Salubrious

A grand and intoxicating innocence

  • She/Her 🏳️‍⚧️

Hey, don't ask me my opinion -- I'm nobody. Just pretend I'm not here.

I mostly just post about things tangentially related to The Simpsons, or Morrowind or The X-COM Files.

29 | 🇦🇺 | ⬅️⬅️


So over the weekend Star Wars: The Old Republic out of fucking nowhere (as far as I was aware) dropped an Asia-Pacific server based in Sydney. I've played SWtOR a few times in the past, mostly just dabbling into it for a couple of weeks and playing through some of the character stories and then quitting. On the whole it's not a great MMO and it's playing double duty trying to be a post-Mass Effect Bioware RPG which it does with widely varying levels of competency. Where it really fell on its face though, and why I never played it for long, was the lag.

Playing in Australia connected to one of the US servers I'd get at best around 200ms, which was tolerable but 200ms in SWtOR felt worse than 200ms in WoW in some strange way that I can't elaborate on but know to be true. The real kicker though was that it spiked constantly and I'd regularly end up with ping well over 2,000ms out of nowhere, the game would become utterly unplayable. Usually after a particularly bad day of long, regular spikes I'd pack it in and uninstall the game because fuck that.

Now here I am, maybe 3 or 4 years since I last played SWtOR. I've sworn off WoW, my former mainstay MMO, and I'm starting to feel the itch to play an MMO again.
I've played Final Fantasy XIV a bit, tried to like it, tried to get through A Realm Reborn which I was so bored by, then found out that after completing its story I've got to go and do a bunch MORE stuff before I can move on to the part that most people say is where it gets good.
I dabbled in Guild Wars 2 for a bit - it's fine.
I've played Runescape, Oldschool and modern, on and off but it doesn't scratch the same itch that other MMOs do.
I've tried to like Elderscrolls Online and failed to 3 times now.
I even played New World when it came out, that Amazon MMORPG from a year or two ago, anyone remember that?
At this point I had consigned myself to trying EVE Online, Fredrik Knudsen's 6 hour Down the Rabbit Hole video had made me curious and I like space things, and I like slow build incremental stuff so it could click for me right? I played it for a couple of nights and... eh. It's okay, but probably not for me and taking one look at the community really sealed the deal as a thing I don't want to really be part of. Then I get this message in Discord:

"So in other news btw, SWTOR have opened an oceanic server"

Now I'm surprised that SWtOR is even still running at this point, let alone opening new servers for new regions. It took up until last year for FFXIV to open an Oceanic server after years of begging and community outcry from empassioned fans. ESO and GW2 haven't done it, and likely never will. For ages World of Warcraft has been one of the only MMORPGs that has had Oceanic servers. Then there's SWtOR which just out of nowhere goes "here you go" and drops a server in Sydney. Un-fucking-believable.

So I'm back and playing SWtOR on the shiny new Sydney-based Shae Vizla server, a whole gaggle of my friends are also playing. It's still the same game as last time I played, more or less, but with no lag, no atrocious spikes. I can actually use my interupt abilities now, or avoid AoE attacks. It's still not a great game, but it actually works and I'm having fun with it. Shae Vizla is very active, there are a lot of players who are returning to the game or were still playing, and even new players flocking to the server because it's an MMORPG with low ping which is a really low bar that is unfortunately rarely met here. I don't know how long this population will last, or how long I'll remain interested in the game, but for right now it's very much appreciated.


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