Hello again, my friends. I hope that more of you have been able to experience all that is SWTOR, as more early access e-mail came out today and yesterday. Me? I'm still working on pushing my wife to the limits by totally ignoring her. So far, she's been awesome about it.

I did a lot of cool stuff yesterday, but I will save talking about some of it for other updates. Today I want to talk about two cool things I played with yesterday: flashpoints and crew skills.

The later first: crew skills are pretty sweet. I have this big f'in dude named Khel or Khal or something. I click a button, pay 90 or so credits, and six minutes later he comes back with some mat that I can sell on the AH for 150 cred. Not bad. Or I can click a button and he goes away and crafts something for me, like a sweet Rolex watch or a Jedi belt buckle. The concept is a very nice change of pace from the boring crafting in games like WoW where you sit there and mash buttons all day.

I didn't pay much attention to the crew skills I took. I went with Synthweaving, Archeology, and Underworld Trading. They seem to work well together. I'll go back and play around with it more later, but I am impressed with the concept. It's well done and I can see how Bioware stuck to their "keep players in the action" mantra. No more sitting down to craft crap when I'd rather be questing.

So, all during the first flashpoint I visited, I was sending my crew off to make me money. Sweeeeetz.

Speaking of Flashpoints, I played through Black Talon yesterday. I was quite pleased with how it went. I've worried for a while that this would be KOTOR online with no real group interaction, but the Flashpoint I did was rather excellent. We had to work as a team to take things down, and it felt like I was a part of all the action, rather than just having to stick to "click healz lol click healz lol." The storyline was fun to boot.

The most surprising part is that the flashpoint conversation structure works. We had a couple options to be evil and kill people, and it was awesome when all three of us picked the dark choice. The game actually showed one of us pulling out a gun and blowing some dude away. Awesome. I was glad to see the conversation flowed, no matter who was involved. You can tell Bioware took a ton of time to develop this concept, and it works. The Flashpoint was tied into my questline, and it really, really played out nicely.

The guild is still doing awesome by the way. So am I, which may be the cause of at least part of the guild awesomeness.

Jac's tip of the day: make sure you bind at all bindpoints. When you use your Call Shuttle ability you will get a choice of all places you have bound to return to, not just the most recent one. This is a huge one-up on WoW's hearth city concept.

Peace,

Jac