* Site owners, you are all lovely people but you have GOT to put a link to your RSS feed near the top of the page because I am lazy and already have 18,000 bookmarks that I will never find again.

General SWTOR
All for the Wookie (also has a great list of SWTOR blogs!)
A New Dope
Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies
Hawtpants of the Old Republic
The Holocomm
Inquisitor’s Roadhouse
Land of Odd
The Stoppable Force
TORForce

General SWTOR and other Social Games
Dwism.com
GamingSF

Guides and Other Clever People
Psynister’s Notebook
Space Cadets

SWTOR Healers
Force Mocha
Peal’s Heals

SWTOR Class Blogs
The Ninquisition (Inqs)

SWTOR Crafting
CrewSkills

There haven’t been a ton of changes between 30 and 40. Most of my skills have just been upgrades of existing talents. I did get group stealth at 43 — me and my party can be stealthed together for 15 seconds — and although I haven’t had a chance to use it yet I look forward to surprising some poor Republic bugger while he’s solo guarding a point. (Sorry in advance. =3 )

Companion Chat

Thus far I have used Kaliyo almost exclusively from the moment she joined my band of merry psychopaths, but now with a mere 6 levels to go I am starting to reconsider. Kaliyo, when geared, is a fairly solid tank and I enjoy her company. However I just obtained my final companion who (no big spoilers) could also be a tank and who I find more interesting than poor Kaliyo.

I read a very good defense of Vector or Temple as the perfect healing Operative companion, the idea being that you are the tank and the healer while your companion rips things up. It’s supposedly much faster than using a tank companion, who you can always pull out for the odd gold mob. I intend to try this tonight!

Also, while on the subject of levelling, Chapter Two of the IA story is amazing.

PvP

I generally love PvP — I’m already at Valor 29 — but I am feeling a little meh about it right now.

At some point since I hit 40 I am pretty sure jawas broke into my ship and replaced my armor with tissue paper. I’m not sure how it is that the more levels I get the more weak and ineffective I feel in PvP, particularly with the addition of a level 50 bracket, but there we are. I die fast and trying to single-target someone down is like watching them be slowly nibbled to death by ducks. There is practially no use to me wailing away on even a level 19 character. While I understand that a healer in healing spec should not be a DPS juggernaut, it would be nice to stun a dude and lay into him for a bit and see even 25% of his health gone.

Instead, I heal and stun and practice throwing the Huttball. Occasionally PvP is amazing, but with nerfed stuns and poor DPS and the PvP healing debuff and tissue paper armor I am starting to feel like I have nothing to contribute and my team would be better off replacing me with another Bounty Hunter. This sucks.

Hopefully hitting 50 and gearing up will help.

Other Random Things

• I have learned to always have a two-stack of your HoTs ticking on you in PvP to generate TA points immediately, even if you don’t need the heals. You can kite people for a long time using just our HoT, self-only shield, and Surgical Probe procs.
• Along that line of thought, I think I’ve decided to focus on crit (surge) over haste (alacrity) for my gear, along of course with power. Having a faster heal is okay, but without doing the math I think it might be more effective to make our Surgical Probe (the procced instant heal) bigger.
• I am really bad at using my AoE cloud heal in a way that is effective, if I remember to use it at all.

There was a big todo in the blog world this week about skimpy gear on female characters, and it’s kind of been making me cranky. I feel like the conversation has unfortunately fallen into a common rhetorical trap, and I dislike it when things that are variable and complicated are phrased in very cut-and-dry, “us vs. them” ways.

The crux of the matter, as outlined in this article about “slut plate” over at Apple Cider Mage, is that “[c]hoosing to wear something skimpy in real life or World of Warcraft should be because someone wants to, because it makes them happy, and should not indicate anything other about a person’s personality or sexuality other than what they wish it to indicate.” Hey, swell. I can totally get behind that, and agree that the phrase “slut plate” is dumb and should be discouraged.

As usual, though, the ensuing conversation conflates the choice with the action itself. Women should be able to dress their characters in anything they like without others assuming they are “sluts”, and I will happily defend that choice as a feminist act. However, this does not mean that dressing your characters in revealing clothing is in itself a feminist act. The issue becomes skewed away from the issue of choice and becomes a message of “celebrate in-your-face-sexiness or you hate women”. In fact, under this paradigm dressing modestly is seen as patriarchal, unfun, and something to be avoided. The choice has yet again been taken away.

The point is not the plate booty shorts. The point should be the CHOICE to wear them.

Every day we are shown women being sexualized in the real world. From the moment I leave my apartment in the morning there are girl butts on taxi ads selling beach vacations and botox injections. I am shown sexy ladies all day long in advertisements. There are ladies in skimpy clothing as NPCs in my game, on login screens, dancing on my mailboxes. By the end of the day, I want to play a game and not worry about it. I’m tired of having sexy sexuality blasted at me all day, co-opted or not, which means that in my group you, Black Mageweave Elf, can sit this one out.

(And, like, what is the external difference between a 15 year old boy playing a mailbox-dancing nelf in her underwear and a woman playing a mailbox-dancing nelf in her underwear? Because if you’re just walking by, there is no difference. Can someone tell me if I should be offended or not? I DON’T KNOW ANYMORE.)

My point is: dress your character in skimpy clothes if you want to. Seriously. I will dress my characters in modest clothes if I want to, and both options are equally valid. No one should make any assumptions about your sexuality or personality from how your elf is dressed, but I am perfectly within my rights to think your outfit is tacky and to select a group member who chose to wear pants.

The above image was taken from the front page of the Firefall website.

You know, after years of playing video games and reading fantasy novels I’m used to inhuman physiology in related artwork. I can overlook the fact that this woman’s right shoulder doesn’t seem to exist. (Seriously, try and figure out where her right shoulder is. It hurt my brain after a while.) Her head also doesn’t seem to be attached to the rest of her body, but hey, space combat is perilous stuff.

And truth be told, I didn’t even blink at the robot halftop. Sure, it covers her arms and legs yet leaves a wide expanse of open skin over the part that carries all our important organs. It does kind of serve as a giant “insert pointy thing here” advertisement, but at this point I am quite used to croptop armor.

But that BOOB WINDOW. Look at it. It is, in fact, the most ludicrous boob window I have ever seen, and I do not say that lightly. It doesn’t even look comfortable, much less sexy. Maybe if they hadn’t spent the time and resources lovingly manufacturing boob windows in armor they would have already won the damn war against the aliens 200 years from now in the dystopian future. Yeah.

“To this day, I am deeply resentful; resentful of Blizzard, of the game’s later raid designs that presented my own guild with such a reality. [...] Most of all, I resent them for making me that different person. A person with less and less tolerance for team diversity.”

Reading that passage the first time was striking because I lately have been feeling almost the exact same way. But is the “hardcore” raid culture really to blame?

The Cats were never traditionally hardcore, not even in our peak raiding days. I always believed (and still do) in recruiting smart raiders and then getting out of the way so they could do their thing. We didn’t yell or insult people for performance, and attendance was always optional. But as time went on, we — I — started getting more and more picky about who was and was not considered an essential part of the team.

That nice guy with a newborn who could only raid once a week? Accomodating him felt less important than keeping the experienced people together when faced with night 3 of Heroic Putricide. The woman from Australia with bad latency but awesome attendance? Taking her on a cloak run of TotGC put everyone on edge. Granted, in TBC we got a little more serious about raiding as a guild, but the folks who found themselves on the outside were generally the people who didn’t care that much. They didn’t have enchants, or “forgot to train taunt”. But in WotLK in particular I definitely started leading the guild in a more serious business direction.

So, why did that happen? Part of it was that I personally wanted to keep the ol’ progression train rolling along, and certainly the increased emphasis on fights where individuals can kill the whole raid was a factor, but I think there is another obvious culprit: Casuals. Yeah, that’s right. I said it.

Okay, that was a bit sensational, but I genuinely think the drive to increase the accessability of raiding actually made the culture of raids more focused on performance.

In TBC, after a certain point you had to raid to earn PvE upgrades. And because there were multiple tiers at once and no outside way to obtain the gear, you had to work through the tiers in order. Many tiers of content were valid at the same time. The lean, mean raiding machine with the army general leader could log on and work on their upgrades in Hyjal, while my guild with our not-ungenerous portion of dorks and drunks ( <3 ) could log on and obtain our upgrades in SSC. Usually by the time we worked our way to a boss it was ~10% easier beween nerfs and class buffs and we were loaded up with gear from the previous tier.

My guild, anyway, was quite satisfied with this system. I did not worry what Raidy McRaiderson was doing in Hyjal, because I was too busy securing a resist tank for Hydross attempts or other goals appropriate to our raiding dedication and ability.

In WotLK, Blizzard added two big (and totally successful!) initiatives to improve raid accessability in WoW: badge gear (technically introduced in TBC, but right at the end) and the LFD. The effect was, of course, people being able to gear up faster than ever before, almost to the equivalent of the latest raid content. Running previous raid tiers became obsolete overnight, and out with it went guilds clearing content at thier own pace.

Now every guild started the same raid at the same time, and stopped the same raid at the same time. The sense of being in direct competition, somehow comparing ourselves to them all, began to get hard to ignore. Additionally, the introduction of the simultaneous badge/raid system meant that raids were no longer released en masse, but one at a time. Instead of looking at a handful of raids and thinking we had 18 months or so (we averaged a new boss every couple of weeks), the window of opportunity for current content seemed to become smaller and smaller. Ulduar, for example, had 14 bosses, some of whom had 3 different difficulty modes, and a whole giant mess of achievements. It was current for 5 months.

So not only were we all forced to raid on the same timetable in WotLK due to having a badge system tied to raid tiers, but that time got a lot shorter. Is it any wonder that some of us started to get a bit squirrelly about failure?

Before you accuse me of being a jerk about raid accessibility, let me assure you that I’m all for it in theory. Play the game, raid the raids — I don’t care if you have better gear than I do or whatever it is I’m supposed to be all elitist about.

However, the specific ways that Blizzard chose to implement raid accessibility actually alientated a lot of the players they were trying to help, and encouraged leaders to be more stringent about individual performance. Sure, we did it to ourselves, but Blizzard paved the way.

I think at this point no one can deny that SWTOR has been incredibly polarizing. Quite a few people are enjoying it and will defend the game, and the folks who don’t like it… well, let’s just say they really don’t like it. I’ve seen people call SWTOR the “worst game ever made” and predict that it will be completely dead within six weeks of launch. They don’t just dislike the game, they hate it with a zeal that to my mind borders on fanaticism.

So why the strong feelings? Certainly part of it is just disappointment after a prolonged period of hype. Part of it, I think, is burnout with WoW-likes. But my hypothesis here is that maybe — maybe — part of the problem is that Bioware never intended WoW’s core audience to be the exact same as SWTOR’s core audience, and that makes people unconsciously angry.

Who is WoW’s target demographic? This, of course, is hard to pin down exactly, but I think you can make some assumptions by looking at Blizzard’s advertising campaigns, the features they bring in, and their corporate culture at events like Blizzcon. WoW’s target audience is straight white dudes, probably college-age, who are the Achiever and Killer types of players. Blizzard has emphasized things like raiding and competitive PvP over features such as an appearance tab or guild housing. In fact, they’ve always been pretty dismissive of guild housing as unnecessary twaddle, and until the recent downturn in subscriptions acted the same way about an appearance tab. Please don’t mistake any of this as derogatory — the straight white raidin’/PvPin’ dude market is large and historically critical to a business’ success, and I in no way blame Blizzard to trying to target them.

However, the unfortunate Cannibal Corpse video at Blizzcon last year just showed that Blizzard hasn’t put a lot of thought into their GLBT players. (I don’t attribute the video to maliciousness, just terrible cluelessness.) The company’s surprise at the reaction to RealID shows that they’re not good at thinking beyond their target audience, not to mention the fact that apparently as a female NPC the more important you are, the less likely it is that you’re wearing pants.

Okay, so: who is the target demographic of Bioware RPGs? I think it becomes a little more clear when you read Bioware writer David Gaider’s official response to a complaint that Dragon Age 2 was ignoring the “straight male gamer” demographic. (You probably read about this when it happened last March. The part most relevant to my post is this: “[Our games are] for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention.” Bioware is pretty commonly considered to have a diverse playerbase, and to cater to some of that diversity. Part of the success of SWTOR is predicated on the company turning some of their diverse RPG audience into a dedicated MMO audience.

Perhaps SWTOR was designed with some of this in mind. The game shipped with personal housing (your ship), NPC romance, and appearance controls (orange moddable items), all things that Blizzard has written off in the past as being too frou-frou and not something their target market would enjoy. There are humanoid NPCs who are not white. Storytelling is definitely emphasized in SWTOR during the leveling process, and players are encouraged to create a bond between themselves and their character. Even I, someone who is usually far too cynical to truly role play, find myself coming up with little stories for Panacea’s background, or turning down a dialog option because it just doesn’t “seem like something she would do”. The game even launched without damage meters or a competitive PvP meta-game. People who play MMOs for the serious raiding or PvP experience (most Achievers and Killers) are unlikely to receive satisfaction on this front.

So why are people so angry about SWTOR? Perhaps it is in part because without even realizing it, they are angry that a game is not entirely oriented to their market and their playstyle. Perhaps the makers of SWTOR wanted to create a game meant to appeal to the Bioware target audience, who is arguably more diverse than the Blizzard target audience and who enjoys different activities. That’s not to say that there are NO straight white raidin’ dudes who play and enjoy SWTOR (this is absolutely not the case), but it is not a game that caters to that market almost to the exlusion of others.

Maybe, blogosphere of mine, when you sit down to write that rant about how SWTOR is the worst game in the whole history of the universe, you should take a moment to reflect that it might not be meant for you.

How hard is normal mode raiding? We had 8 Cats in Eternity Vault, ranging from two weeks to two days of level-capped gear farming. About half of the folks had raided together before in WoW, and only 7 were on Mumble due to technical difficulties. I think 5 members of the group were different flavors of Inquisitor, which is a little suboptimal. The group killed the first boss and had about 4 attempts on the second one in two hours on Sunday. In another two hours on Monday, they killed the second and third bosses and got in a few attempts on the fourth one. My non-participant conclusion is that degree of difficulty in normal modes is just about perfect for a group of new 50s. Not too easy, not too hard, and a little practice went a long way.

How fun is normal mode raiding? Again, keep in mind that I’ve had limited feedback, but it was generally quite positive. The second boss in particular seemed to be a big hit with people. Listening to the fights, I heard references to mechanics that I was very familiar with from WoW raiding, such as waves of adds at certain health percentages, tank switches, and having to move around to avoid lava. My impression is that boss fights in SWTOR are not hugely different from boss fights in WoW or RIFT, which is pretty much what I expected. There DID seem to be a lot of trash that was a pain to clear, and it was respawned the next day even after their boss was dead.

How buggy is normal mode raiding? Kinda buggy! Occasionally when someone reset a boss by leashing it or using their Vanish-like ability, it would be completely bugged out on the next pull. (Not using mechanics, using them at unusual intervals.) The best bug was, I believe, caused by simply zoning in to Eternity Vault when often at least one raid member would just instantly drop dead. This was amusing at first for the team but quickly drove them crazy with repair bills and just losing time to people running back in.

How profitable is normal mode raiding? My take is VERY. First, the loot system is kind of confusing at first but cool in application. Every member of the team gets a container of some sort when a raid boss dies. Inside that container can be a token for a class-appropriate piece of gear, or commendations which you can eventually use to purchase gear. It kind of sounded like Christmas on Mumble every time a boss died as people opened their “presents”. Technically, I think, this isn’t a whole lot different than when a boss died in WoW and only dropped 2 pieces of gear, but the random bag idea seemed to be more fun for everyone.

The gear itself made my jaw drop. As a relatively new level 50 character, the upgrades are huge. Our slightly undergeared offtank said he literally gained 1000 hit points from upgrading his hat from a boss drop. That may have been a slightly exuberant exaggeration, but everyone was pretty awed by the upgrades.

I reserve my final opinion until I can see it all first hand, of course, but the initial impression is that normal mode raids are right on target!

So, enough. For an inaugural political-ish post, let’s debunk some popular defenses of casual homophobic slurs in gaming.

No one cares if I use it.

I do. My friends do. Lots of people do, in fact, but they may not have the self-esteem and motivation to say anything to you. This to me is the most obvious argument against hurling slurs around. Isn’t life crappy enough? Do you actually intend to bully people, or are you just not thinking about it? Because you are. I cannot stress that enough: whether you choose to believe it or not, someone is hearing you and someone is hurt. It alienates people of all orientations. It drives them away from games. Smooth move, ex-lax.

For me, when I hear someone use “gay” as a perjorative I don’t actually think that you’re homophobic, although you might be. What I think is that you sound like an ignorant hick. I imagine you as someone who is poorly educated and possibly who has a loving relationship with a farm animal. Everything you say to me from that moment on for the rest of your life will be tinged by my image of you as one of the hillbillies in Deliverance. Maybe you’ll never see me again, but if you keep making that impression on those who cross your path.. one day it’s gonna catch up to you, Jethro.

I met a gay dude at a party once and he said “gay” derogitavely!

Cool story bro. Believe it or not, gay people can be homophobic too. But beyond that… the minute you become a member of the LGBT community, this might be a valid argument. Until then, shut it.

Gay means (kindling, happy, annoying), not gay like people.

As a wordsmith and writer, I think this excuse makes me the most sad. Yes, language grows and changes over time. Your intentions aside, however, it’s safe to say that lots of people still use “gay” as an insult to mean “gross like a gay man”. I’ve heard that plenty of times before (oh, trade chat) and I am hardly looking out for it. Given that, let’s look at the word’s usage:

Homophobic Dude: “That fucking gay rogue stunlocked me until I died!”
You, subverting the vocabulary system: “That fucking gay rogue stunlocked me until I died!”

Huh. Looks the same to me. Sounds the same to me. What is the difference? IS there a difference? Because I do not see one. What I see and hear are two people using slurs. There is a saying in the social justice community: “Intent is not magic.” I cannot read your mind, and if it looks like a slur and quacks like a slur, it’s a slur. It doesn’t matter what you meant.

(Honestly, I am pretty sceptical of the whole “gay means annoying now” argument anyway. If you meant “annoying”, why didn’t you say it? No, you used a slur because it is a word with a lot of power and you are REALLY angry about that rogue. Stop pretending that you’re just on the forefront of the English language and admit that you chose it specifically to be a showstopper.)

They shouldn’t bring their sexual orientation into the game anyway.

This excuse is really just plain homophobia, but I find it interesting because it’s a jumping off point to examining just how heterosexual most games are. I think sometimes straight folks don’t realize how much of our sexual orientation is in almost every game, even if we’re not jumping up and down and shouting about being straight. How many games have a quest that involves a male and female in a romantic relationship? That’s hetero. There’s our sexual orientation, right there, hanging out, forcing others to acknowledge it.

Remember when 4.3 hit in WoW and we all attended the Space Wedding of Space Thrall to his Space Woman? Talk about rubbing your nose in it! It is almost impossible to play a game that doesn’t feature heterosexuality in some way. Straight folks are pretty good at putting our sexual orientation in everything we do! Let’s stop being so hypocritical with the whole, “But stop flaunting YOUR orientation!” argument.

Get over it, it’s just the internet.

And this is the most frustrating excuse of all. I don’t even really understand it. It tends to go hand in hand with someone saying, “People are too sensitive now,” which I also don’t get. Is sensitivity some kind of non-renewable resource? 150 years from now, will future generations grow up callous and cold because we used up all the raw civility? (Huh. Be right back, writing sci-fi novel…)

There is something particularly unsavory about someone insulting you and then telling you to like it. If you insult me, I’m going to be upset! I’m going to think less of you. I may or may not call you an asshat. If you don’t like that, maybe YOU should get over it.

In short, using casual gay slurs while gaming makes you appear uneducated and cruel. It hurts people around you, whether you see it or not, alienates your fellow gamers, and brings up bad memories and sad feelings.

And if you see someone use a homophobic slur, call them on it! I am bad about this myself on occasion, but making things socially awkward for the slur-er is the best method of enacting change we have.

As with a cross-server LFD system, though, while I like the idea of a detailed combat log and damage meters I rarely like the implementation. I had a somewhat heated discussion about this on another site and the argument in favor essentially came down to: “But how will I know when other people are being terrible without damage meters?”. What I didn’t see is a good reason why we all need to be policing each other for poor video game performance.

I mean yes, if you are one of the top ten World of Warcraft progression raiding guilds in the world, then statistics and numbers and performance evalutations are definitely tools of your trade. However, the reason why there are fights with such tightly tuned enrage timers, for example, is BECAUSE players have so much information and are able to min-max to such a minute degree. If a group is able to determine the exact DPS per person needed to kill a boss and enforce it by only bringing players who meet that standard, game developers feel obligated to punish groups that are 1% off that mark.

An end-game without damage meters could not have that degree of finesse, and while it’s not very hardcore of me to say it.. I would be okay with that. Maybe I’m getting old and soft, but I would be interested to see large group content where the keys to success are teamwork, practice, and people who enjoy playing their class and know what they’re doing even if they’re wearing a slightly suboptimal hat because it looks pretty. Not that there should be no place for ultimate min-max raiding, it just doesn’t have to be the overwhelming design ethos.

That all being said while I think hardcore raiding has made damage meters seem like a game requirement, I don’t think these folks and their hobby are actually the problem. The problem is that while it’s reasonable in context for a top 5 world raid leader to examine logs and assist/berate people who are 1% off their target numbers, this attitude trickles down to the pug dictator who starts spamming slurs when someone is performing below maximum expectation in a Baradin Hold random. We, the players, generally don’t seem to know when to stop using game data to beat each other over the head.

Fortunately, I think there are plenty of options for a compromise on this issue. I would like to see personal damage meters, and Bioware has expressed some interest recently in adding that exact thing to SWTOR. I like optimizing my characters and improving how I play them, and my data nerd side would enjoy having access to numbers for this purpose. I also like the idea of a scoreboard shown perhaps at the end of a flashpoint, much like that seen at the end of a warzone. Give me aggregate totals at the end of the session, and not just damage output but healing and damage taken and interrupts and dispels. (Heck, give medals when certain goals are reached, like SWTOR PvP.) Finally, I do think SWTOR needs to add some kind of “cause of death” report to indicate to a player why they died, as some of the fights can get pretty chaotic.

I’m not saying that everyone should be forced to play with Willy The Window-Licking Melee Hunter, but there are certainly ways to tell when someone is doing nothing (no movement or casting, or extremely delayed response times) or perhaps is not sure what to do (running the wrong direction, standing in the ranged pack shooting as a melee class). To go back to the original question, without damage meters will you know when someone is doing 15% less DPS than they optimally could be? Nope! Probably not even a little bit.

And I am perfectly comfortable with that in SWTOR.

Huttball emphasizes teamwork more than any other PvP map that I have played in an MMO. One can just go in and blithly fight other players, but your game is going to end in two minutes when the other team has 6 goals to your 0. Of course I can’t actually sum up how to win in Huttball in a mere two steps, but after playing a billion games this weekend I think there are two things that if applied will enable your team to win a lot more.

Step One: HUTTS DON’T HAVE FEET

No wait, that’s not it.

Step One: THROW THE BALL

The vast majority of touchdowns in football (yes, real Earth football) are done by very slowly moving the ball up the field using shorter passes. On rare occasions someone will get the ball and have the run of their life, zooming past the other team’s defenses and scoring a goal, then doing a little dance. You frequently see the latter event happen at the end of a football movie, mostly because that kind of touchdown is exciting and heroic and inspiring and almost never happens in real life.

USE THIS

Sadly, we are not all movie heros or famous football players. The chances of you getting that miracle running goal are pretty small, so pass the dang ball. (Put the “Throw the Huttball” ability on your hotbars before starting!)

Step Two: BE SOMEWHERE TO CATCH THE BALL

It takes two to tango and to successfully pass a huttball. As discussed above the most common method of moving a football across a field is small passes. This means that at the start of a neutral ball or if you are helping defend the ball carrier, you want to be in front of the carrier and in their line of sight. If you are ranged, get up high and make yourself available for passes. If your ball carrier is in sight of the goal line, go stand behind it so they can pass it to you and score immediately.

Of course this step needs to be taken in moderation — it doesn’t help to be waiting at the goal line for a pass when your ball is possessed by the enemy team and halfway across the field. But when you do have possession, good passes will absolutely dominate the game. Keep that ball moving to your goal line! I’ve seen teams of low levels beat teams of all 50s with smart huttball handling.

I’ve been having a great time with PvP and Huttball, and I can’t wait to get to level 50 and put together a guild team. See you on the playing field!