Ardrossan
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Posts posted by Ardrossan
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Yeah I mean I know it could affect the dialogue in Class stories and such, but does it still affect anything in Kotet onward?
I actually conducted a small experiment today. Whether you have the option to tell the Mandalorians "We Fight for Peace" or "Destroy our enemies" depends on whether your alignment is above or below exactly 0. It's a Light or Dark binary. My Smuggler was still neutral so it didn't take long to go from above zero to below zero, but it seems that neither the Light vs Dark Icon toggle or being between Light I and Dark I has any bearing on the dialogue here.
As others said, no it doesn't. My point though was that even in the class stories, it doesn't affect much either. Or conversely, the writers will forget to add alignment choices at all. So SIs from the silencer mission onwards have a slew of class finale content that only has neutral options. You wanna free your ghosts? That's neutral. You wanna keep enslaving them? Also neutral. Unless you're LS, you can't actually free them. Or Troopers, who can execute Rakton or take him into custody, both as neutral choices.
The game has always been inconsistent about the validity of neutral choices. In Kotfeet, they went one better by removing them altogether.
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A week ago, I read OP's last ragequit thread, as seen here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=959767. To its credit, it was mercifully short.
Then two days later, the OP made a thread about chat filtering (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=959836), and Porsa pointed out that it was a bit odd for the OP to care about chat filtering when he was leaving the game anyway. OP responded with this pompous line about how he was advocating this topic for the betterment of the playerbase, even if he wasn't around to enjoy it. Both posts got deleted.
OP continued his noble campaign to enrich the playerbase by trolling the Arcann thread (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=9696902#post9696902) which OP apparently edited at some later point, and in general, not leaving or telling anyone else that he was leaving.
And that brings us up to speed to now. I usually dislike looking into people's posts, but as this all took place in the space of a week, and as I read OP's increasingly embarrassing posts at the time he made them, I think it's justifiable.
My sub expires next month. Apart from the occasional 90 day referrals and maybe a resub if there's an expansion, I'd prefer not to resub, [but you never know], so I have no definite plans to return. When I leave, I'll just leave. I won't make a big production out of it, because contrary to OP and others, nobody who's staying really GAF why you're leaving or how, except for the lols. At least you accomplished the latter, OP.
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Yes agreed. Or we just make 50 threads like we usually have to do till they pay some attention. Maybe even try reddit and twitter to get swtor influencers involved and saying something through back channels.
Yes do spam the forum with this [or anything], good idea.
I remember your name connected to the recent 5.10 gearing debacle. I also remember it not doing a damn thing, no matter how much spamming you did. However, it did annoy the playerbase here, so by all means, do some more of that.
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Pretty sure it wasn't me, but I do.
Split between two accounts.
Star Forge....88 on my oldest account, and 62 or so on my 2nd subscriber account.
70'ish total on Satele
18 or so on DM
8 or so on the German/French servers
Do you notice much lag playing on the European servers? Or vice versa, if you're from there and playing chars on the North American server? I thought about making a character on those other servers just to see what it's like, but assumed it would be pretty unplayable.
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Oh God, I remember thinking exactly that, on my second character, the Cyborg commandogirl Kylath. It was the source of her undying emnity towards a certain big-butted general, because I interpreted it (incorrectly in retrospect) as Garza saying that *cyborgs* were bad, rather than that those *potential* cyborgs were a major risk. (Not that "they might have been encyborgified for bad purposes, so murder them out of hand" is any less bad a thing to say, mind you.)
And I still wonder why we didn't have the "take them into custody until we can work out whether they are really cyborgs" option.
Speaking of cyborgs and Garza, let's contrast this choice with the mission Garza gives you on Rishi. It would have been clever foreshadowing if there'd be an option to recruit them on the spot into specforce. At least with the Rishi mission, the trooper isn't under Garza's chain of command anymore and doesn't have to cover up war crimes. Apart from the SW killing the Emperor's Hands, the Trooper mission [LS] was surprisingly the most satisfying of all of the Rishi mini-missions, imo.
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Love Interest.
I mean, we have Khem now, and if that isn't a sign that the devs intend to continue scratching the bottom of the barrel, what is?
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It can be somewhat important for the 1-50 class story. It crops up a little bit in the choices available during the rishi class missions. I don't see any other example past that.
As people mentioned, Darth Occlus. Neutral JCs have a slightly different ending scene than LS JCs [Neutral JKs have an identical ending scene, which disappointed me]. Smugglers can be neutral, but the rewards are lackluster. For the class story finale, your choices are: LS: SAVE the Republic! DS: PIRRRRATE Fleet! Neutral: 'Give me 50 credits and you're free to go'. The trooper neutral ending is also identical to LS. Neutral SWs and SIs also have different dialogue during their Act 1 finales. BHs have possibly the stupidest neutral ending, and Tormen will criticize you for it. I like replaying class stories, but I did that once on my first BH and I'll never do it again.
I have one of each class that plays True Neutral. That is, they don't go beyond 100 light or dark, but try to stay as close to 0 as possible. As you might imagine, it was much easier without the alignment bar. It takes a fair bit of micromanagement, and your character tends to be pretty schizophrenic, but it can be fun.
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Retort: HK-51 was always a crappy character compared to the original. If anything, he's become less crappy by comparison to his successor in Kotfe, which was the crappiest version of them all.
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Which is again, your opinion. Not fact or canon in the game. The character's ages are what you want them to be. If you want all your characters to be kids, that's fine, but we'll have to agree to disagree that they're "supposed" to be that way or that anyone else has to follow suit.
This is kind of a bizarre take on what an opinion is. I mean, yes, it's an opinion in that it's what Koriander thinks, but it's also backed by reasonable evidence like the way, as the last poster said, NPCs frequently refer to you in diminutive terms. And it'd be one thing if you were countering this with 'but look at the age of the VAs', which is indeed what Damask has said. But that's not your argument, it's more like 'it's my perspective that they're old'. Which is fine, but it's not an argument with much weight, is it?
So, my question would be, if perspective is all that matters to you, why not simply headcanon that your characters are all older, and what difference does it make if the 'canon' position [the one that is actually backed by in-game evidence] is that they're young?
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I don't think a week goes by where I'm not reporting either a player name, guild name, or player chat. Most recent example was a player's disparagement of Jews and I'm not even Jewish.
Was it on the Republican fleet?
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Sometimes I'll create alts just to play a different gender / species / outfit / subclass / love interest / light-dark choice combo.
This.
I think someone on this forum recently claimed to have over 100 alts, and to be fair, if you've been playing since 2011, it's more than doable.
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I'm curious, what are your daily/weekly habits in this game when you have that many toons? I guess that maintaining all that menagerie takes a lot of time. Either that or you're very efficient.
Cheers
Not for me. Most of these toons I made before I started subbing at the end of 2017. I only had access to endgame content to 70 around Oct 2017. As a result, when the class story ended, and the toon was at max level [50], I stopped playing them. Now, I've got 7 toons at rank 300 [working on the 8th], and when they're done, I'll probably [hopefully] never grind CXP again. Or do another operation. That leaves a little over 30 toons who are stuck at 50, of which 13 are over at SF and I don't care about, so 17 to raise up to 70. I can take my time with those, do a couple, make a new character here and there. I don't have a main that I always play, but on pubside I'm most fond of my Gunnery Commando, and impside I like my Jugg tank, so they're usually who I take through the new content.
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I have two spreadsheets, though one of these days I'm just going to combine them into one. The basic difference is that I made a second one because my Office subscription was expiring and the alerts gave me the impression that I'd be locked out of accessing documents I'd made. That didn't happen, but by then I'd made a second spreadsheet. That inadvertently came in handy during the merger, when I had to delete about half my characters. So now I have two spreadsheets, one with about 40 toons, which is current and up-to-date, and one with 60 toons, which contains most of the ones from the new spreadsheet, as well as detailed info about the toons I had to delete, which is useful if I'm trying to remember if I ever made a male miraluka BH with a #5 Head, or if I'm using an outlander token to remake a deleted toon.
Both spreadsheets are divided into: Server, Name, Class, Advanced Class, Species, Appearance [using the number sliders], Gender, Crew Skills [with an icon for maxed crew skills], Mount, DS/LS Alignment [with a nickname to remember the direction I took that character], Level 70 Y/N [most of my characters are at 50], Optional Regen, Pet, Companion Customizations, Number of Outfits, Name of outfits [typically the one or two preferred ones, or named weapons], and highest companion affection.
I try to have equal numbers of males and female, and of races, divided into classes. Meaning that I dislike having two Chiss JCs, unless they're different genders. Sometimes this is difficult as SWs, for instance, don't make a lot of sense as say, a Togruta. I also try to avoid making characters that look too similar to each other, especially members of the same race. I keep track of comp affection too as I don't like having two JKs that both favor Kira. Their personality will change accordingly if one favors Kira and the other favors Scourge. Well, sort of. It was a more meaningful distinction before companion influence was changed. Comp customization is less important now that I've run through virtually all the different customization options, but if I'm making a BH and noticed that I used Gault 4 twice already, I'll use a different one instead.
I vary with pets, mounts, outfits, and regens; collections don't mean much to me because I want each character to feel different. I also like to have [roughly] equal numbers of advanced class specs so I don't get bored. I keep track of alignment for a similar reason; if I have four Smugglers who end up with DS 1, 3, 4, and 5, the next one, if DS, should only be DS 2 by lvl 70. Crew skills I don't really care about. Many of these characters were originally on different servers, so every server needed its own crafters. Now I'm only on two servers [and SF is where I sent all my less interesting toons], so I only have one of each crafter [mostly], so new characters get slicing plus two of whatever I'm most in need of.
It's a lot of details, but I'm honestly just amazed that I was trying to do this stuff in my head for most of the time I've been playing. I started in early 2013 and didn't make a spreadsheet until late 2016, mainly because of seeing someone on the forum mention that they had one and thinking it was a good idea. Now that I have eight SHs, plus a guildship, I may add a tab denoting which SH they spend their time at. At this point I have room for 14 more toons on SS, and 26 more toons on SF, but tbh, I make new toons much more slowly now than I used to, and I expect the game will be dead by the time I run out of room on SS.
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If I'm running towards mobs to attack - lowbie assassin, Khem on heals so no gap closer - and I'm 1 mm away when a blaster shot from behind me flies past me and hits the mob I was obviously about to whack, and makes them grey, I've been ninja'd.
Still, I didn't make a fuss, moved on, looked for other mandos. Then I waited for them to kill their boss, waiting my turn to activate the thingy. Because they had finished the 8 mobs first thanks to their ninja ways. And THEN this dork pm's me "thanks for nothing ! you should be ashamed, standing by and not helping".
For real...
Were you stealthed?
If they couldn't see you, it's not ninja'ing
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My IA kept flipflopping between Republic and Empire. Iokath: Republic. Nathema: Empire. Ossus: Republic. But she's crazy. Meanwhile, my LS 5 SW stuck with the Empire, but avoided doing the bonus stuff like burning farms.
Given how the pubs and imps were portrayed in kotfeet, it's hard to conceive why anyone would still be supporting the republic, let alone defect to them, unless they skipped kotfeet altogether [understandable].
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I've made older versions of all the classes. They CAN work, because age is rarely mentioned after the prologue, but it's a tough sell.
I generally assume they're all pretty young except for the BH. Neither of the VAs sound all that young, the Male especially. The problem, as Elessara points out, is that the BH is explicitly mentioned to be a newbie hunter, which means he's either young, or had some other career before this one.
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I signed the petition a few days ago.
As for this sub-topic, not only do I not think the game's popularity would increase if it were canon, I wouldn't play this game if it were. Canon has not struck me as being particularly well put-together. Legends, of course, has plenty of crap, but at least some of it is gold-plated crap.
I read most of the canon novels [except the Solo-related ones, I just can't do it], and none of them are equals in epicness to the Thrawn trilogy. None of them have any of the fun screwing around of the X-Wing novels either. And none of them are as well-written as Matt Stover's stuff. What they are is essentially deleted scenes from TFA, TLJ, R1 and Solo, and they're deleted because none of them are particularly interesting or needed to make sense of the movies. They're just fan trivia, and they don't stand up well on their own. I greatly disliked Fate of the Jedi [i would be happy if no one ever mentions Mortis again], but at least that series CAN stand up on its own without reference to another movie or show, or even the preceding series.
Although, the way I look at it, vanilla was swtor canon, and everything from KOTFEET on was some horrific caricature. Those expansions are the strongest parallel to canon, because just like canon, they take characters from Legends that we know and love, empty them of substance and subtlety, and dump them in plots that the writers wish they could say they were high for while writing them, which they abandon for another half-baked idea as soon as it's convenient. I liked Rebels well enough, but does anyone seriously think the Thrawn in that show was remotely similar to the one in Zahn's books? Let alone an improvement? I mean, they were both blue, so there's that.
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Torian and Mako are really cute together.
I did, and she does mention it. She says something like, "I heard about Torian, and I kept thinking if I were there I could have done something." That's it.
For the romance between the two of them, I had the feeling it ended a long time ago, didn't it? From what Torian says they stayed together for a time after the BH disappeared but then he ditched her on some planet when the Mandos called, and "she could take care of herself." And I thought that Mako and Akaavi could plausibly be together.
I was never able to figure out how to get the Torian/Mako romance started. Or maybe it's so minor that I'm oblivious. Don't flirt with Mako. Don't flirt with Torian. Give Mako permission...? Do you have to be on a female toon?
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The romances I actually like are Jorgan, Vector and Quinn. I'm not sure how I'd feel about Jorgan if he weren't voiced by an actor I already really like, but I still think he's kinda adorable and I'm not bothered by the initial grumpiness. Vector is simply a beautiful soul with an angelic voice, he's more perfect than any real person could live up to. Quinn is tops, he actually, how do I say this? Hurt my actual feelings and that's pretty impressive for pixels.
I like all these too.
I also like both the female LIs for smuggler. Risha is the more obvious choice - but even on DS smugs I'm reluctant to tell her to throw away her queendom to be a space bum - and I really like Akaavi, especially her VA, reminds me of Sigourney Weaver.
I don't really like Ashara even without the romance. I don't like the romance much either, but on DS SIs it's a little easier to swallow that she's bought into the whole 'reform the empire' spiel because you seduced her.
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Hi All!
He decides to assassinate Emperor HIMSELF with a help of couple of friends AGAIN!
Really? Didn't it occur to him that something might go wrong and better have some contigency plan?
I can't imagine how great tactician that raised from simple jedi knight to a whole republic army commander (earning every promotion with countless victories) could do something so stupid.
He had contingencies, they just weren't particularly good ones judging from kotor2. He tried to make some alliances with the mandos and provide some kind of early warning system for the Republic, but he didn't count on the alliances needing to hold for 300 years, and he left the Republic while it was still trying to put itself back together.
I headcanon that the initial mindrubbing by the Emperor gave him brain damage, which got exacerbated when the Jedi pulled the same stunt later. In Kotor 1 and 2 we hear about all these impressive strategies Revan is supposed to have done, but they're all from the original mandalorian wars. In the first game, on the LS ending [which became canon], he basically rejects his past and tries to start fresh, which is great and all, but it means he lost a lot of his strategy and cunning. He still had all his powers, but it was left to characters who knew him at the time to tell us how smart he was; Revan as a PC is basically being jerked around from one battleground to another.
In some ways, this makes him a more consistent character through the Revan novel and the stuff in this game, because the portrayal is one of a crazy force-user obsessed with destroying his abuser at all cost, not the brilliant general who - from depictions in Kotor2 - also had no moral qualms about sacrificing whole battalions, but made sure they would be worth something. The Revan that people talk about in Kotor1 and 2 wouldn't have inadvertently woken up the Emperor on Yavin because it's not the same guy [you can throw in the whole Good Revan and Bad Revan thing too if you want; I just think brain damage from mental domination is easier to swallow].
Ultimately, I don't really care anymore about Revan, or the Exile, or any of the Kotor 1 and 2 lore [though I do like that BW, usually averse to using stuff from K2, recycled the living machine planet that Obsidian came up with]. That ship has sailed, and while it would have been great if they hadn't screwed up his story, the novel and resulting retcon did that well before he got screwed over in this game.
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I preferred 3.0. Companions worked fine, pvp was useful for gearing, XP was slow but not quite as tough as 2.0, we didn't have alignment bars...I think I made more characters during 3.0 than any other period. One major downside: iirc, we still had planetary comms by this point. Crafting was also fairly unpleasant.
I also liked 4.0, but not as much. Level sync was all right, and I liked the changes made to heroics and datacrons. XP was much easier to come by at this point, but we traded that for getting the skill trees squeezed into utilities.
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A lot of the 'weirdness' people mention in regard to LIs suddenly proposing out of the blue is related to how companion affection was restructured a few years ago. Originally it was relatively easy to tell LIs you weren't interested and they'd back down [Corso and Doc were notable exceptions], but when affection became influence, it unlocked all the comp story trees so if you began a romance with a flirt [just need one] it would continue down the line. Even if you rejected their proposal at the end, you'll still get a few love letters after. The only time this works properly is if you're romancing two at once [like Akaavi and Risha] and the choice you make there will block the remainder of the romance from the other comp.
I don't really romance any of the expansion characters, like Lana, Theron, Koth, etc. I've tried a couple times, and found that the most enjoyable part of the romance was when my original LI returned [like Vector from the IA] and I could dump Lana/Theron. BW wrote those fairly effectively imo; you can do the let's be friends thing, but you can also make it clear that they were just stand-ins for the comps you really wanted around. If only we could do that more often in Kotfeet.
As someone else said, Jorgan has a pretty good romance once you get into it. I also liked Kaliyo's - it helped redeem her character imo. Conversely, I don't like the romance story for Nadia, DS Jaesa or Mako, pretty much for the reasons other people mentioned. I'm meh about Iresso, but I do like that you don't get DS points for it - unlike Kira or Doc, it's not intended as a towering, Jedi Code-breaking romance. I'm also meh about Jaxo. During the my initial run-through as a trooper, it wasn't clear to me that she was intended as a romance for Males - I missed the invites she sends you. So when she showed up during the prison mission, I couldn't figure out why they were using this random specforce extra from Act 1 as the high stakes gambit. Saving the prisoners was a no-brainer.
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For Cathars, I try to find them cat names, which is probably the toughest [most of the names from CATS have been taken]. So Griddlebone, Verdauga [ie. Redwall] etc
For Troopers and IAs, I use military jargon and spy tradecraft, ie. DILLIGAF, Chest Candy [officers with lots of medals] etc
For bounty hunters I use business slang and financial terms, ie. Incentivize, Mercantile etc.
For the rest, I like to pick an adjective that fits in some way with the direction I want to take the character, ie. Heterodox for a Darth Occlus SI, Hackneyed for a LS Pureblood JK, etc.
Being able to make two names is very helpful; if a name is unavailable, it's easy enough to add something simple in front, ie. Stacy Strategic for an IA, Blush Bravado for an SW, etc.
So actually, you CAN make a character name that is a statement, as long as the statement isn't 'Darth Starrrrkiller', 'President Covfefe' or somesuch.
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This. They need to be fixed, not given more options that would break them even more. We've actually dealt with comps not following properly since 4.x. (It wasn't 4.0 that broke them, but a patch after that, same that broke Star Fortress Veteran modes loot tables). Yep, it was then when they started lagging behind you, and you have to stop waiting for them to catch up. 5.0 just made it worse. Now they are so frieking annoying. They have to be babysat constantly to see a) if they follow b) if they actually do anything or just stand there admiring view.
4.x, really? jeez. Hard to believe it's been that long. I remember when that started people were confident it was going to get fixed. Then we all just got used to it. And we'll probably all get used to this too, which is really sad.
You Have Been Replaced
in Off-Topic
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I live in Western Canada. The game is slow and lags for me too. I don't undervalue his problem. What I lack sympathy for is people who ragequit dramatically [as if there's any other kind] twice in a week.
I lack sympathy for other things too, but to go off Yillarus' point, it's mainly based on how they present themselves. So the other day there's a thread about a guild perk that's showing up in pvp, and obviously a bug. I pvp so the issue is not unimportant to me. The 'strategy' they decide upon is to spam the forum with identical threads because apparently that really helps! That is just one way of how you turn someone who may have been sympathetic, deeply unsympathetic. Yes, let's spam the forum so our niche pvp issue will take center stage. Good thinking, guys!
Your point is that ultimately BW is to blame. It sure is. My point is that if you have a big, available target for people to direct feedback to [say, a once well-loved and now increasingly incompetent subdivision of EA], it seems really dumb to set yourselves up as a target in their place, by doing something likely to piss people off MORE than they're pissed off at the bigger target.