I love blogging, why is blogging so hard?

Posted on May 12, 2012 by

So I read — with some unhappiness — that Alex at A New Dope is retiring1 her blog and moving just to our guild blog at the Snark Side.

I didn’t really see that one coming, and it made me really think about what I’m doing with this blog. Mostly, what I seem to be doing with it is not posting. I think the smaller blogging community that SWTOR has leaves me scrambling for motivation to write more often than not, but I also think that my unwillingness to sit down and get the conversation started is contributing to the small, shallower blogging community around the game. It’s a vicious circle.

When I left WoW, I’d been burned out — really burned out — for a long time. Longer than I realized, so my blogging motivation was pretty low. Then there was a couple months hiatus before I picked up SWTOR, and once a habit is broken, boy is it hard to pick it back up again. Since the end of my former relationship, I expected to get back to blogging because I’m feeling so much more positive than I was before and I’ve got a lot of things to say… um, well that didn’t happen. I blame my new relationship (squee) for taking up my every spare minute right now.

But I like blogging and I’ve been doing it, albeit sporadically, for years now. I am not a guide-writer, I’m not a theorycrafter or a class expert, but I love the community and being able to put my thoughts out there for feedback and being part of the larger conversation around the games I play.

So I’m not going anywhere2. I’m flaky, I’m sporadic. But I’m still around. Still playing SWTOR, still blogging.

I’ll be back with a real SWTOR post very soon… if anyone’s still reading.

  1. Ironically, I read this on the stupid scraping site that prompted her post in the first place, good work, scraper guy. /sigh ↩
  2. Except back to that damn scraper’s site to see if they pick up this post too. ↩
Posted in Tangentially Related (Maybe) | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

9 Ways to be Dark Side without Being a Total Asshole

Posted on April 7, 2012 by

You know you wanna have a dark character or two to see the full range of story possibilities. But being bad is just so hard for me. Take for example, Hutta, the starter planet for Imperial Agents and Bounty Hunters. Early on, you get a quest from a wife to go talk to her husband about their child’s education… but as it turns out (mini spoiler, highlight to read) she wants to send the kid to Korriban to become Sith, and the only way to persuade the father to let that happen is to shoot him in front of the kid. IN FRONT OF THE KID!

Now if you’re like me and shooting random strangers for trivial offenses, denying lifesaving food and water to orphans, and lying like a lying lying liar isn’t your cup of tea… it can be hard to swallow dark side options sometimes. So here’s a few suggestions on how to play dark without being a giant douche. I was going for a top ten style, but you know what, I could only think of nine and that’s really plenty!

1) Make “For the Greater Good” Decisions - You know, choose the many over the few. Save buildings not people. These are perfectly acceptable decisions to make, even for mostly good guys. There are just times when you have to choose the rebuilding of the planet over the lives of a few factory workers or you save a case of medicine that could cure thousands instead of one person in immediate danger.

2) Have a Short Temper - Even good guys lose their temper sometimes. If a particular villain makes you really mad shoot him in the face. It feels good, and it doesn’t require you to be an evil evil bastard, just a mostly good person who had a moment of unpremeditated rage. As Kira Carsen would say, “Eat lightsaber, jerk!”

Oh yeah? Well take THAT!

 

3) Have a “Trigger” - My light side sage, Joscelin, hates it when people discriminate against aliens. Maybe you’ve seen her… she’s bright green. Only a handful of times has she ever accumulated dark side points in her career. Those few times were all people who put her down for being an alien. Is she light side? Very. But she’ll do something dark if you provoke her just right.

4) Be a Little Impulsive - Do things on a whim. Poor impulse control can totally lead to the Dark Side. When someone suggests you take revenge for them, shrug your shoulders and do it. Don’t be all noble and well-considered all the time. Revenge is FUN!

5) Use Diplomacy - If you just want smexy yellow eyes but can’t stomach the bloodshed, use Diplomacy to keep yourself balanced. Just hover around dark 1, look hot, and farm those medical supplies. This also provides an awesome source of income.

Oh my, look at those smexy evil eyes...

 

6) Pick Someone You Don’t Like to Be Totally Mean To - Pretty self explanatory, but some recurring NPCs, including your companions, can net you dark side points when you say really truly horrible things to them. Sadly, not every NPC works this way because it’s really fun and awesome.

Someone I don't like to be totally mean to

 

7) Take Bribes - everyone loves money right? When that next NPC offers you a stupendous reward for doing something not-quite-on-the-level, take him up on it. Just be aware that a tremendous fortune to those guys is usually like 250 credits… cheapskates.

8 ) Have Sex - If you’re a Jedi. That sort of thing is totally frowned upon. And it’s fun and nobody gets hurt! Unless… well… there is… /whispers space herpes…

9) Be a Little Bit Gray - Nothing is going to get you straight Dark V with no Light Side points except taking all the giant douche options that are offered to you. You’ll have to harass children, shoot women, and generally make yourself the caricature of evil that I, for one, can’t stand to play. But being a little gray will get you plenty dark, and still let you be nice to your favorite companion and save babies when the whim strikes you. What’s not to love?

Posted in General SWTOR, Roleplay | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Who Did This, No Seriously, Who Thought This Up?

Posted on April 1, 2012 by

So, Romily has been making more than satisfactory progress in her raiding. She’s in full-Columi now with the exception of jewelry (ears, relics, implants, which are mostly crafted and/or Tionese equivalent) and we killed our first Hardmode boss this week (yayyyy!). But her clothes, OMG guys, her clothes. It PAINS me.

Below for your viewing pleasure, is Romily’s Columi Field Medic’s set:

Columi Field Medic's Crap. You can click to embiggen if you're not worried about possibly burning out your retinas.

 

Let me draw your attention to some of the finer points here. I know the overall impression is SALMONBOOBS, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. Let’s look for a moment at the hat. Cream with brown trim, a gas mask, and a highly questionable wimple effect around the back of the head.

Why cream? Really, I mean, WHY cream? Every other light colored trim on the whole outfit is either white or grey. So in what universe does it make sense for the hat to be cream?  And Brown? Really? Because every other piece of dark colored trim on the outfit is black or charcoal. HELLO DESIGNERS, there’s something called matching. It’s what makes sets go together. And while we’re on the subject of matching, why is my high tech bandanna MAROON when my jacket is ORANGE? Did Romily get dressed in the dark? Is she color blind? Is she on some kind of psychedelic trip?

/headdesk. It’s bad when I need match to chest to make things match WITHIN a set. Srs, Bioware. Color schemes, they’re a thing. Or at least they should be. Please.

Posted in Operations, Smuggler | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Three Months: Srs Bzns Edition

Posted on March 27, 2012 by

Three months doesn’t seem like a long time. But it is apparently the right time to post my first SWTOR retrospective. The blogosphere for SWTOR might be small, but it’s totally got memes, yo!

Today’s topic comes from Kristalys at All for the Wookiee, and asks us to review our first three months in SWTOR.

Well. Hm.

My first three months of SWTOR has been rocky, to be quite honest. Far from upgrading my machine and modeling leaf-butts, I’ve been having personal drama and stress instead.

I’ve been quiet on this site lately, partly because I spend more time playing than writing about playing, but also partly because the game has intermingled so much with my personal life, that when stuff started to go haywire I couldn’t find much positive to say. Not to mention my trying not to air my personal problems in such a public channel.

But now that I sit down to write this post, I realize I can’t do a retrospective on the first three months of SWTOR without touching on what these three months have really meant to me: conflict. You see, I am a member of the fantastic and wonderful guild The Snark Side. But my significant other was not.

We had a miscommunication early in the beta stage, and he didn’t get in on guild planning until after our somewhat stringent recruitment policies had been put in place. He felt as though I’d engineered this to keep him from joining, and was really hurt by the slight. He’d also had some (mild but ongoing) personality conflicts with other guild members in the past who were less than enthusiastic about working with him (although willing to give it a try)… and it all added up to some serious bad feelings. There were other things going on, both in and out of game, but in all the fights and conflicts, we just kept coming back to the core issue: I love my guild, he seriously did not.

Now a relationship is pretty important. And if it’s a good relationship, it’s worth prioritizing over silly things like SWTOR guilds. In light of this fact, I really wrestled with my decisions about my gaming time. I considered leaving my guild to please him, and going off to find/form a guild where we could both be happy. I thought about returning to WoW where he was still raiding with our old guildmates. I even thought about running away to an RP server to just play as a hermit and escape all the tensions. He encouraged me not to, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to go either. The Snarkers are some of my closest friends and if he wasn’t going to ask me flat out to leave, I wasn’t leaving.

Things continued in a downhill spiral. We fought every day. I got to 50 and started running dailies. He accused me of leaving him behind (You wanna grind dailies? Be my guest!). We were fighting during my first flashpoint. We were fighting when I finished my class storyline. When I dinged 50. We were fighting during my first endgame flashpoint. And he hung up on me in the middle of my first operation. He said this fighting was souring his experience of the game. Well mine too. I got so I barely wanted to talk to him, or log in at all.

And I don’t want you readers to think that the problems were in the game. It really would be a ridiculous thing to be that miserable over. The problems were outside the game, in our real lives, the things that had changed since we met and the physical distance between us. But it all played out within the conflict of Boyfriend vs. Guild.

Long story short: we split up last Thursday. And it wasn’t angry or horrible, but necessary and probably even overdue.

But that’s all I can say in a retrospective of the first three months of SWTOR. They’ve been three months of personal struggles, a decaying relationship, conflict and… just misery, really. But in the end, I don’t know if things could have worked out better. I lost the relationship, but I was going to lose that anyway, and I got to keep my friends… without whom I’d have been a messier mess than I was to begin with.

So let’s look ahead to the next three months instead! Kris’s meme can be the corner I turn, away from the barely concealed angst and writer’s block, and on to newer, better, shinier things. What I’m looking forward to in the next three months:

  • Stomping a Hutt flat in Karagga’s Palace
  • Test driving Hard and maybe even Nightmare Modes
  • Mastering the art of Smuggler Healing
  • Alting my brains out
  • Learning what it’s like to play MMOs outside of that gaming power couple dynamic.
  • Getting more involved in guild and raid stuff (now that I don’t always have to be worried about fighting over it). I do the rostering for the Raiders of the Lost Snark, and we’re planning a future collaboration with the Church of Alvis to field some 16 man content sometime soon!
  • Sharing my adventures (may they be many) with you fine folk here on my very own Ice Planet. Of course!

 

 

 

Posted in General SWTOR, Tangentially Related (Maybe) | Tagged , , , , , , | 17 Comments

Patch 1.2 Cannot Get Here Soon Enough!

Posted on March 17, 2012 by

Fashion Smashin' (as in, smash these hideous clothes)

 

Here you see, from left to right: Njessi, our guildmate Biscotti, and myself. We killed Soa last night, and the three of us scored our Columi 4 set bonuses. Yay! Right? Um, sure. I don’t know if you noticed, but my shirt is salmon, with boobstripes, and a vampire cape and somehow the shape of it distorts my character so she looks like a linebacker. Njessi’s shoulders look like they’re going to fly away without her (also her coat is orange and her pants are green), and Biscotti looks like he was assembled out of spare parts by the Lego Star Wars team.

Click to embiggen if it won’t burn out your retinas.

Give us patch 1.2 pleeeaaaase….

Posted in General SWTOR, Operations, Screenshots | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

High Speed

Posted on March 14, 2012 by

So, since my last post I got down to business, went out, and ground to 50. And it’s a good thing I did because I hit the ground running! I also installed Fraps and have been holding down my screenshot key pretty near the whole time, so this will be a pictorial review of my last week or so in the game! With pictures! *no or very minor spoilers only*

Last Wednesday I finished up the questline on Corellia and was treated to some of the best screenshot fodder I’ve seen in the game so far. Specifically, me and the gang got honored by the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic. The scene reminded me a bit of the ceremony to honor the crew of the Millennium Falcon after Yavin 4.

Hey Princess Leia, Where's MY medal?!

 

After Corellia I headed to Ilum which has one of the most beautiful scenic views of any spaceport I’ve been to yet. My Fraps key is totally going to wear right out.

The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow

 

I was about level 49.99 when I arrived on Ilum, so I barely had to do anything before I got that final triumphant ding.

Space Balls!

 

I immediately went out and got my gear into the most presentable state possible. Including, of course, stripping the mods out of the long purple coat I’d dinged in and putting on something a little more fashionable.

This collar misbehaves, but DAMN I look good!

 

Then I hit the three planets I needed matrix shards from and made myself a hot new relic.

Imma firin' mah lazors

 

And with that, and a few crafted pieces from my guildies and the GTN, I was OFF to my first raid op. Talk about discombobulating, I’ve gone from the leisurely pace of leveling with no particular deadline, straight into healing endgame raids operations with barely a pause to breathe.

Friday night we were in Eternity Vault Normal. We got the first four bosses without a single wipe, and spent the rest of the evening learning the Soa fight. Toward the end of the evening we were getting really good, real close attempts. Then the bugs set in and pretty much put paid to our attempts for the rest of the night.

I was really concerned about the Infernal Council, because as a Scoundrel healer, I have to deal damage from melee range and a lot of what DPS capability I have depends on getting behind an enemy and shooting it or smacking it in the back of the head. Without someone else to take the aggro for me, I have really limited opportunities to get behind things, which made me wonder if I’d struggle with taking out my own mob with no tank and no companion. I had heard that the healer’s mobs were especially wimpy, but I worried just the same. Fortunately, `I didn’t need to, I beat the SNOT out of my assigned target and was one of the first people finished. Woot!

Saturday, we hit Karagga’s Palace Normal. Unlike EV, which the rest of the group had raided without me the week before, none of us had been to Karagga’s yet. We got Bonethrasher and the Bounty Hunter Twins, but Foreman Crusher defeated us through his devious use of bugs. He’s a big fat cheater, FYI.

Being the only smuggler in the raid both nights, I got an embarrassing shower of goodies, and am now looking quite respectable for my raids going forward. I picked up four pieces of Columi, one piece of Tionese (sadly given to Guss cause I already had Columi for that slot), one Cybertech pattern, and almost enough commendations to buy the Tionese Scattergun…

I STUPIDLY picked up the Columi Enforcer’s Gloves instead of the Columi Field Medic’s Gloves on Friday night, because I was tired and only paying half enough attention. I’m super frustrated because it means I’ll have to pick up a fifth piece in order to get the four piece set bonus… but considering that I picked up three pieces toward the set in two nights, I guess I can probably live with it. The stats on the Enforcer’s Gloves are fine anyway.

Anyway, my first celebration for my successful raiding operations weekend was to go out and roll a bunch of alts!

Jalysca, Sith Marauder

 

Kelty, Human Mercenary

 

Now that I’m back into the swing of things, I’m hoping I can keep up with it without giving myself horrible horrible burnout. Forgive me if I keep harping on a point, but I enjoy raiding ops, and I don’t want to get to the point where I was in that OTHER game where I never wanted to see the instance entrance ever again.   So dear dear blog readers, if I have any left, here are my resolutions for my future in SWTOR:

  • I’m going to keep up with our raiding ops program, and stay on the roster as a healer with my guild.
  • I’m going to take the breaks I need, and learn to say no when I need to for my personal balance.

Additionally, I’d like to make some progress toward being a bit more consistent in my blogging, but that’s not really my historical tendency, and I can’t make any promises to that effect. I can try though!

Until then, what’s the coolest thing you did in the last week? Do you have game goals?

Posted in Healing, Operations, Screenshots, Smuggler | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Feelin’ Angsty

Posted on February 28, 2012 by

My guild is getting ready for their first raid on Friday.

I’m not going with them.

I’m a “stops and smells the roses” type leveler, and I’m a serial alt-roller, and it took me forever even to choose a character to level seriously. I’m not ready yet.

Not only am I not 50, I don’t think I’m there in the brain yet. I’m in the new romance phase of the game. I don’t want to be at the end of the game yet, and that’s pretty much what endgame implies. It’s in the name. But I really like this guild and I like the people and I work well with them. And when I do get around to raiding, I want it to be with them if at all possible.

And I guess that’s going to be about next week, because they’re not really into the whole social thing. And while they love the alts, they mostly are main focused types, or at least people who have a clearly defined main that they spend most of their time on. I am more of a nebulous wishy-washy type who declares a “main” only when the strictures of raiding require me to, and I might at any given moment be playing that main most of all my characters or least as the whim strikes me.

I like raiding. I’m fairly good at it. I love healing. I think I’m fairly good at that as well. I fully expect I will want to do it and probably quite rabidly… eventually, but I guess just not this Friday.

But in the meantime I’m feeling left out. I don’t feel like I can provide anything useful to the guildies right now. And beyond company they’re not really providing anything to me. I’ve been so far behind the leveling curve that I haven’t even run a single flashpoint with them since the few buggy Black Talon runs we did in beta. I’m not 50 yet so I’m not really studying up on gear or raid strategies yet, so most of the conversations in guild chat and our forums (and even some in my gossipy workday IM sessions) go right over my head.

Compound that with Boyfriend still raiding in WoW, with my ex-guild that I’m not on great (though not horrible) terms with. And he doesn’t get along with my SWTOR guild very well either, so… Yeah. I’m feeling the frustration a little bit today.

Posted in General SWTOR | Tagged , | 4 Comments

I went to see Episode I in 3D

Posted on February 25, 2012 by

Here’s what I learned:

They needed more health!

 

With our sharp eyes we were able to spot a Nikto and a Kaleesh in the scenes on Tatooine as well!

It’s kind of neat to see the inspiration for game lore in action, actually.

 

Posted in General SWTOR, Inquisitor, Jedi Knight | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Six Six Pick Up Sticks

Posted on February 24, 2012 by

I got tagged by Selly @ A Lovely Starwar (gratuitous plug: Selly and Reznikov and their occasional ensemble are hilarious and thoroughly enjoyable. ALS is becoming one of my favorite blogs, if anyone isn’t reading it!) for the Sixth Sixth Screenshot Meme, or whatever we call it.

The process is as follows:

  • Go into your image folder
  • Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
  • Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couldn’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
  • Challenge six new bloggers.
  • Link to them.

Now I have two screenshots to share with you today, because the sixth subfolder is where I keep all the images I take with my precision snipping tool, regardless of game. The sixth of these happens to be from WoW.

Meditating

 

This is my discipline priest from WoW, taken early in Cataclysm. One of my more minor, but quite beloved alts. She is in the secret shrine room in Orgrimmar that you have to glitch your way through the floor to get to. She’s clearly meditating in front of this candle. I really loved that room.

So next I checked my dedicated SWTOR folder, which is pretty sparse because my screenshots key hasn’t been working properly. So it has no subfolders (yet) but I have prepared for you, the sixth screenshot:

There's something wrong about this pose.

 

You can click to embiggen that, I know it’s a tad small as presented. There we see Romily on Taris experiencing a common, but still bizarre launch bug. She paid for a speeder ride but the speeder didn’t show up. She got all in the pose for it and everything, but… nothing! HEY DROIDFACE, I WANT MY CREDITS BACK.

Also, let me draw your attention to a subsection of this shot:

Hay look who that is!

 

Not only am I expressing the thoughts I just elaborated, but Njessi is busily involved in her noted obsession with Corso’s pants and their relative state of off-ness. XD

My guild… I couldn’t make this stuff up!

Anyway, I think this meme is pretty well winding down and I can’t think of any bloggers I regularly read who haven’t already done it, so I’m going to say screw it with tagging. :P I’m so bad at memes.

Posted in General SWTOR, Screenshots | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Romily is BROKEN. /cry

Posted on February 23, 2012 by

So my main is glitched. It seems like a small thing, but I can’t stand to play her as she is right now.

I have NO CHAT WINDOW.

It appears while I’m typing… but only while I’m typing. The minute I stop typing it vanishes again and nothing I do can make it reappear… except typing.

That means in order to see what I just looted, I have to type gibberish. To check what embarrassing typos I just sent to chat, I have to type gibberish. To see if anyone responded to a question I asked, I have to type gibberish.

And if someone’s talking in guild… forget it. I can’t type gibberish constantly just to follow the conversation. Not working as intended!

So I tried everything I could think of to fix it. I reset my chat settings to default. I turned the “Chat Fade” option off. I messed with the fade alpha. I reset ALL my preferences to default (which made a mess, let me tell you). I tried ctrl+UU. I tried relogging. Restarting the client. Nothing. All my other characters are fine.

My ticket response was the canned “forwarded to the appropriate department” and “not able to provide further updates” but “check the patch notes”. Yay.

Suggestions, anybody? I literally can’t stand the thought of playing in a bubble like that indefinitely, and if it can’t be fixed I will HAVE to reroll. Something I do not want to do, like AT ALL.

Posted in General SWTOR, Smuggler | Tagged , , , , , | 18 Comments