Wednesday Warzones #2: Arena Annihilators

It's time for another instalment of Wednesday Warzones!

Due to not having much opportunity to group up with other players throughout the last fortnight (noisy kitchen renovations all but nullify TeamSpeak for me, and when it was done for the day it was nearly time for other people to go do Ops or whatnot), again I've had to make do and mend and only use one day's worth of PvP footage for this video.

On the plus side, this means that this video is much shorter than last time. In grouping up for the Lowbie PvP Bracket with fellow bloggers Shintar and Traitine - who also streams several games including the occasional bit of SWtOR PvP - on Sunday, we encountered several Arenas and only three actual Warzones. It was a very hectic afternoon!

I completely forgot to record the first Arena (my bad!), but recorded the other six matches. In spite of this, I have not included footage of the Huttball and Novare Coast matches. Whilst I'm not averse to include defeats in these videos, my perspective makes for an absolutely rubbish viewing experience in both cases. 

Even with cropping footage down to the actiony bits, it's still too much to cut out to justify including either match.

Also if you're wondering why there's suddenly a "blip" sound effect when I talk when there wasn't last time, it's because of the VOIP program which we used on the day, which was GameVox. I haven't checked to see if it's possible to mute that, as it is quite aggravating even on my end!

Anyway, enjoy!

Participants:

• Coli'hara - Gunnery Commando
• Zataa - Sawbones Scoundrel
• Traitine - Tactics Vanguard

They Seek them Here, they Seek them There

Because last week I finally got around to delivering my thoughts on the Macrobinocular questline, I figured that it would make sense to follow it up with a post on the Seeker Droid questline as well.

Unlike the Shroud quest, this questline is neatly self-contained. There aren't any little twists to keep the story going, and everything is wrapped up nice and tidily.

As I've already described at length the intricacies of how this quest and the Macrobinocular quest were tied together, I won't be doing this again here. Everything will be about the Seeker Droids.

Remembering the Shroud: Preparation for Shroud of Memory

If there's one thing which I'm surprised that I haven't written much about, it's the two secondary questlines which launched with 2.0; the Macrobinocular and the Seeker Droid missions.

This is mainly due to one thing; there sadly hasn't been much reason to talk about either as nothing has emerged to encourage people to complete these quests especially since a lot of people just do the final Heroic-4 missions once and want nothing to do with them ever again.

Potentially, this might no longer be the case.

The HK-55 Bonus Chapter, Shroud of Memory, is confirmed to feature the antagonist of the Macrobinocular questline, the Shroud. He's had numerous mentions throughout 4.0 - a probe sits outside the Star Fortresses which can be scanned for an Achievement and Theron Shan mentions that he came across him as part of his idle chatter - so it will be nice to see him again.

Admittedly, it does hurt that our characters themselves won't be able to do so...

I figured that with the oncoming approach of the Shroud it would be good to finally send Calph to do as much of the questline as she could with the aim of completing it this weekend - just in case completing it yielded extra information for 'us' to pick up from the Bonus Chapter - and finally note my opinions on this infamous questline.

Although admittedly my timing on this post couldn't be worse, as I only just learned while making final preparations for this post's scheduled posting that this subject was touched on for exactly the same reasons over on MassivelyOP just two days ago, so now it looks like I'm pilfering ideas yet again. Yay for annoying coincidences!

The End of the Alliance Alert?

The Alliance Alert has so far been the most useful means of recruiting former Companions to our side and get them to serve the Alliance.

I have a post planned for the KotFE Retrospective series which will look back over the various Alerts and state which ones were my favourite or least favourite, but this will need to wait of course until the final one for the season. Whichever one this may be, because with Zenith's mission having been lost in the pipeline momentarily this may or may not reappear before Eternal Throne.

Something which I brought up in my most recent post made me think seriously about the future of this system. With the sole exceptions of Khem Val, Lord Scourge, and Tharan Cedrax, all of the returning Companions are Romance options, which means that there is a greater precedent - if not an outright guarantee - for their appearance in the overall 'main' story.

Certainly, given that the Alerts are disliked by several people due to us becoming the Revan-esque silent protagonist after hearing their voices for so long, the reaction to encountering a potential sweetheart and hearing nothing coming from our characters' mouths will not be pleasant, so it's 'safer' for the powers-that-be to eliminate this as a possibility.

Which then leaves us with the quandary; with only three non-Romanceable Companions left, is there much future for the Alliance Alert?

KotFE Retrospective: More to be Desired for Romance

Romance with a close friend and ally has always been a selling point of the most well-known of BioWare’s RPGs. Whether you were traversing the stars with Bastila Shan or Garrus Vakarian or riding through the rugged hills with Blackwall, there have been several prospective partners for our characters to end up with at the end of the games’ stories.

The Old Republic is of course no stranger to this, boasting no fewer than twenty-two full-blown Companion romances, four semi-serious one-time flings (with two Companions and the two ‘poster’ NPCs for Rise of the Hutt Cartel), and two gender-dependent diplomatic marriage opportunities for the Agent on Voss.

As diverse as the options are, they have noticeably begun drying up since the game has begun expanding beyond its initial form, with Knights of the Fallen Empire attempting to reinvigorate matters, even if the success here is limited.

Wednesday Warzones #1: The Drunk Guardian

As mentioned two weeks ago, I've had a little something in the works: Wednesday Warzones! This initiative will be a regular occurrence every two weeks, and I hope it's well-received.

This first one is a rather interesting one to start off this series. All three matches took place on the same evening, and this won't be something that will happen often.

The reason for this is because I went on holiday on Friday, so that meant that the only days I had to ensure that I would have at least one video prepared for today were Thursday and Wednesday given that for the previous couple of days I was focusing mainly on the DvL Event.

As you can already tell from the title, one of the players was really quite drunk throughout, to the extent that he participated in the first match without a weapon. Thankfully, there is never any mocking of this fact as it is quite frankly a frequent occurrence.

It also resulted in quite a bit of swearing, which I have endeavoured to eliminate. I might have missed one of them, but it's not the most audible as it's swallowed by another person talking.

So, yeah. I hope that you guys enjoyed this first instalment of Wednesday Warzones, and I look forward to creating the next few!

Participants:

• Vhiallia ("Cal") - Balance Sage
• Suss'dao'wuss - Seer Sage
• Numendar ("Mark") - Telekinetics Sage
• Kenkuria - Defense Guardian

Taking to the Stars

One thing which hasn't been featured much in this blog is PvP. Wednesday Warzones will rectify this to a great extent for the ordinary PvP, of course, but this still leaves Galactic Starfighter hanging out to dry.

Maybe I should do Saturday Starfighter...

Nah.