Server Transfers: From Ghost Town To Impersonal Crowd

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Lemme give you a little background: Juyo was a reasonably populated server.  Not totally a ghost town, but not overcrowded with laggy spots.  On an average night, there were 50 people on each fleet.  You’d be able to easily do your dailies without having to camp spawn points, but you would see people here and there while you went about your business.  General chat was a lazy conversation and most people kept it on because it wasn’t overly spammy – this was useful for finding groups for dailies.

Now, the bad part is that flashpoint grouping was pretty much nonexistent and it was a little difficult to find things on the auction house.  I mean GTN.  Whatever.  When they announced server transfers, I figured they’d buff Juyo’s population to about double or triple what it was with refugees of truly DEAD servers.  To me, that seemed like a viable community.

When it seemed clear that they were funneling everyone onto a handful of servers, I realized that Bioware was going for a different community model than I envisioned.  I’m kinda sad.  With a huge population you lose the connections you gain in a medium-sized population – where everyone has at least HEARD of everyone else’s guild, many names are recognizable, etc.  I feel that to correct the problem of dead zones, they zoomed past the sweet spot of “viable community” and went straight to city-like crowds.  They went from small town life straight to a Manhattan or Los Angeles without pausing to consider if a Tucson or a Memphis might be a good balance.

Last night, upon arriving in Canderous Ordo, I had to turn off general chat because it was going by too fast and just spamming up things.  I lost a connection to the community of which I’m a part because it was too big and unwieldy.  I did find a hat recipe that I had been stalking for weeks now on the GTN, which was a bittersweet victory.

Onward and upward, right?

Making Your Companion Mad is Expensive

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

So, those late companions, man… it feels like someone punched me in the wallet every time I make one of them displeased.  In the beginning, your companions give you +15 for good, and even if you’re a total asshole, it’s usually somewhere around -30.  Ok whatever.  With the later companions, however, they gain a lot more affection per conversation choice and also lose more if you piss them off.

Now, if I’m giving my newly-minted companion some gifts and he suddenly wants to chat, hey cool, more affection.  Well, maybe not.  If I suck up, then I get more affection.  If I say something my companion hates, it could be -100 or more!  Now, -100 can be a lot of cash when you consider companion gifts.  I lost 500 affection with Scourge in the course of 1 conversation and it was expensive to bribe him back to being my friend.  It’s pretty demoralizing to end a companion-requested conversation with less affection than you started.

So what do you do?  Stay true to yourself?  Or give lip service to your companion to avoid paying out the nose?

It’s even trickier with romance options.  For example, the husband has a female consular and has no intention of getting cozy with Iresso.  So she’s tactfully letting him down easy because shutting him off completely results in the -100 Of Cash (not to be confused with the -1 Of Shame).  Then he gets to a point in the conversation and his choices are:

(1) [Flirt] Let’s make out.

(2) [Flirt] Let’s BSOCK.

(3) Fuck off and die.

Ok, I’m paraphrasing.  And exaggerating for comic effect.  But he’s like… argh this is going to cost me!  Thankfully (and surprisingly), option #3 did not cost any affection, but still… how much is it going to cost my character not to sleep with this guy?  Ugh.  Not a conversation I want to be having in my head.

Well, you say, just don’t care about affection.  Which is totally fine for you non-crafters out there.  But I need for them to crit on all the things or it makes it (you guessed it) expensive for me.  So it’s money either way.  Money to buy their love, or money lost for lack of potential crafting bonuses.

So, dear readers, does companion affection affect how you play?  If so, is it driven (even a little) by cost?

[Screenshot] Oh YEAH? My Companion Is Bigger Than Yours!

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Some dude had dressed his Kira in a bikini – honestly, why do guys DO that?  Sigh.  Anyway, if all the cool kids were bringing out their bikini-clad companion, I’ll be damned if I’ll be left out of that party.

 

Y’all, help me caption this image?

Why I’m Freaking The Eff Out About Patch 1.3

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Patch 1.3 looks beyond awesome.  However, in my little corner of the universe, I’m freaking out…

Augment Kits

Presuming everyone already has augmented weapon(s), chest, head, and legs, we will still need to augment 10 more pieces: boots, gloves, bracers, belt, earpiece, implants x 2, relics x 2, and off-hand.

Each augment kit takes 10 reverse engineered doodads, each of which comes from a crafted item.  That means each person will need 100 items crafted for those kits.  100. Items. Granted, you can get SOME of the mats back through reverse engineering, but still, 100 items that take level 6 materials.  When each mission to get level 6 mats takes 30 minutes, and then each minion comes back with 4 units (give or take), the flow of materials is severely limited.

But wait!  You’ll have to fill those new augment slots with augments (duh).  Each augment takes 4 purple augment parts from slicing missions.  That means each person will need 40 purple augment parts.  Holy geez, do you know how long it takes to accumulate those damn things?  I have all my companions at 10k affection, and T7 has a 2% crit bonus, and I probably have 80 of them.  Which would just about cover myself and 1 other guildie.  That’s not a lot of people coverage for months of gathering.

Needless to say, I’m looking at how the fuck we are going to augment all the things in a reasonable amount of time, and I’m seriously panicking.  I comfort myself with the thought that people will not want to augment a non-orange item unless it’s close to best in slot, so all 10 augment kits might not be needed right away.

New Recipes

New orange recipes for boots, bracers, gloves, and belts – woot.  However, how many will there be, exactly?  I’ve just finished gathering all the recipes for armormech and synthweaving.  Right now with chest, hat, and pants there are about 120 synthweaving and 90 armormech recipes that I have (give or take).  I’m only missing 4 (armormech hats).

Now, suppose they add recipes for belt, bracers, gloves, and boots to each existing orange set.  That would mean 160 new synthweaving recipes and 120 new armormech recipes.  After gathering the aforementioned existing recipes, the thought of collecting an even larger number of recipes makes me want to hide under my desk.  For the last few months, I’ve been checking the auction houses religiously to make sure to complete my sets.  I’m nearing the end of that journey just to be tossed back onto the trading treadmill.  Fail.  At least they’re combining the auction houses so I don’t have to check in multiple places.

We will have to see what they add… and I dearly hope they increase the underworld trading drop rate because, holy hell!

And that’s what’s making me run for cover.  Your thoughts on Patch 1.3?

Mid-Year SWTOR Assessment: Active Guilds Are Hot Property

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Anexxia posted her Mid-Year SWTOR Assessment and it got me thinking about what’s happened with me, the guild, and the game in the last 6 months.

It’s been 6 months, more or less, and the biggest thing I’ve noticed is a lot of people stranded – and I don’t mean stranded on a low population server.  I mean stranded by their guild.

As is natural with a new game, people get psyched to play it and find out it’s just NOT for them.  Hell, I lasted maybe a week in EQ2 before I was like I HATE THIS I CANNOT DO IT ANYMORE!  But a few of the people I started playing with loved it, stayed, and played hard-core end game for YEARS.

We started out with a piddly little guild of 8-10 people (because I am too lazy to go back and count), and we didn’t really know what to expect.  We had all raided together in WoW but we didn’t know if people would go back to WoW or what.  And before we had a viable raid team (people were still leveling) it was a bit of a struggle to keep people interested.

But as soon as we started raiding, it clicked.  We know how to do this!  We know how to not-stand-in-bad.  We know how to analyze an encounter and figure it out – even without meters (I know, the shock.)  Maybe what’s even more shocking is that we were having so much fun, nobody went back to WoW.

Sure, we had people who were unhappy with this or that, but we worked through it as a team.  One guildie decided he didn’t like the class he had chosen, and was just miserable.  Well, don’t go back to WoW!  Just reroll!  Instead of QQing about any possible holes in our roster, we adapted, because this isn’t a JOB, this is a game, and if you’re not having FUN, that sucks.  We pulled together and helped him level and gear his new main and hot damn, he’s happy, he’s good at his new role, we’re happy.

As for recruitment, it’s really hard to integrate people into an established group and have them really feel like one of the team and not like a junior member.  Here, I think we actually did it.  Well, Alex did it.  She’s in charge of that stuff.  I’m pretty derp when it comes to recruitment.

Here we are 6 months in.  We can most of the time fill the roster unless a bunch of people go on vacation at once, and usually we don’t have more than one person sitting out on a given night.  We’ve had people’s schedules and mains change and managed to adapt the roster to make it work.

I hear about these guilds falling apart and I wish I had a magic bit of advice how to keep your guild strong and together, but I honestly have no fucking clue how we did it.  We just kinda did.

There’s a domino effect when a few people leave, and more tend to leave.  There’s also a domino effect when you manage to stay together.  Suddenly, we have (unsolicited!) applications to our piddly little guild, which we didn’t expect, and we have to adapt and figure out, as a guild, if we should limit growth… and honestly, that’s a conversation I never thought we’d have.  I am as shocked as you guys.

What Am I Doing Lately

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

I figured you guys wanted to hear what I’m up to, right?  RIGHT?  Ahem ok…

(Can we tell I’m out of writing ideas?  There are only so many ways I can yabber about Fashion, and it’s not like I know anything about playing my class…)

Synthweaving.  I actually finished out my orange recipes and got every last stinkin’ one of them, even all the sithie ones (but not the pvp crap).  I guesstimate that’s 140 recipes.

Toward the end, I was missing 2 key recipes and actually ran underworld trading missions in the appropriate level range until I got them.  Luck was on my side, and I managed to get each recipe within a day, and that’s not really a day of PLAYING, more a day of logging over every once in a while to send the minions back out.  Yes, I am aware that running UT missions for a specific recipe is crazysauce.

Now I’ll cry big salty tears when 1.3 comes out and I have to ferret out any new recipes.  Ok, I’ll be happy to have new recipes, but crying due to the difficulty of procurement.  You know what I mean.

Armormeching.  Remember how I went insane and dropped cybertech for armormech because I had to have all the fashion?  Thanks to being maxed in the relevant supporting skills, having some mats already in the bank, and having 5 minions in play, I got to 400 armormech 24 hours after starting.  And yes, I also went to work that day (and I don’t have one of those jobs where I can play the game at work).

I have a spreadsheet – when I say “I”, my husband actually made the dorky spreadsheet and I copied it for my armormeching.  3 columns (hat, chest, and legs) by about 30-something rows, let’s just say there are 90 recipes.  I’m missing 6.  Of those 6, they are sithie gear, hats, or sithie hats.  While I want to be completist and get all the recipes, I’m not that worried about sithie gear that we won’t wear or hats that we won’t show.

Legacy stuff has sped up recipe gathering – and what I mean is that I can mail an opposite faction toon goods and money.  I now check both auction houses, Rep and Imp, every day for the remaining recipes.  For whatever reason, the imp auction scene is pretty good, expensive but good, and I’ve gotten most of my stuff there.  I also have been known to buy republic-only recipes on the cheap from the imp auction house and sell them on the rep side (and vice versa).  Since my imp is questing out of Nar Shaddaa, I also check that auction house periodically, but it’s not very widely used.

Social 5! Party Time! Excellent!1 I hit Social 5 which comes with the “Party Time” title (perfect for the Pretentious Legacy) and opens up most of the social gear (except for the corsec outfit).  I ran around buying up all the social gear, which is incredibly stupid because I don’t have the bank space for it.  Fortunately, it’s really cheap so I can just vendor it for the space and then buy it again later if necessary.  I was a bit disappointed how some really desirable pieces clipped or colormatched poorly.  My dreams, dashed.

The Belsavis set comes with a shock collar.  Unfortunately, I do not have Social 5 on my Consular… because I’d totally put that collar on Tharan, whom I hate.

A New Self-Indulgent Gaming Mouse.  Guys, the naga was redesigned for 2012!  Now, my naga works well.  I don’t need a new mouse.  However, the new version has 2 extra buttons on the top, where I can reach them.  2 extra buttons in a convenient place are SRS BZNS.  What can I say?  I bought one.2  I justified my purchase by sending my old and perfectly functional naga to a guildie whose naga had broken recently.  See, I’m doing a good deed.  And getting 2 extra buttons.

The problem was, of course, learning to USE those damn buttons.  I ran some dailies to practice, during which I was completely inept at interrupting anything (as I had moved my interrupt key).  However, that was resolved by raid time (whew).  Muscle memory is hard to overcome.

Guild Stuff.  I’m lazy.  I already wrote a post on how awesome my guild is.  Go read.

If you got this far, it’s amazing, because I confess that when a blog has a wall of text like this, I tend to glaze over and move on…

  1. If you don’t get this reference, you’re too young to be reading this blog. Begone, fetus! ↩
  2. Once again, I paid my own money and didn’t get any freebies or payment for writing about this. ↩

The Case for Trying Clothes On

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

If you’re serious about getting your outfit right, the preview window has several major flaws:

It’s teeny.  But you already knew that, right?

For example: these 3 headgears look pretty much identical in the preview window, but they are clearly different (some more different than others) when tried on.

Continue reading »

All The Cool Kids Dress Their Companions In Bikinis

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Seriously, all over the fleet I see Kira, Elara, Risha, and Nadia roaming about in bikinis.  Well, if dressing your companion in a bikini is the cool thing to do, I’m not going to be left behind.  Behold, my bikini-clad companion, Akaavi Spar.

Does she remind you of anyone?  From Futurama?

Death by Snoo Snoo!

I think Akaavi might murder me in my sleep.

All Ur Fashion Is Belong To Me

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

I’m clearly crazy.  Last night in a fit of fashion-lust and frustration that cybertech is getting absolutely nothing useful (probably EVER), I dropped cybertech on my smuggler and picked up armormech.  I’m going to be able to craft ALL THE THINGS.  And if you’re wondering, I have a spreadsheet of all the orange recipes so that I can track which ones I have and do not have.

Deranged fashionista looking for recipes, PST.