So this week, what have I played so far? About 3 hours of swtor, maybe 3 hours of gw2, a few hours of swg emu and 3 hours of tsw. Listened to a lot of podcasts at work. A little bit of the latest DarthHater, some DCUO Show, some DCUO Unlimited, and some TSW Society. I have a feeling that I've got a few upcoming weeks, or at least 1, of short play sessions (2 hours or less).

If you've been following gw2, or even if you haven't, you've probably heard about the suspensions/bans for both chat / name issues and exploiting/botting (there are reddit threads for these things). As far as the chat/name issues go, I don't side with Beau. I think those people deserve to be shamed and that it will result in a community that at the very least, is no worse than the community in wow and tor. As far as the exploit/botter situation goes, I think ArenaNet is in the wrong. Three day suspensions for botters, but bans for people who "exploited" by buying something ArenaNet made available in game. Everyone knows they're stretching if not breaking TOS by botting, and they know when they're being rude in chat, but it's entirely conceivable that someone could have bought a crap ton of 21 karma weapons without realizing it was broken. It's not like they were exploiting bugged geometry, a vendor with prices that are too low, is not nearly as obvious to someone who hasn't really checked out vendors and stumbled across these. Since there's no way to verify if someone was informed that the situation was clearly a mistake, the should have limited it to 3 day suspensions, including the streamer who admittedly knew the prices were wrong yet streamed himself "exploiting" to (so I read) 3000 people. Give 14 or 30 day bans to botters and you'll get a lot fewer botters. But to ban conceivably naive folks while only wrist slapping someone who knew they were taking advantage of an unintended mechanic (the streamer) and botters (who know they're not playing right). Gah. Makes up for the good karma I feel they earned with the original reddit thread about chat/name violations.


Assuming anyone reads this, what are you up to and do you have any podcasts you recommend (I'm a podcast junkie). I'll be travelling through tsw, gw2, and the swg emu this weekend, feel free to say hi and/or ask how you can add me to your friends list.

Moof thoughts?

Who's Moof and why might I care his thoughts? A name I've taken across a couple MMO's now. I've been a cantina rat in SWG (NGE era), turned pve/pvp junkie, and always casual, but somewhat enthusiastic pilot. Enjoyed my barbarian in Age of Conan, but didn't play long due to lack of folks I know in game. Extremely casuual WOW player, whose highest toons are about 45-50 (a hunter and pally). Currently guild master and pseudo ops-leader in SWTOR, casual "what's this?" player of GW2, and "trying to decide which professions" in SWGEmu.

I'm an also an IT guy IRL and generally have too much time on my hands outside of work. I'm a relatively frequent reader of Going Commando and the blogs linked there, as well as any blog linked on Virgin Worlds.

Anyways, I plan on using this space to get some uber nerdy thoughts out of my head, and hopefully 1) hear what other folks are thinking about things, 2) get pointed towards good reading, be it discussions of gaming in general/mmo focused (going commando, keen and graev, west karana, tobold, simple-n-complex, etc etc), or sites with great info for improving my game play (mmo-champion, gw2guru, stuff like that).

So to start things off...I've been burning out on TOR lately, and had more fun than I expected in GW2's head start. I enjoy the end game pve, and to some degree pvp, of TOR, but at legacy level 45, obviously I've put in a lot of time. My guild is making good progress on the Empire side, especially for a guild filled with folks who are far more casual than I am. I recently found out that some folks I've been missing from Valcyn (SWG) are on the same server as we are (Canderous Ordo), so I'm hoping they can help kick start our Rep side ops along with some new guys we recruited after a good LFG experience. I've actually been sitting out runs on the Empire side, so that my guildies could go since I've been full Columi since Feb, when I started running with a guild I met while doing Ilum pve dailies, and I honestly don't feel like taking my sorc (full Columi) into any runs as either healer or dps. That friendly guild has been giving us some spots and vice versa on their HM Ops and SM EC's, which has been nice.  On the Rep side, my scoundrel healer has been sitting in mixed rakata/bh/campaign gear for awhile because I stopped running HM Ops and SM EC with another friendly guild there, and my sentinel is the same, with a few pieces of Columi mixed in. So overall, I'm doing fine on gear, but if we're not doing an op, I'm not logging in (or less likely to). I'm also burned out on leveling, so my 44 commando and 41 operative are getting shelved until I get the juice again.

More than anything, I'm burned out on SWTOR's management and customer relations. Maybe I haven't followed MMO's vigilantly enough, but I've never seen a more dishonest/misleading group of folks, and the QA makes SWG's first year look stellar by comparison. The straw for this camel ended up being Hickman (I believe) saying that it's quite possible that subscribers will have to pay for the new planet, Makeb. In TOR speak, that actually means (IMO) that it's going to be that way, but they don't want to take the PR hit and lose more subs yet. When (and if I guess) that happens, I think I'm going to have to transfer GM to someone else and cancel my sub. Prior to that interview, I figured that worst case scenario was I'd unlock Ops and PVP and however many character slots. I would be willing to take the big one time hit and pay for content patches only, or, if they didn't do anything stupid (like that interview), I might even stay subbed. At this point, I'm ready to just walk away and look the class storylines I haven't finished (trooper, agent, and consular) up on a wiki.

It's really too bad that things are heading this way, but I don't think TOR ever stood a chance of not going down this path. The devs were over hyping the game even before EA bought Bioware, and have given more misleading / dishonest answers to questions, than any devs/mgmt/pr folks I've seen. I can deal with vague, because that's what you normally get. I don't want to hear lies about a super secret space project that doesn't exist, or how they didn't realize that a customizable UI was a must have feature for launch. I never was a fanboi of TOR, but I knew it was the only game in town when LA refused to offer the SWG license back to SOE at a reasonable rate, so I did want it to be fun and worth my money.

 It IS a good thing for EA/Bioware that LA didn't make a license extension of SWG available though. SOE doesn't give up on games if it doesn't have to, but to be honest, most TOR subs who were SWG subs in 2011 would likely have left to head back to SWG by now if it was still available. Can you imagine the press if a 300+ million dollar game went F2P inside of a year, and the 9 year old (by this time) game was still going as strong as it was the day TOR released? Granted, that's not a sub number that compares to many other mmo's, but it had a dedicated fanbase and features that may never see the light of day again in a commercial mmo.

Anyways, I never was on the GW2 hype train, but thanks to Gamebreaker TV and Taugrim, I'm giving it a shot. I can't argue with the cost, and am relatively confident that the pvp will keep me playing from time to time, even if I never hit level cap. Since I was never a fanboi, I know I can't be burned by any failure to meet unrealistic expectations, and that's nice. I'm also playing the swgemu and enjoying it for what it offers. Again, I can't argue with the cost, and I've even got a couple of the Prima guides from back in the day available. It truly is a game where I feel like I'm in the Star Wars universe, and I'm exploring real worlds, while I play around getting different types of xp and figuring out what type of character I want to play.

Alrighty, anyways, let me know if you read this, even if you don't feel like typing out an actual response, and feel free to link your own blog if you have one.