If Companions in The Old Republic MMO may possibly be love interests, will Bioware need to update their traditional storylines a bit to account for massively multiplayer-ness?
“Over the course of our adventures, with all we have been through, I find I have grown much closer to you… and your friend… and your other friend… and that pick-up tank we found on the LFG channel…”
Tier 3 scenarios have been rather a mixed bag. For a while, when queuing for everything it seemed Tor Anroc popped 9 times out of 10, a Destruction Dude would always pick up The Thing, and you’d have to slog it all the way over to their base and fight your way up the hill under a withering barrage of fire in an oft-doomed bid to Kill The Dude With The Thing. Then different scenarios starting coming up more frequently, and Order were winning Tor Anroc more often than not, but losing most others. This was from a fair mix of the Temple of Isha, Doomfist Crater and High Pass Cemetery, an occasional Talabec Damn, and almost no Black Fire Basins. Conclusion: the best scenarios are those that involve Killing Dudes With Things, or Killing Dudes Standing Next To Things. Picking Up The Thing And Running To Another Place Without Being Killed, not so hot.
Last night, after a few days of general exploring, questing, dungeons and the like, I thought I’d go scenario crazy again, queued up five or six times in a row, and Order won everything, convincingly in most cases. It might’ve just been the luck of the queue, but glancing at the summaries at the end, Destruction’s levels seemed a bit lower on average than they had been. There are a couple of pretty dedicated Order guilds on our server, with several players who’ve been level 40 for a while now, probably more than Destruction (from anecdotal evidence), so I have a suspicion that Order players have tended to start on Tier 4 scenarios as soon as they can, whereas Destruction had been staying with Tier 3 as long as possible; I’d often see four or five level 30/31 Destruction players in a scenario, and very rarely see an Order player over level 28. Now it looks like a wave of Destruction players who were on that cusp have either outlevelled Tier 3 entirely or chosen to head for Tier 4, and coming up in their place are some lower level players, tilting the Tier 3 level advantage in Orders favour. Or I could be reading way too much into random scenario queue matches. Either way, it made for a nice haul of XP and renown, huzzah!