I wonder sometimes why, with all the entertainment that we now have at our fingertips, we come back to Star Wars Galaxies. I guess in my mind it is a story, every moment I spend in the game, even the grind, I can imagine as an alternate reality in which I’m part of a bigger epic. At least that is what I tell myself when the hours slip away.
‘I remember friends that seem like I knew them an entire lifetime, and yet when I focus, I realize that it was only a matter of weeks or months that they were in my life before they were gone…’ Jericho Knox
I made a new friends list when I began the EMU because I wanted to at least have a connection to the place, even if the people I met weren’t truly my friends. When I’d played the previous times, my friends list would be a wasteland and it always spun me into a melancholy mood when I viewed it. However, this time around, I figured there would only be the hardcore players, the ones like me who refused to quit, so this list would always have ‘color’ to it. Over the first week in August 2015 I collected about two dozen names on that list. When I logged yesterday, as many days over the past months, not a single name was aglow. The only one that lasted more than a month was a player from Turkey, and with all that is going on there I fear for him and doubt I’ll see him again even if he wanted to return.
I looked at the houses, so many you can’t leave a city without entering another city, and wondered about all the folks who must have come back, built, adventured, and then left again. I can only guess that they got credits, loaded the bulk in their houses, and then come back every nine months to put more money in so their shit doesn’t delete. Maybe they are waiting for Jump to Light Speed. Maybe quests (which BTW I was ecstatic to see had been added), or maybe they are geeky collectors who can’t let things go. Whatever the case, I move around these towns and wonder at them. I did this with New Mandalore yesterday on Talus, and couldn’t help but be both impressed and saddened by it. When I played on Tarq all those years ago there was a town right where New Mandalore is called Twinloch that I called home for a time. A good spot for a town I guess, but as dead as the rest, so I walk alone… the grey buildings reminiscent of my unlit friends list.