Player versus Player combat (PVP) and Battlegrounds
Both games support PvP and battlegrounds (or referred to as “battlefields” in Star Wars Galaxies.) Each game supports world PvP as well as instanced PvP. Each game also supports a queue system for the battlegrounds.

In Star Wars Galaxies, the queue system is very simple. Bring up a queue window. It will show how many people on both sides are currently queued. (If you’re unlucky enough to still be stuck on a low-population server, this will be the window with 0s in it almost all of the time.) Double click one of the battlefields and you are queued. Once the queue hits 4 people for each team, a countdown will start (after you elected to enter your battlefield.) Each battlefield can hold up to 15 people from each team. GCW (the point system used to rank up within the two factions) is awarded on a per kill basis, and tokens are awarded (more for wins) which can be redeemed for rewards at the appropriate faction vendor. Once the battlefield ends, you are transported to a pre-designated area (depending on which battlefield you were in.)

In World of Warcraft, the queue system is similar. You may queue for different battlefields, and once a certain number of participants have queued, you are prompted to enter. This is where the similarities end. Unlike the SWG system, players are pitted against each other based on current level, insuring that a level 49 won’t be facing a level 80. And while there are points earned on a per kill basis (called Honor points), there is also: experience points earned for completed objectives, bonus honor points depending on whether or not your battlefield is currently offering that, and even quest objectives available in some of the battlegrounds. Honor points can be redeemed at vendors for different rewards. The variety of rewards is large, and the diversity of the list is much greater than that of SWG. While SWG only supports 15 on 15, WoW battlegrounds consist of raid groups. A complete raid can consist of 40 people. That’s a possibility of 80 people in one battleground! Once the battleground is over, you are transported back to the spot you were at before you went into the battleground, making it fairly seamless to quest and level while doing a random battleground here and there for a bit of fun.

With the release of Patch 1.12, cross realm battlegrounds were introduced to WoW, meaning that a battleground will be comprised of people from multiple realms (or servers). A list can be seen here. In SWG, it has been stated numerous times that inter-server PvP is not doable, despite being requested by the community for years.

Leveling
In Star Wars Galaxies, there are 3 different types of experience: social, combat, and craft. Only one set of professions can earn crafting experience, only one single profession can earn social experience, and only one set of professions can earn combat experience. There professions (or classes) are simple, yet leveling can be repetitive and boring. Most of the player base, when faced with rolling a new toon prefer to do it AFK, with the assistance of players who have already hit the 90 level cap. Which would make it seem that one of the few “end-games” in SWG is PvP. Quests can be boring, long, and more often than not there is little reward. (Go to location B, kill x amount of creatures, come back, turn in quest, maybe get a piece of equipment that is subpar in comparison to nonquest related rewards.) Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t quest rewards that are valuable – it’s just that the bulk of the rewards given during the leveling process are usually horrible, and not even worth junking.

In World of Warcraft, each player can learn 2 main professions on top of their chosen class (for instance, a Warrior can also learn mining and skinning in order to obtain materials to sell on the AH (Auction House) to make gold (money) in order to keep his items repaired or buy that next mount he’s been keeping his eye on.) There are also 2 other professions that can be leveled aside the combat. One of these is first aid. Questing can be different for each class, and the rewards given from quests are actually somewhat needed. (They may be upgrades to your current weapon or armor or they may be trinkets and gold.)

And while both games support instances, the systems for entering the instances and what levels you can be effective (and how your team is comprised) are unique to each game. Star Wars Galaxies allows for an 8 person group. You can have as many of any profession that you want in any instance (7 Commandos and 1 Medic, for instance) or you can have 2. However, each instance must be traveled to by vehicle/foot/group pickup point. In WoW, instancing is done in the same way that the battleground queue is done. You can queue for an instance as either tank (will be taking most of the damage so to keep the rest of the group alive), a healer (the person keeping the group alive with heals and spells) or damage (one of the people responsibility for dealing damage to whatever the tank is keeping at bay.) Each team will be comprised of 3 damage, 1 tank, and 1 healer. At all times. Once your group has been formed, you will be prompted to enter the instance, and then you wait while everyone else accepts. You are then transported to the instance, and once you are done, you are transported back to where you were before you left.

A list of SWG instances and dungeons can be found at those links. World of Warcraft instances can be found here.

The modding community
In Star Wars Galaxies, mods are frowned on by the devs. They are not supported in any way. In World of Warcraft, the modding community is alive and strong and the mods themselves, while not officially supported, are supported in a way on the forums. Mods can be installed to WoW via the Curse client, and once installed, can be managed by in-game options, and can be turned off and on via a new option on the character select screen called “Addons”.

Buying and selling in-game currency
In SWG, the act of buying credits with real world money is not only frowned upon, it is a bannable offense. If found to be buying credits, a user can have their account banned for an indefinite period of time. In WoW, quite the opposite is true. Accounts can be banned for selling gold, but not for purchasing it.

Graphics and lag
Having played on both higher population servers and lower population servers on SWG (from Ahazi to Bria to Starsider to Chilastra), one of the most serious offenses this game will throw at you is the sheer amount of lag that can accompany any battle, no matter how well you built your gaming rig. The development staff has taken the position that it is all client side, and has never addressed that it may be the aging hardware and software of the game itself. Which, in most cases, it is. Constant downtimes for the most populated of servers and lag so game breaking that it can root you in place for 5 seconds at a time or more, and reduce your frame-rate to that of a Powerpoint presentation slideshow, SWG, while boasting PvP as its endgame, is definitely not built to handle it gracefully. Most of the blame can be laid on the NGE, which sped up game combat, meaning more processes for the system to handle, meaning more delays in client-server communication, which results in the lag that has plagued this game for over 4 years with no end in sight. Some of the suggestions to cut down on lag have been to reduce graphic quality, which in doing so, will make an already dated looking game look, well – even more dated.

WoW, on the other hand, can be played with almost no lag without having to mess with the graphics options. I myself play with maxed out graphics and have yet to experience any of the game breaking lag I experienced in SWG, no matter where in the game I may be. An occasional server hiccup may occur every once in a while, but you are kept informed of what is going on. Unlike in SWG, where the server may or may not be up, and you may or may not be informed of whether or not it is being looked into (at least, not until the forums have been bogged down with 9k posts about how the servers are down. Then maybe the devs will see it fit to get off their asses and take a look at the problem.)

I could go on
but why should I? After 6 years in SWG, I can honestly say that the better game, based on these points alone, is World of Warcraft. With no expansion planned for SWG, a new Star Wars based MMO about to launch, a player base that is filled with people so jaded they don’t even know why they even still play the game, and an aging system that is not being updated any time soon (along with a dwindling development staff, failed money grab attempt known as TCG, continued loss of subscriptions, continued ignoring of the lower level population servers, continued ignoring of the bugs that have been present since day 1, and no real new content planned), SWG is currently, in my opinion, barely treading water.

If you are currently playing SWG, I can give you one good solid piece of advice: forget all of the time you just spent on your character – if you want to keep your sanity, get out now. Get out while you still can. SWG is a sinking boat that only the naive are still standing upon, yelling defiantly in denial there’s nothing wrong here! everything is fine!

A month or so ago also saw the launch of Everafterdisaster.com. News and updates for EAD will be posted here (and you can also listen to the full catalog as well, although download links have been removed for an unknown amount of time.)

I have also pretty much kicked SWG out of my life completely, logging in every now and then to grab 15 minutes or so of some laggy-as-hell PVP action before deciding that I’m bored with that aging and pitiful game. I’ve also been rolling 3 toons on WoW (Blackhand): a Rogue, a Paladin, and a Death Knight. And I have to admit, the DK is a lot of fun to play.

As has been updated over at Everafterdisaster.com, I am working on a new album. Exact details and information aren’t available as of yet, and it’s taking a bit longer to spit out new material than I had originally planned. To give you an idea, I’ve spent a few months on one song, tweaking it in certain areas, and changing certain tones. It’s not that I’m being a perfectionist – I’m simply aiming for a sound that I haven’t quite found yet.

I’ve also managed to put on an extra 5-10 pounds. It looks like my morning jogs will have to be re-enacted. This pooch is just not healthy for my self-image! I’m really not that vain, but seeing my stomach start to sludge out in areas that it never did before is just something I can’t have.

Bits of who I used to be.

I can see these bits and pieces and I can wonder to myself about who that person is, or was, that is looking out at those things that are so fragmented and tattered. I wish I could remember what it was like to be me. I wish I could recapture was it was to feel the way I did.

We are all unique in the sense that we see and hear things differently from one another. We are unique in the sense that our perception of the world around us is unique to our own minds, which are, in turn, themselves unique. No one person exactly the same as the next.

And that’s a problem. Isn’t it? Because one day you’re going to wake up and you’re going to realize that there is no other person who will be able to share in your view of the world around you. There is no one person who will be able to see things in the same light as you, or feel things in the same way as you. There is no one person who will be able to share in the world in the same way that you live within it.

This is nobody’s fault. Don’t read this the wrong way; I am not assigning blame. I am simply mourning for the utter lack of actual and honest understanding between two or more people. I’m not mad or angered by this; I am saddened. It’s a horrible thing to come to this realization early on in life – you start to realize that not only is there not a single other living human being that will be able to share in your view of the world, but in fact, there are so many more years of this existence to weather through that fact.

So many more decades of existing in a world that, for all intents and purposes, is a model of your own creation, sprinkled with elements of simple and meaningless human interaction. Sure, some interactions may hold more meaning than others, but it’s kind of like being stranded in the middle of nowhere and waiting for your friend to come pick you up, when the only person you have on your speed dial is yourself.

In the late 1990s, the COPINE project (“Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe”) at the University of Cork, in cooperation with the Paedophile Unit of the London Metropolitan Police, developed a typology to categorize child abuse images for use in both research and law enforcement. The ten-level typology was based on analysis of images available on websites and internet newsgroups. Other researchers have adopted similar ten-level scales. In 2002 in the UK, the Sentencing Advisory Panel adapted the COPINE scale to five levels and recommended its adoption for sentencing guidelines, omitting levels 1 to 3 and recommending that levels 4 to 6 combine as sentencing level 1 and that the four levels from 7 to 10 each form an individual severity level, for a total of 5 sentencing stages. (source)

So what are Levels 1 to 3?

1. Indicative: Non-erotic and non-sexualised pictures showing children in their underwear, swimming costumes from either commercial sources or family albums. Pictures of children playing in normal settings, in which the context or organisation of pictures by the collector indicates inappropriateness.
2. Nudist: Pictures of naked or semi-naked children in appropriate nudist settings, and from legitimate sources.
3. Erotica: Surreptitiously taken photographs of children in play areas or other safe environments showing either underwear or varying degrees of nakedness.

Confused? You should be. By definition, the picture in question can not be “child pornography”. In order for a picture to qualify as pornographic, it has to first have been verified to have been produced in order to stimulate the viewer in a sexual manner. Shots like these (the so-called Celeb Crotch Shot “Ooops” shots) are not actually produced for that affect; they are produced in order to catch celebrities unaware. They are embarrassing moments that just happen to be caught at the right time.

But she’s only 17!

So was she. Thora Birch, in American Beauty, at the age 17, baring both of her breasts, in an Oscar award winning mainstream film. Yes, there is a certain level of context and consent to this, but the argument is still the same: she’s 17. (And nude, whereas the Miley Cyrus picture in question, Miley is fully clothed.)

The truth is: the Miley Cyrus oops! photo is not child pornography. And anybody who is riding the platform that it is is just trying to latch on to the coattails of a recent controversy in order to hear themselves talk. And once we strip away that lie from the whole thing? It becomes just another photograph, taken at just the right moment in time, immortalized on the internet. But that’s not very exciting now, is it?

And she is right to an extent. I have to have faith in the people preparing my food, but only because I can’t go into the back and make it myself. I can’t guarantee for myself to 100% accuracy that my burger isn’t going to be spit on for some unknown reason unless I make it myself. And even if I do make it myself, I have to have some level of faith that the meat that I’m preparing it with passed some sort of inspection and is relatively disease free. I have to have some level of faith in the people who keep the instruments needed to prepare the burger to keep said instruments clean.

Which is true. We have to relinquish some level of control throughout our lives to the people around us in some capacity. However, in doing so, we are also placing some level of responsibility upon these people. If, say, my burger were to come out with spit on it, I would be able to place a level of blame and accountability on the person who made it. And this is where my perception of what religious faith is becomes personally clear.

With religious faith, there is no accountability. People can (and often will) do whatever they want and place all responsibility for it on their God, and on their faith. Where I could lay blame on the person who made my burger for the spit on it, who am I to blame when some extremist blows up half a city block in the name of God? When a person refuses to see a doctor for an illness they have for the sake of religion, who are we to blame when they die of that illness? The person, or their belief system? The family, for not intervening? Society?

When you place all accountability on an idea, who is really taking responsibility for the actions that take place?

Some day.

Having gone back in time, he takes a ride in a car parked outside of the facility.
Being run off of the road by a red van, he wraps his face in bandages.
He soon realizes he is the man in bandages who attacked him.
He makes the woman entice him to come looking for.
He then attacks himself, where Hector 2 (his past self) runs to the facility.
He goes to his house chasing after the woman, trying to explain himself.
He chases her upstairs, and then she falls from the roof and dies.
He gets on the walkie talkie and convinces the man at the facility to make Hector 2 get into the time machine.
He shows back up, and explains everything.

He then finds out that Hector 3 had gone back before him and told the man to keep him from going back in time.
He convinces the man to send him back.
Back in the past, he comes out and convinces the man to play along with his scheme (effectively becoming Hector 3).
He goes ahead and gets in a red van and runs Hector 2(3?)(4?) off of the road in an attempt to stop the chain of events from unfolding.
Having been run off of the road, Hector 2 wraps himself in bandages, and proceeds with the plan to lure Hector 1 into the woods.
After running Hector 2 off of the road, Hector 4(?) crashes. The girl finds him after escaping from Hector 2 (Bandaged Hector).
They go to his house, where he instructs her to run to the attic and hide from Bandaged Hector.
He throws a table at the other Hector coming up the stairs.
Instead of missing, like the first time, he gets hit.

The girl falls from the roof like she did before, and the movie ends with Hector 4 (1?) sitting on the lawn with his wife,
leaving Bandaged Hector to go back to the facility and scare the other Hector into getting into the tank.

Here’s what I have a problem with:
When we start the movie, and Hector breaks into the facility for the “first time”, the calendar is already on the wall. The same calendar the man had used to explain to him the meaning of the timeline. Which is all fine and well since we later find out that Hector 4 (or 3…?) had already had this explained to him “earlier”. However, since we start the movie off with “this” Hector, it would suggest that he had nothing at all to do with the sequence of events that unfolded after (we start with him leaving the store, coming home, receiving a phone call from himself, and then viewing the girl through the binoculars, where he then goes to find her, and the events of the movie begin to truly unfold from this point on.)

So if we can call the store “Point A” (the beginning), then how did he get the girl to undress to coax him into finding her in the first place? Had this not happened, he wouldn’t have gone after her, and he wouldn’t have ended up in the time machine. If he never ended up in the time machine, he would have never had to come up with a plan to lure himself into the woods to begin with.

In other words, what lead him to the time machine in the first place to set up the sequence of events for the rest of the film?

Nothing. And just like the junk e-mail filter I have on my email account, your comments will continue to be deleted on this blog and every other active non-spam blog in existence. So, by all means, continue pushing the product that nobody cares about.

And we’ll just keep deleting your comments. Way to accomplish nothing, spammers. You really are the most useless things on the Internet.