What F2P Means for SWTOR

In case you missed the announcement, SWTOR is going to move to the Free to Play model in November (Official F2P FAQ). It’s an… interesting way to go about the F2P model that will be very appealing to some and possibly rather alienating to others. While I know every SWTOR blogger out there is going to blog about this as well, the whole point of blogging is sharing information and opinions so I’m going to add mine to the mix regardless of the other posts out there.

 

WoW. SWTOR. Guild Wars?

I’ve been itching to blog about something, anything, for over a month now but couldn’t really find a worthy topic to do it on. Today I decided I had a decent enough topic to talk about that it would be worth my time to go ahead and write it down and send it out to the masses, so here it goes.

Today I’m going to cover a little bit of what’s been going on lately in my own gaming world and how that has impacted the blog, and I wanted to address some of the issues that I see right now that will impact my gaming (and by extension my blogging) in the near future.

State of the Blog
When I was playing WoW it was easy to come up with a new topic because there was always a new class, spec or playstyle that I could write about and by the time I got through all of the choices there would be a new expansion or patch that would change things enough that I needed to start all over again. Then SWTOR came along and stole my heart away from WoW and I found myself in a world where people no longer cared about reading leveling guides or getting ideas about how to play a certain class.

 

Affection Farming: Black Talon & The Esseles

In a previous post on Legacy and Companions I mentioned the two entry level flash points as methods of farming affection with the starting companions for each class. Even though there are only eight different companions you can do this with, it was just a bit too much for an already lengthy post.

Unfortunately for us, this type of farming only helps with one of the Picky Companions, but any help you can get with them is welcome. Of the eight companions that you can do this with, three of them also share the same type of companion gift for their favorite, which makes this a much cheaper method of farming that affection on multiple characters than trying to buy every Weapon gift that hits the GTN.

 

Legacy Perks from PTS 1.3

[Thank you to my guild leader @Asros of NSTK for the screen shot!]

Today we had a torrent of SWTOR information sent down the pipes. Twitter started to go crazy over the first bit of information about Patch 1.3 on the PTS and the notes related to it, and before we even had time to read over them all we were slammed by specifics of the 1.3 Legacy perks. Just as we were starting to add that to the info we were already trying to take it we got slammed yet again with server transfers being confirmed to start next Tuesday, June 12th.

As I’ve done with my other Legacy posts, I’m going to give you the scoop on what they do, how they work, and how much you’ll have to pay to get the. I’ll also share my thoughts on cost vs. benefit.

 

Ask Mr. Robot’s SWTOR Item Database

I received the comment above on an article I wrote last week about companion affection and the legacy unlocks associated with it. At the time I didn’t know that AMR even had an item database for SWTOR, much less that I could link to items in it. I had spoken to the team at Ask Mr. Robot around the time of SWTOR’s early access about testing out their SWTOR features but after I had agreed they never contacted me again (I thought we were friends too, AMR. Why the silent treatment, eh?).

As you can see from my WoW leveling guides and heirloom guides, I’m real big on linking to items when I have a reliable database that I can look things up in and actually work with. Up to this point I’ve been using Torhead, mostly because I had no other option, but also partly because I was hoping that Torhead would eventually get somewhere close to Wowhead in terms of database functionality. Here we are 4.5 months post-launch and Torhead is still lackluster at best as far as items are concerned.