Like many before me I am leaving the Old Republic for pastures new. Sure, the grass isn't always greener on the other side but even grass must be less repetetive than SW:TOR. Unfortunately it has been a huge dissapointment for me. I am leaping from the sinking ship.

I leave behind a guild of reasonable people who continue to clasp to the hope that Bioware will emerge from a kitchen within the depths of this striken vessel (armed with a knife and a pony-tail) to take back this 'original MMO' from the blackened claws of Tommy Lee Jones. While SW:TOR is under seige from the masses of dissapointed subscribers I intend to swim to the shore where Rift, or some other desperate ex-girlfriend, will take me back. Hopefully it will be the girl with the massive boobs from Under Seige...

Ultimately you can't have a rankless PvP system where time is the only commodity worth having. You also can't keep those cut-scene decision things going constantly since they bore the fuck out of most sane people. They also should have put some kind of professions or trade skills in the game. Crew skills are nothing but a pile of wank.

There's me rant. Eat it up. Go on, taste the bitterness from within me, for I am a dissapointed MMORPG subscriber with a blog.

There is an evil droid overlord in our midst, stealing our warzone victories and permanently placing quests within our mission logs. He calls himself 'Electronic Bastard' and lurks amongst the dark corners of Huttball arenas waiting for you to score your 6th touchdown so he can gobble up your victory whilst cackling manically.

You may have heard talk of him amongst the drunkards in the cantinas. Rumour is he likes to give you a little shove everytime you jump onto that last pipe of a particularly difficult datacron retrieval attempt. One of his more depraved acts is to hold the corpses of recently deceased 'baddies' in stasis, making them appear as if they are still alive and blowing your mind when the loot option appears.

He has attracted several followers known as the 'Bastard Minions' who worship him as a holy deity. They claim he has imbued them with power to become invincible by simply channeling the rhythm of modern dance. From his hovel within the Huttball arena he is believed to have made combatants faster and stronger in exchange for fragments of their soul.

I intend to make it my mission to capture this droid so If you have any information about his whereabouts please let me know. According to witness reports he looks like a small steel bin with glowing red eyes. I will not use his powers for evil, I simply intend to enter him into the next Robot Wars.

_It has come to my attention that I haven't actually entered a Flashpoint yet. This isn't something I had planned on avoiding and I was actively involved in the equivalent 'dungeon' features in other MMO's. Ultimately a break from the genre was broken when I entered the beta testing phase, where the unerring realisation that those annoying habits and behaviours (the kind present in previous incarnations on the MMORPG) are still present in SW:TOR. I simply don't want to spend a significant quantity of my playing time, and therefore my life, dragging some toothless monkey through an instance.

As if Barrens chat from day 1 wasn't enough why would I want to subject myself to the torture of an inconsiderate 12-year-old who is only capable of typing acronyms and breaking the CC? I guess it's because I am foolishly missing out on what accounts for about half of the game due to my deep-set fear of pugging. Since leaving a guild of carefully amassed friendships in WoW I have struggled to move on. In other words I have become a miserable old git.

I have the same ambition of every other bog standard MMO'er wishing to compete in the end-game and see all the funky shit; I would eventually like to take part in Operations. It's not my intention to grab a scalpel and start shoving dodgy French silicone implants into unsuspecting bimbos (an operation joke...sorry) but instead to engage in mortal combat with some massive lizards or robots with flames coming out of their tits. Whatever passes for a boss on SW:TOR will do, provided it drops the shit that I want (and has flame tits).

Needless to say I am readying myself for Flashpoint entry. I am dressed like a cheap hooker in my PvP welfare epics, the aesthetics of which I recently saw described as a 'grasshopper with down syndrome' on the SW:TOR Bounty Hunter forum. It's time to persevere in the hope I can find the 4 people on the entire server who are not either; perverts, chimps or elitist jerks. It's time to do a Flashpoint.

I've just written a massive blog post and then deleted it. After that I went A BIT MENTAL. I threw a pen on the ground and everything... It was intense. To cover the whole thing again would make me want to die so here's the jist...

I'm level 50 and now married to one of my companions (which frankly is downright weird). I've amassed a selection of buddies from which to choose but spend all my time affectionately stroking Blizz, my Jawa. And I don't mean stroking in the way you are thinking (you sick bastards).

I spend much of my time involved in a reasonably enjoyable PvP grind, knocking Jedi into flame pits and hiding behind pillars to hold on to my precious life points. Unfortunately I have to travel to Ilum everyday for a daily which involves exchanging fragments of my soul with Republic bystanders. You may have seen such a transaction occur or performed this perfunctory task yourself. To the naked eye it just looks like bored noobs pointing giant over-sized bazookas at static objects.

I have also started the process of searching for Datacrons. These sexy little boxes are littered around the galaxy, in the most bizarre places, and insane nerd robots from the future have found them all and placed them on several websites for our perusal. I recommend this site if you're looking for directions.

I've managed to calm down now. The pen is back on the desk and I've regained my composure. Now I can get back to stroking my Jawa.

As I sit here waiting to return to SW:TOR following an extended server maintenance period it has occured to me I've not made any post since early access started on December the 15th. This is, in fact, my first post about the game having genuinely experienced it. Fortunately I have not been dissapointed.

Reading between the lines it may seem obvious that I have enjoyed it, perhaps too distracted playing the game to make a simple post, but that's not strictly true. I've had christmas festivities to attend to and a new job to start which have kept me from ranting on the interweb. However, every nugget of time I've had spare has been spent shooting lazers in nerd-land and the game occupies my thoughts pretty much 24/7.

Why? Well that's simple, SW:TOR meets my expectations...

Hardly a eulogy to tempt the angels down from their heavenly abodes and swap their halo's for a headset, but significant nonetheless. This is down to the fact that I had (and still have) extremely high demands of the game, leading me to make this website about 3 months in advance of release and boring my girlfriend to death with it for the same period.

Thus far the Star Wars lore, universe, and feel are all present and working hard to make me a happy gamer. The flashpoints and warfronts are also doing a stirling job of keeping me entertained in the company of others. Perhaps most significantly I have ignored other games and the attempts of MMO 'loyalists' (largely from the remaining WoW community) to convince me that any negative elements of the game cannot be improved given time.

I am hopeful that I will continue to enjoy the game as I have so far. Sadly the only day I'm not working or seeing family over the holiday period has been blighted by the dreaded maintenance overlords, much to my chagrin, but I can live with it right now because SW:TOR is everything I hoped it would be.

My countdown timer is a lie. Or is it? When will I get in? When will you get in? We finally find out whether we are first day special types in an email this week. Then, when a few weeks have passed, we can regail children about how we got in on the first day as if it was an exclusive Vietnam war experience and we somehow garnered a greater level of wisdom and understanding of the game than any mere 'day 2 entry' mortal could ever comprehend. Or, alternatively, we could get in on the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th day...

OH THE HUMANITY!!!1!!1ONE!!ONE.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to get in on the 2nd day then? The trouble is right now every game I play, drug I take (lemsip) or woman I make sweet passionate love to (in my imagination) seems incredibly dull compared to SW:TOR. Such is my anxiety about early access that I will likely go mental if I don't get into the game straight away, choosing instead to smash my computer up and do something constructive with my life. Perish the thought.

In the meantime I can watch Strictly Come Dancing on the television, hoping for the glimpse of a middle-aged breast, or even 2, to entertain me on a Saturday evening. Oh, what I would give right now just to be scavenging some metal and killing a set-number of cronies for experience points... But alas I must wait another few days and sometime this week, while I'm at work, I can only hope an email arrives granting me access to this game which will almost certainly be a massive anti-climax (largely because I have gone to great lengths, personally, to build it up beyond all possibile reckoning).

It can't be any worse than television, which appears to have lowered itself into the gutter while I was turned the other way and is having a bloody good swim around.

The SW:TOR beta test has finished and it failed to dissapoint. In fact it only managed to increase my anticipation levels as we wait for the big release day. I'll be checking my inbox every day this week for the email that reveals at exactly which point of early release I get to enter the game. After a couple of weekends spent playing the Bounty Hunter I had a blast (no pun intended) and am delighted to be choosing the class as my main in the new game. That said, I feel every class has attractive elements and will look forward to making alts in the distant future.

In the meantime, if you're bored and desperate for more Bounty Hunting, check out the Newbie's Guide to the Bounty Hunter at torwars.com. It covers more elements of the class that I had time or inclination to experience during the beta and is worth a read.

Having taken my Bounty Hunter through to the grand old age of level 21 I thought I'd share some randomly taken screenshots from adventures. I am pleased to report that so far the game has been thoroughly enjoyable and I felt right at home in the Star Wars universe. I'll be putting together some of my thoughts over the next few days on the subjects of story, PvP and companions in particular - it's those 3 elements that most captured my imagination. Not forgetting the Death from Above ability, which is worth the subscription alone!

_After the NDA was lifted this week I've trawled the internet for my top 5 snippets of information, articles and videos related to the Bounty Hunter produced by those who have been beta testing. Please bear in mind that anything you read or watch will likely contain spoilers and this is just the beta, so anything contained within is subject to change!

1. TORWARS - A Star Wars: The Old Republic online magazine. 'Bounty Hunter: Hands-On First Impressions from the Beta' by Acea Engen.

    "The Bounty Hunter is an extremely fun class to play. With         limited downtime, and the span of both Advanced Classes         giving you the option to DPS, Tank, or Heal – the Bounty             Hunter can do it all..."