My 13th Year of SWTOR Blogging

With SWTOR's birthday comes this blog's 13th birthday! And it's been a good year for the blog as well - I think I might actually manage to hit 100 posts by the end of the year, which would be a feat I haven't achieved since 2019. And yes, nobody is setting me any targets, but it does feel nice to know that it's not simply a matter of my activity always going downhill over time. 

In fact, I thought it would be fun to create a little table showing the number of posts I've made across both this and my other gaming blogs over the years. If you just count SWTOR and WoW, 2024 was actually my third most prolific year since I started posting! Then I remembered that I also maintained a blog about Neverwinter Online for a few years, and while those posts tended to be very short (and I'm not sure they should be given the same weight to be honest), it skewed the numbers into a whole different direction. Apparently my busiest year altogether was 2016, for some reason...? 2020 coming in second at least makes some sense, what with the pandemic and all that.

Year	Total Blog Posts	about SWTOR	about WoW	about NWO
2009	87		87
2010	181		181
2011	115	5	110
2012	155	149	6
2013	116	109	7
2014	163	115	20	28
2015	190	107	17	66
2016	229	146	32	51
2017	164	113	12	39
2018	185	103	9	73
2019	156	103	39	14
2020	213	96	64	53
2021	154	76	57	21
2022	139	75	62	2
2023	159	94	65
2024 (so far)	168	98	70

Anyway, coming back to this blog in specific, it feels to me like it's been a good year. I felt like I was engaged with the game pretty consistently, which was reflected in an urge to write about it pretty consistently as well.

In January I was still busy dissecting some of the content that had come with December's 7.4 patch, such as graphics updates made to the starter planets, the new GTN or our continued research into Basilisk droids. I was also still heavily into playing on the Shae Vizla server, which had launched only two months prior. In an effort to do better by my fellow content creators, I started my "Around the SWTOR-sphere" column at the end of the month, which I've been able to keep up with pretty consistently over the course of the year and which was (to me) surprisingly well-received.

In February, I still wrote about some adventures on Shae Vizla, such as me replaying the Sith warrior class story for the first time in ages and musing about the server's decreasing activity levels. I also wrote about more evergreen topics such as missing Kuat Drive Yards or being very impressed by the Republic saboteur choices on Dantooine and Manaan. A dev stream gave us a preview of patch 7.4.1 and beyond, and I gave my opinions on it.

The patch actually arrived in March, which saw me checking out two of the new date nights and going all in with Galactic Season 6. I started a series where I documented my various visits of public strongholds for the weekly seasons objective, which ended up being unexpectedly popular with a a certain segment of my readership, and I decided to revive the weekly Galactic Seasons diary I'd kept in Season 1.

The next two months were pretty much entirely consumed by these diary entries plus more stronghold drop-ins, with the only deviations being a tale of a crazy Conquest adventure in April, and thoughts on the 7.5 dev livestream in May as well as the situation on the Shae Vizla server after six months.

In June, my Galactic Seasons activities slowly wound down (though not before hitting legacy level 50 on Star Forge, which was a notable milestone to me) and patch 7.5 launched. I had fun with the new Spring Abundance Festival and really enjoyed the latest story update, though I also expressed some concerns about the state of PvP.

July was a wild grab bag including another dev livestream, me quitting Twitter, mount sale shopping tips and my first impressions of the new venture system. I also put a bit more thought into pieces about my favourite post-launch story updates and my strange relationship with playing male characters.

August brought with it the return of the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event, and I mused on some evergreen topics such as achievements I would add to old content and how flashpoints could become a bigger part of SWTOR's endgame again. At the end of the month, Galactic 7 started. And that's still going on until February! That's one long season.

In September I was already hit my the mid-season doldrums, so I instead spent time on game-adjacent things like Twitch drops, going on a podcast, or musing about the next expansion.

October got me more excited again with the return of the Best View in SWTOR contest and a surprise teaser video for 7.6 generating hype. I also had fun revisiting the Feast of Prosperity and grinding currency for flower pots (no, really).

November saw another dev stream about 7.6 as well as me visiting and commenting on content on the PTS several times. I also raised my glass to the Shae Vizla server's first birthday.

And this month of course we got patch 7.6 as well as all that entails, and I'll have more posts about different aspects of it to come. Also, I had another crazy Conquest adventure with my guild...

Thanks for another year of reading along, whether you're currently playing SWTOR yourself or not, whether you're an old-timer or someone who only just found the blog recently, whether you just read along quietly or leave comments sometimes. My interactions with other players through this blog are definitely an important part of what keeps the game fun for me.

SWTOR Is a Teenager Today

... and I'd totally forgotten until other people reminded me on social media. I feel bad because I usually have this post prepared quite some time in advance, but the Christmas period is often stressful for me and this year has certainly been... something. Anyway, it's not too late to celebrate!

But first, the usual collage of my main character with a new image added for 2024!

2024 was the developers' first full year under Broadsword instead of Bioware, and as I already noted in June when it had been twelve months since the original announcement, not much actually changed from a player's perspective. Contrary to some people's expectations, the game did not go into maintenance mode. (Seriously, the way I see people throw that word around on social media - also when talking about other games - just makes me roll my eyes at this point. I feel like it's becoming the new "[game] is dead" in terms of how utterly meaningless the phrase is becoming.)

As it stands, Star Wars: The Old Republic continued the last couple of years' trend of releasing two major patches per year, with smaller patches which are mostly tied to seasons added in-between. Major highlights from the past year included the new world event added in spring, a meaty story update that came with a new planetary map added to Hutta, the venture system giving us a new companion with a story to earn in game, Twitch drops becoming a thing (again), the addition of the Mac launcher (which is now in open beta!), and with the most recent patch a new operations boss and a new public event system. Aside from that we had more seasons (one of which included a new stronghold), date nights, plus all kinds of new art modernisations, not to mention my favourite bug fix ever: the return of non-combat pets. Not too shabby when you add it all up like that, eh?

Here are my birthday posts from years past if you want to make comparisons to what I thought of years gone by at the time:

Happy Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 2nd Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy Third Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 4th Birthday, SWTOR!
Five Years of SWTOR
Six Years of SWTOR
Seven Years of SWTOR
Eight Years of SWTOR
Nine Years of SWTOR
Happy 10th Birthday, SWTOR!
Eleven Years of SWTOR
SWTOR Turns Twelve Today

To many more! I'm looking forward to seeing the story content that was meant to come with 7.6 and had to be postponed, as well as seeing what else the devs have in store for us in the new year. I know I wrote a post back in September about when we'll get a new expansion, in which I was not very optimistic about that prospect, but I've actually changed my mind about that a bit since 7.6. I'm not sure 2025 will be the year when it happens, but I'll just say that I've got a hunch that the devs have got something bigger planned again for the future. I can't wait to find out!

Dynamic Encounters Are Here and They Are Fun

I have to admit I wasn't immediately racing to check out dynamic encounters after the patch went live last week. Sure, I was looking forward to doing them eventually, but after completing fifty of them on the PTS, I figured I knew what I was going to be in for and didn't feel the same urgency to find out "what the new thing was like" that I sometimes feel when a patch adds new content. Plus I figured that things might be a bit overcrowded for the first couple of days and wanted to avoid that too.

When I finally set out a few days later, I was kind of surprised by how different the experience was to the PTS. Not dramatically, mind you, the basic system is still the same - but there were some changes that I absolutely didn't expect (beyond the obvious bug fixes like Republic characters no longer being prompted to kill Jedi in one dynamic encounter - that felt so wrong on the PTS).

For example, I'd noted on the PTS that encounters tagged as "encounter shared" would progress at the same pace for everyone in the area, just to then disappear once completed. This has been changed on live so the encounters loop endlessly (for the duration of the encounter anyway), which was initially kind of confusing to me. I don't think this is a bad change, mind you, just different, and it might affect how you want to prioritise different encounters when several interesting ones are up at once.

The number of events that are active on the map at the same time has also been reduced, at least on Hoth - my screenshot from the PTS showed 15 of them up at once, and I did in fact note at the time that I thought this was a bit overwhelming from a visual point of view at least. However, I didn't expect the number of active encounters to go down, as the general feedback on the forums seemed to be that the more active Hoth was preferable to the more quiet Tatooine. I would've expected the devs to up the number of events on Tatooine and not reduce the numbers on Hoth. Again though, this is not a complaint; it was just surprising to me. It does probably help with funnelling more people into doing the same encounters together, even if it means that it takes longer until certain ones come up in the "rotation".

Finally, there were some small changes - for example I quite enjoyed the ice fishing encounter on the PTS, but I was confused by the instructions to "look for the shadows" and I had the most success fishing by just plopping the fishing droid down on the cracks in the ice - I eventually figured it was meant to function similarly to certain GSI missions where you're meant to put your seeker droid over specific, static ground markers. I left feedback that I thought the instructions where unclear and expected those to be updated (if anything was going to happen at all) - but instead I found that on live, there are flitting shadows to target that never appeared for me on the PTS! And even funnier, when you catch a fish it appears to kill an actual invisible mob somewhere, as you get Conquest points and an "ugh"-style death sound plays. I just thought that was unexpectedly hilarious.

I've just been having a lot of fun doing dynamic encounters in general - I haven't been grinding them heavily, but have just been doing a few on both Hoth and Tatooine every day until I've completed both of the daily planetary "kill enemies" Conquest objectives. It's been nice to see more people out and about in the open world, with the new encounters proving quite popular at all times of day despite not offering any huge rewards.

In general it feels to me like these have the potential to fill a kind of gap in content that I didn't even realise existed, when you just want to play a bit but don't necessarily have the time or focus to dig into a piece of story or even a round of dailies. Dynamic encounters make it easy to play as little or as much as you like, and I've found them quite great as something to do while sitting in the PvP queue as well if pops take a bit of time.

I'm curious how long it will take me to complete all the related achievements, as the random nature of the events and the fact that only a limited number are up at any given point means that some encounters can prove kind of elusive. However, I'm in no rush as I'm happily just enjoying what we got and I look forward to (hopefully) seeing this system expanded to more planets in future patches.

Name and Game

It was only really a footnote on the list of interesting things to come with patch 7.6, but to me the fact that the devs were finally going to release some old and inactive character names was the most exciting patch feature by far. While talking to other long-time players, we were unable to recall for certain the last time this was done, with the best guess being that it was over ten years ago (!). Obviously some names were lost and reclaimed during server merges, but still... a decade of forgotten throwaway alts taking up names had made coming up with new and unique names quite challenging by this point.

I also found it interesting to watch the reactions of different kinds of players to the announcement, especially from ones that were inactive at the time. I mean, I generally try to take people's grievances seriously even if I don't necessarily agree, but some of the complaints I saw were really quite bizarre, with people writing veritable essays about how they cared so much about their character names and Broadsword was evil for threatening to take them away, and then it'd turn out that they hadn't actually played the game in five years and considered the mere act of logging in to secure their names an unreasonable effort.

What really surprised me though were all the positive reactions I saw: people basically just viewing the name purge as a reminder to re-download the game and get back into playing and even giving Broadsword money. Clearly they should do this more often if that's all it takes to make people resubscribe!

Also, if you missed out on your opportunity to secure your existing character names for whatever reason and your names were "released", don't worry, you're actually not that badly off, because if you log in now, you can still reclaim them if they're available, and even better (and I haven't seen anyone else post about this) you get a free name change on all your characters! Meaning on login you can either re-use their old name if it's still available, or if you ever thought about changing it before (for example because you used a bunch of special characters and want to see whether you can now have the same name without those) you can now make that adjustment for free.

I know this because my guildies noticed that characters whose names had been released were identifiable in the guild roster by now having "_010124" attached to their names, and someone teased that they could troll people by stealing their names, which prompted one non-subscribed guildie to finally log in and find out about the above. He then proceeded to give himself a bunch of free renames on various alts for exactly the reason I mentioned, to get rid of some special characters.

Anyway, as for myself - I just went on to claim the name "Shintar" on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, which were the only two servers where I didn't own it yet. Now it's me everywhere! Shintar isn't always my main on the other servers, but she's always a trooper and she's always me. I also renamed one low-level alt on Tulak Hord who had an apostrophe in his name that ended up bothering me more than I originally expected when I named him.

Flying high on these gains I got a bit over-excited and decided to also use a rename token on my bounty hunter T'ir, who'd gained the apostrophe in her name during the very first server consolidations back in 2012. I don't play her that often so I'm not hugely invested (and this particular apostrophe doesn't bother me that much) but the idea of reclaiming a name I'd lost in 2012 still made me starry-eyed for a minute. Except - "Tir" on Darth Malgus was still taken. Fair play!

The rename token was still consumed on use though, and she just has the semi-permanent option in her character panel to change her name now. I just don't know what I'd even change it to if not removing the apostrophe! I guess I'll just consider it a write-off. Not that it's a big deal with the tokens being 90% off at the moment.

Did you get to snag any new names? Several of my guildies were extremely pleased to pick up some nice and short new names or old ones they'd lost, such as someone getting the name of his main back that he'd lost years ago.

Living the Degen Conquest Life

It's patch day today and there are lots of interesting things going on, but I'll get to all of those in good time. First though, I wanted to talk about why I haven't posted in over a week, and the reason for that is that I was stuck in a Conquest-shaped rabbit hole because it was Total Galactic War.

I know this is where a lot of my regular readers probably click away, but I can't help myself: 99% of the time, SWTOR may be a character-driven multiplayer RPG (and I do love it for that), but that 1% of the time in which the game is a vehicle for fierce guild battles instead still fascinates me as well. Hardcore Conquest players are the type that even the most elitist raiders and PvPers see as a whole different level of degenerate, and two to three times a year, I'm part of the club.

This Total Galactic War started innocently enough. I did my usual thing of checking where the big guilds went first, and once all those planets had been ruled out, taking into consideration which destinations guildies were still interested in, the choice was clear: we were going to Oricon.

I didn't think it was going to be much of a challenge to win first place there as I didn't recognise any of the names on the leaderboard, though I'd later find out that the guild in the lead, called Ace of Saints (which is a pretty cool name, not gonna lie), was actually a well-known ops progression guild on Imperial side. 

For the first few days, enthusiasm for Conquest in my guild seemed to be at an all-time low, and often it felt like me and the one other major Conquest enthusiast were the only ones grinding out any points. As such, it wasn't entirely surprising that we failed to actually overtake this (to me) complete no-name guild even after several days, though I still found it frustrating, because even with just a few of us putting any effort in, we were at least keeping up with them pretty well, never falling more than a few million points behind.

I also developed a bit of a grudge against at least some of the Aces during that time, as I kept coming up against them in PvP and they were being annoying (something that can be seen as a compliment in that context, I guess?)

With two days left to go on the event, I finally made a passionate plea on Discord for someone else to generate some Conquest points, as it seemed to me like even a couple of people taking up the cause might be enough to close the gap and secure victory.

Somewhat to my own surprise, people heeded my call in respectable numbers and we quickly started to catch up, though we then got to see that Ace of Saints were serious about winning too, seemingly redoubling their efforts whenever we came close to overtaking them. At one point they suddenly surged ahead by something like four million points within thirty minutes, a number they couldn't possibly have generated by "natural" means with the number of people they had online at the time.

This did leave an impression on some of my guildies: "Look, we're not going to beat them! Look how many points they got in such a short time; we can't beat that!" Being a veteran of many Total Galactic Wars, I did my best to counter the psychological warfare of course: "That's what they want you to think! Look, they obviously popped some tokens to get that far ahead that quickly - we've got them scared! We absolutely can beat them, we just mustn't let their tactics intimidate us."

And once again, people actually listened, and if anything actually redoubled their efforts (because I think as far as competitive Conquest goes, a little bit of adversary actually helps stir their spirits and pride). I have to admit my heart melted a little when I saw a long-time guildie get the achievements for doing the Iokath dailies for the first time - all to earn us points!

We also picked up rampaging across the galaxy again, an activity that is nominally quite boring (you literally just run around as a big group and kill everything in your way) but which always tickles me a little just for how different it is from everything else in the game. As a guildie commented: "I wonder what a new player would think if they saw us racing past in this big group, scouring the landscape everywhere we go?" Personally I suspect that new player would wonder what the heck is going on, but they'd probably also think that whatever we're doing, it looked kind of cool.

As I've mentioned in previous stories like this, unless you've got a spy or something, you can never know with 100% certainty what's going on in your opponents' minds, but it did seem pretty clear that they were very much set on staying ahead of us at all times and at all costs, as any time we made some headway towards catching up, they'd get more people online to do group activities together or resort to popping personal conquest requisitions to give their score a boost.

So naturally, an idea started to form in our heads - after all, earlier this year there was this guild that was consistently trailing us all throughout TGW, just to then attempt to dislodge us from first place via usage of personal conquest requisitions minutes before the end of the event. What if we reversed the roles this time, happily continuing to farm points but without necessarily aiming to overtake our opposition? Our token stockpiles hadn't really recovered from the big click-fest back in April yet, so we still needed the gap to not be too big as we only had a limited supply to work with, but a gap of just a few million could definitely be overcome.

I really would have loved to be a fly on the wall in the Aces' Discord conversations over those last couple of days. Were they confident until the end, certain that they had it all figured out and would beat us eventually? Or were they fretting and unsettled by our unwillingness to just concede? One of them whispered one of my guildies on Tuesday morning to say that our efforts were pointless because they were going to win, which got a good chuckle out of those of us who were online at the time.

Now, when our planetary victory was last decided by frantic token-clicking back in April, I couldn't be online at the time so had to wait for others to report what had happened, but this time I was working from home on the day and boy, was it nerve-racking to be online as the Conquest timer counted down! I actually started to watch the way point gains worked really closely, noting that it took a minute from you earning any points for them to be added to the guild total, and on a separate timer, the guild totals on the scoreboard also update once a minute, so depending on your timing, it can take close to two minutes for points you've contributed to actually show up on the board.

I decided to pop my own twelve tokens with five minutes left on the clock, and then it was just frantic staring at the board as everybody's scores jumped once a minute, with no time left to react to any new developments. Suddenly, our score was at 79 million! Then theirs at 80 million! Then ours at 87 million! When the padlocks came down to indicate that the event had ended, we had once again won first place. (And I learned that despite Conquest nominally being locked, points still trickle in for another couple of minutes... I wonder what would happen if those last few points were to actually change the ranking of guilds...)

After spending all day grinding Conquest points for several days in a row (Mr Commando had expressed concern that I was behaving on a level of obsessiveness that was usually reserved for him), I almost wasn't sure what to do with myself for a few minutes after the event ended. More than anything though, I was extremely satisfied, as we'd once again been challenged to a fight and came out ahead.

 

I also can't help but wonder whether we simply had more tokens than the Aces when push came to shove at the end, or whether they could have beaten us if they'd only been more strategic about things and willing to let us get ahead for a few days instead of burning tokens worth millions of points early on to stay ahead of us at all times while also continuously spurring us on even more.

When I checked the galaxy-wide leaderboards to see how things had gone on other planets, it was striking that there hadn't been an actual battle over first place on any other planet - everywhere else the guild in first place had simply won without any real competition. There was one exception: Section X, where the Stale Cookie Warriors had only barely triumphed over the Republic branch of Yerba Mate (I only just looked up what that means... I always figured it was a phrase in a foreign language; I didn't realise it was a plant!) I wonder if they had a cool story to tell about their battle as well? Too bad we'll probably never know.

This is why I like to document our little stories, because while they may not be important in the grand scheme of things, they are the kind of emergent gameplay MMOs are famous for (and yes, it even exists in SWTOR for all its theme-parky nature) and tend to become the subject of tales told about the guild's history for years to come.

One Season Ends, Another Begins

I'm happy to say that I finished all my goals for Galactic Season 7 this past week. Everything just came together all at once: First I hit level 100 on Star Forge and Leviathan, then over the next couple of days on Tulak Hord, Satele Shan and Shae Vizla. Finally, on Saturday I ticked off the two meta achievements on Darth Malgus. I got the last few world boss kills I needed a few weeks ago, so it was just a matter of completing a few more seasons objectives and grinding out some more bounties.

I know I sometimes talk about how my ambitious goals for seasons can take on a somewhat chore-like quality, but damn, did it feel satisfying to be done with everything. I also love knowing that I can now expect to have a roughly three-month break from seasons - there will be a PvP season during that time, but that's not quite the same thing - and I look forward to checking out the new content coming with 7.6, progressing some characters' personal stories here and there, and just generally chilling and throwing snowballs during Life Day. As mentioned last year, during December more than during any other time of the year, I really appreciate this in-game holiday simply giving me a chance to relax, without putting any particular demands on my time.

As for GS7, I already gave my overall impressions of it last month. Setting stricter limits for myself on the other servers ultimately worked out well, as I definitely had fewer "trying to squeeze in just a couple more objectives before going to bed" moments of stress than on some previous occasions, and I still completed all my goals with plenty of time to spare. If anything, I should probably try easing up on my activity on the other servers even more next season, just to see how little time investment I can get away with (while still playing in a way I enjoy instead of simply maximising for seasons points per minute).

In general, nothing too exciting happened on the other servers this season; I would sum up my experiences playing on them over the last few months as follows:

While playing on Leviathan, I probably have the most strictly solo experience of any server, simply because my ability to communicate in French is so limited, but boy do I adore all my alts on that server for some reason. I've actually given my knight over there more different outfits to wear than most of my alts on Darth Malgus. I guess it's just been too long since I allowed myself to simply fall in love with another Twi'lek (I keep telling myself I need to try playing a greater variety of species)!

On Tulak Hord, I'm still in the guild with the dedicated website that nobody uses. I'm not sure how active the guild itself still is either, as I got guild mails from officers at various points that seemed to indicate that they hadn't been around as much. The planetary invasion still happened every week, and the guild Conquest bar did get filled up, but some weeks I was up there in the top five contributors just for making my 100k on my trooper.

On Satele Shan, I'm getting so close to finally finishing my Shadow Zilek's class story - it's so close I can taste it! I wrote about how he was my first ever male character in this post - it's hard to believe that I created him more than twelve years ago now and he still hasn't defeated the First Son. However, he's about halfway through Corellia now and I'm considering just pushing through even after being done with seasons, just to finally complete that particular milestone.

Star Forge and playing with New Outriders and occasionally helping out Swtorista's Team Disco has turned into a warm comfort blanket for me. I love my guild of twelve years on Darth Malgus, but being an officer is work sometimes, and many of my guildies are - how do I put this nicely - a bit cynical about the game at this point. So when I get to just hang out with friends on Star Forge, it's nice to not have to do any talking or organising for a change, to just tag along and do as I'm told, and simply giggle at people's jokes in a more light-hearted atmosphere.

On Shae Vizla, I'm up to two class stories completed now (my consular got there the other week) and with me hitting legacy level 44 yesterday, I came to realise that despite the server's young age, this may well end up being the one on which I end up hitting legacy level 50 next, a feat I've otherwise only achieved on Darth Malgus and Star Forge so far. We'll see whether I get there during the next season.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: October & November 2024

October was a fairly quiet month in terms of how much interesting SWTOR content I saw, but things picked up considerably in November.

• Astute readers may recall that I've already been on Bluesky for over a year, but it was a fairly quiet place for most of that time. The last month or so saw a massive surge in activity however, and suddenly the previously almost non-existent SWTOR community on the site has been popping off like crazy, much to my personal delight. Far be it from me to tell you which social media sites to use or how (if any at all), however if you're a SWTOR player and interested in giving Bluesky a try, Swtorista put together a nice guide for how to get started and how to easily find other people interested in chatting about SWTOR on the site. The game itself has also had an official account over there for almost a year already.
• The OotiniCast, SWTOR's longest-running fan podcast, also had an exciting month as they got to release their 500th episode! They managed to make it a special one too by securing an interview with Keith Kanneg and Eric Musco. They chatted about a number of different topics but the things I personally noted down as interesting were that the upcoming Mac launcher actually came about due to them wanting to update the regular launcher, that porting the game to consoles would be a "monumental" effort, and that whatever the next venture is going to be, it probably won't be a companion. The latter was intriguing to me because I can't quite picture how a non-companion reward would even work with that system, but I guess we'll find out!
  
  The podcast's 501st episode was released immediately afterwards by the way, and had the hosts Chill and Kittykisses do their usual thing while also discussing the interview from the previous episode.
• The State of the Old Republic Podcast, which updates a bit irregularly, also released two episodes in October and November, with the first one mostly talking about the Feast of Prosperity and Galactic Season 7, and the second one talking about the 7.6 dev livestream.
• In more random SWTOR content, big YouTube channel Gamology released a video called David Hayter Reacts to Star Wars The Old Republic. (If you don't know, David Hayter provides the English voice for the male Jedi knight.) The title is a bit misleading because it's not really a reaction video in the classic sense, more of an interview during which he answers some questions about Star Wars in general and his work on SWTOR in specific. It contains some interesting tidbits though, even if the video editors seemingly got Kari Wahlgren (voice of the female Jedi knight) and Xanthe Elbrick (voice of the female Sith inqusitior) mixed up.
• Speaking of Xanthe, an anonymous commenter linked me to a GoFundMe in her name that's supposedly meant to help her recover from colon cancer?! I hadn't heard about that at all and hope she's doing well. I feel a bit weird linking to a health-related GoFundMe because I never know whether these are legit (though this would be a weirdly specific thing to make up and looks real enough to me) plus the general concept of people in the US basically having to beg for money online to not die from routine health problems always makes me freeze in existential dread, but in this instance at least it sounds like she's already on the road to recovery and this is more of friend trying to help her out a bit.
• As we're approaching the end of the year, reddit puts out its annual recaps, and I always tend to find the ones for the subreddits I frequent most regularly quite interesting. I was going to link it here but apparently you can only view recaps on their phone app? Boo. Anyway, I did save one post from the SWTOR subreddit that I personally found interesting recently (not from the recap). If you come here regularly, you already know that the ones that catch my eye usually aren't the most upvoted ones but ones with interesting comments, and so it is with this one as well: "Why is the Kotfe dlc so disliked?", which is a question that I often see newer players ask, and understandably so I think - if you come to the game now and it's just another storyline you play through, it can't possibly seem that bad. Anyway, what I found interesting is that there were a lot of different answers, and even quite a few I didn't personally agree with, even though I was incredibly relieved to leave the "Knights of" era behind myself. Which just goes to show that back then the devs really managed to conjure up a perfect storm of things that ticked off a surprising variety of players in different ways.

Got any good SWTOR-related content of your own to share? Feel free to leave a link in the comments and tell us what you liked about it!

My Experience with the New Lair Boss on the PTS

I wrote at the start of this month that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to try the new lair boss on the PTS or not. Wanting to earn the associated special titles was a point in favour, but my general preference for "going in blind" and being surprised once the content hits the live servers was also a strong argument against it.

In the end an opportunity arose for me to join Swtorista's Team Disco today to have a go at the boss and I decided to take it. (I guess I have Galaxiya to thank for being unable to make it, meaning I could take her spot. Thanks, Galaxiya!) I was glad I did, too, for three reasons:

1. We did get the boss down on both difficulties, earning me the associated titles on the live game.
2. I now know what to expect and have a better idea how to tackle the fight with my guildies once it goes live.
3. It was honestly just good fun, too! The fight had clearly come a long way from that first iteration of the PTS where people couldn't even tell what was supposed to be going on most of the time.
   

Primarily, I was relieved to find that story mode seemed to be at an appropriate difficulty for a story mode, which is to say: easy enough that an inexperienced pick-up group should be able to do it. Several members of our group (including me) had never done the fight before and nobody gave any explanations pre-pull either, but it worked out fine anyway. All the mechanics do fairly low damage, so you can learn as you go and it takes quite a bit of messing up for anyone to take enough damage to die.

If I had to pick anything to criticise here it's that the fight still felt like it took pretty long for a story mode with a group that had quite solid dps output, but that may just have been subjective, and I didn't actually time it. Plus we went in with the standard group setup of two tanks, two healers and four dps - on story mode you could easily swap out a tank and a healer for two more damage dealers to speed things up a bit.

Veteran mode was another pleasant surprise after all the unpleasantness that was my experience with R-4 Anomaly, in the sense that it actually felt like what I'd call a "proper" vet mode, not something bordering on NiM, just trying to please the top 1%. As a healer, there was enough damage going out to give me something to do, but it wasn't so high that I couldn't also throw a few damage abilities into the mix at various points. There was stuff on the floor to dodge, adds and different boss mechanics to watch out for, but at no point did the number of things going on feel overwhelming.

We got the encounter down on what I think was only our third try, though I wouldn't read too much into that as a sign of it being too easy, as several people had worked on it before and could tell the rest of us what to do. The biggest challenge was actually the hard enrage, which kicks in at around the ten minute mark, and was what killed us on our penultimate attempt. We hit it again on the actual kill but managed to get the boss down just before it had the chance to kill us.

I checked to see what feedback others had given on the official forum thread, and winced at several comments along the lines of "I went in with my NiM team, using only one tank and healer, and we thought it was too easy". I just hope the devs don't use that as an excuse to do any last-minute upward-tuning before releasing the patch, because I don't agree that the fight was too easy at all. A vet mode ops boss isn't supposed to be something that's hard for NiM raiders! I did think that some of the suggestions that were given for how to make things harder might actually make for a good master mode version of the encounter later on, if Broadsword ever decides to add that.

However, vet mode struck me as fine as it is. If anything, the fight still seemed quite long and the dps check pretty tight for a group of raiders that aren't at the extreme cutting edge, but I'll assume for now that with more experience and better understanding of the mechanics, groups will be able to improve their damage output and general performance over time, to the point where the enrage timer won't feel quite so challenging anymore.

In general I was pretty happy with everything I saw, and assuming what we experienced is going to be close enough to what will go live in a couple of weeks, I'm actually looking forward to tackling the new boss on the live servers. It will be nice to work on farming materials and schematics for the new augments in a story mode that should be accessible enough to actually do on my guild's social nights, and a vet mode that will pose a bit of a challenge for my regular ops team without making it feel like we're just bashing our heads against a wall.

Character Modernisation Panic on the PTS

I mentioned in my post about the 7.6 livestream that the devs revealed that they're also working on updating NPCs and player characters with new textures, shaders and more. They emphasised that they were aware of how important it was that your character still felt like your character afterwards, and the examples they showed in their previews looked very good.

I didn't expect them to also push this update onto the PTS immediately afterwards, but they did... and I found out about it because there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about it. Well, actually, the first time I heard about it was when Intisar showed me a before and after screenshot of his main and commented that his Jedi suddenly looked old enough to be her own mother, which just made me laugh. However, as I heard more reports and saw a couple of honestly kind of appalling-looking screenshots, I got curious - something was clearly wrong here.

So I updated the PTS myself to have a look and... honestly, at first I didn't get what the fuss was about, as both my Republic and Imperial main (who are a body type four cyborg/human respectively) pretty much looked fine to me. But then I loaded up some alts and yeah, I could see that things looked rough. Doing my own before and after shots for my Chiss agent and Mirialan smuggler, they both appeared to have aged about twenty years each.

I figured that obviously couldn't be right, considering that it went completely against what had been said and shown on the livestream, so I was still more amused than worried. I posted some feedback on the PTS forums, but in what I thought was a kind of playful tone - you might want to review some settings on these, guys! I also took further heart from seeing posts like this one from someone who has some knowledge about 3D models and textures and showed that a lot of the issues people were seeing could indeed feasibly just be caused by one slider basically being set to the wrong number.

However, the SWTOR community loves a good freak-out and I still saw many posts that weren't just pointing out that something was wrong, but whose authors were seriously upset, threatening to unsubscribe forever over this, and so on and so forth. As someone who's 41 in real life, I was honestly a bit offended by some of the comments that claimed that the changes made their characters look 70 years old. Have you ever seen a 70-year-old in real life, kiddo?! I'll admit that some of the memes people came up with were amusing, but all in all I found the whole thing a bit tiring, considering that it seemed so obvious to me that it was simply a bug on the PTS, which exists specifically so people can find bugs before go-live.

Fortunately the latest PTS update has improved things and the worst of the panic seems to have subsided... though I'm still seeing some criticisms in the new PTS feedback thread, the most poignant of which to me was the one pointing out that the new faces look a lot worse on low graphics settings than the old faces, which I agree is definitely something that should be looked into.

I also had a kind of strange experience when checking out the new update myself, as I basically logged into the PTS, clicked through my characters on the character selection screen one by one and thought "yep, these all look great". However, after I took a few more screenshots for comparison purposes, I lined them up next to the "buggy" faces and they... actually didn't look all that different? As in, there are still some pretty noticeable differences compared to the old faces, and I can still see more wrinkles than I'd necessarily like to on my idealised video game heroines, but at the same time - it didn't bother me at all while in game, only when staring intensely at the close-up shots, which is not something I would usually do while playing.

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

My conclusion for now is that I'll be fine and will be happy with my characters getting updated, but I also feel like I have no clue how the majority of players will react to these changes. As mentioned, there are still plenty of complaints being raised in the feedback thread, some of which I can kind of see, but others just make me feel like Pam from The Office, going "They're the same picture" (meaning I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about).

And maybe that makes you think that my eyesight is lacking and obviously everyone will still hate this update, to which I'd respond: Will they though? Because I've also spoken to people who saw that very first, bugged update and genuinely thought it was fine too, going "sure, my character looks a bit older than before, but so what". My hunch is that most players will probably be fine, because even if you do notice differences between old and new that you don't like in the direct comparison shots, I reckon most players don't actually spend that much time staring intently at their character's nostrils in everyday play if you get what I mean. I don't think the differences will be as noticeable when you're actually playing the game normally and not glaring at your character like they're about to have their police mugshot taken.

All in all, I guess this goes to prove once again that player character updates in MMOs are a tricky thing. I remember when I briefly resubbed to World of Warcraft in late 2013 after having been away from the game for more than a year, the low-resolution old character models that I'd always liked before suddenly appalled me, as I'd gotten too used to SWTOR's much better-looking avatars. When WoW then updated its models in 2014, I logged in once just to check out my characters' new looks, and while I thought Blizzard did a decent job with the upgrades overall, I also noted at the time that many characters looked older and angrier than before, and ten years later I'm still not over what they did to female tauren. So this kind of thing is always a bit of a gamble, but remembering my own reaction to WoW's old character models in 2013, it's probably also a necessary one if the game is supposed to continue attracting new players.

If you have any doubts about this update yourself, I can only recommend downloading the PTS, copying over some of your characters, and giving feedback in the relevant forum thread. If you've already seen your characters' updated looks, how do you feel about them?

Happy Birthday to the Shae Vizla Server!

One year ago today, the SWTOR devs surprised us all with the sudden and previously unannounced launch of the Shae Vizla APAC server. As someone who lives in Europe but nevertheless jumped right in just to see what it was all about, I had a lot of fun with the fresh server experience. This lasted for about two months, but once Galactic Season 5 and PvP Season 4 were over, activity on the server kind of dropped off a cliff.

Unlike many, I didn't stop playing there myself, but I did dial down my investment a bit, simply treating the server as equal to my other "secondary" servers where I'm mainly active for Galactic Seasons. I'm still in the same guild, my legacy level is up to 43, and while I've still only completed one class story, two other characters are very close to finishing theirs too, which is still more progress than I've made on that front on any other server bar my home on Darth Malgus. However, I've stopped trying to attend guild events that start at 1 a.m. my time (I don't know why all the raids seem to happen at what's lunch time in Sydney) and I no longer attempt to queue for PvP. Group content just isn't happening for me on Shae Vizla.

I wrote about the state of the server six months ago, and as far as I can tell, the situation hasn't changed much since then. You can still get things done if you can find a guild or community that organises events in your time zone, but looking at the Conquest board this week, the numbers actually look even smaller than on Leviathan at this point, indicating a further drop in activity.

I really wish I had something more uplifting to say to celebrate the server's birthday! I guess in another six months it will have outlived the original APAC servers, which were only online from March 2012 to August 2013?

Feel free to share your own Shae Vizla experiences in the comments.