22/10/2019

It's Onslaught Time!

Tomorrow today SWTOR's long-awaited new expansion Onslaught launches at last! There hasn't been much hype about it compared to the previous two, but the other day it was actually advertised on the official Star Wars Twitter account - which is always enough to make us long-time players feel faint with shock - so maybe word about its release is finally getting around at last.

I left my final bits of expansion preparation until way too late... mostly because I forgot that spending certain currencies and then vendoring what you bought involved waiting out bind timers that don't progress unless you're actually logged in.

In other words, I realised that I had a crap ton of Command Tokens left over, and that allowing them to simply convert to credits at the default rate was going to leave a huge amount of money on the table.

The official conversion rate is going to be five credits per token, so if you have 50k of them saved up across your alts, you'll get 250k credits for them.

Alternatively, you could spend those same 50k tokens on buying 1,020 belts at a price of 49 tokens each and then vendor all those belts for 15,325 credits a piece instead... resulting in a total gain of more than 15 and a half million credits instead.

I'm not exactly short on money in game, but that just seemed way too wasteful, so I've been spending the last couple of days logging into and out of characters to claim tokens, buy belts, chuck them into a cargo hold and then wait two hours until the timer had run out so that I could vendor them.

Riveting gameplay, I tell you, but it's not like it's hard to just leave the game running in the background and move my character every so often while doing something else in the meantime... such as writing this blog post.


Live from my Dromund Kaas stronghold

Aside from crazy belt trading schemes, I haven't really made any further preparations - I remember when I would load up my quest log with completed dailies the night before expansion release to get a head start on levelling, but those days are fortunately long past... I don't think I've had trouble making it to the level cap since Shadow of Revan.

I also actually took two days off work again - thanks, Bioware, for always launching expansions during a time of year when I usually have a few days of leftover holiday to burn anyway. Expect my posting frequency to increase again over the next couple of weeks, as I'll be talking about everything from the new story to the new systems as usual!

10 comments :

  1. I haven't played SWTOR in a long time and I don't assume I will ever again, but I'm hoping it will turn out to be a good expansion all the same!

    Looking forward to your impressions.

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    1. Thanks! I finished my last batch of belt vendoring just before they started the countdown to server shutdown - now to see how long the maintenance takes!

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  2. I'm looking forward to Onslaught. I'm hoping this is a big success for them given all the efforts they've put in to have a more traditional expansion. I know there will be some bugs, but what MMO doesn't? At least this time they seem to be trying to appeal to all of their player base and not just a specific part.

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    1. I agree; I feel that they've been trying really hard and have really earned a break, even if not everything will be perfect from day 1.

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  3. Your impressions will make for good reading, and vicarious enjoyment of the game from afar, as always.

    The introduction of class-specific ability-modifying gear reminds me of WoW's emphasis on artifact weapons in the Legion expansion. I wonder whether those were part of the inspiration.

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    1. Are you not playing anymore? If not, why not?

      Personally I saw more inspiration in ESO with the many different set bonuses, but either way they've clearly been looking at what other MMOs are doing (which is not a bad thing as long as they remain selective about what they are trying to copy).

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  4. I finished the story content in about 2 hours, is that all there is to it? It was shallow, short and so incredibly lazy. It felt like a free patch update rather than an expansion. The epilogue meeting Kira was the only interesting part. And not even anything for my characters love interest? Sorely disappointed in this I'm afraid.

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    1. There are different stories for both factions again, so if you've only played for 2 hours, you've still got half of it to go!

      I don't know why people are still complaining about 4-5 hours of story being too short in 2019, considering that this is Bioware's 5th story expansion for SWTOR and they've all been similar in scope. Makeb only felt longer because they made you kill about 100 Regulator mercenaries for every objective, and KotFE/KotET sacrificed literally all other content for a couple hours of extra story.

      "Lazy" is just objectively wrong because there is such an incredible amount of loving detail in this expansion; it's insane! You may not have seen it or didn't care, but it's definitely there.

      Full post with some more early thoughts coming later tonight!

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