After the Merge

Well, the server merges have completed in Star Wars: The Old Republic.  And things shook out pretty well, on my front.  Only one character name had to be renamed, and it was one of my minor characters that I’d thrown together at one point.  My “primary” eight, plus Sorshan and Anthrandos, all made it through the other side intact.  Just as importantly, the guild names came through intact as well, so all is well with the world.

So, my first order of business was to ensure that I was able to get the Darth Hexid companion-well, to be more accurate, qualify for it.  The companion won’t be awarded until near the end of the month.  But there is a pair of achievements that key to it; either one will qualify a player for the companion (and a pet, if I recall, but that’s no big deal for me).  Both rely on grouped content:  either 3 Flashpoints via group finder, or 3 PvP warzones.  Not a combination of both, so if you do two of one and one of the other, it won’t work.  Oddly, for me, the warzones were the easiest to do.  Heck, I might even log into my Republic and Imperial mains to get the PvP locked companions while there’s still demand in PvP.

I’m kicking around rolling a new character in SWTOR to help fill out the time while I wait for things like the Foundry in Star Trek Online to come back up.  It’ll probably include a random element again, but I am purposefully excluding a few options in my head-no Knight or Inquisitor, no Mirialan or Rattataki.  Mainly because they’d been covered by my Dark Vs. Light characters.  I’m also likely to choose advanced classes based upon what my mains don’t have-why repeat when I don’t have to.  Heck, I could conceivably make a healing based character, which I haven’t done much of.  (I’ve never had that mindset, but I’m willing to try anything once, right?)

One thing I’ve also discovered with the server merges is that with so many new people (relatively speaking), finding a name for a new character is a lot rougher than it used to be.  Fortunately, somewhere along the line, the devs put in the ability to include a space in the character name, so if you aren’t heart-set on using your Legacy name as the character surname, you can make a full name your character name, like “Darth Vader”.  I’m dead certain the devs would’ve blocked that particular name…right?  Anyway, it’s just one of those little things that I should have realized but didn’t connect the dots on until after the merge.

With the merge complete, I will probably at some point continue the SWTOR version of “The Cast List”, to sprinkle in with the other games’ lists in between activity for Dathiro in STO.  On with the show!

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The Unifying Force?

Merge Ahead

The devs at Star Wars: The Old Republic recently put up their roadmap for the next few months, and…well.  This can’t be good.

The biggest news coming out of it involve server merges.  It’s not a new thing-it’s happened at least twice before with this game (I freely admit there may have been another I missed at some point).  We’re now going from seventeen servers down to five:  two American, one European (English), one European (German), and one European (French).  They can put up a nice face on this all they want, but the simple reality of it is this:  you don’t see server merges of this nature unless the subscriber base has dwindled severely.  And that bodes ill for SWTOR entirely.  You can dress up the reasons for merges up in pretty language (More competitive PvP!  More people to group with for raids!), but in the end, the simple fact is that the developers feel that the seventeen servers don’t have the population to support their current “group focus”.  How much of this is a result of having focused too much on the last two expansions is an open question (I’m not convinced that a “raid or die” philosophy would’ve done much better).

With the merges comes the usual potential drama with names.  Legacy Names will not be impacted, and guild names will potentially have a former server slapped on it (so you could well end up as the “501st Fist – Jedi Covenant” because another guild on another server had the same name.  If one of those guilds should go belly up at some point, the suffix will be removed.  Of course, god forbid that the devs offer free rename tokens to the guild leaders to rename the guild to something that doesn’t have a server suffix on it.  Character names are, of course, an entirely different issue, with priority going to subscribers, then “highly played” characters.  I’m sure there are going to be a lot of people who are going to discover that their characters aren’t going to be what they last saw them as.  Characters who have been inactive for an extended period and not beyond 10th level will also be flagged for renaming prior to the big move.  So, good times.

(I’ll be putting any Cast List entries in my queue for SWTOR on hold until the merges hit; no sense in posting names that may be obsolete when the merges hit in early November.)

It’s not all doom and gloom here.  A new Flashpoint is set to land which continues the storyline with the Alliance Traitor, and offers the return of another lost companion, scheduled for late November.  Another step in raid progression is in the works, but they won’t be hitting until early 2018.  There is a lot of class “balancing” going on; whether or not that’s a good thing depends a lot on what classes you play, and I’ll leave it to other more analytical sites to go into that sort of detail (I always recommend Dulfy for this sort of thing).  There’s an anniversary celebration slated for December (let’s hope it’s not the last one).  There are updates being planned even for the Galactic Starfighter stuff, centering on Iokath (which I imagine would be a pretty fun map to fly on).  A minor but welcome thing is a new vendor at Fleet that will allow you to purchase customizations for opposite-faction companions (so Republic characters can change Vette’s coloration, and Imperials can slap on new T7 designs).  And there are some rewards for encouraging grouped behavior on deck, which can earn you the Darth Hexid companion.  If that names sounds familiar, it should:  Hexid was one of the two possible companions that were offered during the Light vs. Dark event, which Hexid lost (I guess folks liked the light-sided Chiss Jedi better).  I always suspected that Hexid would make an appearance sooner or later, but I figured it would be a gamble pack thing.  Instead, you need to play content under the Group Finder (PvE or PvP); I believe the target number is three of either of these (I don’t think it triggers from any combination; it’s gotta be three of one or the other).  Finally, there will be double rewards (xp, command xp, etc) for about two weeks after the merges go in.

November is shaping up to be a big month for SWTOR.  Whether or not this is a good thing is the big question.

Consolidating Character

  Once in a while, I get surprised in a game.  That happened twice recently with Star Wars: The Old Republic.

  Very recently, the developers at Bioware managed to work out how to make “superservers”.  I’ll give the benefit of the doubt in believing it’s hardware improvements and not “there aren’t enough people around anymore”.  So it was looking like all those locked servers were about to be forcibly merged into existing servers.

  What I hadn’t realized was that there would be similar moves with the servers that were still around.  I logged in to find that Canderous Ordo had ceased to exist, and my characters had been bumped over to Jedi Covenant (along with the rest of the guild).  I’d been under the impression for some time that Canderous was one of the more populated servers, and had gotten even more so with being a server destination for some of those locked servers, so this was an ugly surprise for me.

  The better surprise was that, ultimately, it didn’t really affect me much.  I had one character who required a rename:  and that character was so rarely used (I hadn’t gotten to leveling that one) that deleting the character didn’t cause me any loss of sleep.  The guild didn’t suffer a rename, either; a bunch of guilds who found themselves moved also found themselves with “Guildname@Canderous Ordo” as their new guild name.  Also, I was equally happy to see that very few of the characters in the guild had been given forced renames.  All in all, things could have gone much worse from a personal standpoint.

  My Ebon Hawk characters, incidentally, weren’t fazed a bit.  All the names there were free and clear.  There may have been less competition, since it’s a roleplaying server, and there weren’t as much servers to merge in at that point.

  So that’s the biggest news for TOR in the last month, I think.  Freemium is still on deck for “this fall”, and the next big patch (1.4) is slated to go in at some point in the not horribly distant future, and likely prior to the conversion.  Most of the stuff I’m seeing for 1.4 won’t really affect me directly, since I’m not an Operations sort of player; but there is some stuff that will be handy:  being able to finally make my companions match their color schemes and hide helmets on select character will make them more tolerable to look at.  Since they’re as much a part of my characters as their gear, this really is a fairly big deal.

  Oh, and one more thing happened with all this, that made me smile with that crazed look in my eye:  they added four character slots for each server, bumping the number to twelve.  Being the altaholic I am, I was extremely pleased by that.  I’m considering making an Imp on Covenant now:  there are still hints of an HK companion that will be easier if I have characters of both factions over there, and I still have somewhere in my cargo bays a “rakghoul infected” appearance kit for Mako, one of the Bounty Hunter companions that I would dearly like to use….