To SWTOR or not to SWTOR

I got an email from Bioware the other day informing me that my account was almost due to be renewed. This I think is a nice feature. Most reoccurring subscriptions just charged you without warning.  I had originally paid for the 6month plan, and with the extra time they’ve given out, I had lost complete track of when the next billing cycle would be.

Now that it’s here, I have a decision to make. Do I renew? I haven’t logged into the game in about a month now. For the next little bit, my game time is going to be consumed with Civ. That’s going to be true whether or not I resub.

On one hand, SWTOR is a hard game to play casually. I’m undergeared and behind so can’t join my guild on raid nights, even if I felt like staying up late to do so. The baby is sleeping a bit more regularly now, so playing a game at night is entirely do able. He also doesn’t usually get up until sometime after 7 so I don’t have to be up before dawn anymore. Though, it still helps to get up early so I can get some work done beforehe gets ups.

I have only a single level 50 character at the moment. I really want to pick up some of the cool legacy perks, but I have no money. Earning money in SWTOR requires a fair amount of time investment. With my play time, I can either grind dailies for cash or play lower level characters. I don’t have time to do both effectively.

Now, I could ignore the endgame completely. Bioware has suggested the level cap will be raised with a mini expansion later this year. Chasing new gear everytime the level cap is raised is an annoying aspect of MMO’s. Not so much the upgrading gear, that’s a staple of RPG’s, but the spending months upgrading your gear, and then the level cap obsoletes all that work.

The endgame is the hardest part to keep up with.   STO is an inferior game, but I can log in and play an STF in 20min. There’s pretty much nothing you can do in SWTOR in 20min.  The voice acting, while great, makes questing take a long time.

One of the things I really enjoy about the game is the class quests. I have only finished the smuggler one and have gotten to 25 Inquisitor and 37 Knight. I want to finish those and play through the others. It takes a lot of time, but is more interesting than logging in and running the same dailies again.

I also enjoy grouping with friends in the game. That’s hard to do on a limited play schedule though. Most everyone is max level in the guild, though they do have alts. Randomly teaming up is hit or miss. I’ve thought about reviving the Empire group I started. We would only play together and level a set of Empire characters. We ran into time issues but it might be possible to find a night to do that again.

Will I get my monies worth out of resubbing? Unlike many people on the internet, I don’t think SWTOR is a failure as a game. I’m just not sure it’s the game for me right now. I want to play the rest of the classes but that’s a huge time investment.