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United We Stand: It’s Almost Like Being Popular

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Off-Topic: Four out of five Hard Mode Eternity Vault down! It felt amazing, raiding in this game is so much fun.

When I started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, I put a constraint on myself. I decided that I was going to accept every group invite offered to me because I wanted to meet random people. For me, the people that have affected me the most are those that you meet in a group, a guild, or in a brief moment of doing the same quest and not wanting to trip all over each other. How did it work out? Well, I have a startlingly long friends list and it’s not stopping. My goal is to be friends with most of the level 50’s on server, a goal that doesn’t seem that far off because the 50 community still isn’t that big.

Cultivate a friends list and there’s a lot of good reasons for doing this I think the most practical is that there’s no LFG system in the game right now so we have to build our own. General fleet chat isn’t that great, so the best way to go about finding flashpoint groups and premade PvP groups is to friend everyone who you group with who you think is good and always offer yourself up for future runs. Don’t be afraid to send them /tells asking if they want to  go to Hard mode False Emperor with you or go claim the west Alderaan Warzone turret as your own.

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United We Stand: Cops and Robbers

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

I absolutely love hard mode Flashpoints. To anyone on the Dreshdae Cantina server, look me up and let’s run some. My freakin’ legs won’t drop in Directive 7.

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of sitting in a parenting Sunday school class with my parents. I’m still not sure how I got there, I certainly didn’t fit in, it was early in the morning and I’m not a morning person so I kind of just came to consciousness in the room. However, one thing that stuck out to me was I heard a mother ask was, “Should I be concerned if my child takes the ‘bad side’ in a violent game?”

I thought this was an incredibly interesting question and a new turn in the discussion about whether or not violent games are bad for younger children. While we gamers have our own opinions on the subject, for most of us might say that we are better off from our violent games, what about our alignment choices? What does it mean when we pick the ‘evil’ choice in a conversation, or choose to play our characters as violent, immoral people?

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United We Stand: Happiness Is Anyone Or Anything At All

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Happy New Years! I’ve decided my new year’s resolution is to become friends with all the other level 50’s on server.

Yeah, I know that’s ambitious and kind of ridiculous, but right now it’s not that hard because there’s only like fifty of us (even so, I’d say I’m only friends with about fifteen). But for me the point is the effort and the progress that I will make along the way, the people that I will meet, the experiences that I will have, and the joys that we will be able to create for each other.

This is really what brings us back to the point of online gaming: the people that we meet here are what make the game real and important. I think particularly at the beginning of a game’s life, a.k.a. the last few weeks for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is especially clear. Less people, less content, a less clear understanding of the game all make it more important that we meet others and build community.

Several nights ago I had my first TOR raiding experience. We went into Eternity Vault and Kragga’s Palace and cleared them both on normal. While half of this example is just to brag, the other half is to serve as an illustration about how important to is to build relationships with other people on one’s server. As much as I would like for this to be an accomplishment of my guild, it wasn’t.

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United We Stand: Visibility, Channels, And Giant Droids, Oh My!

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Happy day after launch day! It’s the little days that count…

One of the awesome things about Star Wars: The Old Republic (of many, of course) is that there are heroic world bosses on every planet, each requiring a full raid of on-level characters to kill. During beta, I came across the first one Republic players get to see, SD-0 on Coruscant, and my roommate GenerallyAwesome turns to me and says. “Dude, I totally know what our guild is doing first.” Thus, we did.

It was an awesome feeling, there were four of us online so we immediately started advertising wherever we currently were and /whispering all our new server friends asking them to come lend a hand. However, it was on Coruscant that we really got the majority of our help. It was refreshing to see how quickly and easily people came to us when we started talking about it in general chat.

If the day comes where this game becomes so routine, especially at such a low level, that players are unwilling to stop their questing and come together to try something new, I will be very disappointed. It was this awesome feeling that reminded me of why I love MMORPGs like Star Wars: The Old Republic (or at least one of the many reasons why): because of how easy it is to for groups and go do something cool. With the exception of GenerallyAwesome and myself, it’s highly unlikely that any of us even live in the same city, yet we gathered together for about half an hour to kill a giant robot.

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United We Stand: Four Rules Of TOR

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Yesterday morning at about 10:00 AM, I had a moment. When you know something like this is coming, it’s weird. You can’t imagine what it will be like once it has passed, what it will be like once Star Wars: The Old Republic has become a norm in your life. But, until that time, it seemed like it will never come. But, as my mouse hovered over the “Play” button beneath the carefully picked appearance bars, I took a moment to think about what I was doing. I was preparing to fully immerse myself in a whole new world, a world where I would meet people from anywhere from across the world to right across the street. I looked at the name I had typed in for years, and realized I needed to decide exactly who TwinHits is. We want to become what we want to be, and who do I want her to be?

Thus,  I want to share with you the “Four Rules of TOR”, four rules which I will play by, and I hope that you will play by as well. These rules are meant to encompass every action and every decision that you make, both within the game and within the community, and to guide us with wisdom towards a better game.

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