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TOROZ (short for ‘The Old Republic – Australia / New Zealand’) is a site devoted to covering the Massive Multiplayer Online game Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR) . Launched in May 2009, TOROZ is a sister site to The Metaverse Journal.

David Holloway – Founder and Editor (Australia)

David Holloway has been involved with gaming since the early 1970′s and with virtual worlds since heavy use of a MOO in 1993 – he even admits to having owned a Vic 20 and used it heavily to play cassette-based roleplaying games.

As far as Star Wars goes, he still owns his original set of Star Wars figures and can vouch for the fact that a 1978 Stormtrooper can be blown to bits by shooting it with a slug gun from a distance. He’s also played Star Wars games as far back as the Super Nintendo console and to this day is devastated by the accidental erasure of all his progress on Lego Star Wars on the Wii.

David refuses to confirm or deny that he’s also a Level 85 Mage in World of Warcraft.

Contact David via our contact form, or drop a line via Twitter.

Edward Wilson – Flash Point Podcast Co-Host and Writer (Canada)

An avid Star Wars fan, Edward Wilson owns every single Star Wars game that has ever been put out for PC starting with the original X-Wing. He has played every single arcade, platform or PC Star Wars game in existence. He has been a Star Wars fan since he saw it from the back seat of his father’s car at a drive-in theater in 1978. Admittedly, since he was six at the time, he spent every scene with Darth Vader in it, hiding behind the seat in front of him. He has since then grown up, but still feels an irrational pang of fear when he hears heavy breathing. When Star Wars came out on VHS, he was one of the first in line in his city to get the movies. And when the DVD came out, likewise.

As far as MMORPGs go, he is remarkably tightlipped about his experience. Something was dropped about having level 50 heroes and villains battling somewhere called Paragon City and something about the joys of sniping at level 50 when one had a blank slate. Or was that a Tabula Rasa?

Currently, Edward is writing fanfictions for SWTOR under the pseudonym Kalenath. Names have been changed to protect the guilty and incriminate the innocent. And he cannot wait until he can roll a trooper and allow some Sith to join the Force. By blasting them.

Contact Edward via our contact form.

Alec Bailey – Writer (USA)

Alec has been a gamer for more than 16 years starting with a NES and a Gameboy. Being a huge RPG fan, which most likely comes from his first real addiction: Pokemon, Red version. Alec has played every game Bioware, Obsidian, and Bethesda have made and beat Mass Effect, Mass effect 2, and Dragon Age at least 10 times. He also enjoys gunning down helpless noobs at FPS games such as Black Ops and Killzone.

Alec has been a Star Wars fan since the first time he saw A New Hope at the age of 8. He has played almost every single Star Wars game and read a modest amount of the EU (mostly comics). He is also proud to be a geek and loves everything that comes with being one, such as the endless amount of useless knowledge he has obtained.

Alec has also played nearly every MMO from EQ to FFXIV but, is proud to say that out of all the MMOs he’s been addicted to, World of Warcraft was not one of them. Alec’s play style is usually main or off tanking. He loves helping out new players with quests and helping them get a grip on the game. He will be rolling a Trooper Vanguard as well as a Jedi Guardian.

Alec is a self proclaimed Playstation fanboy. Any like-minded individuals are invited to send their Playstation friend invite to Emo_Slayer. Alec is enrolling in college in February. He is majoring in Game Design.

Contact Alec via our contact form

Mark Duncan – Flash Point Podcast Co-Host and Writer (Australia)

Mark has been a gamer for almost 30 years, owning a Sinclair ZX81 with a whopping 1k of memory to the Commodore 64 with more games than he knew what to do with. (Last Ninja FTW)

As far as Star Wars goes he was hooked from A New Hope and collected every figure and most of the other toys that were released around the time of the original 3 movies. He has spent many a dollar on the Star Wars arcade machines and has played through just about all the Star Wars computer games that have been released through the years. With regards to MMO’s he spent many hours on SWG (Unlocked his Jedi pre-CU), WoW and has lately been seen on World of Tanks while waiting for SWTOR.

He owns just about all the Star Wars novels and is currently reading through the Old Republic novels gearing up for SWTOR’s release but is still un-able to quench his thirst for all things Star Wars. He will be rolling a Sith Warrior Juggernaut.
He currently spends his time recruiting for his Sith based guild, working on the guilds website and looking for inspiration for his next tattoo which will be a Star Wars tatt.

Contact Mark via our contact form

Simon Potter – Flash Point Co-Host and Writer (Australia)

Simon has been into Star Wars since 1978 when the original movie blew his mind. Some pieces remain missing. His first Star Wars game experience was the original vector arcade game and he still owns almost every Star Wars game ever made for PC and XBox. At night he dreams that LucasArts will release an updated version of Tie Fighter. He’s played a variety of MMOs including LotRO, WoW, DCUO and (briefly) SWG.

He’s owned Star Wars on every media, from 8mm film to DVD but refuses to buy the blu rays until George stops tinkering. He also owns the double LP of the soundtrack, but doesn’t own a turntable. That’s how committed he is.

His Star Wars figures were lost during the fireworks powered SFX of a diorama, ‘Destruction of the Death Star’ which also set fire to the school gym’s scoreboard, however he is the proud owner of a full size Darth Vader which unfailing frightens unsuspecting visitors.

Simon will be a Powertech Bounty Hunter and he hopes to be able to put shock collars on all his companions in a future expansion.

Contact Simon via our contact form

Tim Buchalka – Writer (Australia)

Tim Buchalka has been a gamer for more years than he cares to remember.

He fondly remembers spending hours playing multi-user tank at his first job using a state of the art (at the time) mainframe – with considerably less power than one of today’s iPhones.

His first computer was the mighty Microbee upgraded to a staggering 16Kb (Not Mb) of ram.  Over time he purchased various computers including an Amstrad CPC 464, Atari ST,  PC’s and now Apple hardware where he plays SWTOR by dual booting into Windows 7.

He has built up an impressive range of games over the years and now wishes he has taken a lot more care of the packaging and disks they all came in.

In 2008 he gave up his career as a software developer and went into Internet Marketing full time with his brother Anthony. He figured the time saved not having to commute to and from work each day could be spent playing games instead!  So far so good apparently.

He rated himself as a relatively hard-core World of Warcraft player until he gave it away for SWTOR, apparently even multiboxing (playing 5 characters simultaneously via 5 separate accounts).   Some would say that was a little excessive and greedy, Tim prefers to think of it as “challenging”.

Currently he is having an absolute blast with his Jedi Consular (Sage), a Sith Inquisitor (Sorcerer) and Imperial Agent (Operative) characters, although he refuses point blank to call them toons.   Having created and edited literally 100’s of videos with his online gig he is now aiming to apply those skills to SWTOR related video, showing his skills (or lack thereof) in game.

Fun for Tim comes in the form of exploring all aspects of the game rather than rushing to level up to as quickly as possible.  Sounds like an excuse to us  :)

You can contact Tim via our contact form or via his youtube account.

Timothy Gow – Writer (Australia)

Tim is a university student in his final semester.  A casual gamer, Star Wars fan and when not enjoying spare time, involved in politics in various ways.  He is an all-rounder, enjoying PvP, solo play, Tanking, Healing and DPSing.   He can be found contributing and lurking on the SWTOR forums.

Rick Duff – Writer (Australia)

Rick has been a self professed gamer since pre-1995 and a SW lover since he picked up the Storm Trooper toy in Grade 1 and loved it so much that he “stole” it. (In a normal world this is theft, but when you’re 5 years old, it’s cute.)

Gaming came naturally as he reminisces coming to physical blows with his step brother after waking up at 5.30am to silently creep in and load up “summer games” on the commodore 64 to fight over who gets to play first.

In 1996, after years of blistered thumbs from the SEGA and Nintendo control pads, Rick began playing MUDs: the ancient yet addictive root of where today’s MMOs come from.  Focused primarily on the “PK” or otherwise known as PVP, Rick started to create and lead guilds/clans of like minded individuals driven by destroying other non like minded individuals. Sound’s destructive, yes, but fun nevertheless.

Apart from the other plethora of games on many different platforms, Rick has always created and led guilds/clans in all facets of gaming… from Halo 2, to Chromehounds on Xbox/360, to numerous guilds on different MUD’s and even in more recent years, creating a guild from scratch at level 5 on WoW and growing it all the way into end game. The end result being a powerhouse raiding guild full of many players he still calls close friends in real life. He even led the Sith Empire on a popular star wars roleplay site which you would still classify a game, if only barely.

Today, Rick works fulltime as a corporate accounts manager for Telstra, specializing in Complex Voice, Data and Wireless rollout for Corporate and Government. He is the family guy too: wife, kids, dogs and the picket fence. But come evening he is the one guiding his guild in SWTOR and pushing it to the next level through progression.

You can contact Rick via our contact form.

Kate DiBella – Writer (Australia)
Kate has been a gamer and self-professed geek for most of her life.  Among her family and friends, she is a one-woman tech support team, and handles everything from upgrades and advice, to maintenance and malware extermination.  Her one exception being that she refuses to have anything to do with “i-Things” — in part because the only Apple product she owns is a Gen1 iPod Shuffle (it was a gift), and mostly because she sees them as inferior to PCs for all but graphic designers and film-makers.  Over the years, she’s found herself involved in many forms of fandom from the ubiquitous fanfiction (reading mostly, but writing when she can), to roleplaying and cosplay.  She currently spends her weekends as a soul-destroying retail minion, and her weekdays studying game design and computer science at University.
First introduced to Star Wars, back in 1997 via the cinematic re-release, she was quick to fall in love with it. She may not be the most dedicated fan on the planet, but she is a rather tolerant one — loving the franchise despite many of its changes, inconsistencies, and short-comings.  While she may be judged harshly for it, Kate is nevertheless a fan of the prequels, too; and while she admits they are not perfect, they are at the end of the day, still Star Wars.  She has partaken in bits and pieces of the Expanded Universe (including games), and still wants to try going through it all chronologically some day.
Now, she thoroughly enjoys relentlessly blasting bad guys, blowing stuff up, and delivering swift dirty kicks where it hurts, as a Gunslinger in SWTOR.  Ranged classes have always been her favourites, from hunters and archers, to rogues and infiltrators.  Despite this preference, she’ll give most things a go, and usually ends up with massive amounts of alts in games (currently on 12 across 5 or 6 TOR servers).  The majority are on RP servers, because this is after all, an RPG, and it is really kind of sad how little actual RPing there is on the RP servers.  *insert shameless plea for more TOR roleplayers*
Kate is thrilled to be joining the TOROZ team, and can be contacted via our contact form.

Toby the News Droid (Australia)

Toby is a mysterious young man from Queensland who works a night-shift job, thus making him our day-shift news hound. He’ll be bringing you any breaking news on SWTOR, including server downtime and the like. He is willing to disclose he’s “over 30″ and has played pretty much every Star Wars game released.

Toby can be contacted on our contact form or via our Twitter account.

 

Ken Clark (Australia)

Ken has been a Star Trek fan long before he became a Star Wars fan. Having been turned off Star Wars by the Phantom Menace at the age of 9 he found Star Trek which led to Stargate which by the age of 15 led back to Star Wars. He willingly admits that he never thought Playstation would catch on and that nothing could beat a 1024×768 CRT (and technically nothing can. I’ve dropped it down stars and it still works – yes, I keep it as a backup).

Ken enjoys long walks on the beach.

Ken doesn’t have very good money skills which ends up leading to him owning excessive amounts of DVDs and Games. However his favourite 4 are Skyrim, Minecraft, SWTOR and Mass Effect. He has also tried many different MMO’s including World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online, AION and Guild Wars 1. WOW was played for 2 years (and I regret half of it) where as the rest where played for under a week.

Ken drinks Bundaberg Rum.

Ken plays a republic Jedi Consular however, he also plays everything else. You can posibly find my main doing suspicious stuff by the name of THEFUZ.

Ken can be contacted on our contact form or via our Twitter account.

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TOROZ is a publication of Creative Shed Services, Wollongong NSW Australia. ABN: 64 969 281 861

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