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The Galactic Drift

Hollows: What will become of Rachel Morgan?

Oh Rachel Morgan, what is going to happen to you? You’re not the white earth witch we met in Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison. Now you’re tainted with demon smut and, it would seem, contain some demon DNA.

Sometimes when reading a series, it’s easy to forget how little time actually passed. It seems as if Rachel should have more of her life figured out by now. She’s still a bit clueless at relationships (no love triangle, thank goodness). She lacks finesse. The Ivy question feels as if it will never end. 

Rachel Morgan is one of the better female leads in fantasy literature. She made a difficult choice at the beginning of the series to set out on her own. She works as a witch detective/apprehension agent with the living vampire, Ivy, and the pixie, Jenks. She continues to make sacrifices for those she loves and cares about at the expense of her status and soul. Gone is the pure gold, now stained with black.

What makes Rachel’s story so appealing is the setting and morality issues. The story takes place in an alternate reality where thousands of humans died from contaminated genetically modified tomatoes. When the humans began to die out, Interlanders (vampires, werewolves, pixies, witches, warlocks, ect) saved the race. Now the two groups live in a somewhat peaceful, if separate, setting. The Interlanders walk around as the humans do. Most stories like Harry Potter and Twilight require the magical or mythical creatures to live in hiding. The combination of the two worlds adds a touch of intrigue. 

Rachel starts out using earth magic, determine to keep her aura smut-free. Her charm use is quite impressive. It’s clear that those who use darker forms of magic can wield a more obvious power, but Rachel doesn’t want to go there. That is, until she has no choice to save those around her. She eventually finds herself in a situation that requires dealing with demons, namely Algaliarept. Where as many would willing give into the temptation to embrace all the power demon magic has to offer with no qualms, Rachel works to maintain as much of her white witch beliefs as possible. 

She does use demon magic a little too often as the books continue, but the core of Rachel still exists. The demon magic question causes readers to think about ends justifying the means. Is it acceptable to taint your soul to help a friend recover his wayward son? What about to save yourself from an eternity in the demon’s land, the ever-after? Do the facts regarding Rachel’s relationship with demons regarding her DNA give her the right to harness ley line magic?

The cure for Rachel’s blood disease opened her up to a different set of rules than regular witches. As there are no others like her, she’s held to the same standards as the other witches. Revealing her heritage would only harm her more. Despite being shunned and disowned, she continues to do everything possible to save those who need help.

SWTOR: BioWare, we need server mergers

SWTOR needs server merges. 

Yesterday around 4:45 p.m. EST, 11 players were on the Republic Fleet and 100 on the Imperial Fleet. Yes, other players were on other planets, their ships and other locations, but 11 is still a horrible number for that time of day. The server I play on isn’t one of the smaller ones, either.

The players need server merges just as much as BioWare does. There’s no way to balance out the number of Republic and Empire players. More people play Empire, especially Sith Inquisitors it seems. As Star Wars fans know, the Dark Side is more seductive. Force Lightening looks cooler. Chocking someone in the Force creates a Darth Vader moment. Quite frankly, the imbalance doesn’t matter. Huttball makes the PVP queues more bearable for the abundant Empire players, as they can play themselves. 

It’s incredibly difficult to find a group for a Flashpoint or a full PVP during certain points of the day due to the sheer lack of players per server. Not only do group activities suffer, but also the Galactic Trade Market. Finding gear, mods and other items is an incredible challenge when nothing is up for sale. 

BioWare needs to merge the servers before they lose more players. The key aspect of MMORPG is the interactions with other people. While the game needed more servers back at launch, this is no longer the case. Trim the numbers down. 

Weekend evenings see more players logged on both sides. It’s the rest of the time that suffers the greatest. Players want to see scads of features, like dungeon finder and cross-server PVP, but none contains the urgency like server merges do. 

Some players reroll characters on other servers. Many of us don’t want to redo the entire class story and that should not be necessary. As customers, it’s not our job to find workarounds for such an issue. Playing guess what server contains a high amount of players on a regular basis is frustrating, pointless and annoying. Players needed to redo the same classes repeatedly just to interact more with other players will not keep current players or attract new ones. 

Server merges benefit everyone. The players aren’t scrambling for others. BioWare eradicates the risk of losing subscriptions due to frustrated customers leaving because there aren’t enough people online. It will take a bit of tech time, but in the end, it can only improve the gameplay experience.