The Light Side of the Empire

/looks both ways

/whisper . . . I have a Sith Inquisitor.

(Ok, Fanthisa, you can pick yourself up off the floor.)

When my eldest daughter found out last night, she squealed, ran across the room, and hugged me, saying, with a slight catch in her voice, "Mom has joined my side!"

With my husband not playing with me anymore, and not being on a team or anything in my Republic guild (which tends to build friendships), I have found playing to be a rather lonely process.  When I'm running quests for the third time, having something with whom to chat makes it bearable, while otherwise, I'm reduced to listening to audiobooks or podcasts . . . and it can start to feel tedious.  ("Bored to tears" comes to mind.)

When it comes down to it, what makes the difference between a good MMO experience and a mediocre one?  It's not the flashpoints, the operations, or the armor styling.  The developers can beat their heads over new ideas, buffs, and events, to no avail, especially with people (like us) who are recognizing the general MMO format has lost much of its luster.  In the end, the undeniable truth of MMOs is this: 

What makes an MMO fun for an individual player in the longer term is the people.

Most of my old WoW guild who created accounts in SWTOR ended up on the Empire side of the house, on various servers.  So I decided to look up one of the players with whom I had raided for a long time.  While trying to maintain some calm during the long process of my daughter working on her school project (projects make me agitated, which reduces my patience and doesn't help kids feel confident in their ability to successfully complete said projects), I went to the server on which he played Empire and created a character on that server.  Interestingly enough, at about the same time, unbeknownst to me, this player had created a Republic character on Vrook Lamar and sent me an in-game e-mail in which he referred to a previous discussion which would reveal his identity.

(What's funny about all this is that when I later messaged him via other means to ask him the names of his characters, he started by commenting I had done a good piece of detecting.  I was completely puzzled until after I went back and found that message to my Consular.  Oooooh, that's what he meant!  Would have been a dead giveaway, anyway, as he well knew.  No real detecting there.)

I chose the Sith Inquisitor because I'm a die-hard healer and because a Sith Inquisitor is basically a Jedi Consular in red clothing.  In a manner of speaking, I know what I am doing.  The skill tree is very similar, and I can put the corresponding skills on the keybinds I am already using.

I'm playing this character completely on the Light side, which I'm sure is hardly surprising.  (*ahem* Read the name of the blog!)  I never felt the need to create any kind of a back story for my Consular, because she's a very "toe the line" kind of person, who delights in meditation and in communing with her fellow Jedi, but somehow I felt I had to make excuses for my Inquisitor being Light side . . .

My take is that she didn't have a hand in choosing her faction, as she was a slave who was forced to learn the ways of the Sith.  Given the choice, she would have gone to the Jedi Order and she believes in their code, but she knows that even when she gets a ship, the likelihood the Republic would even let her get close enough to talk with them is slim to none.  (And if, by some miracle, they managed to let her defect, she would never be truly trusted, because "traitors" are never truly trusted.  Witness Elora Dorne.)  So she tries her best to get along in the negative society in which she finds herself, living according to her light the best she can.  (She avoids some tasks completely . . . like scanning people for loyalty and dispatching the disloyal.  After all, she's not exactly sure how she would scan, herself.)  I do not yet know how she plans to keep her sanity, recognizing that her whole life, as something of a closet Jedi, she's going to have to stay under the radar to some extent, never being able to completely relax and be herself.

My husband shook his head when I told him about it.  "You're desperate," he said.  "You won't like the Sith story line.  How will you feel when you have to corrupt a Jedi?"

He may be right that the story line will some time end up turning my stomach, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.  I could simply stop progressing the class story line and play general quests and warzones . . . (I've been informed, though, that Inquisitors don't have to corrupt a Jedi . . . I suppose it's all in the point of view.  Again, bridges and all that stuff.)

I found myself rather surprised to be having fun doing the "new" quests, but even more, I was delighted to be in a situation where I could talk with people with whom I had some kind of history.  (I discovered, to my surprise, that another former guildie, as well, was playing on that server.)  The guild to which they belong accepted me as a friend, and as there is a lot of activity in the guild chat, I feel less alone, even when I am not talking with my former WoW guildies.

So while I do not plan on abandoning my Jedi Consular, especially if I can get my husband to log on now and then, it looks like I'll be splitting my time between servers and factions.