Vi Sittar Har I Venten

I've recently gotten no less than three e-mails demanding that I TRANSFER MY CHARACTER NOW from Bioware.  There's a lifeboat analogy there somewhere.

I played APB: Reloaded for a while last night.  It was fun and I'd like to continue playing it but for three strikes:
-The game is optimized terribly.  My computer is no powerhouse but I turned all graphical options to their minimum and went to lengths outside the game to limit performance hindrance, yet the game still has 3-minute long loading screens and rampant framerate drops.  This game's been out for over a year and this is still apparently an issue.
-This is may be two points, but I'm combining them into one: the game apparently at one time had a tutorial zone which was evidently removed--though the game still assumes you went through it.  There is nothing to tell a new player what's up, though I was quickly informed that I was leagues ahead of the vast sea of trainees having equipped my grenades and supply pack.  An hour into the game it's easy to see why there's no tutorial zone however, as an hour into the game I'd seen pretty much the extent of the gameplay--there's little else to do but run missions all day for small pocketfuls of cash and rep.
-And the matchmaking was the last straw.  I was actually on a 9 mission win streak when the matchmaking decided it'd be totally alright to put me alone on defensive missions against a group of 3 experienced players after I'd barely scraped through a previous solo mission against two fairly determined opponents.  I play enough other games with shitty matchmaking to humor yet another.

So that's going far on the back burner as far as games I'd like to keep playing go.

I decided to learn how to jungle in Dota 2 in order to broaden my experience with the game beyond what I'm used to from my old HoN days.  I briefly tried to get into jungling in LoL; I'm finding jungling is much, much easier in Dota.  Learned all of the "jungler" labeled heroes that don't involve additional unit micro and am now wading into the ones that do starting with Lycanthrope.  It's tricky.  Need to find a better way to hotkey groups.

Build That Wall

So it's coming up on a month since I quit and Nightmare Mode Denova isn't even out yet? That's funny.

The longer I'm away from it, the more glad I am that I actually decided not to stick it out and give SWTOR a long term chance. What a train wreck.

Still playing lots of SMNC. Finally started learning heroes in Dota 2 as well. Playing through some of my Steam backlog as well to kill time to Torchlight 2.

See You Space Cowboy...

I logged in for a little while to dick around this morning.  Talked to the GM briefly, resolved some of the tension.

I logged on ~15 minutes ago like I said I would.  Then I saw the edited doc on the Facebook group, the last little kick to the shorts that drained the last few drops of will I had to play this game.

I'm trying to find a reason to want to play now.  I'm literally going down the guild list one by one trying to find someone I consider a loyal friend, someone I'd feel bad about just leaving behind, but nobody's name sticks out.  All the old guys from Last Resort/Remedy I used to play with have long moved on.  I no longer have any loyal ties to the half of the council I actually know.

Raid isn't even starting on time.  Still.  People are missing and there aren't even enough to fill up the raid now.  Everyone's using Diablo 3 as an excuse.

Denova is a boring instance.

So I think it's time to close the book on SWTOR.  I wish the best of luck to MoX in the future, it was fun for a little while.

I'll find another topic to temper this blog to eventually, but that's all for now.

Can I get a little key light over here next time I do that?

So I took the last week off from SWTOR.  It was fun, relaxing.  Took some time to play other games.  Tried to play a little Prototype, started a new character in Skyrim, played a lot of Sudoku to clear my head, played a lot of Super Monday Night Combat with some dudes from the /vg/ Steam group--that was a lot of fun in particular.  I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire and following along, rewatching the first season of Game of Thrones.  All the stresses from the last few weeks finally melted away a bit.  Until today.

I thought, since I had spent the last week off that it was only fair that I try to get back into the swing of things before I make any final decisions regarding my subscription.  The problem was, I had to really psych myself up to even log in, and even once I had I quickly began to get that deep, adrenaline-fueled pit in my gut telling me this was a terrible idea.

The funny thing is, even though I thoroughly enjoyed my time off I've been having this silly little recurring dream the last few nights where I log back in and everyone's like, "Hey, where you been?" and I'm like, "Oh you know, just needed a little time off to sort things out, no big deal." and we laugh about it, go right back to raiding, and everyone's friends again.

Didn't quite go like that.  Actually, it was nearly the opposite; nobody acknowledged my presence either in game or on Mumble.  All my characters had been demoted from Council rank to the standard Ops/Rated, which I could almost accept, but it was probably symbolic more than anything else; wasn't invited to raid, wasn't even asked to wait on standby.  The paranoid, this-was-a-huge-mistake side of me suspects that my absence was spun in a negative light, the more logical side of me is just sure my membership in this guild simply just had that little of an impact.

I sent the GM a lengthy message last week detailing the crux of my issues.  I never received a reply.  Evidently it turns out he interpreted it to mean that I hated his guts (Update: Upon further reflection, this seems to indicate that, once again, my points were either misunderstood or just outright ignored.).  I did not intend that message nor any of my previous blog posts to imply that, and for that I publicly apologize.  Tonight's events, however, did seem to back up one of my conclusions in said message: that the guild now was not the same that I had joined before 1.2.  The kicker, the hilarious irony, and the ultimate wound to my pride in this whole debacle is that in the week I've been gone they've completely cleared all of 16-man Hard Mode Denova.

That adrenaline-fueled pit has faded since I logged off to start typing this.  I'm left just feeling depressed now.  I plan to log in again for raid time tomorrow but it's purely to prove to myself that I have the willpower to do it even though I'm pretty sure it'll be another few hours wasted sitting on my ship with no reason to play the game.  I genuinely want to not have to move on, but I don't hate myself enough to stick around when I'm not wanted.

It's like Birthright all over again.  Actually, that gives me an idea.

Okay

Just logged in for an hour waiting for the "optional" raid to come together tonight only to be told I was benched for the 1 HM Denova boss they were attempting tonight (the tanks).

This is basically the second-to-last straw for me and SWTOR.  I'm at that point I've been at in WoW et al multiple times, nearing the end of my cycle for an MMO, where I only log in to raid and at that end up raiding many hours of slow progress--which I'd normally be okay with if hanging out with guildies in the raids were fun and frankly the last few weeks have not been.  Add to that the fact that SWTOR as an MMO is the floundering infant of a production staff that has refused to learn from the mistakes and successes of its predecessors in general.  When the development cycle of the next 1.X patch is measured in months and basic features such as dual-spec are dangled in front of us as being beyond 1.3 I find myself having trouble caring more and more.  I can almost sympathize with people who were disappointed ranked PvP didn't land in 1.2.

I'm told that the reason we've been doing 16-mans is basically political; in order to get Ghost Codex to agree to the merger, among the terms was that we'd be focusing on 16-man.  These are terms that I do not like and it's worth noting that this was a decision made without consulting the current guild membership.  This translates as struggling to get 16 people to pull off each boss' raid mechanics perfectly, which is an astounding frustration.  Jumping straight into poorly-tuned 16-mans is stupid and a complete waste of time without spending time first accruing gear and experience in the 8-man; even if there's enough people sitting around to do 16-mans--that's two 8-mans that could be clearing every week.

Anyways, in other news I've been playing an awful lot of Super Monday Night Combat the last few weeks.

16-man Hard Mode Zorn and Toth Down

We just finished Zorn and Toth on 16-man Hard Mode.  We've also done Colonel Vorgath, think I forgot to post about that.  Also beat Nightmare Pilgrim tonight as well.

Rocket Boost Tweaked

This caught my eye in today's patch notes:

Legacy

• The Rocket Boost ability can now be used inside and isn't restricted by areas that do not permit vehicles. It cannot be used in combat or in Warzones.

So now it's not useless, just mostly useless.