What Will the EA Buyout Mean for SWTOR?

In case you managed to miss the big gaming news on Monday, Electronic Arts announced that it's going from a publicly traded company to a private one, thanks to a 55 billion dollar buyout. This is unusual as generally, large companies strive for the opposite, to go public. You hear about things going the other way a lot less often, never mind with such a large sum of money changing hands.

I wasn't sure whether I should write about this on the blog because I'm not really an expert on all this business stuff. People who seem more knowledgeable on the subject mostly seem to think that this will enrich a certain number of individuals while ultimately being bad for EA itself, likely leading to a lot of lay-offs and perhaps even bankruptcy further down the line. So not great news for fans of Bioware games and the like.

However, many of the comments I've read on social media about how this is likely to affect SWTOR have been so utterly hyperbolic and divorced from reality, I feel we need to clarify some things. Remember, The Old Republic is NOT a Bioware game anymore, not in the technical sense anyway. It's being developed by Broadsword!

Also, if you read the article linked at the top, the transaction "is expected to close in Q1 FY27" so nothing's happening as a result of this for at least another year.

Whatever is going to happen as the result of this buyout eventually, I do not believe we have reason to worry about SWTOR in specific. Keep in mind that SWTOR isn't something that EA wholly owns; it's a collaborative project between Disney, Broadsword and EA.

Disney may be making the smallest contribution at this point (unless they are secretly responsible for a lot of the investment in the game) but they are actually the ones with the ultimate power due to owning the Star Wars IP. They could theoretically cause the game to shut down at any time by saying "we no longer want this to represent Star Wars" and that would be it. You can't take the Star Wars out of SWTOR and still have a game. This seems unlikely to be a problem though as based on various dev interviews, the Disney peeps seem to love the game and are quite happy with the work the devs have been doing with it.

The interaction between Broadsword and EA is a lot less clear. Unlike Bioware, Broadsword as a studio is not owned by EA, however EA still serves as SWTOR's publisher. Wikipedia actually has its own entry for video game publisher - and from the sounds of it a publisher's influence can vary a lot, from being heavily involved in pretty much everything but the coding to basically just handling distribution. From the outside we can't really tell just how much involvement EA has in SWTOR nowadays. We know they provide customer services, distribute the game through Origin the "EA App" and handle payments. But do they actually put money into the studio to develop the game and give any direction in terms of what the devs should be working on? For all we know, Broadsword might simply use SWTOR's revenue to pay the devs and then pay EA their cut. We just don't know.

I would personally be wary of assuming that EA in its publisher role is this all-powerful entity that controls everything. It's very much possible for a game dev studio to break ties with a publisher and continue doing their thing without them, such as Bungie did with Activision in 2019. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen here, I'm just saying it's within the realm of reasonable possibilities that Broadsword, with the approval of Disney, could continue to develop SWTOR even if EA wanted to stop being involved with the game for whatever reason. EA doesn't have the power to simply unilaterally shut them down on a whim.

Not that I think it's likely that this question would even come up. SWTOR seems to currently sit in this relatively comfortable spot where it's small enough to not draw unnecessary attention in terms of opportunities to cut spending (What's even left to cut when the team is already this small?) but simultaneously profitable enough that none of the bigwigs feel the need to get rid of it. When EA's new owners are looking into cutting costs, they'll probably look at single player focused studios that are using up money without sufficiently high returns, not so much at live service games whose development teams are already small while contributing a steady pay check month after month.

Yes, there's always a chance that something weird and crazy happens, but that's like worrying about being hit on the head by a meteorite when you go outside. The more likely scenarios are not immediately concerning to SWTOR players, not unless or until we directly hear otherwise. To re-use an image from a few years ago (yes, we've been through this whole panic thing more than once at this point):

(P.S: To be clear, I'm not saying this isn't big news, and you have every right to be concerned about games directly owned by EA as well as the devs working on these games. However, this blog is about SWTOR and my point is that for SWTOR in specific, there is currently no reason to assume that it will impact the game in a major way.)

Legacy Level 50 on Shae Vizla

Last year in June I made a post to commemorate the milestone of hitting legacy level 50 on Star Forge, making it the second server on which I achieved this feat. I said I'd post again when I achieved the same on another server, so... here we are!

I hit legacy level 50 on Shae Vizla this weekend, after completing the featured veteran flashpoint of the week for Galactic Seasons. And yes, I failed to get a screenshot of it once again, though I wasn't completely oblivious to the event this time. I was in fact very aware that I was getting close, but to be honest the flashpoint had been a bit unpleasant from my perspective, so that distracted me... When we clicked the console at the end to trigger completion, I got about ten different message pop-ups about achievements, Conquest and seasonal progression, and the couple of seconds it took me to realise "oh snap, I also dinged legacy level 50; I should take a screenshot" were too much of a delay, as the relevant text had already faded from my screen again.

You may be wondering how my legacy on Shae Vizla ended up getting ahead of Satele Shan, the Leviathan and Tulak Hord, where I've been playing for longer, and the answer is simply that I played on SV pretty intensely for a few months when it first came out, which ended up giving me a boost. It's also the secondary server where I've completed the largest number of class stories, with that number currently sitting at four (warrior, consular, trooper and bounty hunter).

That said, these days it doesn't really get any extra play time compared to the other servers on which I primarily play for Galactic Seasons. It does always make me a bit sad to remember how bustling and alive the Shae Vizla server was at its launch compared to how it is now. This Sunday it occurred to me to work my way through the levels in /who (so typing "/who 1-9", "/who 10-19" etc. in quick succession) and around 8pm Sydney time, what I would expect to be prime time for the APAC region, there were only a little over 100 people online on Imp side. Even if we're generous and assume about the same amount of activity on Republic side, 200 concurrent players is not a lot for an official SWTOR server. Maybe there are other times of day when it's busier if the population is still skewed towards including as many US and EU players as there seemed to be at launch, but it can't be that much better I reckon.

Anyway! The other three servers on which I haven't hit legacy level 50 yet are not that far off either at this point - I believe they are all around legacy level 45 or so. I wouldn't expect to ding 50 there this season, but I could see myself hitting that milestone on all three servers in quick succession at some point next year.

10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There

Star Wars: The Old Republic is primarily know for its developer-crafted stories, but any player who's engaged with the social side of the game for any length of time knows that there are also community-driven stories and dramas, and moments when you simply had to be there to know what made them so exciting, even if some of the related content is still available in the game today. As someone who's been a subscriber since early access and never stopped playing, I thought it would be fun to share some of the most interesting moments I remember with my readers, especially with newer ones who may not have been playing as long.

Note: If you've never played through some of the expansion storylines, some of the later items on this list will contain story spoilers.

The /getdown bug

Going chronologically, let's start with a story with which I amused my guildies one night. Back when the game launched, you could apparently do dance emotes in combat, and someone quickly discovered that doing /getdown would suddenly prevent opponents from attacking. This was actually picked up by several gaming news sites at the time, both because SWTOR was the newest hotness in town and because the mere idea of enemies being stunned into inaction by your dancing skills was a very funny thing to write headlines about.

I never saw this bug in action myself, but I did come across this comic on social media at the time which made me laugh so much that I saved it:

Click to enlarge and read properly. I wish I could credit the original artist (Minicrit?) with a link, but alas, RIP Google Plus.

The big PvP debacle on original Ilum

Another thing that made headlines around launch was the planet Ilum and the PvP taking place there. You see, the western ice shelf where the Gree visit nowadays used to be a dedicated PvP area. This brief video by Force Gaming should give you an idea of how it was supposed to work. It was released about two weeks after launch, and the video notes that at the time, people were just flipping objectives and not much PvP was going on. This was "fixed" with a patch... that in turn broke the area in a whole bunch of other ways. The result were crazy AoE fests that the game's engine couldn't deal with very well, which caused people to gain valour way too fast, even as they were just dying over and over in the mayhem. It was just chaos and caused endless complaints.

Once again, this is something I didn't actually get to experience directly, as I took my time levelling and didn't get to Ilum until about three months later, by which time all the craziness had already died down. In January 2013, I actually wrote a post called "The strangeness of Ilum a year later", but in those first weeks after launch, it was seemingly all people would talk about on forums and news sites, about how this newly launched MMO clearly didn't know how to deal with PvP and was therefore already failing horribly.

The original Rakghoul event

The recurring Rakghoul Resurgence event is probably old hat to most of you at this point - just another world event that comes around every so often and which has been around for what feels like forever. The very first Rakghoul event in April 2012 though... that was something else. The activities it came with weren't really any more exciting than what we have in the repeating event, but the vibe was very different and unique, mainly because we had no idea it was coming.

The game was still very new at the time, had a lot going on and we were getting patches and updates about more patches all the time... but this came as a complete surprise, and the experience of everyone being confused about what was going on and slowly figuring things out over the course of the first day was unique and exciting in a way that I think is hard to convey nowadays. You can read the blog post I wrote about it at the time to get an idea though. (I also wrote two follow-ups.)

Ultimately the fact that it was a time-limited one-off was also one of the biggest criticisms Bioware received, which is why they eventually swapped to making new events recurring. The Rakghouls would eventually join the rotation in early 2014.

The Grand Acquisitions Race

The Grand Acquisitions Race (sometimes also referred to as "the Chevin event") was SWTOR's second one-time world event, and a lot less exciting than the original Rakghoul incursion on Tatooine. One reason for this was that we actually knew that it was coming, even if we didn't know the details. The second reason however was that it was simply a lot less exciting in terms of activities, as all there was to do was a time-gated puzzle quest chain and farming currency crates on Nar Shaddaa. I have to chuckle a bit when I occasionally see people say that this event should be brought back. People didn't even care about it that much when the game was still in its heyday and a limited-time world event was something exciting! Still, I guess my point is you had to be there to know just how underwhelming it really was.

The return of Revan

I think this one might be a bit hard to parse for anyone who started playing after 2014. We all know Revan is in the game, right? There's a whole expansion called "Shadow of Revan", no? Well, for a moment, try to imagine that there wasn't. Revan is in the game, but only in this weird side quest that you'll only see if you like doing group content, and he's a prisoner one moment and a genocidal maniac the next, and if you blink you'll miss him dying as well. Also note that you had to have levelled through and done group content on both factions to be able to make sense of this brief cameo, something which fans of the original KotOR were not at all happy about.

Then it's 2014 - we've been level 55 for a bit over a year, got several new daily areas and raids, everything's kind of chugging along nicely if you're not dying for your character's personal story to be continued... and then we start getting a new series of flashpoints that's being promoted as a new story arc called "Forged Alliances". That Theron guy is kinda cute, but aside from that it's all a bit mysterious. Who are these new troublemakers in the shadows? The answer came in September, in a post in which I felt the need to give a spoiler warning.

Whoa, Revan is back? Revan is alive? Is it really him though? And then a whole expansion with his name! It was exciting times for a while, showing once again that Revan's name still attracted the crowds. I think reception of the expansion storyline was ultimately a bit mixed - it gave the character a better send-off than the base game had for sure, but it was still a bit awkward in the eyes of some.

The launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire

Did you realise that we're less than a month away from the KotFE expansion turning ten years old? I'm sure I'm not the only long-time player who still thinks of everything pre-KotFE as the good old days, and everything that came after it as "the new stuff". It is after all a fact that it changed the game in bigger ways than perhaps anything that came afterwards, with the introduction of features like level sync or its complete overhaul of the companion system.

Still, I'm not even talking about all of that. What made KotFE's launch a "you had to be there" moment was just how absolutely insane the hype was. A new CGI trailer for the first time since launch! Accidental leaks with announcements that could be interpreted in multiple possible ways! General Star Wars hype as we were all looking forward to the sequel trilogy! (Oops.) Absolute mayhem!

And when it came out, people (including me) did indeed love it! Mainstream gaming sites were like "hey, this game still exists and is good"! It felt like we were all set for a big SWTOR renaissance... except it all fizzled out within a couple of months. People thought the story was neat, but they didn't want to hang around to wait for one new chapter per month. They felt there wasn't enough to do at endgame. And those of us who did stick around quickly found out how tedious the new story was to play through on alts, never mind the plot going in directions that became more and more aggravating. For the second time in its life, SWTOR had released (something) with a lot of hype and then failed to live up to it.

Galactic Command

For anyone who might not know, Galactic Command was a new gearing/endgame progression system introduced with the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion, and in its original iteration, it was the worst system of its kind that I've personally ever seen. To add insult to injury, people (including me) were telling them from the moment it was announced that it was a bad idea, but the devs were all "nah, it'll work and be fun, you'll see".

It didn't and it wasn't. For me, the early days of Galactic Command were one of my all-time low points with the game. Fortunately the devs scrambled to fix it immediately after launch, but it took about six months to get it into what could be described as an "acceptable" state and many players held a grudge long after. It's another one of those things that in hindsight makes you wonder what could've been sooo bad about it, but if you were there, you know.

Theron's betrayal

I did say there were spoilers in here, didn't I? I think looking at the game's storylines as a whole, the Fractured Alliances story (consisting of the three flashpoints Crisis on Umbara, Traitor Among the Chiss and The Nathema Conspiracy) is probably not among many people's favourites. The writing definitely felt like it had dug itself into a bit of a hole with Knights of the Eternal Throne, and it wasn't clear how it was going to get out of it.

I actually think that Fractured Alliances ultimately succeeded in what it set out to do, but it's fair to say that it was a bumpy ride. One thing I really did enjoy about it though was the community interactions it created. Theron's betrayal in Crisis on Umbara was not well-received for a variety of reasons, but it was interesting to watch the conversation around it evolve as more people started to believe that the whole thing was just a ruse. In hindsight, there are some hints towards this from the beginning, but they were easy to overlook at first.

People just didn't want their love interest to betray them, and there was even a hashtag called #believeintheron making the rounds on Twitter. I remember seeing screenshots of people assembling on Odessen with all their Therons out and forming a heart-shape or something. I just thought that was very cool, and actually kind of made me more invested in the final outcome than the story itself would have been able to do on its own.

Darth Malgus' return

Back in 2017, I wrote a post called "11 NPCs That Died Before Their Time" and Darth Malgus was second on my list. I just couldn't believe that they put him in all the cinematic trailers and then simply had him get killed off in one of the first endgame flashpoints! I'm not sure I was aware at the time that there was a supposedly deleted scene from the KotFE trailer that showed Malgus being delivered to Valkorion, frozen in a block of carbonite. Even if I was, it seemed obvious at the time that they'd deleted it for a reason and for all intents and purposes, Malgus was still considered dead.

When he really did come back with the Ossus update at the end of 2018, I absolutely loved it. It was a really well-presented surprise, and while I don't think it was as big as the return of Revan, for me personally it was actually more meaningful than that had been. It's hard to think that it's already been seven years since then - at this point it feels like it should be obvious to everyone playing the game in any capacity at all that Darth Malgus is alive. However, that moment when we first found out was definitely special. (Cue some comment about how he's unfortunately outstayed his welcome since then.)

Move to Broadsword

Two years ago, when IGN leaked the news that Star Wars: The Old Republic was going to be transferred from Bioware to some largely unknown studio called Broadsword Entertainment, all hell broke loose in the community for a few weeks. I think dedicated SWTOR players are quite used to endless doom-saying about the game and are well-practised at ignoring it by this point, but this sounded serious, and it was not at all clear what the consequences were going to be.

To me it was probably more worrying than even the original free-to-play announcement had been, and I found myself seeking solace in spending a lot more time than usual talking to fellow content creators. I also felt compelled to try and do my own part by practising something vaguely resembling journalism, which meant assembling information from different sources and trying to put it into context for people. In hindsight it seems almost silly how much we worried, considering how little changed from a player perspective after the studio transition, but at the time it was big news.

Runner-ups:

I could've tried to come up with even more stories, but I thought that 10 was a good number to stop at. Nonetheless, here are three more events that I considered mentioning but decided against because they were mostly negative but also ultimately not that interesting to talk about in detail in my opinion:

• The original free-to-play transition
• The Legacy of the Sith expansion launch
• The whole character texture update drama

Which of all of these events were you personally around for? Do you agree with my characterisation of how things went down? Are there any other major events in the game's history that you would've included on this list?

Truth Sought and Found

There's a dynamic encounter on Hoth called "Trial By Fire", which I ranked among my top ten favourite encounters on that planet. As mentioned in that post, the encounter has you testing an experimental heat resistance suit inside one of the small lava fissures in the area, which requires you to press some buttons both to stay alive and to gather data.

Back in January I wrote: "I also feel like there's definitely more to how the suit works that we just haven't quite figured out yet, which intrigues me." At the time, I even spent some time trying to do more research on that myself, which included recording myself doing the encounter and noting down the sequence of available ability buttons in a spreadsheet. Unfortunately it quickly became clear that there wasn't a straightforward solution or "correct" button-pressing order. I was intrigued that on one of my attempts my charge button changed to "hyper-charge" but at the time, I couldn't figure out what that meant.

In the end I got bored of the whole thing again pretty quickly. In March however, the devs added new achievements to the dynamic encounters on Hoth with patch 7.6.1, and the real depth of Trial By Fire was revealed, including several new achievements and other rewards, which of course got the real super-sleuths on the case pretty quickly. That hyper-charge I had previously achieved by accident turned out to be only one of those achievements.

Going somewhat counter to what you'd expect considering my initial interest, I didn't immediately jump on working on all the new achievements myself. The main reason for this was that when I initially read about them, it sounded like you'd need a second person to help unlock most of them. You see, they required you to stay in the lava fissure for longer and focus on the data-gathering abilities at the expense of the self-preservation abilities, so initially the advice given was to bring another person to heal you through the damage (your own companion gets dismissed whenever you don the lava suit).

However, as new information was uncovered and the guides were updated, I learned that it was possible to survive by yourself, by falling back on tried and tested methods used for other purposes: buying a health regenerating meal on the fleet (yes, this is a thing) and getting the "refreshed" buff from the moisture vaporators on Tatooine, the same buff that's required to hatch an Orobird pet out of its egg (and serves to protect you from extreme heat in that context as well). It just really tickled me that they'd actually re-used an old mechanic like that in a way that made sense and I wanted to see for myself how it worked. So I got myself all refreshed, ate my dewback steak sandwich and started diving into the lava.

And what do you know, I had fun! I quickly got into the habit of just parking my character with the buffs next to where the encounter usually appears and then relogging her whenever it was up. (Both buffs last half an hour, so if you don't do anything other than spend five minutes on the dynamic encounter every time it's up, you can do several runs in a row without having to go back to Tatooine to refresh the buff from there.) It didn't even require a huge amount of effort, just a bit of patience. (I did make myself a little crazy at times checking the galaxy map every half hour to see whether the encounter was back up yet, but that part's not mandatory.)

A few weeks ago, I finally dug up the last item I needed for the last achievement, which earns you a special armour set and the title "Truth Seeker". The armour set kind of looks like the hazmat suit you wear during the encounter itself and therefore isn't exactly the most stylish of outfits, but I've been wearing both it and the title on my main for several weeks now because I'm just so proud of having achieved it. It's not proof of great skill or anything, just of patience, but it's such a niche thing that I don't think many people are even aware of it. Which, to be honest, is also why I wrote this post, to spread awareness of this bit of hidden content. I think it's a very fun little puzzle and I appreciate whichever dev came up with it.

GS9, Week 4 Thoughts

This week was probably the least fun week of Galactic Season 9 for me so far, though I can't tell for sure whether the objectives were just less fun by themselves or whether my "new season enthusiasm" was slowly starting to wear off. That isn't to say that it was a bad week, just one that felt like it required more effort.

The dynamic encounter planet of the week was Dromund Kaas, which was weirdly enough quite a mixed bag. First off, it required 25 instead of 15 encounter completions again, which I found off-putting, though that didn't prevent me from doing the objective anyway, at least not this early in the season.

More strikingly though, Dromund Kaas was a weird inverse of Ilum last week - as mentioned then, I think the dynamic encounters on the latter are usually somewhat less fun due to the high mob density, so having more people around who were constantly clearing things out actually made everything more pleasant. Dromund Kaas on the other hand has a lot of encounters that are usually quite fun in my opinion... but they just don't scale with large crowds at all. Watching a dozen people all try to be the first to click that one terminal in "Rogue Droid Uprising" would have been funny if it hadn't also been very frustrating. The cherry on top was that this particular encounter has an achievement for clicking the terminal really quickly after getting to that stage of progression - not this week, bucko!

The veteran flashpoint of the week was the first part of the Jedi Prisoner storyline on each faction, which meant running either Taral V or Boarding Party and was another objective I wasn't too thrilled about. The Jedi Prisoner is an interesting storyline, but all the flashpoints involved in it are definitely in the bottom half of my list if I had to rank all flashpoints from best to worst. Gameplay-wise, they're all kind of long and boring, and while there are a lot of mobs that can be skipped, that just makes the whole experience feel a bit unsatisfying in a different way (to me anyway). Also, what's the point of doing Boarding Party if you don't get to confront Captain Yelto at the end?!

Unsurprisingly, my favourite run of this objective was the one I did with Mr Commando, who - despite not having run any flashpoints in what felt like forever - still remembered his exact pulling routine to unlock the Taral V bonus boss in what he felt was the most efficient way possible, which I thought was quite beautiful to behold. As it happened, we also had to pug one dps in that run, and I was a bit worried that we might get someone who'd be annoyed at us not skipping everything to finish the run as quickly as possible. However, we got lucky and got a level 15 who actually seemed quite delighted by the experience, gained six levels throughout the flashpoint and asked us at the end whether we wanted to do another one, which I thought was cute.

Running a master mode flashpoint was also an objective once again, and I was happy to do so on five servers (Shae Vizla is only being left out because I can't get the queue to pop there, even while queueing as tank or healer). My random pops this week were Blood Hunt, Cademimu, Mandalorian Raiders and Assault on Tython times two, which took me up to four runs of the latter this season already.

I'm curious whether that was just pure RNG or whether this is a side effect of the new exclusion rules. I have this theory that people primarily choose to exclude flashpoints from their random queue for three reasons:

1. They're perceived as too hard (e.g. Ruins of Nul, Shrine of Silence).
2. They're perceived as too long (e.g. The Esseles, Directive 7).
3. They're perceived as easy and overfarmed to an annoying degree (e.g. Hammer Station, Athiss).

If all four people that are up next in the queue have excluded five flashpoints for different reasons, that narrows the selection down by quite a lot - and I reckon Assault on Tython may simply be one of those that slips through the net either way, as it's neither faceroll easy nor particularly hard, and not terribly long either (especially if you skip some of the early trash). Has anyone else been seeing more of this one than usual? My hypothesis will need further testing for sure.

As for the other flashpoints, Blood Hunt was largely unremarkable, and Cademimu was the one I did with Mr Commando, which once again meant doing the bonus and just dragging a pug along whether they liked it or not, though they didn't complain about it. It was funny though when the guildie who was our fourth accidentally took the elevator downstairs in the middle of the bonus boss fight. 

That said, the weirdest/most amusing run was probably the Mandalorian Raiders I did on Satele Shan. I noted last week that I'm not a fan of dps running ahead and pulling when I'm the tank, right? Well, in this one there was a Guardian dps who took off like a bat out of hell the moment we zoned in and then kept pulling non-stop. I considered saying something like "you know this is master mode, right" but decided that this would've been too passive-aggressive - but also, I was honestly kind of confused more than anything because of how he kept getting away with it, in the sense that none of the trash seemed to hurt him too badly even when he got all the aggro. I was even starting to wonder whether I'd accidentally queued for veteran mode by mistake.

It wasn't until we killed Braxx the Bloodhound with the healer dead and everyone else on about ten percent health that the Guardian paused and said something along the lines of "I only just realised this is master mode since there were no kolto stations". So that was kind of humorous. He did stop pulling after that, we had a few more mishaps anyway, but ultimately it was all good.

Subscriber Login Event

This past Tuesday the new login rewards event for subscribers started, and it will run until early December. We'd heard a bit about this in the last dev stream back in July, but didn't get any more details about just what exactly it was going to involve until the event actually went live. (Here's the article about it on the official website.)

To summarise in a nutshell: There is already a login reward every week that all players get if they log in four days a week. This is usually something very basic such as 8 bonus points towards your Galactic Seasons progress. Tied to the same tracker, there is an additional reward for subscribers only, which again, is usually something nice but not particularly exciting, such as a valor token or a Personal Conquest Requisition.

However, for the duration of this event, this subscriber-only reward is instead going to consist of 6 "subscriber login tokens" per week. This is a legacy-wide currency which stacks up to 18, and can be traded at a fleet vendor for some cosmetic rewards or endgame gear, with items ranging in price from 2 to 12 tokens. (Swtorista has a full, detailed guide here.)

I've got to admit I was kind of surprised by the inclusion of endgame gear on the vendor. I mean, isn't that a little bit pay-to-win? I seem to remember a time when something like "free raid gear on login if you subscribe" would have generated some outrage, but I've seen very few comments even go in that general direction. I'm not saying that people should be upset or anything, it's just... part of me does bristle a bit at how gamers as a whole have been slow-cooked into finding real money translating into in-game power less and less objectionable. Which does include me by the way!

I know I'm going to use these tokens to buy my alts on the other servers some better gear (since the login rewards are per server, not account-wide), and I can't argue with the people who've told me that it's not a big deal, considering that Rakata has been our endgame gear for three and a half years now - not to mention that SWTOR is generally not a game focused on grinding gear anyway. I just can't quite shake the feeling that it does still feel a little wrong somehow at the same time.

Anyway, if you've ever wanted endgame gear in SWTOR just for subscribing and logging in, now's your chance. With each Rakata piece only costing 2 tokens, you could be fully kitted out after four weeks.

What I'm actually interested in (though I doubt we'll find out) is how much of an impact this is going to have on subscriptions. I was recently told by someone that according to some financial report, SWTOR's revenue was pretty steady, but subscriptions have been down lately and more money has come in through microtransactions instead. While I haven't been able to verify a source for this, it does at least sound plausible if you think about it.

What are reasons to subscribe nowadays? You need to be a subscriber to do operations, but that's a system that receives relatively little support and new content. I'm sure many people sub up for at least a month to check out the newest story updates every so often, but due to the voice actors' strike, we haven't had a new installment of that since June last year. And they just removed a bunch of free-to-play restrictions that were meant to annoy people into subscribing as well. (Which I do think is a good thing for the game, holistically speaking, but I would still also expect it to lead to at least a slight drop in subscriptions in the short term.) So unless SWTOR is one of your main hobbies and you're constantly subscribed because of that (as is the case for me), incentives to become a new sub have been pretty weak for a while.

I guess Galactic Seasons have been another reason, since you need to be a subscriber to unlock all the rewards... but that's not a lot. For the game's sake, I hope that these new rewards find an audience.

GS9 Flashpointing, Week 3

I wasn't planning to keep a diary of my weekly activities this season - and I guess I'm still not really keeping one, at least not one that involves the level of detail with which I kept Galactic Season diaries in Season 1 and Season 6 - but I do find the weekly flashpoint objectives interesting enough that I keep wanting to take some notes on them.

In general, the third week of Galactic Season 9 was another really pleasant one with multiple easy objectives, to the point that I ended up going 7 out of 7 on all servers. You know it's an easy one when you set yourself a goal to reach a certain objective by the end of the week and end up ticking off several others by accident before you even get there! That's the kind of week it was.

The dynamic encounter planet of the week was Ilum. It's the planet I've ranked as the least fun in terms of dynamic encounters so far, but the reason I did so was that I think many encounters have a high mob density that tends to get in the way of whatever the actual objective is. In a week like this one, where there were plenty of people on Ilum every day, this wasn't nearly as bad as mobs were constantly getting cleared out left and right. Turns out even the rather tedious Fall of Fort Tonvarr can be fun with a sufficiently large crowd of people around.

The featured veteran mode flashpoint of the week was Mandalorian Raiders, which is another relatively easy one. I wonder if all the featured flashpoints will be softballs or whether the devs will make us "graduate" to some of the trickier ones as the season progresses.

Anyway, nothing too noteworthy happened in any of my runs of this particular flashpoint this week, except that in one run where we had particularly high dps (it was a group with multiple level 80s if I recall correctly) the last boss was burned down so quickly that he completely forgot to do any mechanics, just stood there and didn't move until he died. The only downside of this was that this also seemed to bug out his on-screen position, as none of us were able to loot him, always getting the "you can't reach that" error message.

I still remember when at least parts of this flashpoint could be quite deadly, such as if you pushed the last boss himself too quickly and got too many turret adds, but in the one group where this happened it was no problem to survive the turret fire anyway.

Also, the dog trash used to hit so hard, I remember on master mode we'd have to rotate stuns to make sure the tank would survive. I will say though that in runs with lower-level characters, I did notice that ahead of some pulls with multiple dogs, people often suddenly step on the brakes, clearly waiting for someone else to go first and get pounced on (I tended to volunteer).

The more exciting thing were once again the master mode flashpoints though, even if I got a pretty tame selection this week.

On Leviathan I got Hammer Station at last! I'm happy that it took until week three for it to show up in my randoms. Also, we actually killed all the trash to the first boss properly instead of trying to run like headless chickens, which is something I appreciated.

On Tulak Hord I got into a Maelstrom Prison and nearly died on the first pull when I got all the healer aggro just as a guildie was asking me something, but other than that it was smooth. And yes, a guildie was actually online in the largely inactive guild I joined! They asked me to invite an alt of theirs into the guild, so I had them invite two of mine in return after the flashpoint, so I can at last reap a few more Conquest rewards on this server. (Now, if only I knew what to do with my Imps...)

On Star Forge, I did several flashpoints on Swtorista's stream, and we got Nathema Conspiracy and Legacy of the Rakata. In the former, we actually did no skips, and we all agreed that the last boss used to be way harder somehow. In the latter, we wiped once on the bonus boss, oops! But it was all good fun.

On Satele Shan, I once again used my magic tank powers to get an instant pop for a pug. The power is addictive! This time I got into Red Reaper, a flashpoint I hadn't done in ages. A dps Powertech was constantly running ahead, which annoyed me a bit because if you're on a class that can tank and you want to always be the first to charge in, just queue as tank, damn it! These sorts of damage dealers are my least favourite to tank for. Though this one did stop just short of actually trying to pull for me. Fortunately I did still end up remembering all the pulls and skips so I managed to keep up reasonably well. I was really just having tank ego problems here: I got an instant pop and had a smooth run where nobody died, but one of the dps was playing in a manner that was slightly annoying to me, woe is me.

On Darth Malgus, we managed to field two groups for master mode flashpoints after our social ops run on Saturday, which was something I was very happy to see as I've always felt that flashpoints are a great social activity. My group got the Esseles, which I didn't have any particularly strong feelings about at this point, but Mr Commando groaned as it was the third time he'd had to run the Esseles in three weeks. I will note that I think for master modes the cut scene skip is fine by the way, because these were always meant to be a gear grind above anything else.

I'm curious to see what exciting places the group finder will take me next week!

Armour Sale Time!

Like last year, SWTOR is running a number of themed sales this summer. I like these themed sales because they make it much easier to know in advance whether something relevant to you might be included or not, but I didn't mention the whole thing this time, because to be honest it wasn't as exciting the second time around, at least at first.

When they put a whole bunch of mounts on sale at the end of July, I basically ended up buying exactly one mount that I had regretted not grabbing last year, and that was kind of it - pretty much everything else I either already had or wasn't really interested in. They don't add a lot of new mounts to the Cartel Market nowadays, do they? It's mostly weapons and armour sets.

Then the next two sales were about weapons and modifications and I was very eh about those too. However, this week we got armour sets, and that's one area where they keep adding a lot of interesting stuff, so I found this one much more intriguing to revisit. As it happened, I had just created two new alts as well, for whom I hadn't decided on outfits yet, so going shopping for those quickly became my primary objective.

I ended up making a very shiny Twi'lek. She's wearing the Secret Agent's Armor Set with that shiny dye from Galactic Season 6.

Anyway, why am I posting this? Because I think that this is a cool sale and wanted to make a PSA to my readers to not miss out in case anything interests them. If you want to browse the goods without being logged into the game, Swtorista has a handy page that lets you see all the different sets while also allowing you to sort them alphabetically, by base price or by discount, to make it easy to find the best deals or specific sets you might be looking for. Just remember my advice on how to shop responsibly (that post was about mounts but really, the principle's the same regardless of what items you're looking at)!

Also worth noting: From the 16th of September, the theme is supposed to switch to decorations, another one where I personally expect to spend some coins. They really don't let me hoard that free CC like they used to!

A Good Start to the Season

You may find it hard to believe after my outrage at how gutted the Esseles and the Black Talon feel without cut scenes, but I've actually had a pretty good start to Galactic Season 9 in spite of that. Patch day was a bit rough, with my game crashing to desktop something like seven times, but once I learned that this was caused by hovering over one specific UI element, I was once again too amazed by just how weird MMO bugs can be sometimes to really be mad about that. (Plus, once I knew what was causing it, it was easy to avoid. They then patched the issue a couple days later.)

The flashpoint theme has actually felt surprisingly invigorating. I've long said that I'm a big fan of flashpoints, but I'm not immune to incentives, and the fact that there's literally been nothing to earn for me in flashpoints for a couple of years now has admittedly discouraged me from running them. I would rarely go for the seasons objectives that required you to run two specific flashpoints because they were just too time-consuming and felt inefficient. The dedicated weekly objective for this season only requiring a single quick veteran mode run makes a world of a difference, and I was genuinely surprised that I actually had fun blitzing through Athiss six times this past week.

My favourite run was the one with my husband on our home server, where he actually bothered to go into one of the side alcoves to use his scavenging to repair the broken combat droid there, something I hadn't done in so long that I'd genuinely forgotten that it was even a thing. One of the guildies in our group then kept casting a heal over time on it to keep it alive, to the point that the temporary pet was actually still alive when we got to the last boss. This is where we learned that the living fire debuff can go on non-player characters! The poor droid didn't manage to survive that one, but it was good for a laugh. 

The other weekly objectives for the first two weeks were pretty good too, with some nice softballs that didn't take too much time to complete on multiple servers while also earning me new achievements.

My personal biggest delight last week though was that there was also an objective to run any random master mode flashpoint, which I did on five out of six servers. (Sadly I couldn't get the queue to pop on Shae Vizla even while queueing as a tank.)

Even better, not a single one of them was Hammer Station, even though I had queued for the full selection. I had the expectation that most people would use the new feature that allows you to exclude a few flashpoints without losing your random bonus to primarily veto long or difficult ones, but maybe there are more fellow Spammer Station haters out there than expected who are actually excluding that one instead.

Either way, the random master mode flashpoints I got put into were Assault on Tython (twice), Battle of Rishi, Lost Island and Crisis on Umbara. The latter must have been nerfed a lot since I last did it, as my group completed it successfully without wiping despite feeling pretty mid in terms of skill. I know there's been some gear inflation since 7.0, but the first two bosses barely even seemed to do any damage, and we pulled the bonus boss by accident with a bunch of trash and still killed that successfully too. Not that I'm complaining!

Battle of Rishi had me busting out my Shadow's tank spec on Satele Shan, which I had actually set up some time ago but then never ended up using. I was very pleased with myself for how I guided the rest of the group through the run after someone expressed that it had been a while and they weren't sure they remembered what to do. Trying to model good tank behaviour!

Lost Island was the most memorable one though, as that was what I got on the Leviathan server while queueing on my Sage as a healer. It quickly became obvious that the tank and one of the damage dealers knew basically nothing about the flashpoint, while the other damage dealer gave the vibes of someone who had done it before and generally knew how to play but couldn't fully remember all the tactics properly. It was pretty funny to read the chat and try to make sense of it, as my knowledge of French is very limited. I think I could generally get the vibe/general topic, but not necessarily what exactly people were trying to say.

Unsurprisingly we wiped something like five times on the second boss as everyone but me kept getting knocked off the platform. I tried to use Google Translate to explain where people needed to stand, but either the translation made no sense or they intentionally decided to ignore me because I sounded too weird, as they didn't appear to listen to my advice. Fortunately they eventually seemingly managed to figure it out on their own and we were victorious. The remaining two bosses after that were comparatively easy, but I still felt like I was carrying pretty hard, healing people through some significant amounts of "standing in bad".

I felt properly giddy after we finished, both excited and relieved that we'd succeeded despite our difficulties, but also a bit amused by how ridiculous the whole experience had felt. The dps who'd given me vibes of having some idea of what to do whispered me afterwards to... I don't know, I'm guessing it was something like "we're queueing again" though it might have meant something completely different; I genuinely had no clue. I just logged off because I'd definitely had enough for that evening.

I'm hoping to see that objective pop up more often though.

Flashpoints: Why Are We Here?

I've been having fun with the new season so far and will probably talk about that at some point, but the removal of cut scenes and group conversations from the group finder continues to weigh heavily on my mind. While my initial reaction was skewing towards slightly negative, I was telling myself that this is probably one of those cases where I'm just a weird outlier for liking something (group conversations in pug flashpoints) that many people don't like, and that I'll see the benefits of this change soon enough. I still remember when the Czerka flashpoints first came out back in 2013, I was actually somewhat disappointed at first that they were so streamlined without any interactive cut scenes, but I got over that pretty quickly.

One of the seasons objectives this week was to run either the Black Talon or the Esseles on veteran mode via the group finder, and with me doing Galactic Seasons on all servers I had plenty of opportunity to see the new change in action. For the most part, the experience was... fine. I'm not going to pretend that I would have had so much more fun if I'd gotten the full cut scene experience six times instead of the new fade to black thing. Primarily, it was all just kind of weird, with a lot of running back and forth with no discernible purpose when you don't actually have the story cut scenes to tell you what is happening.

There was one run that really annoyed me though. I got into an Esseles on a level 80 healer, and the other three members of the group were a level 80 dps, a level 10 and a level 14. I don't know if the two lowbies were new players or just alts, but either way they were subject to certain limitations at their low level, such as slower speed and lacking strong AoE abilities or defensives. Yet the level 80 was constantly mounting up and driving ahead, aggroing absolutely everything to pull it into a corner at the end, while the rest of us slowly jogged after them on foot. (I would've been able to keep up more but I felt it was my duty to protect the lowbies, who would've died several times if I hadn't healed them.)

The 80 repeatedly told them off for fighting things and said they should just mount up as well. I got the impression that at least one of them got a bit flustered by that and tried to overcompensate by mounting up and rushing ahead even of the level 80 at one point, just to then be told off because not everyone had made it up the elevator yet when we were put into combat as a result of that (which was technically correct but also must've been confusing in terms of mixed messages).

I got really annoyed with that level 80's attitude but didn't say anything because frankly I was quite busy just keeping up with their constant running myself, as well as just keeping everyone else alive. I simply did what I could to support the lowbies, such as when one of them veered off towards the bonus boss while the 80 was just trying to go straight to the end. I just kept hoping that neither of the little guys were genuinely new players because if I had been a newbie in that situation, I would have been so put off from running flashpoints ever again.

Now, to be clear, all of this technically has nothing to do with the cut scene change, because people could act like that while the group conversations were still a thing. However, at least the cut scenes would put the brakes on things a little bit. They were a reminder that this flashpoint wasn't designed to be rushed like that. And I feel that the removal of the cut scenes does the opposite now, vindicating people like that level 80 in the sense that yes, the devs agree with you that flashpoints are something to get over and done with as quickly as possible. I feel like my opinion was validated by a thread on the SWTOR subreddit posted this week about how this kind of behaviour seemed to be worse than ever since the patch. In a comment thread there, someone who commented that "games are meant to be fun" also received the reply: "It's a season objective. Literally not meant to be fun. Just a way to progress."

I just kept thinking to myself: What are we doing here? Why are we optimising content for people who don't like it? And I realised that I'm worried about SWTOR flashpoints going down the way of World of Warcraft dungeons.

WoW was my first MMO as well as my introduction to doing group content with random players, and I loved it. The first time I did the Deadmines? Amazing. I got yelled at for ninja-looting a chest because I didn't know any better, but I apologised, learned from it and we moved on. For about three or four years, dungeons were easily one of my favourite things to do in the game. However, somewhere along the line, things changed. Blizzard wanted players to run dungeons in greater numbers and more often, so they became increasingly incentivised for endless replay, and people's attitudes changed accordingly.

I still play WoW almost twenty years later, but I rarely do dungeons in its modern incarnation now. Every now and then some reward will lure me into queueing up for a pug dungeon again, just for me to instantly be reminded of why I no longer find them fun. Everything is just an insane rush to the end to pick up the reward and it's a casual or new player's absolute nightmare.

When I started playing SWTOR, I instantly fell in love with the game's flashpoints too. The Esseles and Black Talon are absolutely amazing experiences that have no real equivalent in other games when you play through them in a group for the first time and as intended (which is to say, actually paying attention to the story and listening to the group conversations). They are also clearly not intended to be re-run on a daily basis. Sure, they can be fun to re-play every now and then, to see what different conversation choices do and so on, but it's clearly not something you're supposed to do all the time. The game won't stop you from running it multiple times a day if you want to, but I think it's fair to say that you were effectively "doing it wrong" in that case and couldn't really complain if it wasn't super fun. The idea with SWTOR flashpoints was that they were still meant to be a bit of an adventure every time you entered one, something you can only really consume in moderation.

With this change... I don't really know anymore. I can even defend the removal of cut scenes as a temporary measure for the Galactic Season, mostly because it benefits me personally, but people like me, who do Galactic Seasons on every server, can hardly make up a significant chunk of the player base. Clearly the intent is to get more players into flashpoints that haven't done them before, but I'm not sure this whole exercise is going to show them anything appealing enough to want to come back. Endless running along corridors with no rhyme or reason about what is going on? What's appealing about that?

I also saw someone comment somewhere that Final Fantasy XIV used to have a similar problem with new players having a bad experience in the group finder due to issues with cut scene skipping, and Square Enix's solution to that was to make the cut scenes unskippable for everyone and increase the reward payout to make sure veterans were being suitably compensated for the fact that the run was taking longer to accommodate the newbies. Now, I don't play FFXIV myself, so I can't tell you how well that worked out for everyone, but I think it shows that "whelp, we've got to cater to the people who are in a hurry" is not an inevitability. SWTOR and FF have a lot in common in terms of their focus on story, so it's actually kind of odd to me now to see the SWTOR devs choose speed-running over story in this instance.

At this point, after thinking about it some more, I feel like instead of removing cut scenes all over the place they should've gone back and reconsidered what flashpoints are all about and why people are funnelled into them the way they are. Why do people ask to skip cut scenes? Because they're in a flashpoint they don't really want to be in. Why are they in this flashpoint? Because we give extra rewards for queueing for a random flashpoint. Why do we give rewards for that? So people who want to run specific flashpoints can get groups for them. But why would people run the Esseles in a group these days when there is a solo mode available anyway? Maybe the devs should've just taken it out of the group finder like they did Kuat and Colicoid War Games. Leaving it in but taking out everything that actually made it unique and insteresting just feels like extremely muddled game design to me. It just doesn't make sense in my head.