pretty high legacy level and it has a decent population; however, I’m part of a failed guild and haven’t seen any guilds that I really want to join (until today, more on that later I hope). I also have a couple of real life friends who joined that server and that guild so we could play together one night a week. I don’t really want to move to a low population server, and I’d need to leave a character behind to play with my friends, or talk them into moving servers with me. With legacy rewards and levels thrown into the mix, decisions about server moves become complicated.

Now lets ponder the fact that I have a second legacy of a different level with the 4 characters I’ve started on Krath. Krath has become low population, but we joined it with another real life friend who wanted an Empire side option. Originally our guild had said it would go to Krath on Empire side while queues were high on The Harbinger. That never materialized, but by the time we realized that, we already had invested time and energy in that server and our friend had already started his legacy and didn’t want to give it up. The transfer picture gets pretty complicated at this point when it isn’t just me and my husband, but also other friends.

Now suppose I’d like to move just my level 50 character who wants to run Operations, and has geared up through the original Hard Mode Operations, onto a server with an active guild and active Operations team. What do I have to sacrifice in order to make that move? I’d be moving her from a higher population server to a lower population server, so what happens if that server never gets a high population? I’m pondering all of this without even knowing what the cost might be for transfers and what that cost will cover. The developers must have these types of questions going through their minds, and more, as they ponder worst case scenarios. I’m sure there are plenty of complex situations, especially when an entire guild may be thinking of transferring.

Still A Great Big Galaxy Out There

Let move on to the bigger picture of why this has become necessary, that of people quitting the game. I love Star Wars, so I’m slightly biased, but I still think this is a great game. It solves a lot of issues I have had with other MMOs, namely hating walls of text, boring quests, lack of meaning in why I quest (kill 12 rats…), repetitious content, and lack of variety. Is the lack of a lot of end game content really so bad when compared to the rest of what is great about the game? Sadly enough, for a lot of people, it seems to be.

Paying a subscription and playing a game with other people seems to really require more end game for a large chunk of the people who started playing the game. Many of them don’t seem to appreciate that there is plenty to do while additional content is being built. I find it odd and very sad. I’ve considered other MMOs I’ve played and I don’t want to go back to those games and put up with their grind just to get the larger end game content, but I seem to be in a minority. Are people really willing to go back to grinding reputation, grinding dungeons, grinding PVP dailies, and boring meaningless quests just to get their end game on? It seems that many of them are, enough so that we’re seeing a sharp drop off of players.

Beware Trolls!

I actually think that while the group finder will help get some people back playing, it won’t help enough. There will still be a smaller pool of people from which to draw, and many of the people who are still playing aren’t doing end game content. Like me, many of them will be glad for an easier time getting into Flashpoint groups, but I’d assume most are entertaining themselves playing new classes and stories, rather than doing end game or even dungeons.  After all, we’ve all done them by now and much of the content is becoming repetitious. I am very glad that they are sticking to their guns in having the group finder stay within a server. Doing so means they aren’t solving the immediate population issues, but it shows that they are thinking long term. Not having cross server will make many unhappy in the short term, but in the long term, under the assumption that server populations will get healthier, it is the right choice. Bad behavior only gets worse when there is no recourse or consequences to behaving badly. We’ve all seen really bad behavior from people with no reputation on their server to risk. People would scream as loudly at having to put up with cross server jerks as they will at not having cross server pools.

Some have argued that those of us playing in small groups or doing new classes could be doing that in a single player game, but I doubt we’d get the richness of this experience in any single player game. We certainly wouldn’t get the promise of new content or dynamic world events without being in this game model. I really want the game to succeed and flourish so it can keep giving us new things, but it has to make enough money to be able to keep the quality and variety high. With “ok” Free to Play games out there, I think people are under the impression that they can get high quality without paying for it. That “quality” only takes you so far.

Epic?

Some have also argued that the goal of an MMO is to get shiny purple gear, and that once you have that gear, there are no other real goals to achieve. They say the gear in SWTOR was too easy to get, and came too fast. If that’s true, then maybe most MMO players really do love grind. I very much appreciate that SWTOR strives not to make us grind, to avoid forcing us to repeat content over and over again in order to obtain nice rewards. There are many paths to power in the game and that is fantastic!  Maybe the rewards did come too fast and too easily for anyone who dedicated a lot of play time early on in the game. We had guildies playing almost 24/7 and they quit weeks ago.  For those who couldn’t play that many hours, I think the rewards have been at a pace that was much less frustrating than other games. The gear rewards feel attainable to those with less play time available.

It is a grim thought indeed that for an MMO to really succeed and flourish, it has to cater to the voracious content consumers who will only ever play one character. I have friends who have said that an MMO only starts for them when they get to max level. I always thought/hoped that they were in the minority, but maybe MMOs generally do attract the majority of people of that mindset. How do you make the process of getting to max level a lot of fun and balance it with keeping the max-level-only people happy? I can promise you, a game that isn’t repeatable or has a meaningless and boring leveling experience won’t make the end-gamers happy either. Every single one of the people I know who have had that mindset have ended up getting bored with their main character and eventually started playing alts.

Needless to say, with these heavy thoughts going through my head, coupled with news of Bioware Austin layoffs and the assumptions about what they might mean, I’ve been pretty depressed. I’m trying hard not to feed the gloom and doom or assume the worst. I have said in other places that I think SWTOR has an awesome foundation, high quality, and a bright future if we can just get through the current bumpy downturn. But I’m also someone who has seen wonderful shows I love, like Firefly, killed by meddling executives with only the great dollar on their minds. I know that things I love and believe to be worthwhile can be killed by those not willing to take risks in the face of dwindling profits. So while I hope that EA and BioWare are willing and able to take a long view for the game, part of me worries that they won’t. Heavy thoughts for a game experience with so many epic, goosebump-inducing moments.

In the end, I’m still having a lot of fun, I still haven’t experienced a fraction of the game content, and I plan to keep playing. I just hope they don’t pull a Firefly on me and end something special before it hits its full stride. Or maybe worse, put it on life support and forget about it. Instead, I still hope we get all of the new and exciting features and content that I know these creative people have in the works for us. I hope for a resurgence in players so we can all see the stuff still sitting on the wall of crazy. People should think carefully about whether the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. I think that grass is full of 12 dead rats…

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When LFG Means Looking for Guild

When guild chat gets empty, when login notifications become non-existant, when your guild leader doesn’t show up anymore and no one but you visits your guild site; if you plan to stick with a game, it finally becomes time to make a tough decision. Finding the right guild is not always easy. Some people get lucky and find their in-game home quickly while others spend a lot of time guild hopping. I’ve had a mix of both in my time in MMOs, but mostly I’ve been pretty lucky in my guild experiences. But no matter how much you might like a group of people, when they no longer play you either quit along with them, play mostly alone and essentially guildless or you find new people to hang out with who are still active.

I believe a good guild is essential to fully enjoying an MMO. I know it is essential for me. With my guild gone inactive, I’ve been thinking about my play style and what I want from a guild. I’ve been with the same guild through a couple of WoW expansions, playing up to level 50 in Rift, and now playing up to level 50 and through the initial (pre-1.2) end game in SWTOR. They have been a good fit and fun to hang out with, enough so that we’ve tried to stay together through multiple games, but I’ve come to a few realizations after trying to get the guild going, unsuccessfully, in a couple of new MMOs.

The most active members are also heavily end game focused. That worked for us when end game was plentiful and fun, but for new games where end game is pretty sparse or grindy, it hasn’t been enough. I always thought they were enough of a mix of casual and altaholics that end game wasn’t so essential, but I’ve realized lately that I was wrong. There aren’t enough of them willing to find other pursuits while waiting for new end game content to make the guild survive. Most of them didn’t even come back online to try the new operations in patch 1.2. Hardly anyone even said goodbye, which is probably what bothers me the  most and makes me re-think whether relationships were that close with anyone but our guild leader.

What I want in a new guild is a pretty tall order. I need a guild that does end game and is good at it, but remains casual in their approach to end game raiding/operations. They organize ops efficiently, people know what they are doing and work hard toward success, but there is room to play other characters, take time for real life, and laugh while running operations. I want a group with minimal to no guild drama, no loot drama, and fun to chat with while not being overly chatty. One where people visit the website and contribute information or just check in once in a while; Info that is posted contributes toward the success of raids/ops, and we use tools to make organizing them as easy as possible.  Website use is also something my current guild doesn’t do very well. As I’ve been their webmaster for a while, it makes what I do feel pretty silly.

I don’t like a lot of the chat requirements of social guilds, where you must say hello and goodbye all the time, must “gratz” people for every little thing they do, to the point where someone makes a program to just do that for you automatically. Insincerity and forced chatting has always bothered me. I want a nice mix of friendly and genuine joy at people’s success, but not artificially pushed.

While the  guild needs to do end game and be good at it, when end game has been tackled and we’re waiting for new content to be released, the guild doesn’t evaporate. This last part is where my current guild has failed and is probably my hardest requirement. I’ve got a well geared level 50 and a pretty high legacy level, so until we have the option of character transfers, I also need a guild that is on my current server, The Harbinger. I don’t do PVP beyond dabbling, so that limits my options as well. They need to be not too big, not too small, but big enough to try world bosses and other 16 man content.

I’ve been looking, watching general chat, checking out who is online and looking for a healthy population of a guild logged in. I’ve been visiting websites and reading fan sites, hoping to see a guild recruiting that looks good. So far I haven’t found one that I’m willing to approach. Thankfully my husband plays and is still enjoying the game with me, although that complicates the picture a little bit since we both need a guild we can be happy in, and he’s less into end game than I am. Still, I’ll keep looking and keep hoping to find that perfect or nearly perfect fit. And I’ll feel sad at the inevitable loss of contact with the folks I’ve followed around for so long. I feel bad that I’m the only officer who still logs in, when there is the occasional other person online. Once I go, what will they do?  But when you are the only person online most of the time, what else can you do? I need enthusiasm and a sense of fun most of all. The journey must be something we all pursue, not something a few drag the others along to do. So, here I sit, LFG.

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The Rakghoul Surprise

What do you mean my eyes are glowing?!

Bioware launched a surprise dynamic event on us over the weekend. I haven’t seen any of the world bosses for it, probably won’t with our guild gone dark, but the content I’ve been able to do has been pretty fun.

I like the pets from questing or purchase with the event currency. I’m not a pet and mount fiend like I used to be, but these spikey little guys are pretty nifty.

Pet reward for scanning debris across Tatooine

The Crimson Rakling requires a pretty long chain and epic exploration of Tatooine,  a bit of cliff jumping, some cross faction guards dodging…  Thank goodness for map coordinates and fan site guides. I used the one from Torwars and it saved me a lot of frustration. I’m amazed at how quickly people found and documented the pieces for this chain.

What, something's behind me?!

The other pet, can be purchased from a Jawa vendor north of the crash site which is ground zero for the event. For 60 DNA Samples, you can buy a Pale Rakling pet. Between my various alts getting infected, experiencing glowing eyes, green gas, and blowing up, I was able to gather that many pretty quickly for a pet on one of my characters.

Here are a couple of the companion customizations for the “rak” ish look. Quinn looks sexy even as a rakghoul.

Quinn even looks good sickly!

Hey Corso, you're not looking so great.

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The Evolution to Epic Gear

My guildmates keep giggling over the gear sets we’re picking up from raiding. I recently upgraded my pants. I miss the  good old everyday wear, but the lure of purple gear set bonuses can’t be denied. I suppose the new pants look lived in and comfy? You decide:

Do these pants make my butt look fat?

Favorite smuggler pants

New Hat. I may actually be willing to stop hiding my head slot now.

Don't have to hide my head (gear) in shame anymore

These boots are more like it!

Better hat, and these boots are very cool looking. One night in HM Operations and my feet are happy, new guns, belt, and a dead Hutt!

And finally, the vest goes but the 4 pc bonus will be nice. Farewell comfy scruffy vest, hello Lando-looking cape.

Bye Bye comfy vest hello 4 piece bonus

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