I’ve finally done it, I’ve changed profession. I’ve been a Bounty Hunter since they took TKM away from me but this week I changed profession to Smuggler. My reasoning behind this is that if I am going to be rubbish, I might as well look good. The innate armour line lets me to wear snazzy threads instead of my Shock Trouper outfit that made me look like a member of KISS.

Things have gotten a little stale for me lately, I tried the BM stuff and it didn’t really flick my switches. I’m not knocking the content which I think is amazing, it’s just not for me. All too often I’ve found myself knocking about not knowing what to do. As if I felt like I should be in the game no matter what, but actually had nothing to do. Smuggler has changed that around for me. It’s the profession that chose content over expertise, nerfing themselves in the foot. Smugglers have real content specific to their profession and while some may say its simple Fed-Ex missions, I’m totally immersed in it. Since smugglers are smugglers for the love of it rather than their combat prowess, the official forum reflects that. You’ll find everyone there welcoming, helpful and also pretty eccentric.

I know it’s wrong, but it just feels so right

I had a quick look at the Officer stats for all servers and discovered just 387 smugglers or roughly about 3% of the player base. Maybe it’s entirely a personal preference but based on the films, I’d rather be Han Solo than whiney Luke. Han get’s the girls, Luke get’s to kiss his sister – with tongues. Yes, I admit some Jedi in the films are cool but I’m surprised that there aren’t more people who want to be a gunslinging scoundrel rather than a glowstick wielding do-gooder. I guess that combat powers are king.

Besides ditching armour, the one thing that excites me the most about smuggler, the one thing that will drive me to grind up the Underworld faction with all my energy is that I get to actually own a DL-44 that has decent stats. The thing that seems to have gone by unnoticed lately is the sheer undeniable campness of the new armour and weapons introduced into the game. I’ve already mentioned the glam rock inspired Shock Trooper armour but weapons have also been hit with the gaudy stick. The old weapons (the ones seen in the films) are basically unusable to anyone higher than CL20. The travesty is that these are the cool looking guns. The high damage looted weapons are oversized and quite frankly, lame.

To I’m going to spend a lot of time in SWG as a cadaver but I’ll have one of the best looking (well unique at least) corpses on my server. If you’ve not already done so, I urge you guys to at least take a peek at this underused profession.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could buy clothes with decent armour protection? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use any weapon we liked? At one time everyone used to wear Composite armour and carry a Vibroknuckler. At least we have a bit of diversity now. But can’t we take this one step further? It’s all there. It’s all in the game already. It’s just not used because it’s not viable to do so. People don’t wear thinly striped pants because without armour, you’re dead. People don’t use the E-11 carbine because it shoots bubbles. It’s a crying shame I tell you.

Since I was too lazy to write a complete column last week, this is going to seem like old news now. Blixtev has announced the return of the legendary village of Aurilia in chapter 7. In case you weren’t around at the time, or bought your Jedi from eBay, the village is a hidden location on Dathomir where force sensitive people hung out and learned how to swing their laser swords, learned to speak l33t, and learned how to whine on the forums. It’s a wonderful, magical place and it held the best content in the game. Hang on, I remember the village – it was that dilapidated shanty town in the middle of nowhere that was bugged to buggery and everyone hated it. Maybe I’m holding a grudge because I never completed it, but those misty eyed memories seem like a big fat lie to me.

The village of Aurilia – Get a shuttleport you bums!

Thankfully, Blixtev was around at the time and shares the same recollections as me. The new incarnation of the village sounds like an improvement. It’ll have a shuttleport for a start and will be the meeting point where people go off on adventures with heroic mobs. The main concern on the forums is that Aurilia will be a haven for credit spammers. So if that’s the only criticism, it must be a good idea.

Next up from Blix is the collections system. Basically, this is a mini game where you get rewarded for killing x amount of a specific critters or you loot x amount of specific items. It is goal based, it has cool rewards, it increases your ePenis – it’ll go down a storm. Seriously though, it sounds like it will be fun. One of the rewards is an increase in your house item limit. These will stack, up to a total of 5000 items for a guild hall. I’m sure that will be amazingly popular, although I dread the day that I walk into a guild hall with that amount of junk on display. It’ll be wall to wall blue carpets, spinning x-wings everywhere and 2,000 holo-pets biting at your ankles. They will be introducing Style Police in a later chapter, I swear.

Finally, I’d like to salute our new community rep, GreyPawn. Maybe it’s just new employee syndrome but since coming on board he has really shaken things up a bit. He’s out there, defending SWG in 3rd party forums, giving interviews, communicating stuff. He seems to have won the players over too, earning Virrago like respect in a short period of time. I was never a big fan of either Tiggs or Thunderheart but I can’t help but like Joe GreyPawn Pishgar. Most importantly, I trust him.

One of his most recent acts has been the reemphasis on the Senate and the reformation of profession based representatives. This is without doubt a welcome return and I congratulate all the new game senators. I secretly hoped that perhaps I would have been made Senator of Funny Forum Posts but it just wasn’t to be. I’d be the senator who turned up late, got things wrong, but always made people laugh with my whimsical comments on the state of the game. Thankfully, the real senators are the guys who make the guides, who draw up FAQ’s, who do the testing on the latest changes. As a dedicated forum junkie, I was familiar with a lot of their work and I think they were excellent choices. Good luck guys, you’re going to need it. Especially the Munitions Senator, God help you.

Take care of yourselves readers, I guess that’s what you’re best at.
SuperFurry – 22nd July 2007

Email me: SuperFurryGalaxies@hotmail.com