Time Past

I was eating dinner out with my oldest last night, and talk turned to MMOs. We'd discussed LOTRO for a bit --she mentioned that our house was out of storage-- and about several of the changes made to legendary weapons. Because of the changes, you didn't have to swap out your weapon every so often; you could keep that same weapon as long as you wanted. 

"I still have my original weapon," I mused. "I doubt I'll ever get rid of it."

We covered some of the other changes made to the game over the years, as she'd continued to play LOTRO actively long after it became a niche event for me, then we discussed another MMO we'd played a lot in the past.

"I miss SWTOR," I said, "but that bug keeps me from playing it."

"The companion bug?" she asked.

"Yeah, that one."

"I have that bug too, and it drives me crazy."

"It's the only game I see where a companion just simply does not keep up with me over time. I typically last as far as Alderaan until I can't stand it any more."

"That's a shame," she replied, "because I loved the story in Alderaan."

"I used to think it was a problem with the Radeon graphics cards," I added, "but when we bought my current PC it runs on an NVidia card that's far more advanced than anything we had in 2012 and it still does it."

"I wondered if it had something to do with server congestion."

"There was more server traffic back then, so I have no idea what the problem is. I have seen it on two separate installations of the game, and now three if you're seeing it too. It's not like Bioware hasn't made games with companions before or after, so I don't know what the issue is with this one single game of theirs."

After a brief pause, my oldest added that if there were Classic SWTOR servers ever created, she knows several people who would jump at the chance to play those again.

"Like your brother?"

"Yeah, he disliked how easy the game became."

"I miss the difficulty," I said, taking another bite of my salad. "The Consular end boss in particular was originally really tough until they nerfed it. And even after it was nerfed it was a hard fight."

"Remember the final zone in the Tatooine story?" she asked. "You kept going through this long maze until you got to the end, and now it's 'you take an elevator and you're there.'"

"Yeah. Or remember accidentally touching something out in the field and discovering that was a World Boss spawn point? Or when you'd be assembling a group to take on a World Boss and someone from the other faction would run up and cause the WB to spawn, grabbing it for the other faction?"

"I remember that. Or those Heroic 4 zones out in the field. They're all 2+ Heroics now."

"I haven't set foot in a Flashpoint since they changed the design so that you didn't need a healer or a tank," I confessed, "and you have those self-administered healing points scattered around the instances. But boy did I love the original Flashpoints they had." 

"Yeah."

You know you're getting old when your daughter starts reminiscing about how things were back in the day, I suppose.