The Unstoppable Force

Viera Comm, I love a cool scythe!

and why is there like NO other content apart from some abandoned fics and 4+ hour long YouTube videos of peoples game play. where is the fanart!? the ships!? WHERE ARE MY BABIES!?

There's a lot of completed fic out there, it's just usually a few years old at this point, and there's a lot of fanart, it's just also older. A lot of former swtor blogs (like myself) moved on to other games over the years after swtor kept getting worse. It got SO bad that the game was recently taken away from Bioware and given to another studio. THAT bad.

There were a number of contributing dev-factors to many in the fandom packing their bags and leaving. I don't know where you are in the story, so I don't want to spoil things for you, but basically all the story content after KotFE was... divisive, to say the least. It was pretty clear that the devs didn't give a damn about the years of story they'd built anymore, and for players that did care about companion characters, they were given pretty insulting narrative endings for almost all of them, drawn out over the course of irl years. For those playing non-force classes, it also felt as though the story was suddenly completely irrelevant to them - If you sign up to play Boba Fett, you're gonna be confused and probably disappointed when the story suddenly makes you be Luke Skywalker.

It looks like people have mentioned this in the notes, so I won't go too into detail on it, but the harassment. Oh my GOD the harassment. Fleet chat became a nightmare of slurs and bigotry, and it wasn't always like that, it was, like a lot of what the devs did, a slow frog boil.

Then there's the stuff that actually made people keep playing the game, the mechanical stuff that the devs started letting go. First, the economy became a nightmare. FtP players were capped at a ridiculously low amount of credits and prices skyrocketed to the point where if you weren't actively money farming as a subscriber, the GTN was unusable. Abilities that were rp-focused or immersed you in the class started to be removed - Infamously, people were really sad to see Sith Marauders lose the force choke ability. The release of 7.0 honestly broke the combat system and so for many removed the reason they'd log in every week. For anyone who was into the raiding scene, your raid team was basically thrown back to beginner level by how badly the new combat worked. The weekly rewards system being so limited (idk what it's like now, but it was really bad for the first year) made players feel as though they were being shoved towards content they didn't want to play, like galactic starfighter.

Fandom-specifically, there was kind of all the usual stuff you see on tumblr - the bad actors, the toxicity/harassment, the ship wars. It wasn't really that much worse than what you see in any other fandom, but the small size of the fandom made it stand out for some people, and there were some popular creators/writers who ended up just sort of throwing in the towel, and all of it was of course happening at the same time as the devs were torching their own game. I know for me personally, once I finished my longfic in 2022, I did it with kind of the sense that it might be the last thing I did in the fandom. I'd finished my passion project and was finding, as a lot of fandoms do, that creativity and passion are really difficult to sustain when the source material is actively being ruined

I have lots of fond memories of swtor and I will always love it because it gave me friends that I still talk to to this day. Still love my characters and my strongholds.

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

So in case anyone needs it: