New SWTOR Fashion Website

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

You probably already know this, but Dulfy and Mr Robot have launched a fashion website for the orange moddable gear in the game.

tor-fashion.com

Remember, with 1.3 social gear should scale with armor type and you can add augment slots to existing pieces – so oranges are even more serious business!

It has pictures of (most) all the things!  They keep adding things!  You can help them add things!  You can sort by armor type, see the social stuff.  I am drooling on my keyboard.

Why are you still here? Why are you not ogling the fashion?  What’s wrong with you?

New Blogger Advice

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Ok, this new blogger initiative is going around1 and I decided I’d give you my stupid advice.  Because, you know, I know things.  At least about the technical setup of the blog.  About content?  Community building? HAR HAR.

In no particular order:

A Blog Description

A first time reader isn’t going to scroll back to your intro post where you’ve laid out your introduction – especially if your blog is a few months old.  And a reader visiting for the first time doesn’t want to dig through pages of posts just to see if he or she is interested in the subject matter.

For example, I play SWTOR but not TERA.  If you’ve been in the TERA beta or something, your front page might have 4 posts about TERA, and I’ll assume it’s a TERA blog, and move on.  If your blog description states that you write about multiple mmo’s, including WOW, SWTOR, TERA, and Hello Kitty Online, I might subscribe.  The more specific you are about what you intend to cover, the better.

Finding Stuff

Your posts are listed chronologically, but that might not be the best way for a new reader to sort through your past posts.  There has to be a way to find things without just going page-by-page.

A search box is an absolute must.  The rest is up to you.  I recommend having clear categories so people can find what they are interested in quickly.  Also, highlight your “important posts.”  If you made a post that is a GUIDE to something, and is a resource that someone would want to find again, consider adding a link to it in your sidebar or on the top menu.  If you have multiple guides, you might create an index page for all the guides.

Commenting – Make It Easy

Guys, especially you using Blogger, listen up.  People want to be able to comment without being logged in to anything.  Name + email address should suffice.  There have been times that I’ve written up a whole damn comment only to discover that I can’t post it without logging in to google + (which I don’t have), wordpress (which I don’t have, being self-hosted), or a variety of other things I also don’t have.  Your commenters aren’t going to sign up for a new service just to comment on your blog.

Now, spam.  I know that if people can comment with only a name and email address, you open yourself up to more spam.  However, start with the least intrusive spam protection measures first.  See if you GET spam.  If you just can’t get rid of it, then maybe you’ll need to use a CAPTCHA, but that kind of thing is a last resort.  Remember, people are lazy.  If it takes extra steps, they’ll just hit the back button.  Or become enraged if they fill out the captcha wrong and the comment gets EATEN.

Another point – make sure people can subscribe to comments by email, so they can see if someone later posts a comment on an article they already commented on.  This is pretty much built in to blogger and wordpress.com, but for self-hosted, you might need a plugin.

A Nice FULL Feed – Do Not Truncate

I know you want people to come to your site for precious hits or advertising (more on this later), but truncated feeds are not the answer to getting more traffic.  Many people read in a feed reader, and don’t want to click through – or can’t if they’re behind a firewall.  They’ll just move on without reading your article or, worse, unsubscribe completely (that’s what I do).  The big sites can get away with truncating and not losing readers, but if you’re just starting out, you need to make your blog as accessible as possible.

Story time: After drafting this part, I discovered that another site was “scraping” my content – republishing my articles in full from my feed.  I sent a copyright notice, and the scraped articles were taken down, after the site owner suggested that I truncate my feeds to prevent this from happening in the future.  It is true that truncating feed makes it more difficult for scraper sites, but it also makes it more difficult for readers.  I decided to keep publishing a full feed, and just keep a “cease and desist” letter handy.  If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you’ll see a big obnoxious footer on my feed that makes it very obvious that if it’s published on another site, it’s scraped.  That’s my solution instead of a truncated feed.

Ads? In My Blog?

Ads are annoying and break up the flow of navigating your blog.  I’m not talking about ads on wordpress.com hosted blogs, that you don’t control (although paying to remove them wouldn’t hurt).  I’m talking about ads that you choose to put on your site to make money for hosting or whatnot.

Yes, you get money when people view or click on the ad, but if you drive away people with those ads, that means fewer views and clicks.  So examine how much money you are spending on your blog, how much you are earning from ads, and whether it’s worth it.

Now, ads in the feed… don’t even get me started.  Nothing will make me unsubscribe faster – big blog or little blog.  I get that people need to recoup costs.  But they need to get that I won’t be one of their readers (and maybe others feel like I do).

Contact Information

You need to have contact information SOMEWHERE on your blog.  It can be on your profile page, or on your sidebar – wherever.  But you need it.  I recommend making a separate gmail account for your blogging persona for privacy reasons.  I would also recommend not listing your email address in the standard way, but rather as blahblah [at] blahblah [dot] com, to avoid spam engines finding you.  Or create an image with the text of your email address, with a signature generator or plain old MSpaint.

There are legitimate reasons someone would want to contact you outside the comments section.  Story time: A guy whose blog I read had accidentally turned off comments.  I wanted to tell him, but – surprise – I couldn’t comment.  Don’t be that guy.

Read Your Own Stuff As A Reader

What does that mean?  It means that if something is WRONG from a reader’s point of view, you might not notice it as a logged-in person.  Log completely out of your blog.  Make sure you can comment.  Make sure you can subscribe to comments by email.

Subscribe to your own feed and by email.  If something is wrong, you’ll be the first to know about it.

  1. Like space herpes ↩

Legacy Of Idiots

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

So I’m mucking about on the Sith side, right, just casually leveling an alt.  However, about 30 minutes in, I start thinking “I bet Corso and company are back from their Underworld trading missions.  Geez, they’re like SITTING there.  Doing nothing.  And I really need more blah blah.”

I think you can see where this is going.  I log off my baby sithie and log on both of my 50’s in turn to send the idiots back out to gather stuff.  This takes a bit of time, even if I’m fast about it, what with load times and stuff.  Rinse and repeat every 30 minutes or so.

Here’s what I want: If I’m logged in to a toon on my legacy, I want to be able to direct the minions of the other toons.  That way I can do all my minion management without staring and load screens.  I would seriously pay a ton of credits if this were available as a legacy perk.

Synthweaving and Storage Space

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Let’s start out by talking about Armormech.  Assuming you are a conscientious armormech that has stuff of every level on hand – OK I’ll stop here.  You need to have stuff of every level on hand OR farm it every time you happen to need it, because there are almost NEVER mid-level mats on the GTN.  But you will definitely be using the mid-level mats to make moddable orange gear.

I’ll allow that you don’t really need mats for lower level augments because they’re rarely needed, so just the high level augment mats.  Also, you will not need mats for purples at any level other than end-game.

As I was saying, you have mats on hand.  And to make all the armorstuff, you will need the following:

  1. Scavenged Metals x 6 levels (there can be 2 metal types for a given level)
  2. Scavenged Compounds x 6 levels  (there can be 2 compound types for a given level)
  3. Underworld Trading Metals (Blue) x 6 levels
  4. Mando Iron (purple UT metal, lvl 6)
  5. Level 6 augment mats (blue and purple)

OK, that’s a lot of mats.  It’s also about the same as needed for Cybertech.

But wait… Synthweaving has EVEN MORE.  First, we need archaeology power crystals and artifact fragments.

Then there’s the Underworld Trading component.  You see, we don’t just need Underworld Trading metals.  We need underworld trading fabrics TOO, because they are used in light armor.

AND, you thought I was done, right?  Nope.  Synthweaving also takes scavenged metals and scavenged compounds for many of the recipes, especially the in-demand oranges.

Get ready for your synthweaving list:

  1. Power Crystals (Archaeology) x 6 levels (there can be 2 crystal types for a given level)
  2. Artifact Fragments (Archaeology) x 6 levels (there can be 2 artifact types for a given level)
  3. Underworld Trading Metals (Blue) x 6 levels
  4. Underworld Trading Fabrics (Blue) x 6 levels
  5. Mando Iron (UT metal, lvl 6)
  6. Denebrillan Star Silk (UT fabric purple, lvl 6)
  7. Scavenged Metals x 6 levels (there can be 2 metal types for a given level)
  8. Scavenged Compounds x 6 levels  (there can be 2 compound types for a given level)
  9. Level 6 augment mats (blue and purple)

And that, folks, is why I had to buy a 3rd cargo hold tab.

On the Fronts of Robes

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

OK, what I mean here is the damn dangly crotch strap on certain (most) Jedi robes.  But if I put “crotch” in the title, I get a lot of spam.

After they fixed the headgear bug, I was all excited to ditch my belly shirt and wear a proper jedi robe (without the hood showing).  I chose the blade master robe.  Very classic.

See? Doesn’t that scream Obi Wan?  Just lemme take out my sabers…

Um what the fuck is with that stretchy triangle of EVIL?  Hell no.  Incidentally, light armor with crotch flaps also weirds out in combat stance, just in a different way.

Not All Hoodies Are Created Equal

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Yesterday, we talked about how I tried to push back the hood of my robe with headgear and there were certain “graphics failures.”  Today, the patch notes claim that it is fixed.  I tested it and it is indeed fixed.

How strange that I post about the thing and it gets fixed the next day.  I don’t think Bioware reads my blog.  I think they read my mind.  Scary stuff.

Moving on, since I was doomed to display belly or wear a hoodie, I started trying on various hoodies and found (to my surprise!) that some are “less face covery” than others.

Observe the ablative laminoid chest versus the resilient laquerous chest (both crafted medium armor oranges).

On the left, we see how most hoods are. Very little face exposed. Profile shot is a joke.  On the right, well that’s much better.  It’s less “grim reaper.”  While I’m not a fan of hoodies, I could live with a hoodie that had some face showing.

Of Hoodies, Hats, and Hair

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

As you know, there’s no hood-down option.  And, for Jedi Sentinels, the vast majority of gear is hooded.  If I don’t want a hoodie, I have the following options:

  1. The Apprentice’s Vest.  This is a strange color and doesn’t match anything.  Also, if you color match anything to it, the result is so weird-looking, you’ll burn your retinas.
  2. The Aspiring Knight’s Vest AKA belly shirt.  The BOY version doesn’t have that much skin showing.  Sigh.  (This is my current wardrobe.)
  3. Smuggler gear.  Which I guess is ok, but… um… I’m a jedi.  It looks a little silly.  Especially the detailing for “holsters.”
  4. Use a hat that pushes back the hood.  More on that below.

Most of the medium armor sentinel hats are circlets that happily coexist with a hood.  Same with most sunglass-like hats.  All big ugleh hats will push back a hood (like smuggler hats) – but those don’t show hair and aren’t exactly an improvement on the hood.

But there are some sunglass-like hats, worn by my heavy armor wearing guardian buddies, that push down the hoodie but still show hair (these are the Star Trek wraparound glasses).   And I finally found a medium armor headpiece that shows MOST of my hair and pushes down a hood.  Double yay.

Here’s the hat:

A simple level 23 armormech orange hat: Laminoid Battle Headgear.  It’s basically a circlet with a chin strap that one of my guildies says looks like a beard.  But most of my toon’s hair is sticking out so win!

Now I decided on the hoodie I want to wear:

And then put on the hat…

Yay, the hood is successfully hidden.  On the other hand, I’m bald and hornless.

This used to work properly and got totally broken in 1.2.  One of my male guildies with the sunglass-headgear discovered this when 1.2 hit and is currently running around bald due to this bug – but that’s all fine and dandy, because he’s a BOY.  And at that time, I didn’t care about this bug.  NOW I CARE ABOUT THIS BUG.  I’m so close to being able to wear a proper jedi robe without a hood and boo!  Foiled by bugs.

This bug is in the known issues thread.  I just hope it gets fixed sooner rather than later.

Also, there are sithies complaining about making out with a bald Jeasa Wilsaam.  We all suffer due to bugs.

Reverse Engineering Pre 1.2 Armor

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

We were all confused when 1.2 came out about what we could and could not reverse engineer, and what recipes we’d be able to get.  After putzing around, I have figured out a few things about armor that is “old.”  I have no comments on all the new armor added in Patch 1.2 or on mods/augments/etc that are not armor.

(1) If you hover over the crafted item and it has “chance to blah blah research blah blah” on it, that means you might get a new schematic out of it.  Otherwise, forget it.

(2) If you’ve learned all the recipes you can possibly learn from a crafted item, you will get text in the tooltip that says “no available research” or something similar.

(3) You cannot learn a new schematic from RE-ing a non-crafted (drop/purchased) green, blue, or purple piece of armor.  There is no research chance stated in the tooltip.  It will not say “no research available” either.  The tooltip is just silent on the research issue.

(4) You CAN RE a not-crafted (drop/purchased) green, blue, or purple piece of armor for mats only.  You will see the required level of synthweaving/armormech to do so on the tooltip.    However, the mats are piddly. Even for raid purples.  You are probably better off vendoring the item.

(5) You cannot RE an orange at all.  Not for a recipe.  Not even for mats.  Not even if you just crafted the damn thing and want to recoup some mats… It says “no research available” but it lies.  What it really means is “no, hahahah.”  It is grayed out when you hit the “Reverse Engineer” button.

The Mystery Of The GM Time Suck

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

For those of you following along at home, remember Alex and I are co-GM’s of the guild The Snark Side.  And while she held the official GM title on one of her toons, she stealth-promoted me when I wasn’t looking.  ARGH!  I’ve never been a real GM before so I flail a little.

Now, here’s how it works at Snark Side.  We have 2 co-tyrants, no officers, no private officer chat, none of that.  People volunteer to take on specific jobs, and they can HAVE em.  Right now I do all the website crap and Alex is in charge of recruitment.   Iyeri does rostering, Lono and/or Wolfsong lead the actual raids.  During the raid, Alex or another person with a second monitor does loot mastering.  Alex has volunteered to do banking but if that proves to be a large task, Kris has offered to step up.

As you can see, besides the website (which doesn’t take much time once it was all set up to my liking), I do not have a single other specified job.  Despite not knowing what the fuck I actually do, I spend an inordinate amount of time doing it.  This is kind of baffling for me, since while I cannot pinpoint the “SRS BZNS GM TASKS” I am constantly doing STUFF associated with the guild.

Do the rest of you GM’s out there feel like your time just GOES?