SWTOR Update

Well, after about 24 hours, I've settled in a bit on my opinion of the update. I still think it's kind of buggy. I think that the new character and inventory combined sheet is ugly and non-functional compared to what it replaced. I've been a little bit frustrated at the grindiness of Galactic Seasons.

I'm not, however, too upset about gearing and grindiness of conquests in general for gear, for the simple reason that I never had optimal gear anyway. I'm actually getting better gear now using standard methods than I used to. Those were concerns that I never really had, although I know that there's lots of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in the player base overall around it. I also haven't even tried to do the new story elements yet, which everybody is mocking because they're so short and pointless and silly. But then again, I've always understood that the story was supposed to dribble out over the entire course of the 7.x series, not that it'd be dropped all at once. And I've only got one character eligible to play it so far anyway.

I'm also not overly concerned about changes to the classes. I've spent more time playing with my Sniper and Gunslinger than with anyone else, although I've also played around just a tiny bit with my Jedi Guardian and with one of my Powertechs. I'm a little intimidated to do more than that, because the learning curve for the changes is a little steeper than it should be, so doing fewer of the characters at a time seems prudent. I've also so far only grinded; I maxed out my GSI reputation (after only two characters even, not three) and I'm moving about as fast as can be done with the new Shadow Syndicate reputation that's associated with the Seasons 2 rewards. I actually quite like the Seasons rewards, but they'll take some doing to get done, so I'll probably be grinding pretty regularly and doing less with my new characters in the short term. I'll also probably put some of my other grinds on the back burner, with the exception of the BBA when it comes up, because there's stuff that I want from that. On the other hand; I'm not quite sure what the reputation does for you. I don't think it actually makes much difference for the rewards. One of the nice perks that it does is that it gives you a fair number of cartel coins; 200 at a time, about every five reward tiers (there are 100. I didn't count them, but that should come to 4,000 cartel coins.) I've started unlocking a few of my collections already with the 400 that I've earned so far, but I need a good 1,400 or so more to get everything unlocked that I already have. And then I'll probably want to buy one of the hot new armor sets, just because why not; I'll have cartel coins sitting around for the first time in forever. 

So, I'm a little meh on the expansion other than to note that that's maybe an overly ambitious word to use to describe it. It has some stuff I like well enough. It has some stuff that I don't. I'm gradually getting used to the latter; or at least some of it. I'm hardly one of the fans who show up on twitter or the forums and loudly flounce away (although I wonder how many of them truly leave; if you have to announce that you're an old-timer who's been playing all along and now you're leaving, then chances are you're just being dramatic and aren't really leaving anyway). But clearly there is a lot of drama, and the player base does not seem to be very pleased. I've only seen one example of this in a fandom that I was part of, and that's when the The Forge was going to be part of the Armageddon's Blade expansion for Heroes of Might & Magic III. I remember strong fan backlash to that idea too, but in that case, NGC actually backtracked their plans and did something else with the expansion pack. Although I feel like there was some lingering and pretty obvious bitterness that the fans didn't just sit down, shut up, and consume what we want to produce, they did actually listen to the fanbase enough to stop before launching something that would have been deeply unpopular. BioWare, on the other hand, ignored six months of comments in the public test server that many of these changes were bad ideas. 

Wow, that was over twenty years ago now. Crazy.

One amusing or obnoxious bug or feature; nobody seems to be sure which, is that they added some more aggressive stubble as a complexion in the game. However, the exact same skins are available on men and women both. Most normal people think that making bearded women characters is, of course, a ridiculously obvious bug that's good for a laugh, maybe, but of course there are a few loudmouth crazy perverts who are certain that this is a blow in the culture war for the "rights" of crazy perverts who can't figure out what their biological sex is or what that actually means. So far, nobody from BioWare has commented, so everyone is left to speculate. I think the crazy people are probably right. Whether it truly was intentional or just lazy, I doubt that they'll change it, and I suspect that they'll use the inane hoax of "trans rights" or "trans representation" or whatever as an excuse to get out of fixing it.

Given the fact that there are an inordinate amount of fat characters, and that they actually offered you the ability to make morbidly obese yet shockingly atheltic characters, I suspect that some absurd SJW is trying to virtue-signal how much she rejects reality. There's a reason that I made the terrible dreadnaughts from my Revanchist Republic who annihilated a world of billions through orbital bombardment the RSS Inclusivity and the RSS Diversity after all.

UPDATE: One curious aside. I was online doing some quiet crafting updates while working, and I got a message that the servers are about to go down for maintenance. Checked BioWarer's twitter page; it's a hotfix for a fairly serious bug. In less than 48 hours, this is at least the third time that that's happened now. What a mess. This was a seriously botched roll-out, regardless of what you think of the changes.