- Miguel Lopez, 8. November/2005, Gamespy, Star Wars Galaxies: A New Hope?

Later in 2004 I decided to give SWG another go, this time I decided to play on a European server instead of a US server that I had started on.

I picked Chimaera and my new character Rylec was born. Rylec still exists and I still play him occationally although I have little time for him these days.

As with all my SWG characters (back then) Rylec also became a creature handler and rifleman - and he was also a rare pet hunter!

After playing the lone wolf game for some time I read that the guild BEAST that Tivo had co-founded was opening up chapters on any server that was able to find sufficient numbers to start the guild there. As I really respected Tivo for his contributions on the Creature Handler forum I decided that I might eventually try to establish his guild on Chimaera.

I was however beaten to the deed by Tor’Dallen - which probably wasn’t a bad thing *grins*

Tor’Dallen was a Bothan, a dog like race. Surprisingly fast he managed to get the necessary players to form the guild and build a small settlement called ‘BEAST Haven’ on Lok that we creature handlers would call home.

I remained in BEAST for the rest of my (then) SWG career and was probably the guild’s most devoted rare pet hunter, always trying to ‘convert’ any of the new BEAST members to join my ‘craft’ *grins*.

Tor’Dallen was a good guild leader and he did manage to arrange a few events. Sadly the guild imploded when the creature handler profession was removed from the game and most of us left the game. In the memory of his lost friends he named statues in their honours and put them in a special memorial museum in remembrance of the profession.

Although Tor’Dallen suddenly found himself all alone in the BEAST chapter he did not disband the guild. Instead he put it into hibernation.

Today Tor’Dallen can be found on the server Naritus where he is exploring the world of the beast master - the recently added but heavily watered down versions of the old creature handler and bioengineer professions.

But he still talks about the day when the creature handlers will return to the Chimaera and he can restore BEAST to its former glory… 

Yoda once mentioned that anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering. What does quiet resignation lead to?’

- Mike Musgrove, www.washingtonpost.com, 2. February/2006, Sadness in ‘Star Wars’ World

I never met Tivo Tenook, but he probably made a greater impact on my gaming than anyone. He was a rare pet hunter and by some strange twist of fate I would end up actually owning two of his pets long after he left the game.

Tivo played a Twi’lek on the Lowca server and if anyone he fought the battle between the Creature Handlers and SoE. He was one of those people that just didn’t go ’shrug, that is the way it is so I better adapt and get on with it…’ Eventually, this attitude would get him banned from the official forums but that happened to a LOT of people back in those days *grins*

He was most known for creating the cross server Creature Handler guild BEAST and for putting together the un-official *Updated list of Rare Pets* that he maintained on the official forums: 

The Nearly Impossible to Find Pets:

• wild dune boar (CL 50)
• malignant squill (CL 50)

The Rare Pets:

• arachne widow (CL 58)
• mantigrue screecher (CL 55)
• merek deaths head (CL 56)
• gaping spider queen (CL 47)

Other Hard To Find Pets:

• thune grassland guardian (CL 40)
• swamp stalker (CL 32)
• prowling gurreck (CL 45)

Pets For The Novice Rare Hunter:

• rhoa kwi pack leader (CL 50)
• rhoa kwi guardian (CL 45)
• gurreck (CL 50)
• wasteland cupa (CL 19)
• bark mite burrower collector (CL 36)
• piket longhorn (CL 37)
• kinad baz nitch (CL 46)
• desert vesp (CL 30)
• kliknik hunter (CL 31)

The Extinct Pets:

• frenzied graul
• king merek harvester
• queen merek harvester
• kliknik queen
• plains hunter
• bloodseeker mite queen
• bark mite burrower
• bark mite burrower queen
• giant peko peko
• dalyrake matriarch
• cannibal dewback
• kliknik queen harvester
• spineflap queen
• deranged wrix
• massive gnort
• meek avenging squall
• narglatch matriarch
• domestic tusk cat
• nym’s kusak guardian
• plodding falumpaset
• motley kaadu
• lurking angler

Most Uncommon Pets:

• giant mawgax (CL 32)
• giant veermok (CL 22)
• boar wolf ravager (CL 34)
• mantigrue hunter (CL 38)
• giant angler (CL 35)
• male mamien (CL 19)
• skreeg warrior elite (CL 30)
• male/female swamp tusk cat (CL 17,16)
• canoid hunter (CL 15)
• war gronda (CL 23)
• jundland eopie (CL 10)
• vesp hunter (CL 25)
• riverside sulfer mynock (CL 33)
• sulfer pool mynock (CL 30)
• ravenous roba stalker (CL 40)

Most Wanted List:

• arachne queen
• mantigrue reaper
• merek harvester
• ancient graul
• surefoot brackaset
• blood-drenched merek king
• thune herd leader
• mire marauder
• gronda juggernaut
• fierce piket protector
• slinking voritor hunter
• seething bol crusher
• grizzled dewback
• better creatures from Talus, Rori, Yavin, Naboo, Corellia, and Lok

I was on Eclipse for about 6 months until I for various reasons I can’t remember stopped playing SWG for awhile and when I took up the reins again I would create my new character on the European server Chimaera. But I did manage to tame one rare pet in those six month - the Arachne Widow - a huge spider that lived on Endor.

About a year after SWG had been launched SoE released the first expansion - Jump to Lightspeed, which added virtual space combat to the game. Although this part of the game was quite entertaining, many people couldn’t understand why SoE spent so much time creating a huge new gameplay part of the game and obviously ignored all the many many bugs in the game proper.

Tivo was one of those outraged people and I remember he posted his goodbyes, came back after about a month or so and eventually got banned due to his quite aggressive posts about this subject in the official forums. I later found out he had moved to WoW.

Back on Lowca his guild members and friends build a guild hall in his remembrance in the midst of the plains of Corellia - the hunting grounds for one of the trophy pets, the Great Plains Stalker - a rare pet that Tivo had spent months hunting.

It is funny how many of the people you meet or hear about in these games makes little impact on you and you forget them almost as soon as you loose contact with them, and then there are those that you never really forget. Tivo was one of those people.

- Vince “Moesha” Massa, June 20/2003, www.actiontrip.com - ‘Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided Hands-On’

- So how did it go?, Dillon asked me in a tell as I was headed out of Theed.

I told him and he said he would fix it. One minute later I got a tell from Dredd and I became a member of KON.

KON turned out to be a small casual guild. We build a city in a very nice valley like area on Naboo with a splendid view over bright green grassy plains.

I don’t remember much from my few months in KON. We made a couple of trips to various Points of Interest (mostly known locations from the movies like Luke’s childhood home, Ewok villages, etc.), and one of our members won a Miss Universe of the month cross server beauty contest.

But it was not the guild experience but something totally different that I would discover in this period, something that would become an obsession and my main reason for playing SWG… rare pet hunting!

- Overheard in Coronet Starport, SWG 2004

Mille had been with me for about a week when I decided that I simply had to tell Dillon how much I appreciated his gesture. So next time I saw him get online I sent him a tell to say thanks - and he asked me if I wanted to join his guild…

I reluctantly agreed (I had never been in a guild before and I of course didn’t know anything about his guild beyond that it at least had one decent member) and he told me to travel to the cantina in Theed to meet the leader of the guild so I could get ‘accepted’.

So here I was traveling to Theed on Naboo - towards unknown territory.

The leader of KON (I later learned that these letters were the guild’s initials and stood for Knights of Nii) turned out to be a dancing male Zabrak called Dredd (or similar).

After the initial meet and greet and ’so you want to be a member?’ some other KON members entered the cantina and started to talk to Dredd and before I knew it they all left!

I waited a few minutes to see if they just went to the rest room but no one returned. I was left with no info about whether I had been accepted, if they liked me or if I should go and find another guild instead.

Discouraged I left the cantina and went on my way…

- Travis, 20/12/05, Blog: Just a Few More Minutes by That Chip Guy

It was with a good deal of apprehension that I located the person that was shouting for hides and contacted him. I had no idea about the ‘code of conduct in a mmo interaction process’ so I was fully expecting complete failure and that I would find myself hours later waking up in some ally with no money or hides and small children pointing and laughing at me - one of them running up and kicking me in the but…

None of those things happened.

Dillon was actually a nice guy. We made the trade - he got the hides and I got the credits (SWG money) and I was suddenly rich. Then just about to leave he said those magic words:

- Is this something you could use…?

Then he handed me a pet - and not just any pet - this was an angler…

I was blown away. I had just started out as a Creature Handler and had practised my skills on taming strange small turkey like birds outside of Tatooine and small lizards the size of a cat. This was something else - it was cool and scary looking, nothing like anything I had been close to master so far!

I checked its Level - it was level 7! And that meant I could use it right away!

It was still a small baby but over time it would grow to become a huge pet that I proudly would let walk beside me. It would follow me around everywhere, fight by my side in battle, sit and protect me as I rested by a fire somewhere far far away from civilization.

Mille became my friend in a way that only other Creature Handlers can ever understand.

Only much later would I discover that Mille was a bio engineered pet. A normal angler was much higher in level and I wouldn’t have been able to tame one of those for months.

I never forgot what Dillon had done for me, and ever since then when I ever had the opportunity I would give away things to strangers I met on my ways. I don’t know if any of the things I have given away over the years have meant anything to anyone of them - but if just one of them felt like I did when I got Mille its all been worth it to me.

I had Mille for almost two years. Then the developers decided to change bio engineered pets.

I don’t remember what you had to do, but after the patch went live you had to do something to your bio engineered pets to make them ‘up to date’ - then the program would recalculate the stats of the pet. Unfortunately, many reported that this gave their pets so strange stats and levels that many where unable to call out their pets anymore.

I feared that would happen to Mille.

So instead of making Mille into some weird abomination - I went out into the wild, said my goodbyes and set her free…

no thanks!’

- thomas997, 06/29/03, warp2search.com

It would be a lie to say that the original SWG was a flawless pearl. But a pearl it was none the less!

The game at launch had a wooping 32 professions, 10 worlds to visit, Darth Vader, and I was ready to conquer it all!

My first character was a Rodian called Sulthon.

I don’t recall the exact reasons for why I picked a rodian, but I can only assume that it was a silly atempt to pick something that no one else did - and contrary to what normally happens this time I was right - it would seem that not a lot of people wanted to play something that looked like a mix between a lizard and a trumpet, and Sulthon never really became a hit with the ladies.

In SWG you had enough points to master two different professions (or just pick a little of many). My initial plan was to make Sulthon a Creature Handler and a Bioengineer - before I got married I had always had a lot of pets and my RL profession was Biotechnologist so a perfect mix I thought.

The problem is that none of those two professions are particular good in combat. And both needed to get very close to a alot of very angry creatures.

Trying to go against the flow I picked Rifleman as my combat profession and scrapped Bioengineer. What I didn’t know was that within a month everyone in the galaxy discovered that this combat profession with a silly name was VERY powerful so suddenly everyone changed to Rifleman - which of course was a blow to someone that wanted to be different *grins*

Soon I would myself discover what everyone else seemed to have caught on a lot quicker than I - that Rifleman was a good addition to my Creature Handler profession - as it turned out I would stick to this formula for the remainder of my SWG days and I leveled at least 3 characters to Master Creature Handler and Master Rifleman (lack of imagination, I know…)

Sulthon lived a quite life in total solitude. I was new to these types of games and the thought of actually talking to one of these other people that played on my server *shudder* Then one day I was riding through Theed on Naboo when I suddenly heard someone shouting that they needed hides and would pay whoever had some a ton of money.

Fate would that I had a lot of hides. So here we had the dillema: stay in the comfort zone of solitude or get rich - I was only human (well, rodian) so of course the greedy side won.

So I met Dillon - and without him ever knowing it he would affect how I have played MMOs ever since…

I watched my friend, disbelief clearly showing. He was telling me about this latest game he was playing called Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC).

My friend had secured me this great job - a night watch position - while I patiently waited for some of the billion job applications I had sent out after I finished Uni to produce a dream job. The night watch gig was fantastic and if it had paid just a bit more money I would still be doing it. It consisted of making sure that 4 authistic people slept.

In reality it meant I had about 45 mins of labour each night and the rest of the night I could play computer, watch tv, read a book or steal whatever I could find in the fridge.

My friend was sitting in the building next to mine and we often spent hours sitting talking. Of course he also showed me this ‘absolutely amazing’ new game DAoC.

Today I know that many people loved this game, not the least for its revolutionary Realm-versus-Realm aspects - but I wasn’t really impressed at the time. I watched my friend play for hours and he always seemed to just be on a horse going from one place to another or sitting by a forge repeating the same process over and over and over.

And he paid money to do it.

I remember I told him that it would be a very cold day in hell and I would have a spa in my living room before I would ever pay to play a game I had already paid for once!

Not many days would go before I had to eat those words.

My friend didn’t play DAoC for too long. In Autumn 2003 a new game was launched and this game took place in one of my favourite universes: the Star Wars Universe. Again I would watch my friend play but this game really caught my interest: you could visit the planets from the movies, meet the famous characters, but most importantly - you could tame a host of animals, they would follow you around and you could teach them tricks and even have them fight enemies for you. I was hooked and before I knew it I was playing my first ever MMO. 

My friend had begun playing on the US server Eclipse so of course I also started here. He had much more skill points than I had (there were no levels in the original Star Wars Galaxies (SWG)) so after teaching me a few tricks and get me started we didn’t really spend that much time together.

It didn’t matter much - I had found my calling: I was a Creature Handler…