A Warning to Star Wars The Old Republic Players

I usually don’t make a big deal out of leaving a game but I have become fairly upset with Star Wars The Old Republic. I have been a subscriber to the game ever since launch and have enjoyed it for the most part. It has been a good game. It has been nice to take a break for the swords and dragons games to play a tech game. Better yet, it is a full blown Star Wars game so who wouldn’t love that?

Real life pushed its way in this summer and I was unable to play Star Wars TOR for 32 days. Finally, after a smidgen over a month I logged back in. I was excited to play again and ready to jump back into it. A large part of the enjoyment with Star Wars TOR was crafting gear for my characters. In fact, I got so into crafting I ended up maxing out all of the skills and crafts dedicating each of my characters to a certain set. I even had multiple crafters of the same type.

As a premium subscriber I ended up with 12 characters I played on and off. All of them crafted. I even ended up spending my Cartel Coins on increase my account wide Auction House limit, which if I remember right I raised to 70 items each. Most of these characters I know I left with full auctions of all sorts of things but mostly gear modifications.

Well, imagine my surprise when character after character had no emails or auctions. Zero, ziltch, zip. With my main crafters I know I had a full 70 auctions going the last time I logged in, now only 32 days later, nothing at all. As I switched from character to character my surprise turned to horror and then to outrage. In the 32 days I was gone I lost 100% of all my auctions and emails. Millions and millions of credits worth of gear lost to the ether. The loss was so atrocious it completely nuked my desire to play Star Wars The Old Republic again.

Now, I might understand if it was a free to play account that never spent a cent. I can see them purging them after a certain amount of time. But I was a subscriber, paying premium monthly fees on top of spending good old hard earned cash in the Cartel Store. There is absolutely no reason what so every my emails should have been deleted. If I decide to pay the 15 bucks a month for the next 100 years, I better have my emails in 100 years. It’s as simple as that. Other games have notifications if they are going to delete your emails. Star Wars The Old Republic didn’t have anything like that. They just vanished.

So after returning to the game to get robbed of millions of credits, any desire I have left to play was torpedoed. It took over a year to amass the crafting and modification resources I had and I wasn’t about to start all over. The only thing left was then a highly repetitive daily grind with my maxed out toons. No, that isn’t very fun either. New character? Nope, there are very limited character options and I had played through every story in the game.

So off I go back to Dungeons and Dragons Online. Yes it is an old game but the character creation methods are awesome. It can be a whole new game playing dozens of different kinds of characters. There is so much more content then you need to level that it is possible to play entirely different sections of the game with each character. The truly active combat system is fun and exciting allowing even the same character to handle situations in a wide variety of ways. Plus, the free to play and subscription models are so much better.

I am also messing around with Neverwinter as well. Though it is far closer to Star Wars The Old Republic in terms of narrow character clones and lack of content.

Anyway, I wish you all the best. I just thought a warning was needed so hopefully you can avoid the same fate I did with Star Wars TOR. Since I will no longer be following and playing Star Wars The Old Republic there will be no more updates or guides on DDM’s Realm for it. However, the updates, guides and articles for Dungeons and Dragons Online and Neverwinter will keep on coming. They are both expecting expansions soon.