I’ll never forget when my wife and I decided to create SWTOR Life. This single decision took us on a 15+ year journey and changed our lives forever. It is time to say goodbye though. With AI stealing every bit of human created content having independent websites that provide information has become unsustainable. It’s not even worth paying the yearly $25 price for a domain.

I’d like to thank everyone that contributed to this website and SWTOR Spy. I’ll leave the website up until the domain subscription expires in a few months. I’ll see you in some other galaxy far, far away.

In light of the most recent news coming from Electronic Arts, Bioware and Star Wars: The Old Republic camps I have come to the conclusion that it is time to change the direction and the intensity of my involvement in the SWTOR community and my support for the companies that made this game.

We will stop posting up-to-date news about the game on SWTOR Life. I would like to thank Joshrooms for working diligently these past months to bring you all that news goodness and I thank all who visited us because of that. We will also steer away from trying to be a column driven fansite or any kind of serious fansite for that matter. I intend to turn this into a personal SWTOR related blog where I’ll share a blog post or two when inspiration hits me and I hope I’ll make a few webcomics that have been floating in my mind for a long time now and that I never was able to do because there were “more important” things to be done. I am telling you all this so you are not surprised with all the incoming changes on the site.

We are now back to where we were in June 2009. when the site first started. This is again my very own, personal pet project, just as it was back then. In the past two years we tried to make SWTOR Life one of the most prominent TOR fansites on the internet. Considering the funding we had ($0) I am very proud with what was accomplished. This is all thanks to a lot of great people that joined and left SWTOR Life over the years. Thanks to SWTORCrafter, Mr. Warlock, Flagg, BorukBH, Dalqak, Rosie, Daelda, MJ and Josh we were able to bring the SWTOR community interviews with the developers, reporting from events, amazing weekly columns and tongue in cheek articles consistently over a long period of time. I had nothing to do with this – it is all accomplishment of the people I just mentioned and therefore I am in their debt forever (and I think the SWTOR community a bit as well).

Sadly, in light of all the things happening with the game and the fact that none of the above people are with SWTOR Life anymore (my fault mainly) I had to make a decision and scale down SWTOR Life considerably. From now on it will be a “if I feel like it” thing. I have overextended myself working on SWTOR Life and SWTOR Spy for a very long time and that has to stop yesterday.

I want to make one thing very clear though (in before the trolls). I believe that Star Wars: The Old Republic is a great game that has a lot to offer to any true gamer. There are so many things done very well that it is a shame if you do not attempt to experience at least a part of it. Personally, I will be enjoying the game for what I hope will be a long time to come. I believe with all my hearth that the Bioware, Austin crew stood by their product to the best of their abilities and tried providing us with the best game possible. I hope they will be able to get out of this hole and break the chains that bound them. Even if that does not happen I am proud and happy to have been a part of this amazing journey that waiting for and launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic has been.

  
Weird sequence of events led me to have my main SWTOR character on a PvE server called Dune Bantha. I initially started playing Republic with my wife on a server some of my SWTOR Life buddies played on, but my wife soon quit due to annoyances in the game she couldn’t pass over and I needed an Empire character to discover some things for our SWTOR Spy Database. That is how Zarmelesh, a demented Twi’lek Sith Assassin came to life – a female character with a randomly assigned name and no ambition whatsoever.
  
Dune Bantha was chosen because it had low population at the time and I didn’t want to wait for queues nor did I want to have my game investigations hampered by random PvP (so PvE server was chosen). I was power leveling my assassin, with exception of class quests which had such great cutscenes and story that I just couldn’t speed past those. Two unexpected things happened. I started loving my demented assassin and some of its companions (Khem FTW). I also started playing loads of PvP warzones. So much that I mostly level through PvP from level 30 to level 49. I was rank 49 in PvP and I had to level to 50 to be able to get to PvP rank 50 – meaning – my PvP rank leveling curve was ahead of my actual experience leveling curve.
  
The consequence of so much PvP was that I’ve started seeing the same faces in PvP and getting familiar with their play styles. We soon started sending each other /wave-s and /hug-s as on Imperial Fleet hallways. The thing about pre-50 PvP is that there are a lot of people that play it just a few times and those that play it all the time. Soon we had a team of regulars that you knew the tactics and were tough to play against. By that time though there was already a big decline in active players and we started seeing less and less PvP matches pop. Nevertheless, I remember this one Sith Warrior called Narfle – he was my PvP God at the time. He was unbeatable and I always wondered how did he manage to survive everything, score regularly and be first on the score board. Cheers Narfle – it was always a pleasure losing to you ;).
  
Reaching level 50 changed the game for me because PvP suddenly became a different game. There were people with PvP gear and knowledge of tactics. Very few noobs existed or were so humiliated that they either practiced to become better or left never to return to PvP. Server population became even smaller and we had perhaps 40-50 players both republic and imperial side that regularly played PvP. I started seeing always the same faces. It was a lot of fun because we all played PvP for hours with the same people and we really bonded – may it be through rivalry or camaraderie – but we kind of bonded. I always knew that if I played with fat and bald bounty hunter Egg or sorcerer Zyntharia or Sith Warrior Morgoth in the group I would win because they were so good at what they did. There were republic players that we knew we would lose against because they were so good (Syth , Kitven, Gilgamesh, Valery, thejedi, Emi (which is Zyntharia’s rep character)). I started learning from these greats and started getting some better PvP gear and sooner rather than later I was getting to be one of the veterans as well. I specced into tanking PvP build and started showing up in the top of the score board more often than not. Tanking build also made it possible to do PvE.
  
PvE was not so good for a very long time. The first three months I barely ever found a group for a HM flashpoint. The server was low pop as it is and people started leaving very soon, which made things even more difficult. I was in a zerg guild that had 15 members online out of 500 all the time (and none of them were level 50). In a surprising turn of events I got an invite one night form a Danish guild. They needed an off-tank to help them in their EV raid. I was ecstatic. I think some of their members knew me from PvP or I was the only tank online. Whatever the case I was soon experiencing my first raid content in SWTOR and not just watched it on livestreams. Things went really well and I even got some gear. Thanks to the Danish Invasion I had my first SOA kill and raiding PvE experience in SWTOR 3+ months after the game launched. We raided several more times in the next month and it is the most fun I had in SWTOR beside some great PvP matches. I would like to take this opportunity to thank P’nes, Aeonkazza, Rion, Rambo, Glikus, Greken, Taball and the rest of the gang for taking me in and putting up with my complete lack of knowledge of Danish language and lack of any tanking skills. You guys made SWTOR a memorable experience.
  
For a few weeks now it has been very hard to get a raid going. Some people got fed up with Bioware’s inability to react to problems. Others left as soon as Diablo 3 launched. Some still persist and try and get a raid going every now and then with the help of two other crippled guilds. It is still fun hanging out with these guys and playing together, but the occasions have become seldom. Zyntharia is still kicking ass in PvP. I enjoy it whenever it happens. Unfortunately it can be hours now before a match pops. Besides, there are so few of us playing now that as soon as one side loses they never reapply for PvP and we go into a waiting mode for an hour.
  
I wanted to tell you my story of the server Dune Bantha and the people I enjoyed playing this game with. I wasn’t planning on it. I always thought I would be a raiding and healing smuggler on the Juyo server. Instead, I became a demented PvP Assassin in a Danish guild. Now that many have left I feel that I need to put this story in writing. I want all of you that stumbled upon this blog entry to know that from January to April 2012 there was this game Star Wars: The Old Republic that we all thought is awesome and that there was this server Dune Bantha on which I found people that gave me hours and days of gaming heaven.
  
P.S. I would like to thank and mention the following players I kept playing with/against in PvP that made me come back to warzones day after day: Drix, Diogo, Valarius, Reddas, Jaqen, Dose, Drix, Tasia (I still hate you 😛 ), Treyus, Bleach, Firezone, Calvin Hobbes, Rbk

I had an enormous privilege to walk the halls of Bioware, Austin development studio in its best days. All the razzle dazzle aside (so much cool stuff could be seen) there was one thing that made me feel certain we are going to have an amazing game on our hands. It was all the hard working people there producing diligently worlds of Star Wars: The Old Republic. We were walking by one of the rooms and there were world designers placing various objects onto one of the planets right at the moment we were passing by. I thought to myself – my character will be running around there in no time.

Yesterday, we learned that a lot of the people have been hit by a wave of layoffs (Click to read the announcement by Bioware foudners). On behalf of SWTOR Life and its staff I wanted to extend my best wishes to all those affected. Thank you for all your hard work and trying to give us fans the best game possible.

Rich Vogel, Executive Producer and member of the original development team, posted a lengthy blog post today entitled “Busting Bugs and Fixing Exploits”. As you can imagine the post is all about how the team at BioWare goes about fixing bugs in their system; what gets prioritized, how they attempt to discover them, and more. It is chock full of great information on how the team at BioWare works.

More after the jump. Continue Reading »

Players who have played since launch already know the order of the planets near the beginning of your epic adventure. The Empire starts out either on Hutta (Imperial Agent and Bounty Hunter) or on Korriban (Sith Warrior and Sith Inquisitor) then moves on to the capital planet of Dromund Kaas. The Republic starts out on either Ord Mantell (Smuggler and Trooper) or on Tython (Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular) then moves on to the capital planet of Coruscant. These are the sanctuary planets. The opposing faction can’t visit these locations. So where does PvP start? Continue Reading »

Crafting. Yes crafting. The all elusive, god forbid, sucks to level, identical item, farm your ass off, kill a ni-hao slinging bot for a node, shoot your best friend in the face for a plot on dantooine… crafting.  I will admit it. I was a crafter.  Yes. the man you look at today, whom rated a whopping 4 in the wow arena system, the lord of murder, Flagg, the god of pvp carnage and utter destruction was a crafter.  All jokes aside, In SWG. I loved that shit.  LOVED it.  Lived for it. Hell, I’ll admit it. I sold gold (credits) to websites, that resold my gold.  I sold so much of it, i lived on it for 2 years….. no joke.  2200.00 a month. It was heaven.  Then it all changed… wait…what the fuck am i babbling on about now…. Oh the glory days. Back to it then… Crafting.

I really want to get back to it. I want an inquisitor for leveling (my full video on ustream thingy) but for gods sake, I want to grind and level a jedi knight crafter.  A “Force Architect”(@flagg20011-2099). if you will. The crystal making , lightsaber wielding mofo.   The man with the plan.  Or whatever.

The thing is, after reading a few 1/2 assed reviews on the crafting, then reading one post beta guy.. Shit, I cant wait.  He ranted and raved about it, being a crafter from swg himself. Good god that’s tough optimism  to try to break. He went on about how engaging it was, how wonderful it was to craft sex droids, how exciting it was to kill jawas and use their soul to fuel his deadly machine based one demons from….oh wait, wrong game.  The point is he loved it. And I’ll be honest here. I know a lot of people who talk out of school and said the same. The crafting system is fun as hell, unique, and phenomenal.

You know how hard it is to find a game with good engaging crafting? How utterly mindbogglingly hard?  Impossible is the proper term. It’s so bad it almost seems as if these days most companies throw it in as some sore-ass abused after-though of some overworked department full of burnouts.  Not so here, I hope.  How do you guys feel?  This week is my monthly questionnaire, first (and most likely only month) to do this before Derek and Serge shut me down like cancer in a radiation lab.

Q:  Are you excited about crafting?  If so, give 3 reasons.  If not, Post a link to a picture of a cool jawa.

Q: Have you ever thought about drawing or animating a sexy alien chick. Even after a drug fueled binge of “heavy metal” and peyote? if not, please tell us your favorite color, and a 300 word essay on what makes that color whup monkey-ass.

Q: Is time travel possible.  Seriously. I want to know.

Q:Do you play “World of Tanks” and when you kill a tank do you yell ” You underestimate the power of the dark side!”  IF not, explain why you like 90210 in less than 7 words.

Q: Ever get in an argument over your Halloween costume…after you turned 20?

Q: Is the only reason you like Harrison Ford at all:  A: HAN SOLO  /  B: INDIANA JONES   ?

Q: Is there a way to travel faster than light? Think, tachyon…

Q: Do you love swtor?

I eagerly await your ramblings!

/Flagg/

P.S. Notice the sarcasm and fucking lack of fucking cussing i did in the fucking article.  Wo-fucking-rd to your mothers uncle.

/Flagg/

Love you all. Seriously….

/Flagg.

Good day my fellow SWTOR enthusiasts.  Let me start off by saying how much I regret not being able to annoy the s**t out of you wonderful people for a  few weeks due to a Move, Girlfriend, Shitty internet, Near heart attack, Medication change, Philly-Cheese steak obsession, and my personal penchant to stuff two badgers in a pillowcase and watch them fight it out like two hookers on the Vegas strip fighting over some japanese high roller.  I missed you all about as much as a herpes outbreak during spring break.
Read more … if you dare

Over the last few weeks, Real Life has come at me full blast. My full time job has sped up in what I am doing and how much of my time I have to get things done. My family has has done the same as the youngest now moves as fast as a Ewok on a Speeder. Needless to say, my life is busy, very busy.  So, because of all of this, I am doing as much as I can before I have to leave.

You see, I have come to realize that once Swtor releases, it comes down to the Game and Real Life. As we all are so excitedly waiting for the game, I am sure you all know what I am talking about. Once the game launches, I will go into game mode. I will get tunnel vision and see nothing but Republic and Empire, Galaxy Maps and little green people that do or do not resemble something I once new. I will become a computer chair accessory and delve into the Universe on my ship. I will envelop myself into a story and my companions story. I will craft, I will fight and probably die, but I will have fun.

So when I say I have things to do before I leave, I do. I have work to get done and try to get ahead of. I have kids to play with and a Wife that I have to get chores and projects done for. I have grass to cut and weed-eat. I have a house to paint and repair. I have windows to get fixed, floors to be cleaned and sinks to replace. I have a real life that I must devote most of my time to so that I can get things done before I leave. Because once my ship launches, I may not be back for awhile.

During this time before we all set off on our journey we are all waiting for, what are you getting done? Are you letting things pile up to interrupt your new life that is closing in on you? are you working feverishly to get caught up and maybe farther on so that you can relax for the game at launch? Will you have time to relax and soak up everything as you come across it or will you be forced to cram as much play-time into as you have other things that will pull you away? So what are you doing?

One of our favorite forum do-gooders, Georg Zoeller, dropped by the main forums today to wish us a Happy Rapt… no, my apologies!  He wanted to clear up a few things about auto-attacking, and whether or not there would be macro functionality in SWTOR at launch:

Macros are a pretty broad term for certain convenience and advanced user functions at this time. Some of those features are present as possible key binds in the game, others are not.

We’re not opposed to macros, we don’t hate them, in fact we will probably add them, but probably not for launch.

So what does this mean for us?

Continue Reading »