20th December 2011 was the official launch of my favorite MMO.
So much has happened before and after this date.
I want to share some of the many memories I keep.

This article is PART I, telling the story of the years before the launch in the years from 2005 to 2011.
PART II will reveal all the events between 2012 and 2015.

SWTOR at 4! Happy birthday to the best MMO I (!) have ever played. Yes, not a flawless one, not the most popular one, but it is MY Star Wars MMO. My love for Star Wars played a huge part in turning this game into my favorite one. I am not blind, I have been playing it for over 4 years and waiting for it for another 3. I know every little bug and issue the game has ever had. Still, it is even today my favorite game.

In this, rather long article and video I will share some old memories. Having the… umm… honor (?) of being around since 22nd of October 2008 when the official website first launched and we received confirmation about the new Star Wars MMO being under development. The story may be longer than I and we expect, so sit back and enjoy the time travel! Even worse, the first part may seem uninterested to those of you who don’t follow my SWTOR activities for long enough and/or don’t care to learn how I came to love the game so much and why.

The Video Version

I entered the “SWTOR Build YouR Alliance Contest” by Nvidia and Bioware with this video. Visit the contest page and vote for your favorite, hopefully mine, by clicking on the GREEN HEART ^^

►https://contests.nvidia.com/build-your-alliance

Before SWTOR

SWG – the epic Star Wars Adventure

Star Wars Galaxies was released in 2003. I remember reading about an online RPG game being developed by Sony back in 2000, or was it 2001. Not sure any more, in a paper magazine. That’s right. I am old enough to remember the PC Gaming Magazines in their paper format :D

So, SWG launched in 2003, but… NOT here. Bulgarian players were forgotten and nobody wanted to import the game into our local video games stores. It’s not that the discs were locked or something, just… in 2003 I was still kind of a young adult/teenager (~19 years old), was still in school, did not have my own income to rely on and most of all – online purchase was way into the future for us, poor Bulgarians. In the Summer of 2005 I finally had a chance to touch the unique and one of a kind game that allowed me to jump into the Star Wars universe and create an adventure of my own. A big letdown was the fact that the engine was so crappy, old, buggy and non functional, that the game was running capped at 30 FPS and very rarely even reaching this number. The epic PvP battles we had at Restuss (a spaceport/city on Rori) prepared me very well for SWTOR’s Ilum disaster. In SWG PvP was massive, entertaining and… impossible. Often we had fights between 30vs30 or so, and all of it was happening with 1 to 5 FPS with a server side ability delay between 5 and 25 seconds. Sometimes longer. Yeah, sounds like I exaggerate. I am not. If you were one of the few crazy players who stood against the issues and found a way to enjoy this lag fest, you will keep that memory for many hears ahead.

Actually, it was SWG and its crappy engine that prepared me and taught me very well how to endure, embrace and survive lag in a game, as long as it’s my game, my Star Wars adventure.

I played SWG for over 4 years with one break in 2007. For a few months I went to Middle-earth and lived the life of an elven champion. My subscription to SWG ended in late 2009 and I never renewed it. I’ll keep only the good memories of the fantastic community and those trully epic open world PvP battles. This is the game that taught me to love PvP and turned me from just a gamer into a competitive PvP player.

LOTRO – a big step up as an MMO

The game was released in spring 2007. I purchased it the Summer of the same year and left SWG for a few months to enjoy the gorgeous world of Tolkien with some good friends (from my SWG guild). After a while, I realized that my Star Wars addiction is too storng and despite the issues SWG had after its NGE patch (more on that in another article/video, some other time, perhaps). Came back to SWG, rejoined my good old friends in Old Republic Alliance (the guild I started SWTOR with) and cleared the few End-Game content challenges I had missed while I was gone. At the time, the guild was the best in the world, having cleared the latest instance first and long before the 2nd one managed to do it.
Went back to LOTRO around Summer of 2009. The first big expansion was just released and we know that the best time to start a new game or return to one you had played before, is right before or after an expansion. Switched servers and this was the birth of my Champion Salborn. The elf, who made me well known around the Snowbourn server community as the solo roamer. I had the reputation of being one of the few champion PvP players, who not only solo roam around the big Ettenmoors map (the Open World PvP area in LOTRO), but also had the knowledge and skills to kill multiple enemies alone. I really spend a lot of time learning my class, the zone, the enemy classes (monsters) and at some point I ended up with the great honor (links 1 and 2) of being called “best champion on the server” by some. I loved being ganked by packs of wargs, because, you know, the stealth clas mentality in the open world PvP is often the same in all games – stack into a group and nuke the solo area.

So, I played LOTRO until late 2010 and with 3-4 years of experience, retired completely and ended my subscription in the first months of 2011. The developers closed the EU located servers and moved the playerbase on the NA ones, where I started experiencing huge lag. On top of that they also boosted my favorite class to the point where it was becoming boringly easy to kill multiple enemies solo without even breaking a sweat.

SWTOR – My dream came true… almost!

2008 and the website launch

I still remember that late night of 21st to 22nd October 2008. The official news was fact. The upcoming new Star Wars MMO was already officially confirmed. We were waiting for the website to launch, so we can be among the first to register. When the launch was a fact, it took me over 2 hours of constant F5-smap to be able to lead the damn page and register my account.

2008-2011 – The endless wait

Not having a clue when the game will be ready and released, we waited for over 2 and a half years before we got the target and later also the exact date for launch. Meanwhile epic podcasts started appearing. I was a big fan of Darth Hater, who, unfortunately, started very enthusiastic (in 2009 or 2010, I think?), but not 6 months after release they all stopped playing and ended the show. The swtor.com website was publishing comic strips almost each week. Friday was the designated day for game related updates and… some of you may even remember the most epic article ever published – the 2010 April 1st joke about the Sarlacc being a playable race in SWTOR.

2011 – The wait was over!

At some point in the summer of 2011 Bioware announced the pre-order. Of course, no such option was available locally here in Bulgaria. I ordered my Collector’s Edition from Amazon.com and paid almost double of its original price to have it delivered to the UK (where my brother lives) and from there, to me.
When it became known that the developers are planing a release in the late December, we all were worried about the delivery status. Who the hell is crazy enough to schedule such a big game release around the Holidays. How would all the 2+ mill preorders be delivered on time with the extra pressure from the Christmas shopping and such.
Well, Bioware launched early access on the 13th of December 2011 and I was there!
We were automatically sent to servers in groups according to Bioware’s program of allowing players to pick their friends and friendly guilds via the website and be placed together on the same server. That’s how our ORA ended up on Frost Claw together with a whole bunch of other old and well known SWG guilds.

The launch on its own was smooth. Well, kind of. Nobody expected it to be perfect with no issues. Bioware made the mistake to release a huge amount of servers. The reason being that they didn’t have back then the technology ready to make big or even so called mega servers. We ended up with, I don’t remember any more, over 50-60 servers in total? The waiting lines were as fun as we all expected them to be. Especially after the official launch. During Early Access it was almost normal – 2 hours of waiting in a queue was accepted with a smile by all of us.

After 20th, when the game officially launched, the terror and horror began. For over a week, the queues were more than 3-4 hours long. Granted, they were shorter on some servers and longer on others. Despite Bioware’s desperate attempts, they could not gain total control on the server populations and new players were joining their friends on the servers they wanted, not the ones recommended by the game. Duh!
In very early January Bioware surprised everybody with a lightniing fast first big update to the game. Patch 1.1 landed and together with it, we got access to a new Flashpoint – Kaon Under Siege. What the hell, people? 95% of us were still in their mid levels of their first characters. We were shocked and a little confused with this. Is Bioware planing to release updates with that speed?

Now we know the answer, hehe.

Back then it was a huge surprise and made many of us worry if we will even be able to play the conteext batch, lol.
Since I am planing to go on like this for quite some time, I have decided it is a good idea to cut here and continue with PART II, which means