Eve of launch

I've made some updates on the Dark Heritage Gamer X blog, about Space Opera X, which replaced my old Ad Astra game (kinda; it actually still refers back to the Ad Astra rules. The transition isn't complete.) I've been using some SWTOR screenshots to represent iconic archetypes of sorts from Space Opera X. Or, at least I've posted one such example so far, although I have a number of additional ones queued up behind that. I've also posted a few details about the reptomammalian artificial clade of animals that are spread across much of known space because they were designed to accompany terraforming projects which made many of the worlds people live on today habitable, way back in the days of the Old Kingdoms or even beyond. That technology has been lost to humanity for millennia now. In fact, in more ways than one, the setting of Space Opera X can be considered a space-faring Dark Age, but only because other periods in the history of the setting—brief and poorly developed as it is and as I intend for it to remain—were so much better either technologically or socially or politically. 

Anyway, because I've done that, I've tried to dial back my SWTOR posting here on this blog. And honestly, I haven't had a lot to report on. It's been the week prior to the launch of the new expansion. As we sit here today, my launcher is supposed to deploy the expansion tomorrow morning before letting me actually play. I've actually mostly been doing grindy things this week. I played all of my characters (who were finished with their story, anyway) a bunch of Gree enclave stuff because the Gree event has been active. Once I had a ton of reputation stored up that I couldn't spend because I hit the weekly cap, I quit. I also hit the weekly cap on the GSI reputation. I did not hit the weekly cap on the Yavin IV, Makeb or Section X reputation tracks, although I did do some work on all of those. I could have done more, but... eh. Too much grind all at once is... well, it's too much. I don't want to burn myself out.

I played a bit of my new characters, specifically my Scoundrel and my Mercenary. I recorded what I've played so far, but I still have a lot of video to edit there. I took the screenshots and costume videos. I actually managed to recruit someone on Ilum to run the Heroic 4 with me (although we heroically did it with 2, not 4. It wasn't more difficult that way, just much more tedious and obnoxious.) After I got the Star Forager chestpiece as part of that conclusion, I grinded some seeker droid stuff. Built a GSI speeder or two. That got old pretty quick too. And I decided that my stim crafting was dumb; I didn't care about crafting medpacs or stims, and they don't sell well either, so I erased all of his crew skills and grinded through computer slicing with him instead. Should have done that with an alt long ago.

I sold a bunch of crafting materials and crafted items. Made some decent money, although I'm still a raw, green, up-and-comer at best in the new economy which isn't measured in credits anymore, but in tens of millions of credits. 

All in all, it felt like a week of treading water somewhat. Knowing that changes are coming makes me hesitant to start too many things. I want to do a bounty hunter story that uses the Vanguard mechanics, with maybe the Operative as his backup so I can go into stealth and skip stuff as often as I want. He'd use a bowcaster from the Bounty Broker Association as his signature weapon. Of course, I need the Bounty Broker Association recurring event to come back around again for that; it happened while everyone was on vacation for Christmas and New Years, so I wasn't even around to earn any of the reputation or special currency that you need to spend. These recurring events now come up less than once every two months now, because there are five of them in rotation, and a week off of any events in between the week that an event is on. It hasn't been announced yet, but I expect the BBA to come around again in March sometime. February has been Gree and will be Dantooine pirates in another week. January was swoop bikes and rakghouls. I dislike the swoop bikes event and rarely participate in it. I've been over rakghouls for some time. And I don't feel like either Gree or pirates offers me much that I want anymore either. So BBA is the only one that  I really look forward to. When it comes around, I'm going to hit it hard and max out my reputation hopefully, as well as earn enough complete contracts to buy a fair bit of stuff. Even with maxed out reputation, there's much more that I want to buy with the BBA currency than there is with any of the other event special currency.

Seasons should start again tomorrow with the launch, so that'll be something else to grind. I missed the first season, because when I came back after a hiatus, it was just wrapping up. I figured I didn't have the time or inclination to dive into an event that was ending. 

And maybe that's just as good. There will be bugs, no doubt, in this launch, as well as a lot of the promised content not being available right away (like cosmetic weapons, for instance. Actually, I'm not 100% sure what will be available, because I don't hang on every little tidbit of news or gossip about it. I can find out tomorrow, I suppose.) I do know that Seasons will launch. And another five levels that characters can earn—although for most of my characters, I'll probably max them out doing the things that I'm already doing rather than "expansion" things. Only one of my characters is all caught up on all of the expansion stories. Because the expansion stories are, in general, somewhat less engaging than the "regular" stories, I don't feel too bad about this. There's no way I'm running every character through the expansion stories anyway, given that there's only two expansion story threads and they're very similar to each other anyway. With the class stories there were eight and other than the planetary progression, they were usually quite different to each other. Don't get me wrong; there's some good stuff in the expansions, but they just aren't the same as the original stories, though. A big part of this is how your original companions have largely been sidelined with some rare exceptions, and play a much smaller role. Another part is how it's all plot driven, and the character you'd developed in the original class story is immaterial. The expansion stories are written so that any character can fit into them. This means that all characters lose their characterization almost entirely. 

Anyway, now I'm at risk of treading into my Mother of All SWTOR reviews territory again, which I don't need to because I said it all already. But that's my weekly report. Just to make it not a complete waste of space for anyone other than myself, here's a screenshotted image I took. I posted this on my other blog as part of my tour of Space Opera X archetypes, so I really need to delete them from my hard drive and take some new ones.