Time to Re-engage a Bit

I received an email from The SWTOR team last Friday, and along with a new subscriber reward there was an announcement:

I received this on October 16, 2026.

Hmm. I was wondering when they were going to perform a character name cleanup. 

I'd never had to worry about that sort of thing before, because I'd been subscribed for such a long time, but now I actually had to consider which toons to save.

Luckily for me, there's a simple fix: login to each toon I want to save and that's that.

Yeah, about that "login" part...

I should have gotten a screencap of this, but when I logged into the launcher, it began to upgrade my SWTOR installation. Typically that's no problem these days, as my internet connection is around 600 mbps, far faster than I used to have when I regularly played SWTOR. This time, however, the download from the SWTOR servers slowed to a crawl, and no matter what I did I simply could not make it go any faster.

At that point I accepted my fate, uninstalled SWTOR that I'd downloaded from swtor.com, and signed up for the game on Steam.

THAT installation took all of 5 minutes.

I know these three, at least I think I do, but
the names of the two to either side of Darth Malgus
escape me. This is October 18, 2026.

I logged in and set about accessing all of my toons.

Since I'm now Preferred Status, I get all the "Hey, come back and subscribe!" screens that I simply ignore --Blizzard has trained me well to ignore "Come Back!!!!!" groveling in Retail WoW-- 

Except for the different color schemes and organization,
this feels remarkably like whenever I login to Retail after
what feels to me like a short absence.

Yeah, like this.

but since I'm Preferred, I only get 13 toons maximum per server. Well, let's see what I have to work with:

Oh.

I guess I'm not that alt crazy as I thought.

Sure, Satele Shan sounds like a good place to start...

This was obviously taken after I'd reenabled all of
my toons, but Sreeka was the closest thing I had
to a main back then.

The last time I'd logged in to SWTOR, I was grumbling about the companion pathing issues I had and had used Sreeka as an example at the Nar Shadda spaceport. I was curious if installing the game via Steam had any impact there, and... Kinda? Maybe? I mean, the companion doesn't dither around and do nothing for a while, so there's that. But when they run with you they are obviously slower than you and quickly begin to lag a bit. I'd have to look at Sreeka's gear, but that might be due to a trinket or something else she has, so I'm not about to discount this, but I guess we'll see how things go.

Anyway, I was reminded of something about not being subscribed when I got to my first Trooper:

It used to be that if you weren't a subscriber, you couldn't hide your head slot unless you purchased that ability (or you subscribed). I'm glad to see that I can hide Kiannala's helmet, because I'm not a big fan of helms in game overall. 

Much better.

It took me about 1/2 hour, but I logged into all of my toons and kept most of them. There were a few that I'd gotten to maybe L7 or L16 and stopped playing them, and given that I never got very far I was fine in deleting them. Their names weren't worth keeping around either, so that was fine. 

There was one thing that I found particularly funny, however. Since I'd been using the swtor.com installed version of the game since shortly after its launch, the Steam Achievements kicked into overdrive when I began logging in.

"I dunno, Boss. This guy logged in and it started going
crazy! Should I check his account for something suspicious?"

Not too shabby, logging in once and getting 72% of the achievements unlocked. Good thing I don't keep track of them any more, that's for sure.

So, I've protected my toons for the time being, and I've got some wiggle room as far as new toon creation is concerned. Now, if only SWTOR had "Vanilla" servers, just like they were back in the day, and I'd be set.