I read a bit about the different marketing campaigns Bioware had. It was hard to miss the “free month for all 50ies”, for example. Huge discussion about that.

It’s definitely good to know that so many of the old crew are with you, though! Do you focus on one side, or play on both?

Come to think of it, I’ll just drop you a private message, either tomorrow, or when I’m about to install.

Before I tell you which server I’m hiding on I’ll give you a personal opinion on the things that I find stop me playing SW:TOR as much as we played WoW together.

The sudden, and massive, shift in continuity you experience from living a fully voiced story-driven experience while levelling (and, to be fair, they’re quite engaging stories too) to the onset of repeated instance grinding once you hit 50 is more noticable in SW:TOR than in any other MMO I’ve played in the past (made worse by the fact that the story element in SW:TOR is that much stronger than in any other MMO I played, it just makes it all the more apparent).

The lack of any kind of “Dungeon Finder” (yes, I know that’s a WoW phrase, but the point remains) means you will find yourself hanging around the social hubs either spamming chat looking for groups or jumping on any kind of group spam you see appearing on screen.

That second point really is it’s biggest flaw at the moment because no matter how bad Dungeon Finders can be at finding competent groups at least you do get to experience the content. With things the way they are in SW:TOR right now your inclusion in any kind of instance group lies solely at the discretion of the group leader, and we both know what tools some (i.e. the majority) of those can be.

Like Harbinger above me I’ve also experienced some disturbing signs that the playerbase of SW:TOR is already starting to wobble and Bioware are already noticing that, although subscriber numbers haven’t really dropped (yet), they’re getting fewer concurrent users online at any one time.

(PC Gamer even had an short article about it on their site a few days ago: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/04/23/bioware-doing-anything-and-everything-to-keep-players-logging-in-to-swtor/ ).

Anyhow, with the doom and gloom out the way, you can find me (as well as Caro, Mohsin and Dap) playing on the Flames Of The Crucible server. Toon name on there is ….*drumroll*…. Thuul (shocking huh?)