Gauntlet = Thrown

So my blog has stayed quiet the past couple days, and for a specific reason. I wanted to share what's been happening with me and explain why I won't be able to continue updating this blog.

Last week, I applied for a position as an editorial contributor with Darth Hater.

I am happy to report that I am now a staff writer for them, and have been working the past couple days on some writing for them. Since writing in the gaming industry is what I ultimately want to do, this is an exciting step forward for me, and I can't wait to see where this opportunity takes me.

The downside is that while working at Darth Hater I am not able to maintain a competing website. As a result, I will not be updating Thrown Gauntlet for the duration of my position with Darth Hater.

I will continue to be active in the SW:TOR community, though. I'll continue to weigh in on the posts, guides and videos of others, and help out where I can. If you want to see more of my writing, you'll just have to see it on Darth Hater. I will still be very active on Twitter and in the comment fields of your blogs.

I want to thank everyone who ever commented on this blog or featured it, started a discussion on Twitter with me, RTd one of my posts, or helped to improve the SW:TOR blogging community. You guys and gals are a big  part of the reason that the community of this game we love will remain populated and healthy for a long time to come.

Peace is a lie, there is only Tanking.

~Burek

Regarding Server Population

"The delegation from Ord Mantell moves to install stairs."

The fine folks over at TORWars have put up their most recent podcast, which addresses among other things the perceived server population issue. Since this is a common complaint, I thought I'd weigh in on this.

I'd like to preface this post by saying that I play on The Fatman-US (PvP) so if my server has a population issue, it is one of overpopulation and not a lack of players. This overpopulation is not currently a problem, but it could eventually become one. On Free Weekends at peak times, you're looking at an hour wait to log in.

I think that the best case scenario here is for us to get real, hard numbers on server population that we can take a look at. Most other MMO companies do not do this, so I don't have my hopes up. In the absence of hard numbers, discussing server population becomes a lot harder.

As Asros pointed out today on Twitter, you end up in a discussion where one side cannot produce any facts and is acting solely based on their "feelings" on server population. The honest truth is that, without numbers, people are guessing. They can tell you what the amount of people on the fleet was at 6pm, but they can't tell you what the total number of people logged into the server are. Dulfy has done a population survey, but it is obviously a snapshot of each server's users at a specific point in time and is not indicative of how many active players actually play there.

There is no doubt that peak concurrent users is down, which is believable. As TORWars reported, the initial playtime was unsustainable. We've been told subscriber numbers are more or less stable, which also seems reasonable.

Now having said all that, I do believe that some of the stories of servers starting to empty are valid - mostly because I think people are re-rolling to more populated servers like mine in the absence of hard data. In my opinion, the best realistic scenario here involves a complete population review of all servers once paid transfers have been open for a couple weeks. I have no doubt that Bioware will be keeping an eye on this.

Stretching out with your feelings probably won't do you much good on this topic.

Bioware needs to be honest with themselves and seriously consider server merges if things look grim a few weeks after paid transfers open. Thankfully, Daniel Erickson has said that server merges, while not a preferred option, are a possibility. I hope it doesn't come to that; I really hope it doesn't. But I think it might, and here's why:

Unless additional incentive is given to players to transfer off of high-pop servers, I don't think you'll see many people leaving them.


Even if the transfers are free (Bioware has said free transfers will be offered to high-pop server players), there's really no incentive to leave. So there's the occasional queue - so what? People have had plenty of chances to leave my server a lot earlier on, like at launch when there were multi-hour queues. People play here despite queues. Lots of guilds have transferred here in recent weeks. I doubt these people will want to relocate again.

On top of that, you're looking at a situation where we're really not given any data by Bioware on server population. Why take a chance and transfer to a light population server, only to pay to transfer back later? With more data, people might make an informed decision. As it stands right now, it's a shot in the dark.

Hate to tell you the odds, but...

There are two scenarios I can see where you will have substantial traffic off of high population servers:

1. Paid transfers open, hundreds if not thousands of people transfer to high population servers, and queues become unbearable for the veterans of the high population servers. If Bioware is smart, they keep unpaid transfers open during this period, because this might actually cause people to abandon ship.

2. Free transfers open and there is some kind of incentive to jumping ship, or some kind of "trial period" where you can transfer back for free. I'm not going to say incentive is everything here, but excepting people who have burned all their bridges on their current server or just have personal problems with their current server, why would someone leave a high-pop server right now with all the uncertainty?

Here's hoping that Bioware offers some incentive to repopulate lower-pop servers. If not, the free transfers will likely be underutilized.

Mixing it up

As mentioned in my Maintaining Composure post, I've been trying to get a feel for all the dedicated PvPers in the guild so that I can assess where our strengths are, and where we need to improve. Also, though our guild screens for disruptive and rude behaviour, people are obviously capable of lying so it also lets me make sure that the guild's name isn't being ruined out on the field.

Last night, I finally had the chance to PvP with one of our newer recruits, a Marauder that I'd heard some good things about. I had been trying to work him into a group, but it seemed for a while that we were playing "Guild Chat Tag": our availability never seemed to line up. One of us always seemed to be AFK when there was a vacancy, or else one of the two of us was already in a full group of four guild members.

I'm also still new to the whole "PvP Officer" thing, which I'm sure didn't help things. Sure, I've acted in an Officer capacity before in other guilds, but normally that was as a class or role officer or raid leader. Never before have I had the responsibility of playing with someone who likely is not playing my class and analyzing their playstyle, strengths and weaknesses. Oh, yeah, I also have to try to help my team win while I do this. I don't resent the duty - on the contrary, I'm honoured to do it. It's just that I'm not comfortable with myself in the role yet, so I guess I probably missed some opportunities to invite this Marauder previously, and I felt bad about it.

Once I got on the field with him, my feelings changed completely.

I'm not sure why exactly, but PvPing with someone for the first time is always a breath of fresh air for me. I'm often exposed to new strategies and playstyles. Instead of intuitively knowing where my teammates are and what they're doing, I'm forced to keep my head up and take it all in. If the class is not normally one I play with, I experience new synergies and group capability.

Perhaps the most interesting part is seeing someone mentally integrate themselves into our group.

In Kira's words, "Isn't teamwork grand?"

I don't prep people when I PvP with them. I guess I could say, "Hey, when we're in there, I'm going to be asking you for information and asking you to do things... if you have any questions, feel free to ask me", but that would be far less fun. I get a certain amount of excitement out of seeing people get it, so to speak. Even if they had done PvP in a group setting before, there's that moment when they become comfortable with us and things just start clicking.

The Marauder in question did really well, and I'm glad to have him on our side. As a result of last night's experience, I'm going to focus on scrambling groups as much as I can. I know there are some people who will still want to play together if possible, and that's okay too. But I feel that we all still have a lot more to learn from each other.

Maintaining Composure

I had a rather jarring experience the other day, and thought I should perhaps share it, because it taught me some things about myself.

I had queued up for warzones with three other guildmates. My guild doesn't have "tryouts" or anything, we just foster a culture of learning and support. That means there is no "skill" requirement to get into our guild, but if you want to get better, there are tons of people willing to help you do just that.

These guys that were in my party are some of the best in our guild, and I had no question in my mind that we would be doing a strong service to our team when we got into the warzone. 

When we got into Alderaan Civil War, I immediately saw our group was accompanied by another 4-person premade from a guild on our server. I won't name them here because, honestly, there's no point. I wasn't terribly familiar with them, but had played with them on a couple of occasions. Some experiences had been very positive, and some had not been. On Ventrilo, my fellow group members shared their thoughts about the guild in question.

Because I always try to communicate well, I asked if they could send two of their guys to left, the rest to mid. Their response: "No". They didn't offer any other advice, nor did they expand on why. As a result, I respectfully asked them what they thought we should do. 

One of them said, "We're going right and if any of you follow us we will leave and you can enjoy your loss".

I politely explained I was just trying to be helpful. They responded with "Stop trying to pretend you're good, you're in Section One."

I would be lying if I said this didn't make me angry. I don't (and never will) claim to be the best PvPer out there. What I do claim is that I do my best to play the objectives, support my team, and communicate. I also do my best to make sure that my guild members do the same, or are given the opportunity to learn how to do this. This person had not only insulted me, they had insulted my entire guild.

This is what I wanted to do.

"Gooooood, gooooood."

Instead, I responded with: "I'm sorry if you've had problems with my guild in the past. I'm trying to change stuff like that." To understand what I mean here, I'll remind you that there's no "skill requirement" for Section One. The guild has history dating back to Star Wars Galaxies, where they were known as a formidable force on the popular Bloodfin server. However, we also have people recruited in this game (including myself). We have people with varying degrees of commitment and time to dedicate to the game. Not everyone is playing at the same level. I'm working, as PvP Officer, to try to elevate everyone as high as they are willing to go.

Anyways, a funny thing happened when I was polite to this guy.

He absolutely backed off. He was still arrogant, and did not call for our help and ended up losing his precious flag on the right (although it was too late for the other team, also made up of two premades, so we still won), but he definitely backpedaled. I think maybe he realized how obtuse he sounded, or maybe someone in his group just decided to scold him.

 

I realize now that I could have freaked out, I could have told him that I've run into players from his guild who weren't great, but that I still tried to work with him in this warzone, strategize with him, and extend him the courtesy of anyone who was on my team. 

In the end, it wouldn't have been worth it. The guy obviously had no interest in being polite to anyone. I'm happy with the choice I made. 

Quick Burek-centric Update; or, Why I joined Section One

It's been a little while since I've indicated what I've personally been doing in-game, so I thought I'd update that first.

Originally, my plan was to form and maintain a guild in SWTOR and to field an 8-man raid made up wholly (or at least mostly) of my friends. <Dark Work> was formed as a result. Due to several of my friends quitting, I decided that I would find a guild for myself and my other friends who were still playing. It was with this goal in mind that I began searching the guild recruitment forums and hanging around in the fleet, scoping out our options.

My parameters were basically that I wanted a guild capable of fielding a raid, but without a strict or mandatory raiding schedule. I wanted a guild that did organized PvP and let their actions in PvP speak louder than their words. But most importantly, I wanted a guild with people that would make me want to log on and just shoot the breeze in addition to wanting to play SWTOR. I wanted a community, not just a guild.

I found this with Section One on The Fatman-US. The guild leader has been nothing but accommodating, the members are friendly and helpful and we all help each other out. The guild has a history dating back to SWG, so there are a lot of casual players who have been playing together for a while.

Since joining, I've been participating in raids, usually DPSing EV (since only one tank is needed) and tanking alongside my good buddy Nubosub (one of the people who came over from my old guild) in KP.

As an aside, if anyone on The Fatman-US is looking for a guild, we're accepting players of all levels. We're also looking for a couple more DPSers who are 50 and able to raid Sunday and Monday evenings (preferably an agent of some kind!). You can contact myself or Zerx in-game.

I'm also considering making the push to Battlemaster before Patch 1.2. I'm already really close.

Back in the Saddle + Juggernaut Update

During the holidays and for a week afterwards I was on vacation - but no more! I will again be updating the blog regularly with all the SWTOR and Juggernaut news that's fit to print.

As for my Juggernaut, I've reached level 50 and have been focusing on Flashpoints and PvP. My commentary on these will begin tomorrow, along with some analysis of the upcoming Patch 1.1, which is currently on the Public Test Servers.

The Juggernaut so far...

Today is an update about my Juggernaut's progress! I'm level 31, and I've so far tanked every flashpoint I've had access to. The difficulty on the flashpoints has so far been rather tame, but I have gone up against a few challenging encounters. I've mostly been running these with my spouse, who is playing a Sith Sorcerer, and a good friend who is playing a Sith Assassin. We've been pugging healers and so far we've had good luck. With that in mind, I've drawn some conclusions about Flashpoint tanking, and Juggernaut tanks generally:

• Flashpoint tanking requires more concentration than in some other games. In the most recent Flashpoints I've run (Cademimu and Mandalorian Raiders), there were a lot of enemies (and some bosses) that drop threat completely at certain points, and need to be picked back up immediately. Stay on your guard!
• Sometimes, you need to prioritize. Most groups won't be marking kill targets for trash, so you'll need to watch your group's damage dealers and grab targets accordingly. Make sure you always grab all the strong/elite enemies. Sometimes your enemies will be very spread out over a large area. If a random normal enemy is firing a blaster at someone, don't panic. Grab it only if you can be sure you won't lose aggro on a stronger enemy, preferably using an ability with some range like Force Scream, Force Push, Force Choke. Your Taunt is on a 15 second cooldown, so you need to use it only when appropriate.
• Juggernauts are active tanks. My point here is that you can prevent a lot of damage with a Juggernaut by using the right ability at the right time. Smash and Force Scream will stun normal enemies, preventing them from attacking you. Force Choke can be used to prevent damage from a Strong (and sometimes Elite) enemy with the added benefit of granting you rage and doing some damage. Retaliation, once improved via Blade Barricade, grants you extra defense, and should be used on cooldown.
• Juggernauts have powerful survival cooldowns. Make sure your cooldowns are somewhere accessible, because you'll want them handy. Juggernauts get Endure Pain, Saber Ward and Invincible. Which one you will use at a given time depends on the situation. I'll write a more in-depth article on cooldown use a little later on.
• Initial Juggernaut Area Threat is lacking. You will receive Threatening Scream (AoE Taunt) at level 30, and Sweeping Slash at level 32, but before these, all you will have is Smash. Just do your best, and as I said above, prioritize your targets.

I hope these initial thoughts help you when deciding if a Juggernaut is the tank for you. I've had a blast so far, and look forward to seeing our performance in Operations, as well as in Warzones. Have some thoughts on the Juggernaut tank that you'd like to share? Feel free to start a discussion or ask a question in the comments.

Welcome to Thrown Gauntlet

Welcome to Thrown Gauntlet! This blog's focus will be on Star Wars: The Old Republic, the upcoming game from Bioware and EA. Specifically, I'll be discussing current SWTOR news, raid content (called Operations in SWTOR), and the Juggernaut advanced class. I'll be discussing my own experience with the game, as well as my guild's. I'll sometimes address general MMO news, too.

Why start a blog at all? For one, I love writing. I love the discussion that inevitably comes with any MMO community. I also love the theorycrafting behind the pixels (though I promise to keep the extreme number-crunching off this blog's main page). I want to bring my own personal viewpoint on news regarding SWTOR, and help provide information to up-and-coming tanks and/or raid leaders.

Simply put, I want this to be an interesting place for players of SWTOR of any class or faction to read another player's opinion. I want to help those aspiring to tank or lead a raid. That I get to write all of this for you is just a bonus.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to Thrown Gauntlet.