SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment

The idea of a classic version of Star Wars: The Old Republic is something I talked about on Ivano's podcast last year, and ever since then I've been thinking about writing about it in more detail on the blog too. There are mainly two reasons for this: One is that I honestly thought I'd already written something about the subject ages ago but when I dug through my archives to check, all I found was a post called "Would You Want To Go Back?" from 2017, when SWTOR was only five years old - so not quite the same thing. The other reason is that I'm a big fan of World of Warcraft Classic - I was hugely excited by its initial announcement, followed its development with interest, and it eventually got me to resubscribe to World of Warcraft again in 2019, years after I'd written the game off as no longer interesting to me.

So, SWTOR Classic: Would it be a good idea? How could it work?

Let me start off by saying that in a world of unlimited time and resources, I think a classic version of SWTOR, presumably based on one of the later patches before the first expansion, would be a fun thing to explore. The thing I'd personally be the most curious about would be how hard the levelling content and heroics would turn out to be, since people often complain about how faceroll easy the game is these days and how things were sooo much harder back in the day.

As someone who was around back then, I have no doubt that this is at least partially true, but looking at WoW's example, a lot of those memories may also be coloured by the fact that we were all new to the game back then and didn't know how to play (yet). When WoW Classic came out, people who had played on private servers beforehand were all very shocked by how easy the "real" classic version of the game was, as private server owners had massively overtuned some of the content to align with their memories of how tough they remembered the game to be. This turned out to not match reality at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was true for SWTOR as well.

That said, I'm kind of afraid that's where the appeal would already end. With WoW Classic, a big draw for players was that Blizzard had decided to literally destroy the original version of the world and all its quests in the Cataclysm expansion, only six years after the game's release, meaning that content and whole zones that millions of people remembered fondly from the game's early years were no longer accessible. SWTOR never underwent anything like that - there are some side missions that were shortened or culled in 2015's Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion, but that's not even remotely close in scope. This game has always been about its fully voiced storylines; both devs and players recognised that as its greatest asset, and accordingly these things have been looked after and maintained faithfully over the years, which means that they can be played in the live game just as well in 2025 as you they could in 2011 (arguably better, because the game launched with its fair share of bugs even in the class stories, and there were a lot fewer quality of life features back then, especially in regards to travel).

"But the gameplay was so different," some of you will say, in response to which I would press X to doubt. Yes, we had old-school talent trees and no level scaling, but again, all things considered I would still argue that even the gameplay hasn't changed that dramatically over the last decade. I would again make the comparison to World of Warcraft, where I loaded up my max-level holy paladin in both Classic and retail (the modern version of the game). Ignoring things like spell ranks, passives, and the fact that spells may have retained the same name but work very differently twenty years later, I counted their abilities and while the Classic pally had 39, the retail character had 35. Only 15 of those were shared between the two game modes. The Classic character had 24 spells that no longer existed in retail, and the retail character had 20 new ones. For comparison, if I look at the screenshot I took of Shintar the trooper in SWTOR when she first hit the level cap in February 2012 and look at her action bars now, there's remarkably little difference. Yes, a few abilities were removed and a few new ones added with expansions, but comparatively, the Commando's core toolkit has changed remarkably little over the course of over a decade.

Okay, so we've established that there wouldn't be a lot of actually different content to revisit in a potential SWTOR Classic other than certain details, but let's consider effort vs. reward. Surely simply rolling the game back to an older version wouldn't take that much effort compared to something like building a whole new patch worth of new story? Ehhh... it's not that simple!

I'm no developer myself, but from what experience I do have dealing with these kinds of things, it's not that straightforward. While developers always take backups of things before changing the game in a major way, they won't necessarily keep absolutely everything forever. When the idea of WoW Classic was first being seriously considered, even Blizzard admitted that it wasn't as simple as pulling an old copy of the game out of a hat and that a fair bit of actual rebuilding would be required. When they eventually committed to the project, it actually required a fair bit of work, some of which they explained in this interesting dev blog from the time. And even with a dedicated team working on that project, it still took almost two years for WoW Classic to actually be released.

Aside from the potential difficulties involved in untangling SWTOR's old spaghetti code, there's also the matter of resources. We don't know the exact numbers, but the WoW dev team is supposedly made up of several hundred developers, with something like thirty dedicated to Classic in specific. Comparatively the SWTOR dev team has a number presumed to be a little larger than that of the WoW Classic team to take care of the entirety of SWTOR as it is. Even assuming that it could be done, would you really want them to stop work on the live game for two years to build a SWTOR Classic client? I know I wouldn't!

The final argument I can think of at this point is that some people might point at classic modes in other MMOs and say that Blizzard were kind of being perfectionists in building Classic, and that it's quite possible to cobble together something less perfect and accurate with less time and fewer resources, akin to Everquest's progression servers or the way Rift had its "prime" server. Neither of these aim(ed) to faithfully reproduce the experience of the game's early days, but count(ed) on evoking nostalgia by simply restricting the content people have access to as well as applying some other old-school limitations. The problem when applying this notion to SWTOR is that as per what I wrote earlier in this post, the game's old key content is still all there and relevant, and the only things that would make the idea of a classic server worthwhile at all are precisely the little details like gameplay differences, so this approach just seems like a dead end to me.

To summarise, I don't think we'll ever see see a SWTOR classic mode as there's comparatively little content and gameplay that would really be different to the current live game. This means that to make it an experience that's actually noticeably different and truly "classic", a lot of dev work would be required to faithfully rebuild old systems (assuming they have all the required backups to begin with), all for something that would probably be appreciated by only a very small minority of players (such as PvPers that want to relive their glory days with a particularly powerful build from 2012).

I understand the appeal of nostalgia, but I think Broadsword is better off having the devs continue to make the live game the best it can be.

Also, a tip for any readers who might miss the levelling content being harder: Try re-rolling on a server on which you don't have a legacy and be surprised by how much weaker you are without all those stat bonuses from your legacy built up over the course of a decade. And if your healer companion still makes you feel too OP, try challenging yourself by questing without your companion for a bit. You'll find that past the starter planets, it's not all quite as easy as you might think.

On the Comlink

One of patch 7.6's more minor features was the addition of the new comlink interface. To be honest, when the devs announced this on the stream in November, part of me wondered how something like that was considered important enough to be included on a stream... but in hindsight I think it's good that they showed it off in advance, as otherwise I'm pretty sure my reaction would've been a big WTF on first encountering it in game.

Musco also said on the stream that this new interface wasn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations, so naturally in the first place I encountered it... it felt like it was replacing a proper conversation, namely the short intro mission for the new ops boss.

The story wrapper missions for operations have been in KOTOR style for almost a decade, so suddenly seeing this purely text interface pop up, with not even an NPC talking to me in Huttese or anything, was certainly surprising. To be honest, the dialogue also felt a bit like it had originally been written for a traditional conversation, as the NPC - after indicating that they don't know who they're addressing on first contact - replies to your first comment with "Oh! It's YOU!". This is the kind of response that would make sense in an in-person interaction, as many a quest giver in the game starts by muttering something or other just to suddenly recognise our character the moment they look more closely. But in a texting interface, where it's already been established that the NPC doesn't know whose number this is... what are they recognising without seeing my face or hearing my voice? Does my character have a super obvious profile picture in her chat app? It just felt like a bit of a stretch is all I'm saying.

Anyway, I may poke fun, but ultimately I didn't mind this change to an ops intro mission of all things. As an operations player, I was just happy to have a new boss to fight, and one that's well-tuned and fun too. I would've gone and done the new ops even with zero story attached to it, and so would many others I'm sure, so the fact that they trimmed down the intro and post-ops debrief to a simple text exchange is no skin off my back.

I will say though that I liked the other two situations in which I encountered the new interface better. One is the little story that comes with the new Remote Outpost decoration bundle from the Cartel Market (about which I'm planning to write another post) and the other was one of the new dynamic encounters on Tatooine, where you're simply interacting with some terminals. In the latter, having this new interface instead of a KOTOR-style cut scene felt very organic, and the Remote Outpost missions felt like something that simply wouldn't have existed without this feature - the devs wouldn't have made a voiced storyline to go along with a bunch of decos at this stage of the game, but using the comlink interface they could add a little something extra that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise, so that was nice.

All in all, I think this is a positive addition to the game, assuming the devs do stick to using it in ways like these. Most people around me haven't minded it at all either, though I will say that there was one guildie who absolutely freaked out when he saw the new ops mission in writing, shouting something along the lines of: "What is this? They are going to make me read? I specifically play this game because I don't want to read things; if I wanted to read things I'd be playing WoW!"

The Best and Worst Dynamic Encounters on Hoth

I've had a lot of fun running dynamic encounters over the Christmas holidays, and after reaching 100% achievement completion on Hoth, I thought it would be fun to rank the different encounters by best and worst (not all of them though, there are too many of them for that).

The Top 10 Best Dynamic Encounters on Hoth

1. The "Ice Kitten Trilogy": Wire You Doing That/Wire Consequences/Wire You So Cute

Could there have been any doubt about this coming in first place? Who'd have thought that Republic power relay in Whiterock Wastes would ever become such a popular destination?

These three encounters loosely tell a story, though you can do them in any order. In the first one, Wire You Doing That, local ice kittens have been chewing on generator wires, leaving you to make repairs and shoo them away. In part two, Wire Consequences, the kittens are still around but grumpy, so your job is to soothe them and put them inside cat carriers. Finally, in Wire You So Cute you assemble some pet supplies and try to get random cantina patrons to adopt the kittens. A noble sentiment, though I'm not sure we're really doing a good thing here considering these are still wild animals and likely to grow a lot bigger... I feel more like someone trying to sell tiger cubs out of a car boot rather than a kind soul taking care of lost pets. Still, as long as you don't think too hard about it, these are very cute missions with virtually no combat (the first one has a chance to summon an "upset momma cat" that needs subduing, but even then there's no killing involved), and of course each one has a chance to reward you with the rare freckled Loth-cat Kitten pet. What's not to love?

2. Imperial/Republic/Pirate Attack

I'm lumping all the different "attack on base" encounters together here, because even though there are slight differences in the tools you're given to help with the defense, the basic concept is the same. I can see why an example of these was how the devs first promoted the concept of dynamic encounters to us, because it does still feel cool to me every time I land at a base and there's an attack happening. Seeing the shared progress counter tick up as an indication that someone else is already working on defending is almost guaranteed to make me want to join in to get credit too and it always feels quite satisfying.

3. Ice Fishing 

After being initially somewhat confused by this encounter on the PTS, now that it makes sense to me I'm really loving it. It's basically the seeker droid mini game with a different name, but the area you have to work in is quite small so it's very quick and pleasant. The fish "death sounds" crack me up and there's no combat involved except for the occasional hungry ice cat making an appearance. The only downside is that it's a bit out of the way for Republic players.

4. Taun Fawn Fun

This one seems to be many people's favourite and I think I would have had a riot on my hands if it wasn't included on this list! (I imagine some players would argue it should be number one.) Another very cute encounter, this one has you carrying taun fawns up a slope so they can slide down. Very simple, and another creative example of a non-combat encounter. The reason I rank it a little lower than e.g. the ice kittens is that it's almost a bit too cutesy for me - with the ice cats, you at least still have the context of looking after Republic infrastructure, but with the taun fawns you're really just pausing to play with some cute animals for no real reason. Also, the fact that only one fawn can be on the slide at a time can cause some annoyance with queue-jumping when multiple people try to do this encounter at once.

5. Fur, Fur Away 

This was one of my favourite encounters on the PTS and I still love it on live because of how simple it is: get three fur samples from non-hostile ice trompers and done! If you're lucky, you can finish in literal seconds, though the animals have a chance to resist by knocking you away. This can get a little annoying if you're suffering from a string of particularly bad RNG and get knocked about for several minutes, but even then I don't mind too much because the animation for being knocked back always amuses me. It makes you fly so high that you'd think you would take fall damage on landing, but the devs were generous in that regard, so you don't take any and can immediately get back into the action to try again. 

6. Under Fire!

This Imperial-only encounter is one of the ones that has a chance of dropping the Everglade Zakkeg mount, and probably the best one at that, as unlike the Loth-cat Kitten, the mount isn't a reward for completing the encounter but a random drop from the Talz mobs you fight. This event has you jumping in to save a beleaguered team of Imperial soldiers from an ambush, so you get a whole bunch of Talz popping out of the snow in easily AoE-able groups, which makes for an encounter that doesn't take a lot of time and also gives you many chances at the mount drop.

7. Snipers!

Another Imperial encounter vs. the Talz, this one can be a bit confusing the first time you try it - and it can also kill you! Once you understand what's going on, it's not hard to avoid dying though, and I find it quite satisfying to flush the snipers out of their hiding spots. If only snipers in PvP were this easy to kill and didn't constantly self-heal and run away...

8. Snow Capped Delicacies

This encounter has you climbing a mountain to pick some flowers for an Ortolan hermit, another pretty creative idea for an encounter in my opinion. It also has a chance to reward a flower decoration (this one still eludes me personally). The slightly lower ranking mostly comes from the fact that the mountain being a "fake exhaustion zone" can be a bit confusing (and you can die if you accidentally cross over into the real exhaustion zone), plus the VFX for the snow storm on the mountain are not easy on the eyes.

9. Trial by Fire

This is a fun little encounter that has you testing an experimental heat resistance suit in the local mini-volcanoes. I was rather amused that when I tried to look up a guide for what the different buttons do, both pages I found were basically like "I'm not really sure what you're supposed to do here, lol" and you can indeed "win" by just mashing random buttons. However, if you do it "right" for a given degree of right, you also complete a bonus mission and get credit for two dynamic encounters in one, which I think is cool. 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.

10. Volcanic Rumblings

Speaking of volcanoes, another encounter in the area that I quite like is to take heat readings from volcanic fissures, which is a simple matter of running in circles for two minutes to find some clickies. Very simple and straightforward.

The Top 5 Worst Dynamic Encounters on Hoth

Boring disclaimer: I don't actually think that any dynamic encounters we've seen so far are truly "bad". At worst they're not that creative and feel a little generic, but that's still not exactly a huge issue considering their intended purpose as filler content. The main reason some encounters stood out to me as unpleasant was mainly due to bugs, and I expect that these won't seem so bad once said bugs are addressed.

1. Unnecessary Repairs

The simple reason I rate this as the worst encounter on Hoth right now is that it's currently bugged in something like three different ways, with the most important one being that the things you need to click on don't respawn once someone has used them, which means that if you ever want to complete this encounter, you basically need to be there when it spawns so you can get it done before anyone else arrives. That one was quite a nuisance to get credit for.

2. Pirate Problem

This is another encounter that suffers from a very annoying bug. This encounter is a shared one with three stages: kill lots of mobs, click on some stuff, then kill two named mobs. The problem is that one of the named mobs doesn't respawn right now (it can be either of the two, it's like the game just can't allow more than one of them to be alive at any given point after the encounter spawns). This means once again that you can only complete this encounter if you're there to take part in stage one right after it spawns - if you arrive any later, the whole thing will inevitably get stuck on stage three, since that one can't be completed without the missing mob, and you'll feel like you just wasted your time.

3. Snow Grift

This encounter has no bugs that I'm aware of, but is just a bit annoying in my opinion. An NPC sells you a treasure finding device which you then use to find the treasure/complete the encounter. There's no rhyme or reason to the treasure finding, you just have to keep spending credits until you get lucky. Other players can also "steal" the snow mounds you spawned with the device you paid for, leaving you with nothing. Very quick to do if you're lucky and don't mind spending the credits, but very annoying if you're unlucky and/or other players keep sniping your snow mounds before you can loot them yourself.

4. Wampa Hunt

This should be an easy and fun enough encounter on the surface, as you just need to kill three wampas in the area. The annoyance comes from the fact that the area has both a top level and a bottom level, and for some reason the bottom level doesn't count as part of the encounter area, meaning you're limited to a very small number of wampas on the top level, which can be annoying when there are multiple people hunting.

5. Lost Inventory

This is another encounter that is relatively inoffensive on the surface, but it has three stages, which can be a bit of an unpleasant surprise if you don't know what's coming up and can cause you to kill a lot of unnecessary extra mobs if you're fighting your way in the wrong direction compared to where the later stages want you to go. Also, it takes place in what used to be a heroic area, and while that has been nerfed a lot compared to how it was at launch, it feels like you still end up with a higher density of strong and gold mobs than in most encounters.

My SWTOR Feature Wishlist Going Into 2025

The start of a new year is traditionally a time for plans, predictions, resolutions - or wishes, as it might be. So I figured this might be a good time to finally make this post about features I really wish the SWTOR devs would get around to updating or adding. I don't really expect any of these to happen in 2025 in specific to be honest, but I just want to throw them out there because this kind of thing isn't actually something I usually spend a lot of time talking about.

I originally drafted this post several months ago under the simple title "feature wishlist" but then I saw someone comment in a video (I forget which one it was exactly) that "devs hate nothing more than feature wishlists", which gave me pause at the time. I have no idea whether it's true, but it's the kind of statement that sounds like it could be? After all, MMO developers are always working on new things that they're hoping will excite players, and the last thing you'll want to hear while you're doing that is someone going "whatever, can you please work on all this other stuff instead".

Anyway, like I said, I decided that now's the time to go ahead anyway, so without further ado, my biggest wishes for SWTOR in the next year (and beyond):

1. A solution for queues

I wrote a post in June last year in which I talked about how I'm worried about steadily increasing queue times for PvP, but to some extent this problem applies to PvE as well, depending on what content you want to do and what server you play on. If you're on Star Forge or Darth Malgus, you're mostly fine, but on any of the other four servers your odds of signing up for an automated activity queue that never pops have slowly been growing over time. Simply put, the game has too many different queues for the number of players it actually has nowadays.

You might ask why that matters, especially if you're someone who primarily plays solo, and my answer is that it's simply not healthy for any multiplayer game. It's frustrating for people who just want to play the content (and who are being led to believe that they should be able to, why else is that "queue for PvP" button even there), but it can also leave a terrible impression on new players trying to get into the game for the first time.

I find myself thinking back to SWTOR's first year, when it still had hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, and yet people would regularly post screenshots about how it was supposedly stone dead, showing themselves standing on the fleet with not a single other person being there. You know why that was? Because when the population started dropping, the devs opened free transfers everywhere to consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers, but it took them months to actually close down the old/abandoned servers, and people were logging into them all the time with no idea what was going on, just to find that apparently "nobody" was playing the game anymore. Queues that never pop can have a similar effect, if perhaps not to the same degree.

Now, there are a number of ways to address this problem. Server merges are one, and you'll find a good number of people suggesting those, but I've got to admit I'm not the biggest fan of that particular solution myself. I like giving people the option to play in distinctly different environments that are busier or more quiet depending on their preference, and then we'd also have to deal with the issue of millions of characters all needing unique names again. However, I do think that this queue problem is bad enough that I would embrace even this radical solution.

Another option would be the introduction of cross-server queueing at last. Now, this is something that people actually asked for way back when the game first launched, and early dev communications hinted at the feature being just around the corner. However, at some point they changed their minds about this, and while I can't find the exact quote anymore (I just found a link to an old episode of the Bad Feeling Podcast that is no longer online), I seem to remember that the devs were basically saying that it turned out to be too complicated/too much effort and wasn't worth it. Please do correct me if you got an actual quote for what was said back then. Either way, this was a long time ago when the game still had a lot more servers, so I'm thinking there's a chance it might be more feasible now than it was back then?

Other options include things like simply reducing the number of available queues, for example by re-merging the warzone and arena queues, or merging the lowbie and midbie PvP brackets. And yes, I know that all of these would cause other issues in turn, which is why I'm not picking one option and claiming that this one would definitely be the best and solve everything. All I'm saying is that I think this is a serious problem and there are a number of ways the devs could go about addressing it. I'd just like them to do something.

2. A legacy- or account-wide friends list

Before the current number one on the list became top of mind for me, this used to be my number one feature request for SWTOR for over a decade. Think I'm exaggerating? Go and read me complaining about "my useless friends list" back in 2014. It's actually quite astounding to think just how many parts of the UI the devs have revamped and updated over the years, but that stupid window is still exactly the same as it was at launch.

This game is all about alts, so we need the option to (consensually!) become legacy- or account-wide friends with someone, maybe with an additional option to hide your online status even from your friends when you feel like laying low some days. As it is, we continue to make do by using external apps like Discord to stay in touch, but we shouldn't have to.

3. Support for manual group finding

This is another drum that I've been beating for at least half a decade - see here. Being able to queue up for automatically formed groups for flashpoints and PvP is fine and dandy, but sometimes you need players for something else and there are tools to support manual group formation for that in other games, but not in SWTOR. Why does forming an ops group with pugs still involve barking "LFM" in fleet general chat in 2025? Hell, we had more support for this back in 2012 when you could flag yourself as LFG in /who while providing more details in the comment field. Nowadays we don't even have that.

4. An updated companion UI

OK, so far everything I've listed has been about social features because those are near and dear to my heart, but I do have other interests as well. The "companions and contacts" window (bound to N by default) was added with Knights of the Fallen Empire and it does have some nice features, like the little text summaries that tell you more about your relationship with each companion as well as their likes and dislikes. The "travel to contact" button is also pretty neat when it works.

That said, after a decade of the devs constantly adding more companions and contacts... it's just a mess. Whenever I want to check my influence level with a companion, I always open the crew skill window instead because at least in there they are sorted from highest influence to lowest. I'm not convinced that splitting companions into different categories based on which part of the story you acquired them in was ever a good idea, but it's only gotten worse over time with inconsistent categorisation and weird duplication bugs, all of which can make it very hard to find the specific companion you're trying to summon at any given moment.

For all the sometimes seemingly random UI changes we've seen over the past couple of years, this is one window I really wish they'd get around to revamping. Mainly I think that the companions should just all be in one big list, but with the ability to sort and filter them different ways, including alphabetically and by influence level.

5. Where's that crafting update?

Remember when the devs said there'd be a crew skills update coming at some point? I think it was before Legacy of the Sith, wasn't it? Either way it's been so long since we've heard anything about that, I find it hard to remember the details.

As someone who enjoys crafting I'd love for it to finally get some love again. It's not completely useless now, and I don't think they need to fully overhaul how everything works, but some crafting skills are definitely less relevant than others and it's just been ages since they even added anything to it other than the latest set of new augments.

I'm not sure what exactly I'm wishing for with this one to be honest, other than that I hope there are no monkey paws involved, because in other MMOs I've looked forward to a crafting revamp more than once, and even thought that what the devs did in each instance looked pretty good at first... just to then still end up disappointed after a while, missing the old systems. I don't want that to happen to SWTOR... but I also feel like crew skills are definitely overdue for some love.

Do you agree with my priorities here or would yours be completely different? Feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments!

Around the SWTOR-sphere: December 2024

It's the end of December, which means that I successfully made it through another year, and I was actually able to keep up with this series pretty well! Summer was a bit of a quiet season where I skipped a couple of months when I didn't really have much to share, but other than that I've managed to find some things to recommend pretty much every month.

• December seemed to be a month for more casual players to come back to SWTOR, whether it was because of the anniversary celebrations or because of the threat of the impending name purge for inactive characters. Roger from Contains Moderate Peril was inspired to return by the latter and wrote down some thoughts about his most recent experiences in "Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic Part 3". He also made a separate post about dynamic encounters. If the "part 3" in the title of the first post makes you wonder where parts one and two are, the answer is that those were made in 2022 and can be found here and here respectively.
• Another MMO blogger that gave the game another spin was Syp from Bio Break, who decided to make a new smuggler for what's probably the sixth time or so. I'm always kind of surprised he isn't more curious about all the class stories he's never seen before. Think I'm exaggerating his love for smugglers? Check out his blog's archive for the SWTOR tag.
• Speaking of personalities from the wider MMO space, if you haven't seen it yet, you'll definitely want to check out Josh Strife Hayes' magnum opus of a video called "The Ultimate MMO Tier List (Backed by SCIENCE) (sort of)". It's (obviously) not about SWTOR in specific, but SWTOR is included in the ranking. If you do want to know more about his thoughts about that game in specific, I did write about it when he gave it its own dedicated review back in 2022.
• Looking at SWTOR content creators in specific, Kal from Today in TOR posted a great dev interview with Ashley and Caitlin this month in which they talked about things like lore and their writing process, which was extremely insightful if you're interested in that kind of stuff at all. Full disclosure: part of why I was so pleased with this interview was that Kal collected questions from the public to submit for the interview, and literally half the questions they chose to answer were ones submitted by me. (Others may have proposed similar ones, I don't know, but the point stands that I apparently ask good questions.)
• Meanwhile Swtorista decided to go down the rabbit hole of Rare Blue and Purple World Drop Gear in SWTOR, which is such a convoluted and historically complicated system it makes my head spin, and I'm impressed that she was interested enough in the subject to actually do the research and put it all together. I know it's a meme that "fashion is the real endgame" but I'm not sure even World of Warcraft has as many content creators posting about how to collect outfits as SWTOR does.
• On the PvP front, Ivano 1337 caught my eye with his video "SWTOR 7.6 PVP TIER LIST | Best Classes for 8v8 Warzones". Now, tier lists can be entertaining content by themselves, but one thing I appreciate about Ivano's content (and I think I mentioned this before) is that as a more casual PvPer myself, I will often notice that something feels "off" somehow, but not being an expert in the field I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is wrong. In this specific case, I've been doing a lot of my PvP as Vigilance Guardian/Vengeance Juggernaut, which more recently just hasn't felt as good for some reason. Seeing Ivano put their current strengths and weaknesses into such clear terms while also ranking them as the weakest of the Guardian/Jug specs in the current environment was a real a-ha moment for me. Since then I've respecced to skank tank and while it hasn't suddenly improved my win rate (probably because I'm still figuring out what I'm doing) it's been really refreshing and a lot more fun. Not to say I necessarily encourage everyone to play whatever's the latest flavour of the month, but if you're struggling to make a particular spec work for you, understanding why that is and how you might have a better experience is really helpful I think.
• Finally, YouTuber /JawaFace got very excited about the introduction of the new companion mount with patch 7.6 - just for said excitement to turn into bitter disappointment when it turned out that his favourite Jawa Blizz doesn't fit into the sidecar for some reason. He expressed his feelings in a creative way with a short video simply called "Companion Mount", which gave me a good chuckle. Are you seeing this, devs?
  

Speculating About Galactic Season 8

We got another Executive Producer Letter last week, and again it was mostly a summary of what happened in the game over the past few months, with only a couple of vague hints as to what's to come in the new year. Personally I didn't think too much about this at first, but then I saw several friends go absolutely wild with speculation about one particular line, which I thought was quite entertaining in itself, so I thought it would be fun to compile all the theories I've seen in a post as well as to add my own thoughts.

The line that got everybody talking was this one:

[Our next Galactic Season] will be a fun one as we throw you into some content you may not have played in a bit...  

The intriguing bit is of course the question of what's "content you may not have played in a bit". I think there are only two things we can exclude for certain here: content that is very popular (because people are presumably playing it all the time), and content that is no longer in the game (because then there would be no "may" about whether we haven't played it recently).

The main categories of content I could see Keith referring to here are as follows:

• Old side content that people maybe do for a bit when they first start playing, but then get what they wanted out of it or simply get bored: Bounty Contract Week, which formed the basis for GS7, would fall into that category for me.
• Content that just isn't very popular with the majority of the player base for some reason or another: A prime example of this one would be Galactic Starfighter, which does have a passionate community that loves it, but it's extremely small compared to the player base as a whole.
• Content that isn't very rewarding: These activities may be fun to do once or twice, but there's just very little incentive to repeat them. The main example I can think of here would be uprisings - while I've never been a huge fan of them myself, people sure did run them a lot back during Knights of the Eternal throne when they were a prime source of Command XP. Nowadays their rewards feel pretty laughable for the effort: I recently ran some during Total Galactic War for the Conquest points, but being awarded ten tech fragments at the end almost felt insulting.
• Content that may well be fun and appealing, but isn't very accessible for some reason or another. Here my prime example would be Kuat Drive Yards (a flashpoint people used to farm like crazy when it first came out) no longer being in the group finder since 7.0. 

I think the thing that jumps out as an immediate problem is that in each of these cases there's a reason the content isn't being done as much as it used to, and simply making it central to a new season wouldn't automatically solve whatever's keeping people from engaging with it right now.

For example I've seen it suggested that the next season could be centred on Relics of the Gree, the same way the current season had Bounty Contract Week active at all times. This wouldn't be the worst thing in the world as I've always enjoyed the Gree event, but unless the devs add at least some new rewards to the reputation vendor, I fear I'd quickly suffer from the same kind of "been there, done that a hundred times" boredom I experienced during GS7.

I also think that the devs wouldn't make a season purely focused on group content. As much as I enjoy playing with others myself, I think that having a whole season centred on one particular type of group content, be it uprisings or flashpoints, would not sit well with a lot of players considering how solo-focused the game has become. I also don't think that the season would be about anything that's particularly difficult, such as veteran or master mode chapters.

I think a Starfighter season could work, if only because they could simply call it space-themed and have GSF-related objectives for those who're brave enough to PvP and on-rails space mission objectives for those who'd rather stick to PvE and solo play, similarly to how GS7 had both the soloable bounty contract objectives and the world boss objectives for groups. My only concern here is that space combat in any variety doesn't seem to be that popular with the player base as a whole. Anyone remember when the devs were first hyping up the "Super Secret Space Project" that turned out to be GSF? I was never quite sure how they expected that to turn out...

Do you have any thoughts on what Keith's hint might have been about? I've really enjoyed seeing people's ideas (even if I've got to admit that the basic notion of another season focused on old - or worse, unpopular - content doesn't currently excite me). I'm curious to find out next year whether the speculation came anywhere close to reality or whether we've ended up barking up the wrong tree.

Lair Bosses Ranked!

I was wondering how to write about the new lair boss added with patch 7.6 without being too repetitive, seeing how I already put down some thoughts on the fight (at least about its difficulty tuning) after killing it on the PTS. I finally settled on this idea, to write about all the lair bosses currently in the game and rank them, seeing how there aren't that many of them and I haven't talked about the others all that much in the past either.

1. Xenoanalyst II

My favourite lair boss is still the very first one they ever added to the game: Xenoanalyst II from the Gree event. The concept of a fight that is openly just a test of your strength rather than hostility towards you has always tickled me (I liked that about Colicoid War Game too), and it always cracks me up how the boss is openly jubilant at the end after you beat him because you've done so well.

The mechanics require everyone to do their part on veteran mode but are fairly straightforward and easy to understand, while story mode is easy to pug with pretty much any group. The random chance to get Jawas during the species comparison is a fun little Easter egg, and reward-wise, it's always worth getting a bit more of the Gree-specific event currency. People like farming the boss for his rare mount drop as well.

The fact that he's only available for a few weeks each year also makes it impossible to ever overdose on the guy, so there's that.

2. Propagator Core XR-53

Yes, I honestly think that the new lair boss is the best boss we've had of this type that isn't tied to a Conquest event. Story mode is tuned in such a way that you can kill it with a pug without needing to give long explanations of anything, yet it also isn't impossible to die if you mess up enough. Veteran mode is a challenge, with several interesting mechanics that can be dealt with in more than one way and most of which have a decent margin for error, meaning that consistent mistakes do make things considerably harder, but there are very few things that will turn your attempt into an instant wipe. The dps check is tight for a standard ops group setup but not insurmountable, and you can also play with the group setup to squeeze more dps out of your raid.

Other things that make it good are the fact that it's very easily accessible, with the entrance being located right inside your faction's main base on Ilum. I don't think this is something that really matters a lot for ops in general, but when you're getting a group together to kill only one boss, you don't want to spend too much time faffing around just to get there.

In the same vein I like that there's a little bit of trash for flavour, but it's extremely quick to get past and doesn't really slow you down.

Finally, I know not everyone's excited about a new tier of augments, but I like that there's a reason to actually visit this boss in specific. Chasing better gear isn't as much of a motivation in SWTOR as it is in other MMOs, but I do think us raiders do appreciate a bit of a carrot to lure us in and make it worthwhile to do new content every now and then. I do suspect that whenever these augments become obsolete, the boss's appeal will also be somewhat diminished.

3. The Eyeless

The second lair boss that's tied to a recurring event is another one of my favourites. His mechanics are very simple on both story and hard mode, but he always feels like a fun romp. Someone always feels the need to comment on his perfectly sculpted butt cheeks, and on hard mode, at least one of the melee always dies to the very obvious and very easy to avoid AoE smash, but it won't cause you to wipe.

Like with Xeno, limited availability and drops that always retain their usefulness are other points in this guy's favour. The reason I rank him slightly below Propagator is that his mechanics are a bit basic.

4. Hive of the Mountain Queen

While we're now getting to the bottom half of the list, 4th place overall still isn't all bad, as it's effectively second place for bosses that aren't tied to Conquest events. Hive of the Mountain Queen's strongest point is that it's a very flavourful operation, with moody environments, interesting trash, and a fight that uses the theme of "insect queen using her minions to fight you" to great effect.

The reasons I rank it slightly lower is that I think the veteran mode is a bit overtuned, and while the trash is very interesting the first time you do it, it does feel like a tad much for frequent repeat visits. Also, the Queen basically offers no interesting loot (which was even a problem when the fight first came out!) - there's technically a rare companion from what I hear, but it's apparently so rare that few people have ever even seen it.

5. Toborro's Courtyard

I wasn't a fan of Toborro's Courtyard when it first came out, and I still struggle to find a lot of nice things to say about it today. I guess story mode is easy enough to pug, and veteran mode feels like it has an appropriate difficulty level as well. The mechanic of having to blow up barrels during the fight, as well as having to flit in and out of the boss's range (because he's completely static but does that laser beam of death every so often) are mildly interesting.

The problem is that you have to repeat the same couple of moves in the exact same way for far too long, which turns the hard mode version of the fight into a tedious exercise in struggling not to lose focus out of sheer boredom. There also isn't any interesting loot to be had, and the fact that prepping the barrels gets you stuck in combat, making it impossible to do a proper ready check before the pull, is a bit of a nuisance (even if "jump if you're ready" is always good for a bit of nostalgia).

Finally, the location is also a bit annoying to get to. I like Makeb as a planet, but navigating all the different mesas is not easy, and getting to the courtyard requires riding through a pretty trash-filled area that is likely to force you to dismount and fight for a bit.

6. Colossal Monolith

I can imagine that some people might question my choice to put this fight at the very bottom of the list, making an argument that it should be above Golden Fury at the very least, if not higher up. I will give you that the Mololith has more interesting mechanics, but I still dislike him all the same. Both story and hard mode feel overtuned for what they're supposed to be (I've actually never killed this guy on 8-man VM to this day), and while you could argue that his mechanics may be interesting, several of them are what I refer to as "circles for circles' sake", meaning it makes no sense whatsoever in universe that you stop this guy from hurting you by having people jump into coloured floor tiles around his head on cue (I always disliked that about Underlurker as well). Like, what's even supposed to be happening there diagetically? Maybe I'm a sucker for caring about this stuff, but I actually find it more enjoyable when boss fight mechanics align with abilities that actually make sense in universe, and Golden Fury at least has that going for it.

Additionally, the Monolith is yet another boss that drops nothing of interest and is kind of a pain to get to. There's pretty much always someone who needs a summon because they haven't unlocked Ziost yet, and if you're unlucky, it will then turn out that someone else can't even accept the summon because they don't have their ship yet. Just being able to get to a boss that isn't even that much fun to fight shouldn't be this much of a hassle.

Have you had a chance to defeat the XR-Propagator Core on Ilum yet? If so, what did you think of the fight? And do you agree or disagree with my rankings?

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.