I’ve been playing SWTOR (off and on but mostly on) now since the beta and official release date in 2011. I suppose that kinda makes me a “veteran” because it’s the only game I’ve truly stuck to next to EQ (five years), WoW (two years) and Gears of War for about 2 years. Playing a game for that long gives you a certain “edge” that newcomers just won’t have. It also helps you to understand a few gaming “truths” that again, you can only truly understand through years of game play. I’ve been playing without a guild for some time now. I managed to get to this place in the game through no real choice of my own but mostly because I just didn’t have any friends to play with anymore. Most of them had either left the game for greener fields or were so inconsistent with their game time that they were hardly ever on. This might sound sad but honestly, it’s not. I’ve come to realise that you don’t have to be in a huge guild to enjoy your time playing an MMORPG. In fact, there are some things about being in a guild I don’t miss such as guild drama, feeling obligated to do things you might not want to do with your game time, feeling obligated to step up and organise things when you’d rather just be playing on your own, you get the idea. Playing solo is actually pretty damn fun to do. That said, I do spend a lot of my time on the GTN whenever I am online but I’ve decided to step up and finish my Legendary Status goal because I feel I’ve let myself down a little by having so much experience with this game and having nothing to really show for it. I have also slowly started to get back into PvP again which was one of my favourite things to do in the game way back when there were PvP guilds that were actually half decent.

The short (and the long) of it is you don’t have to be surrounded by guildmates to enjoy playing a video game. If you’re as lucky as I have been with my game time, you’ll come to cherish both experiences; being alone is great but being in a guild has its merit points too.

That said, one of the highlights of my gameplay nowadays is finding and acquiring new armour sets (collecting all manner of things in SWTOR is kinda my thing) and I got my hands on the Ardent Oracle set last night which is definitely one of my favourites and here’s why:

How sexy is this set, am I right?