At the Movies With Fodder

I think it was Yaksha who asked why movies are a typical date activity considering you both sit in a dark room together in a place that doesn't encourage talking (by movies, I obviously mean going to the cinema as opposed to putting on a DVD at someone's home). Let's consider why people go on dates. If you ignore the people who go on dates just because they want to get free stuff from their dates and the people who enjoy trolling others, I'd say most people go on dates because they are hoping to find someone they would consider being in a relationship with. The nature of that relationship may vary individually - some might be hoping to find "The One", while others are looking for a quick fling. Regardless of the type of relationship you are after, you tend to want to accomplish a few goals (but your priorities will vary depending on the type of relationship):

- get to know them/find out whether you can stand to be with this person for more than an hour.
- make them want to see you again
- establish a connection/history with them

This isn't just for the first few dates, this will probably continue until you consider yourselves "officially together" as you will both be re-assessing whether that is the path you want to head down with each other.

I actually think going to the movies can help with all three things.

Getting to know them
As Yaksha (even though it might not have been her, I'm just going to write as though it was and if someone else wants to take credit, they are welcome to let me know and I'll edit the post) pointed out, the fact that movies don't encourage talking makes it a little hard to get to know someone, but there are still things that you can learn from seeing a movie with someone. Do they talk during movies? This is a huge deal-breaker for some. While I am guilty of this myself (I'm one of those annoying people who has to point out stupid movie trivia that nobody other than me cares about), I don't think I'll ever understand why some people feel the need to ask questions about every single thing that is happening. Sure, if you went to the toilet and missed some important plot points, that's fine, but if something doesn't make sense right away, why not wait a few minutes because it might be explained in the next scene or two?!

The other great thing about movies is that the semi-enforced silence serves as a good comfort gauge.

Relationship Hierarchy

I'm not sure if there's already a theory that describes this, but I think that this is how most of the people that we know fit into our lives (family members can also fit into these different categories, but you'd probably never tell them if you put them in the bottom two).

Acquaintances you don't like (most of the people that you'll meet in your lifetime): These are the people you would cross the street to avoid. If you do need to talk to them, it's usually fluff/small talk.

Acquaintances: These are the people you greet if you happen to see them on the street. They know the basics of your life (in particular, the stuff related to how you two know each other). When you bump into each other, you usually make plans to see each other again but somehow you both always "forget".

Friends: These are the people who you'd probably be hanging out with on the street. They know the basics of your life, and some stuff beyond that. They probably know the names of your siblings, or at least know that you have siblings.

Close friends: These are the people who you probably see or talk to at least once a week (or in the case of socially deprived people like me, you think about seeing or talking to them). These people know intimate details about your life, and you theirs.

"Soulmates": I used the term soulmates here not to mean "The One", but the people who are on the same wavelength as you. The people who "get you".

As you go up the hierarchy, the conversations you have with those people tend to have more substance. You might describe your job to an acquaintance you don't like, but reveal to a close friend that your job actually sucks and you are looking for employment elsewhere. As you go down the hierarchy, the number of words to convey an idea increase. For instance, you say that you went to Brianna's house on the weekend. To an acquaintance you don't like, you need to explain that Brianna is your ex-wife, and that you went to pick up the kids because you have them for a week. A close friend will know that you're probably pissed off because Brianna made you wait over an hour again, and that you want to vent to a sympathetic ear - all from a few words.

Anyway, back to the original topic! The semi-enforced silence of the cinema means that communication between you two will be more non-verbal than verbal. Are they putting their arm around you or leaning on your shoulder? Do they hog all of the popcorn? Are they trying to feel you up on the first date? (After reading ABCotD, I'm really not surprised there are people out there who will do that.) Most importantly, if they are doing something you don't like, and won't stop when you ask them to, unless you are involved in some S&M thing, warning bells should be ringing loud and clear.

The opposite is also something to consider - are they shrugging off your attempts to be more intimate? If you're at an Arnie movie, it might just be because they are too absorbed in the movie, but it might also be an indication that you're moving too fast or that you want something out of the relationship that the other person doesn't. It might be something you want to address later down the track (by that, I mean after a week or so if you are still getting the same impression. NOT IN THE MOVIE THEATRE!).

Making them want to see you again
One of the good things about a movie is that if the movie is good, it can increase the other person's perception of the overall enjoyment of the date. If the movie is bad, then you can shrug it off as yet another piece of crap from the toilet bowl that is Hollywood (please don't use those words, I love you, Hollywood! Make more of these please) and you can work it into an excuse for another date, as you can apologise for how bad it was, and let them pick the movie for next time.

Establish a connection/history with them
Couples who have been together for a long time will have a long history of events together from which to draw from. e.g. "I feel like a creamy pasta, like the one we had at your sister's wedding." Not only can this increase affection from the other person ("You remembered something from my sister's wedding, therefore my sister is important to you, therefore I am important to you) but it leads to a sort of secret language between the two of you. While different people may be able to decipher certain things, only the two of you will understand everything. This links back to what I described above, where you have more substance with less words the higher you get in the hierarchy. Obviously this is something that develops over a long period of time, but I think things like movies and common interests can lead to a psuedo-code.

Back when I was still chatting with people at 3AM, I'd get messages saying, "Are you awake?" and I'd reply with, "I'm awake, I'm awake." In my head, I heard the Druid of the Claw from Warcraft 3, but I think the reference was lost on a lot of people - if not everybody. T_T I'm sure everyone has had at least one experience of quoting a movie/TV show/book and their audience completely missed the reference. It always makes me feel sad. Then you get the opposite when you say "nuke the fridge" in passing, and end up having a long discussion with someone with someone and "click". The two of you share something, and that shared thing tends to make you like each other more (unless you disagree on that topic, in which the relationship can go both ways).

Then you can drop things like "origami unicorn" and the other person will know what you are talking about (I really hope MrMan5.5 gets the reference I am making, otherwise it completely negates my point. T_T). It's the beginning of your secret language, but the development is being sped up because movies tend to have a lot of quotable lines or distinguishable plot points that can be referenced later. The added bonus is that if things don't work out, the language is transferable (hence why it's a psuedo secret language, because it's not really all that secret) - e.g. You go and see all the Harry Potter movies with Girl 1, but things don't work out, then you meet Girl 2 who also happens to like Harry Potter. This can mean the two of you immediately "click".

The last point I wanted to make was that seeing a movie can give you something to talk about together afterwards, if you are lacking conversation topics. I always thought it was weird that it was "dinner and a movie" rather than "a movie and then dinner". Though that might just be because you'd be starving by the time you had dinner if you waited, or ruin your appetite with popcorn.

Game Review - Star Wars: The Old Republic

Since this is the current thing that is taking up most of my time, and a lot of people are asking me about it, I thought I'd add a review to the masses of reviews that are popping up. I'm not going to complain about things that are obviously bugs, but there are some things that may be working as intended which I think are bad for the game, so I'm going to discuss some of those.

Overall, it plays a lot like KOTOR (I never got to KOTOR2, so I can't say anything about that), in the sense that it's very story driven. Most quests are picked up through conversations, and your character can drive the progress of the conversation (though unlike KOTOR, some conversations seem streamlined, so even if you pick an option that seems to allow you to smash the quest giver's face in, the NPC will semi-ignore you and direct the conversation back towards making you kill rabbits for them. (That being said, there are some conversations that let you smash the NPCs face in.) I'm finding that as you progress through the game, the later planets feel a little incomplete, and the story isn't very engaging, so it feels very grindy like WoW.

There is a very MMO feel to SWTOR, so I wouldn't recommend it to someone just because they enjoy KOTOR or are interested in Star Wars lore. I mean, you could definitely roll on a PvE server and just pretty much play it single player all the way through to see the story, but there will be periods where you will feel the grind. I think because they're trying to streamline players to 50, there are a lot of repetitive quests (e.g. "We want to attack the Republic, we need you to do some initial recon/guerrilla attacks and we'll clean up afterwards."). Other than the class quest and a few quest chains on each planet, there isn't very much story/lore that I've found engaging.

The main class I've decided to play is Mercenary, one of the advanced classes of the Bounty Hunter. I'll try to make this review as spoiler free as possible, because I really enjoyed most of the Bounty Hunter class quest line. I've been doing a bit of MrMan5.5's quest line along with him, and the Sorcerer class quest line gets really lame towards the end.

Good Things
Holocall
One of the great things about the quest system is that for some quests, you don't need to be at the quest giver to start/end the quest. One player in your group can start the conversation with the NPC, and everyone else can holocall in to join the conversation. This means you don't need to wait for the entire party to meet up and pick up all the quests, then head out. The only limitation they gave to holocalls is that you can't choose certain conversation options - generally the ones that require you to make a physical action such as slapping someone.

Bonus Quests
One of the things that annoyed me the most about questing in WoW was when you see an outpost or something, but there are killer rabbits all along the road to the outpost, so you practically have to perform mass murder to get to the town only to be told that a farmer has been having trouble with his crops because of killer rabbits, and could you be oh-so-kind as to kill 25 of them so that he can keep growing pumpkins to feed the starving children in Stormwind. Then you will be told to harvest the pumpkins which requires going back again, and killing more rabbits. In SWTOR, a lot of the quests are more along the lines of collect X of these items from the group, or destroy X things. If you happen to kill creatures in the area that are part of a bonus quest, then the quest pops up right away as you are doing it, and any subsequent parts of the quest also pop up after you are done, so that you don't need to walk all the way back to the quest giver and walk back to the quest area. And since they're bonus quests, you know that they won't end up being part of a quest chain.

Dismount On Damage
Although this is a bit annoying while questing, I think that overall, it's a good thing. If you take too much damage while mounted, then you end up being dismounted. I was really frustrated in WoW as a lot of the time, I would try to kill an Alliance player, only to have them ride away on me. I think the fact that every class has the ability to dismount someone is a good thing. It also means players can't (as easily) ride through a huge group of mobs, aggro everything, then cause those aggroed mobs to attack you as they ride away to freedom.

Phases
I think a lot of MMOs sorely need something like this, especially during launch, or crowded times. A lot of the quests with big bosses make you go into a "phase" where your group can enter and do the quest uninterrupted. Like mini-instances. This removes the long waits for bosses to spawn and the need for fast reflexes to tag the spawn before anybody else can. There are also class-specific phases where your class storyline quests take place, and they're restricted to one person of that specific class (i.e. the person whose storyline is being progressed).

Bounty Hunter Phase

Crew Skills
I thought I'd hate this part, but the crew skills have grown on me. You get companions throughout the game, who are NPCs that accompany you, and that you can send on tasks like crafting items or searching for crafting reagents or recipes. This doesn't mean that you can't still mine resources in the world, which I think is a good thing. The great thing about it is that you can send your crew off to craft and do other things in the meantime. They can also craft while you are offline. This removes the need for those circuits around Sholazar  Basin to mine ores and level engineering. You send your crew off while you are questing, and 3-30 minutes later, they return with some goods. The only downside is that it costs money to send them away, but I am rarely finding myself short of cash - even with the slicing nerf*.

Reverse Engineering
This skill allows you to break down the things to use their raw materials (like disenchanting, but every crafting skill has the ability to break down something. For instance, my Bounty Hunter is a biochemist and can breakdown medpacks). I love this, as it means it's a lot easier to level crafting skills, and as you outgrow the things you've crafted, you can reverse engineer them and sell the raw materials on the Galactic Trade Network. Plus it makes it feel less wasteful to create 30 medpacks just to level your skill.

Med Probe and Out of Combat Regen
Two things that reduce downtime. The med probe lets you come back to life where you died (you also get an 8 second stealth to stop yourself getting owned again after you resurrect). I absolutely love this, as I can see it removing the need for the healer to run back to their body and res everyone up while everyone else takes a 5 minute break. Add to that the fact that every class can resurrect others. You also have the option to resurrect at the nearest med center, which Yaksha sees as a fast way to hand in your quests. Out of combat regen is a channeled spell (with no cooldown) that every class gets which heals you and regens your mana (or removes heat in the case of Bounty Hunters). As you might have guessed, it can only be used out of combat, so it's not that great in PvP. This removes the need to eat/drink between fights (though in some of the flashpoints (instances) I've done, people seem to still expect the healer to heal them up between fights rather than channeling their OOC regen).

Map



A cool feature is that when you bring up your map, if you are moving, the map will go slightly transparent and you have an idea of which direction you should be going to get to your destination. You can also toggle icons for various NPCs so you know where to go to train new skills or get to a mailbox if there is one in the area.

Quick Travel



I haven't unlocked many on this planet yet, but there are plenty of Quick Travel points scattered around the place, and they're the equivalent of setting your "home" in WoW so you can hearth there. Except you never need to set your home, you can travel to any QT point you've unlocked on the planet you're on. The cooldown is 30 minutes, which is pretty short consider how time flies while playing. I'm really glad I never have to set my hearth to some stupid area for raids (Kargath, anyone?).

Flashpoints in the Fleet
All flashpoints (dungeons/instances) can all be accessed from the Imperial Fleet (or whatever the Republic's equivalent is), and most planets will have a shuttle to take you to the Fleet. This means you don't have to make your way to the ass end of the world just to get to an instance (and also cuts out waiting for people to make their way to the ass end of the world). It also means there's a central place you can go to in order to look for a group for flashpoints as there are plenty of people hanging around the Fleet, so you can just advertise in general chat there.


Jawa

One of the Bounty Hunter's companion is a Jawa who is so cute! I am 100% sure Olek rerolled from Sniper to Powertech (the other BH advanced class) just for Blizz.


Bad Things
Elevators
Why, why, why would any MMO have elevators after the failure that was the elevator bosses in Undercity (I'm sure more people died to falling from an elevator than died to Ragnaros back in the day). Sure, I think it made UC one of the hardest cities to attack in WoW, but it was also frustrating as hell for anybody who actually wanted to go there (at least for impatient people like me).

It's a looooooooooooong way down

Waiting for elevators is a pain in the ass. There are some elevators in the game where you press a button and tell it which floor you want to go to (like in Pokèmon), I don't understand why all the elevators in the game aren't like that. And it's not even like you can just jump down, die and someone can revive you at the bottom - apparently you can't revive people on elevators (maybe because the game considers you to be "moving").

PvP Brackets
Apparently PvP brackets are decided by Valor level (you get Valor points from PvP and go up levels depending on how many points you have) rather than player level. While this does make sense at the higher levels, as you want to be grouped with people of similar experience, this can mean that you have a level 12 player in the same warzone as a level 50 player. Everybody gets a buff so that they all have roughly the same amount of health, but level 50 players will have way more spells than level 10 players and just end up dominating the warzone. I find that it's becoming slightly more even as we get closer to level 50 (I assume because they are more level 50 players who can play against each other), but I still cringe whenever I see someone under level 30 in my warzone.

Black and White Light/Dark Side Options
Like KOTOR, you have the option of going to the Light Side or the Dark Side. To keep things balanced, the difference between them at end game is only cosmetic (for instance, at Light Side 3, I got a little Sand Crawler pet). However, the options for each side are pretty clichéd, and a lot of the time don't really take into consideration the wider implications of your actions. I remember letting someone live which was a LS option, but I wonder if letting them live was really the better choice, as they may say they won't do bad stuff anymore, but people will say anything if it means saving their own life. I think Olek described it the best by saying the light side is really naive.

Conversation Ganking
Something that someone mentioned in general chat was that there are players who wait for someone to end a conversation and then proceed to kill them once they lose their conversation immunity. It's probably just a minor annoyance, but you would think that they could make people briefly invisible or something as they come out of a conversation. I haven't had any problems while questing with MrMan5.5 though. I've found we can usually take on most people, as there is no healer debuff like in warzones, so you do get a bit of that invincible healer feeling (especially when Bounty Hunters get to wear heavy armor - yay!).

Galactic Trade Network
I thought they would have learned from Blizzard's mistakes with the Auction House, but I guess not.



I think it's a little unintuitive at first. You need to know what category your item is, then subcategory. Then you can click search which will bring up all of the things in that subcategory (which can be filtered by rarity, usability, level or cost - but I've never used these fields). Only then can you type in the name of the item you're looking for to filter the search even further. You can't even shift+click the item from your inventory to populate that field, it seems you have to type it yourself, and there are some weirdly named things in this game. Selling things is also a bit of a pain, as when you are selling multiple items of the same type, you need to enter the same details each time, it doesn't remember them. Auctioneer was basically an essential if you wanted to sell things on the AH in WoW. I think even if Bioware doesn't want to allow automated market undercut calculations by mods, it should at least look at some of the other cool stuff Auctioneer introduced, like being able to see a list of similar auctions when you put an item in the sell tab.

Fishing
There is no fishing, and no sign that they will be adding fishing to the game. WHAT THE HELL, BIOWARE?!

Thing I'm Undecided About
Starship Travel



Travelling between zones (or planets, in the case of SWTOR) is easier than in WoW, as you can just fly their in your ship. You just click the section of the galaxy, then select your destination. The good thing is that it takes just as long to go from one side of the galaxy to the other as it does to go to the planet next door. The bad part is that it takes just as long to go from one side of the galaxy as it does to go to the planet next door. I guess it's a bit of a trade-off, like linear search vs a hash table with moderate cost for look up. I'm not sure if it's my computer or our connection, but loading a planet seems to take forever, so I usually avoid travelling unless I have to.

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*Slicing was a crew skill where you could basically send your crew member out to farm money for you. It got nerfed so that now they are more likely to return with less money than it cost to send them out whereas before it was a bit ridiculous. I could send one out for about 1000 credits, and they'd return with about 4000-6000 credits.