It’s been nearly a year since Empire in Flames was launched on May the 4th, (be with you)! I asked the staff and contributors of EiF to share a memory from SWG with me. To launch our Anniversary Week of Events! (AWE!) we are hosting a ball based upon my memory! There are a lot of events planned all over the galaxy, so pay attention to next Friday’s Feature, the Holonews Terminals, and the Discord channels!

Sandarie (Community Manager)
So many memories, but one which always stands out is the one that launched me (pun intended) into the Piloting RP community back on Starsider. I was going to quit playing SWG because I’d not found a good niche. I was an incredibly newb RPer and really had only been in SWG for a couple months. I was determined to learn to fly a starfighter before I quit though and spent hours on the SWG Pilot forums where I noticed Codyman was throwing one of his infamous parties in the Lucky Despot in Mos Eisley. People from all the servers were planning to attend, so I thought? “Why not do this before I quit?”

Whoa… when I got there, the server was soooooo lagged from the hundreds of people in attendance. I was in awe walking around and seeing the “famous” people from the Pilot forums. One in particular struck up a conversation with me, but the scroll from spatial chat was extreme. We formed a group and chatted ICly for the rest of the evening.

The next day on the Pilot forums I saw a lot of discussion about Leaph and the mysterious blue Twi’lek who stood around all night gazing into each other’s eyes. Suddenly, I’d gone from a nobody to a novelty. That single event changed my life, ICly and OOCly. It lead me to meeting Halyn, impersonating Abi in an intense RP, getting to know Anishor, and eventually Kelta! Now all 10 or so years later, it’s led me to EiF!

Wefi (Asset Contributor)
The thing that kept me in SWG after the NGE. I was lucky enough to play all versions of the Game, I also would make new characters on different servers to try out different things. This was true with the CU. I made a character on Radiant and in the NGE I made a toon on Naritus, Wefi.

I wasn’t too keen on the forums at the time, so I had little knowledge of the NGE. When I came back in December, I eagerly made Wefi, my Jedi. I met couple of players, even had a small guild at one point. But one time in Restuss’  new starport, before the city went boom, I ran into a player named Cye. He invited me into Dogs of War, a PvP guild based around family ideals. I was by far the youngest member. The guild took me in and showed me how to basically PvP in the new system. I came to the server as a nobody, but became one of the better known PvP’ers.

I don’t recall the waypoint on Corellia where we held our city, but we spend most of our time in Restuss. We were often the driving force behind the late night PvP. We defended the GCW bases on Naboo, Corellia, and Talus. If there was PvP to be held, we were there.

Savage (Continuity Contributor)
When I first started playing SWG, starting out on the Naritus server, I definitely thought the game was neat, but I was having trouble finding a niche of my own. I wasn’t sure what to do with my character, or where I was going in general. I was pretty clueless.

Then one day, I was walking through Mos Eisley heading to the bank/bazaar terminals near the Cantina after running some missions. There in the middle of the street I saw a group of players in full stormtrooper armor, acting like Stormtroopers. This was my first introduction into roleplaying. For some reason, it had never occured to me people would really fully immerse themselves into characters in the game, let alone as stormtroopers. I didn’t even know it was possible to get the armor- which I had always loved as a Star Wars fan.

I immediately started talking them up, asking them all sorts of questions. It wasn’t long after that they invited me to join their RP stormtrooper unit, helping me to level up, save money, and eventually buy my own set of stormtrooper armor to allow me to join in on the fun. This started seven years of adventures in stormtrooper roleplaying that would last my entire time in the game and introduce me to roleplaying as a whole, becoming the thing in Star Wars Galaxies that would give me the most joy and help me meet some amazing people.

Anishor (Combat Balance Developer)
There’s really only one spot I can point to, and that’s Chalmun’s Cantina.  This place was the center of starting some of the greatest RPs I had the pleasure of being apart of.  So many memories. It’s where Anishor and Halyn went from being compatriots to real friends. It’s where Anishor defied a cult of Sith to redeem a friend, twice with two different people.  It’s where the ‘three amigos’ formed. It’s where the Eisley crime wars happened and Anishor and another wookiee who’s purple and green fur will never be forgotten, Bycem talked and helped the non-wookiees who were being intimidated by the large criminal elements and sparred with trandoshans from one of the earlier slaver guilds. T’Dosk

Abi (In-game Items Developer)
My earliest memory of Star Wars Galaxies was during the first week or so of live. There were hardly any player houses around because everyone was still figuring out what to do and how to do it, and working so hard on levelling up. I was working on Medic/Doc at the time and ran into a Mon Cal Architect and we got to chatting while I was healing him. I wanted a house super bad, and he just wanted XP to keep levelling, so we reached an agreement. I brought him all the resources to craft a house and he’d call it even.

I spent a bunch of time hand sampling everything I needed to make a Small Corellian House, and we met up one afternoon and made the exchange. I gave him the resources, he did some crafting and I walked away with a Small Corellian House, Style 2. I had already picked out the perfect spot and started swimming west of Coronet, to an isolate island. It was bare of structures and I claimed it as my own, placing my house next to a tree on a small hill near the western beach of the island, and then logged out for the evening – satisfied with my new home in the game.

When I logged in the next day, there was a guild hall almost immediately in the middle of the island behind my house, and I cussed and cursed those fools for taking *my* home. I was here first, and they weren’t going to run me off. A few days later I ran into someone coming to that guildhall, and I went to go give him a piece of my mind. We ended up chatting and found out that the guild was a bunch of friends from other Star Wars games, they were Rebel aligned and were totally happy to have me along for the ride, and so I joined RSPA thanks to a guy named Xtremegene.

It was in this guild that I eventually went on to meet many of my online friends, including Anishor, Halyn, Sandarie and then Kelta. Without this key moment and this location I doubt that I would even be here working on EiF.

Kelta (Lead Developer Support)
When I started playing Live, Halyn already had his group of friends established and everyone he knew was a level 90. I was obviously grinding a new character by myself, so to keep me company, Halyn went and purchased me a pet. I clicked on this egg in my inventory; there was a cracking noise with green slime shooting into the air and my narglatch appeared in front of me. She was so adorable that I was instantly smitten and thus began my obsession with pets. I was determined to learn everything I could about my pet so that I could have those coveted green eyes. (And XP bonus!) I traveled to Moenia, Naboo, pulled her out, and her eyes went from blue to green! Naboo was her favorite planet and as I spent a lot of time there leveling, it became one of mine too.

Zephyr Base on Rori is where the rest of all my memories originate. Halyn was running the flight academy Rara Avis from there when I joined in late NGE. Eventually he would start a guild named HAZE. It was there I met Sandarie, Blue, Anishor, and Abi, gunned at Saturday night PVP events, and began to roleplay. As a member of HAZE, I interacted with the majority of the pilot community and made many friends. The transient nature of the guild concept–join, become a better pilot, leave once you were trained–meant that a lot of my friends left to join other guilds. But the core group remained. I have many friends that I would not know; dozens of rp memories that never would have existed; and a relationship that might never have become a marriage if I hadn’t spent time at that base on Rori. For those reasons, Rori is my other favorite planet.

Blue (Andarta) (Website and Forum Co-Manager)
My favorite memory is tied to a place I can’t go back to, a time I can’t go back to.  Another expansion had come out for the TCG, and with it all the new loot. In that month’s free pack I pulled the rare piece for the pack’s build-an-item, the Cloud City house.  I quickly searched the market and bought up the vastly more common (and cheaper) parts to build the deed. The house was plopped outside the city limits of our de-facto factional headquarters surrounding the Rori rebel outpost, AKA Zephyr Base.  After wandering around inside I was struck with the idea to decorate it as a new briefing hall for our weekly events and RP, and got to work. Halyn eventually approved of the idea and we managed to make the thing fit next to the old one in the notoriously unforgiving rori terrain, and our flagship “MC-40 Virtue” was born.  Within a week I had it done up, in a style reminiscent of the ROTJ briefing on Home One. Players were floored but it wasn’t until the next Saturday when it really sunk in. Not for the first time ever, but often for the first time in a long while, it really felt like Star Wars. We were there, in that universe, existing. It was all the more important because it was something I had built myself.  Not the devs, or lucas. Me. It was part of what made SWG really special. The hall is long gone, as is much of that community, but that first night we used it still sticks with me. Still proud of that deco job too (and I have a very potato recording of walking through it. The key room is the top https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u-ZGEXo3hg)

Violet (Original Art Contributor)
I recall the first day I entered the Dark Enclave and they took PvP that seriously that they were having training sessions and sparring tournaments in the enclave to remain fresh and well practiced. They had a sort of room for newbies to PvP, and a sparring room for the pro’s.

I remember stepping in and seeing a Dark Jedi Oppressor giving some advice or a lecture on how to maintain control of posture in a fight. My turn came to duel him, it was hard, but this was one of the ways I learned to fight and eventually rose to Templar III until I was teaching on my own.

Dax (Quest Developer for SII and EiF)
Coming out of Beta and going live with SWG was an amazing adventure.  So many new players all trying to understand and have fun with the new MMO. My main character, Daxamatic, was experimenting with different professions, trying to find that right build.

When the first Jedi was announced, it was pretty exciting among the players in our group.  Really not knowing what triggered it, we all speculated as we keep playing. Wanting to build items and deeds for my guild, I switched over to something new, Architect, my sixth profession.
Grinding away and taking breaks to travel to the POIs near my harvesters to keep it from being boring. With the last round of resource gathering on Corellia, Daxamatic ground out last of the XP.  Going into CNet I called out for training from a Master Architect. The shock of becoming glowy had me literally sitting at the keyboard.

Realizing that I needed to do something next, I quickly read online what was thought we needed to do.  Traveling with my new character as fast with no protection or skills, as fast I could, I arrived at the Jedi shrine south of Tryenna and at sunset, knelt and began my journey under, back then, the perma-death system which forced me into the wilderness and great adventures.

Halyn (Lead Developer and EiF Owner)
Anchorhead, Tatooine, was where I started my journey. The game launched in June; I joined in October and, like many newbies, made my way to Tatooine to start my journey.

Most of the first month was spent attempting to run missions and level and gain enough faction points to join the Rebel Alliance, while failing to be caught in the crossfire between Rebel and Imperial PvPers during the infamous base busting wars outside Anchorhead at that time.

To this day, the character creation/login music takes me back to a thousand stories…stories that all began, in some way, at Anchorhead.

Lasko (Sunrunner II Developer and EiF Contributor)
Awesome….. joined shortly after start
Mos Espa was my home for ages
Still my fave place

EiF Community!
Leave your memories here! From live or something from the past year with EiF. If you can, include a location! There will be a small commemorative gift for those who leave a memory.

Sandarie
Community Manager