Happy Birthday to the Shae Vizla Server!

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

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

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

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

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

7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

After watching the big Warcraft Direct stream yesterday, it was quite a contrast to spend time on SWTOR's 7.6 dev stream tonight. Smaller studio, fewer viewers, but also a much more relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughs. I was immediately overcome with an urge to make a bunch of gifs of the interactions between Eric Musco and Papa Keith, intending to post them on Bluesky, but it couldn't cope with me uploading any images at the time (I later learned it wasn't just me), so I'll be inserting them into this blog post instead, even if that may seem a bit random!

As usual, if you want the full rundown of every little detail, I recommend watching the recording of the stream yourself or reading a detailed summary elsewhere - Kal already has one up here for example. Over here I'm more choosy with what I talk about and won't mention everything, but I'll add some commentary to make it more interesting. Let's get on with it!

Topical and time-sensitive things first: There's a new Twitch drop for the next 14 days, an Ilum poster deco with a purple border. Handily livestream viewers were able to earn it right away simply by watching the stream as it only requires one hour of watch time. There'll also be another Twitch drop, a purple Vulptilla mount, once 7.6 launches. We weren't given an exact date for that, but from what they did say on the stream it sounds like it will be early December.

Also, effective immediately, there's a big 50% off sale on dyes going on! The interesting thing related to this was that they mentioned that they're planning to make changes to how dyes work soon... I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately jumped to the notion of making them unlockable in Collections, something I've seen people request more than once. I don't think that will happen though - dye sales have got to be too much of a money-maker for that - but I'm still curious to hear what they've got in mind once the time comes.

We got some info about the 7.6 story, and I tend to not go into too much detail about story previews in these posts, but I did want to note that Imperials will finally get to see Major Anri again, almost three years after Manaan, and that the story is supposedly going to be structured a bit differently, consisting of four threads you can advance in any order, about Shae Vizla, Darth Malgus, the Hidden Chain and Darth Nul's holocron respectively. I'm curious to see how that'll pan out - it could mean more content, but I've got to admit that personally I'm a little worried that "you can do them in any order" means that each "thread" will contain a lot of exposition/cut-scene watching and fewer interesting choices - but we'll see.

Unfortunately after all that talk about how interesting the new story is going to be, we won't actually get to see it at 7.6's release, because while the patch itself will still land as planned, they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere.

There was some talk about dynamic encounters and the new lair boss, but I won't go into that here as I already covered those topics in my post about the PTS from last week. They just confirmed that dynamic encounters will only exist on Hoth and Tatooine at launch, with the possible exception of Hidden Chain invasions, which might also happen on other planets from the sounds of it.

The new lair boss is also going to drop crafting materials for new augments, something that people had already caught on to some time ago but that hadn't been officially announced. These new augments will be better than the current gold augments. I guess this will offer a sort of gear progression without further raising overall item rating, though it does make me wonder whether the next gear reset perhaps isn't as far away as I thought.

There was some talk about new Cartel Market items, which I usually don't go into here either, but there was one thing that piqued my interest: there'll be a new decoration bundle called the Remote Outpost Bundle, and it'll come with a small amount of story/gameplay attached from the sounds of it. I was immediately reminded of the encrypted datacubes from back in the day and how people were not happy with those, though I guess a big part of that was that they came from inside Cartel packs, while this will be a direct purchase. I'll make sure to get it when it comes out and will let you know whether it's worth the money or not.

In terms of gameplay, there'll be a new UI feature called comlink to interact with terminals and characters in a more organic way without having to always resort to KOTOR-style cut scenes. They emphasised that this isn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations but should simply serve as another option for interactions where appropriate. The example they showed was of someone using a terminal and being given a prompt to enter a password, where in the current system that would bring up the KOTOR-style black bars and mute dialogue options like "enter code" or "walk away". They explained that they could also see this working for characters "texting" you.

PvP Season 7 will still start with the launch of 7.6 and bring an end to 8-man premades, as they'll once again be limited to four people max, and the devs are also disabling the old level 75 set bonuses in PvP to reduce the power of twinks. Not what I personally consider PvP's biggest problems right now, but better than nothing. What did stand out to me was that one of the new season rewards is actually going to be a proper emote instead of the previous "text-only" one, which might actually be something to look forward to for me.

As the stream was getting close to wrapping up, Eric and Keith dropped a few more surprises on us at the end. First off, we'll get a new mount as a free subscriber reward that introduces something new: the ability to have your (humanoid) companion ride in a sidecar beside you and a non-combat pet in the luggage rack. The preview looked hilarious and made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how much I'll use it but it'll be fun for a little while if nothing else. Plus I appreciate that they decided to make it a sub reward instead of a Cartel Market item. There'll also be two new mounts from dynamic encounter-related achievements that won't show your companion but will include your active mini pet.

Next they announced that they'll do a character name purge for the first time in a long time. If you're a subscriber, all your characters are safe, but if not, you'll want to log into any toons that haven't been logged into since January 1st of this year, else they will be flagged for a rename. I wonder if that'll give me a chance to claim Shintar without the funny i on Tulak Hord, the one server where I don't currently own the name... they also mentioned that they'll try to remember to do this a bit more often in the future to not have all these names taken up by inactive characters.

Finally, a big surprise at the very end: they're working on more art modernisation for planetary environments, but also for player characters. Musco immediately assured everyone that their number one priority was to not change the overall feel of the characters. The examples they showed looked really good, with just more detail on the facial textures and more gloss on the eyes. (When I tried to explain this to Mr Commando afterwards, he said that talking about shiny hair and eyes made me sound like I was trying to sell him a dog!)

All in all, a fun stream with lots of news and some interesting things to look forward to, though the story update being delayed with no clear ETA was a bit of a bummer. What was your favourite part of this stream?

Galactic Season 7 in Review

You might call it premature to review a season that's intended to be live for three more months, but I'm about 80% done with it myself (including my goals on the secondary servers) and I think that's good enough to pass judgement on it.

In a nutshell, that judgement is a resounding "meh", similar to last season, though for completely different reasons. I loved Season 6's stronghold focus (I still use the Copero stronghold a lot on all servers - even bought the matching utility bundle from the Cartel Market), but its story was disappointing and the grindy meta achievement infuriating, meaning the good and the bad kind of cancelled each other out, meaning that all things considered I felt kind of blah about it.

Season 7 had no such problems. There hasn't been anything particularly terrible about it... but unfortunately there hasn't been anything particularly great about it either. It's just been kinda boring in a way I honestly didn't expect.

When the season's theme was first announced, I thought the concept of tying it to an existing world event sounded interesting, and bringing back world bosses that had been removed from the game several years ago sounded like a good idea to me too. However, in practice the fact that there wasn't anything new going on kind of got me down after a while.

I had some fun unlocking bounty hunting achievements on the other servers, where I often hadn't touched Bounty Contract Week before, but on Darth Malgus I already got all those achievements about a decade ago, and there just wasn't anything left for me to chase after. Same thing with the DvL bosses - I know some guildies were happy to finally tick off the achievement to kill them all, but again, I already got that four years ago, and I had so many DvL tokens left over I didn't even really know what to do with them.

I can live with a season without any grand rewards (the white Loth kitten is cute but I don't feel a pet is on the same level as a companion or stronghold), I can live with a season without a story, but I need there to be something.

I even kind of missed the currency drops in a weird way, because at least finding a strange new currency among your loot drops gave you an indication that something was different, even if you weren't following the latest news about the game or paying attention to the seasons UI. This time there just wasn't anything going on in the open that made me feel like a season was actually happening, no gameplay that was different from usual, nor anything new and intriguing out to see in the world (I remember seeing one of the meditation shrines in Season 4 before I'd got to the point of knowing what they were for and they instantly grabbed my attention). It just felt like a whole lot of nothing special.

Even Season 1 felt like it had more of a "vibe" than this, and that had all those tedious daily objectives to kill insectoid mobs on different planets. I was not a fan of those at all, but at least "killing insectoids that you usually wouldn't care about" was a theme! This season's one-minute intro to provide a pretext for why killing two DvL bosses a week should count as "bounty hunting" just wasn't enough.

I did like that we had both a seasonal weekly objective that was easy to solo and one for groups every week, but that's kind of it in terms of things that stood out to me positively. More than anything, this season made me feel like the worst kind of jaded MMO veteran, simply because everything about it felt so much like "been there, done that".

If you had a really good time with this season, please do let me know in the comments! I'd love to hear how other people felt inspired to hunt bounties every week or found fighting the DvL bosses a really novel experience. However, for me it was all just a bit too old hat, and I really hope that the next season will actually have something new to offer for long-time players (even if seasons are inherently about replaying old content to some extent).

Impressions from the 7.6 PTS

A combination of PTS incentives and curiosity about the new dynamic encounter system got me to spend some time on the public test server this past week.

My aging PC doesn't have enough disk space to support having two versions of SWTOR installed nowadays, so I had to put the PTS on my laptop, but that actually worked out quite well this time around as I was travelling last week and had the laptop with me for evening entertainment anyway.

Only two planets have dynamic encounters on the PTS right now: Hoth and Tatooine. It's currently not clear whether that's all 7.6 will launch with or whether these planets were picked for focused testing and we'll be surprised with some more content once the patch goes live. There were some indicators on the PTS galaxy map hinting at dynamic events on other planets like Alderaan and Belsavis, but with no actual content available there so far.

One thing I originally wondered after seeing the sneak peek trailer was whether dynamic encounters would be more like World of Warcraft's world quests (as in, personal to you) or dynamic events in other MMOs (shared and the same for everyone). Interestingly, the answer turned out to be "both". There are two types of events, designated as either "group shared" or "encounter shared". In the former, your progress is personal, and the encounter continues to exist for other players on the map even after you've completed it. In the latter, everyone doing stuff contributes to the event's progression, and once the encounter completes, everyone gets their reward at the same time and it disappears from the map. The shared encounters are generally rarer and can still be soloed if nobody else is around, but they tend to require killing more mobs and can therefore feel like a bit of a slog if you're the only person in the area. On the other hand it's a lot of fun (in my opinion) if there are other players around and you can see things progress really quickly as everybody does their part.

In general gameplay terms, the encounters are about what you'd expect: a lot of kill x mobs and some clicking on shiny things, though there are some standouts where the devs clearly tried to be creative and come up with more varied activities. 

I don't think dynamic events are intended to be a new "main" gameplay mode, though depending on how many planets will get them when 7.6 launches, I'd be curious to see how much levelling you could get done by just doing dynamic encounters - as an experiment if nothing else! Realistically though, I think they are meant to be similar to side missions, just without all the picking up and handing in required. At max level they currently award a tiny number of tech fragments and Conquest commendations, small enough that they wouldn't make for a great primary source of either currency.

One thing that made me wonder a little was how much focus there is on highlighting these new dynamic encounters on the map. The galaxy map highlights planets that have them active, and on the planetary map they show up as big glowy diamonds. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it does seem an odd choice when the devs took multiple steps in the past to hide away exploration missions and/or make them less prominent because they were apparently confusing/distracting people. Surely new levellers will get a lot more distracted by all these big glowy indicators on their maps? I dunno.

I'm still a bit torn on whether to try the new lair boss on the PTS as well or not. On the one hand I prefer not to spoil myself when it comes to content like that and would rather see things for the first time on live, but on the other hand every bit of feedback might help with making the Propagator Core a better raid.

The initial round of forum feedback certainly hasn't looked too good. Players were asked what they thought of the fight's different phases, and everyone basically replied "what phases?" because by all accounts, it was just an extremely long slog against an enemy with a lot of hitpoints while trying to manage some bad stuff dropping on the floor.

There has since been another dev post on the forums that basically admitted that almost nothing about the fight was working correctly and that it will see massive changes with the next PTS update. Which is good in the sense that it means the tedious version people experienced in the first week wasn't at all final, though it also makes you wonder why and how an operations boss ended up being put on the PTS in that state in the first place (since you'd expect the devs to be able to verify that at least the very basics are functioning before asking people to play test). I guess I'll have a few more weeks to see how things develop and whether I want to have a go myself.

A Mini GTN Rant

It's been about a year now since the big revamp of the Galactic Trade Network, and I wanted to use the occasion to post some thoughts on how things have been going. Overall, the deflation of the economy due to the taxation changes has been absolutely bananas (which, to be clear, is a good thing), and the GTN has probably played at least a part in this. 

Transaction fees aside, the sales data it provides makes it obvious to potential buyers what other players have been willing to pay for an item in the past, so it's much harder to artificially drive up the price of things, and you can't hope to just fool someone into overpaying by making sure that you're the only one selling and putting a unreasonably high price tag on the item.

The only annoying thing about this is that you can't see this sales data if there isn't already an active listing, and the prices that the GTN "recommends" based on this sales data don't always make sense, in either direction. I saw this recently when opening some of the Cartel packs you get from the Galactic Seasons track on the Shae Vizla server, where the GTN is a lot more quiet.

First I got what I thought was a new-ish and pretty rare weapon which had no listings on the GTN. The system suggested I list it at 30 million credits and I was like "sure, that sounds reasonable for a rare weapon". Then I opened the listing I'd created and...

The historic price was less than half a million? Why in the world would you recommend that I try selling at 30 million then?! Needless to say that listing expired and I re-listed it at a lot less afterwards.

However, it works the other way round as well. Another Cartel Pack gifted me a bronze armour set that wasn't currently being sold on the GTN either. I know that those usually aren't worth that much, so I wasn't surprised that the recommended listing price was only 10k credits. But again, I checked the listing afterwards...

... and the historic range was ten times as much. Why do you do this to me, GTN? I'd really love to know where those numbers come from.

Also, whatever happened to those buy orders we were supposed to get with the new GTN? I was really excited about those but haven't heard anything about that feature in forever. I thought being able to add new functionality like that was partially the point of revamping the whole thing in the first place.

Once More With Feasting

I've been having a blast with the Feast of Prosperity for the past few weeks. Looking back at my blog archives, I really enjoyed it when it was first introduced in 2020 (Has it really only been four years?!), had a good time again in 2021 (when I also used the event to get my pacifist character to the then-level cap of 75) and was pleased to finish off the last achievement associated with the Feast in 2022.

Last year I only gave it a brief mention in the context of getting my pacifist to 80 and how that hadn't actually been all that satisfying, and I think that if you'd asked me then how active I was going to be during the event in 2024, I wouldn't have given myself very high odds. After all, I'd achieved everything that there really was to achieve back in 2022, right?

However, then seasons greatly increased my interest in strongholds and the devs added a bunch of new rewards to the Feast vendor - many of which were decorations - so off I went. Housing enthusiasts have to be such great customers for Broadsword, not just because they buy deco packs from the Cartel Market, but also because decoration rewards are the motivation that keeps on giving. With things like pets, mounts or armour sets, it's mostly a one-and-done deal, but when it comes to things like chairs, potted plants and rugs, you can never have too many, right?

One item in particular that caught my eye was the Regal Wall Garden, which is a gorgeous small planter that fits onto a small wall hook. Perfect for those tricksy walls in the Copero stronghold, and it fits the aesthetic there quite well too! However, it's 1,125 tokens a pop, so I had a lot of work to do.

Actually, that's the wrong way to put it. I had fun doing the Feast dailies and weeklies, and being able to buy more and more decos after each round just made everything even better.

I did all the weeklies on three to four alts per week, and even dabbled in the event a bit on other servers. Even on the notoriously small Leviathan server I managed to get into a world boss group for Trapjaw - it wasn't big, but it was big enough to kill him. (My Operative was also only level 25 - I didn't even realise you could pick up the dailies at such a low level, and Trapjaw's AoE absolutely wrecked me... after dying once, I had to stay far away and just shoot at him ineffectively from max range.) It was a great way to earn Conquest points too, as well as to get credit for this week's "do x missions as a trooper or agent" seasons objective.

I just found it striking how incredibly well the single-player and group content flow together during this event. I'd arrive on Nar Shaddaa and immediately try to get into a world boss group, but if I just missed the last one, the amount of time it took me to do the solo missions would be just about long enough for the next group to start forming, so it was always quick and easy to get everything ticked off for the day. The world bosses themselves are extremely casual-friendly and simple, and now with shared tagging you can get in on the action even if you're absolutely allergic to actually joining a group even for five minutes.

It's just been a joy all around, and all the (new) decos should provide motivation for me to keep taking part for years to come.

Adventures on Oricon

I don't really have anything too deep or meaningful to say this week, but just wanted to ramble a bit about doing dailies on Oricon. The change the devs made to daily areas with the Bessi patch still kind of fascinates me. It was very much a footnote to the actual venture, but dailies used to be one of the few endgame activities that were still largely gated behind a character's story progression, so seeing them get opened up account-wide with so little fuss just surprised me.

And it does seem a bit like... things weren't exactly optimised for this change in some ways, as I found out while questing on Oricon this past week. One of the weekly seasons objectives was to do exploration or repeatable missions in Empire space, and Oricon was one of the eligible planets.

I hadn't unlocked it at all on Shae Vizla yet, so I took my Sith warrior there to start the story. As I arrived in the base, I saw the daily mission terminal all lit up with quests and a little light went on in my head as well.

For those who don't know, the Oricon story requires you to do four simple missions as part of a storyline that eventually cumulates in you being sent into the Dread Fortress operation, and the dailies didn't used to unlock until you'd done the first three of those story missions. These dailies would then also be similar to the original one-time story quests, for example requiring you to destroy three terraforming devices when the storyline originally asked you to destroy five.

So I thought to myself: Wait, if I can pick up the dailies from the start, do I get a two-for-one? I picked up the first story mission to rescue Republic soldiers from escape pods, grabbed the daily mission with the same objective and indeed: every pod I opened gave me credit towards both! I love it when I get to make use of synergies like that.

Unfortunately, the smooth experience didn't last. I first started to run into problems when I got to the quest that requires you to locate a dark energy source by collecting "bioenergy enhancers" from the local mobs (ten for the one-time mission, five for the daily). I collected a whole bunch and then clicked on them to do the locating. One of the quests updated, but the other one didn't. I tried to use the item again, but it wouldn't let me because it kept saying that I'd already done that bit.

Somewhat annoyed, I proceeded into the phase for the quest and completed the one that was on the correct step. When I looked into my bags afterwards to try and use the bioenergy enhancers again for the second quest, they had disappeared, clearly "cleaned up" automatically due to me completing one of the missions. So I had to farm up another set, locate the dark energy source again, and repeat the encounter in the phase. Alright.

Things got worse in the watchtower. I defeated the various droids inside the control room, clicked on the final panel that's supposed to spawn Commander Zaoron and... nothing happened. This was when I noticed that only one of the two missions had updated correctly while the other one wasn't even on the right step. So I exited the phase again, reset the one that had progressed ahead of the other one and went through the whole rigmarole a second time. This time both missions updated successfully.

I watched the cut scene for the one-time mission and then... couldn't click on the holocron to complete the quest. I sighed and went back out once again, but at least one of the missions completed as I did so. I just reset the phase this time (instead of the whole mission) and went back in yet again, hoping that the game would be less confused now with only one quest left, and indeed, the holocron finally became clickable.

All in all, it wasn't the worst thing in the world, and I did get a lot of quests done in one run, but there was also a lot of trial and error with various resets involved. This is unfortunately the kind of thing that makes the game feel somewhat unpolished at times but at the same time isn't likely to get fixed because it's not a hard blocker and you can eventually push through with enough persistence.

Have you had any interesting experiences with the new daily zone unlocks for characters that haven't actually done that planet's story yet?

SWTOR Comes to the Apple Mac

A few weeks ago, Executive Producer Keith Kanneg published his Q3 Producer Letter. It's the kind of thing I would've looked forward to in the past, but more recently these have mostly been summaries of what happened in the last quarter instead of a preview of what's coming up in the next one, so not that exciting to someone like me who's mostly looking for announcements about the future.

Except for one piece of genuine news that was somewhat hidden away towards the end: that SWTOR is going to get a native Mac launcher soon. (They've since hosted a closed technical test with volunteers.) To which my reaction was... huh.

The last time I used a Mac must've been in my high school's computer lab when I was around fifteen, and I don't really tend to hear much about them either. My only "exposure" to them is due to our graphic designers at work using them. And while I see comments from people asking for SWTOR to come to consoles on social media every now and then, I couldn't recall the last time I'd seen anyone bring up a Mac client.

Of course, I then saw Intisar doing the virtual equivalent of somersaults on Discord, as he's a Mac user (which I didn't know) and was over the moon about this bit of news. So someone's happy!

I was curious to find out what Apple's market share is nowadays, but Google is full of contradictory information on that subject. This Wikipedia page has it at around 10%, but several sites claim it to be higher. Then again, general usage may be different from gaming market share anyway. The Steam hardware survey for example shows less than two percent of users on some version of MacOS.

So I can't say that this seems like a huge untapped market to me... especially since it's my understanding that SWTOR was already playable on Macs, though it required a non-trivial degree of faffing around with partitions or emulators. Then again, I can't claim that making the game easier to access for Mac users is a bad thing, and it may not be too bad in terms of effort vs. reward as they're not developing a whole native client, just a launcher (which is then supposed to automatically adjust the right knobs to make the game playable on Mac as far as I understand the process).

It's basically a slightly weird bit of news as a PC user, because while it sounds like a good thing theoretically, it's not something for which we are able to see any real impact on our end. I really just wanted to give a shout-out to this piece of news because it does feel significant in the sense that this isn't the kind of thing we often see a developer do for an MMO that's been out for close to thirteen years, and it does once again show the SWTOR team's commitment to maintaining and expanding the game for years to come.

7.6 Sneak Peek!

I was planning to write about something else today, but then as I was browsing YouTube last night, a new video from SWTOR's official account suddenly popped up in my recommendations. Whaaa...?!

Here we've all been sitting around, waiting for them to announce the next livestream, and they surprise us with an actual teaser like that. I like it! While I've enjoyed the livestreams over the last few years, they do kind of seem targeted at fans who are already highly invested, while a four-minute video talking about upcoming patch features should be much more accessible to a more mainstream audience.

The three major points of interest from the video are: the new type of gameplay that's coming in 7.6, the new lair boss, and the upcoming PTS.

The new type of gameplay that will take us back to existing planets is called "dynamic encounters" and is basically... world quests? Dynamic events? Something like that. We don't know enough details (such as how often they'll occur, and how much credit will be shared vs. personal) to say which of the comparable features in other MMOs they will resemble the most, but we get the basic idea: They'll be a bit like quests, but instead of picking them up in town, you'll just find them popping up on your map.

This seems like a smart direction for the dev team to take, as it'll allow them to add more things for players to do at all levels without needing more voice acting or fancy cinematics, plus it's likely to make the open world feel a bit more alive as you should encounter more players running around on old planets.

I'm tentatively excited, though it remains to be seen how engaging this stuff turns out to be in the long term, and of course there's always the question of rewards. I thought it was kind of funny that the example in the video showed the player getting literally nothing for completion (obviously since it's still a work in progress) but it does make you wonder. XP and credits seem like a given, but the game already throws plenty of those at you everywhere else too. Is another source of Conquest commendations at max level going to excite anyone? But then, SWTOR has never been as highly reward-driven as other MMOs, so I really wouldn't expect these to suddenly start handing out higher-level currency or anything like that. We'll see.

In fact, we should find out more soon enough as this stuff will be going on the Public Test Server! And there'll even be a new reward for going on there and helping with the testing: a special mini pet. I just thought this was funny since I have a guildie who asks every time the PTS goes up whether there's a new reward, and usually there isn't... so I outright told him at one point that there doesn't seem to be much point in asking that question every time. I of course had to ping him immediately once I saw the video, hah!

The other thing we'll get to try on the PTS will be the new lair boss, a droid called Propagator Core XR-53, found on Ilum among the remnants of the Emperor's old space station. Unsurprisingly, like R-4 Anomaly, the fight won't have a 16-person mode, which I know most people don't care about but I'll keep moaning about it anyway because as a guild who has done and continues to do 16-mans, I miss that option. (When R-4 was a seasons objective the other week and we had 13 people on, that was quite challenging to sort out.)

Aside from that though, XR-53 will have both a story and a veteran mode, and I'm curious to find out what it'll be like. I crave more group content, but R-4 was such an awful experience for me at launch that I'm also still a bit wary of their current design philosophy in that area, so I'm hesitant to get too excited just yet.

What are you most interested in learning more about in regards to patch 7.6?

Looking for Good Views

The Best View in SWTOR contest has returned once again! I noted last year that we were at risk of running out of planets to feature, and that has indeed resulted in a rather strange selection this time around. Instead of the usual ten planets, there are only five eligible locations this year, namely:

• Ziost
• CZ-198
• Section X
• Minboosa District
• The Black Hole

Aside from the fact that none of these are among the most picturesque of places, some of the choices struck me as a bit odd. CZ-198 and Ziost make sense as these were indeed among the last few planets/moons yet to be featured, but for some reason Darvannis was still left out. I know it's not the most exciting place to look at, but neither are most of these!

The Minboosa District is technically part of Hutta, which was featured before, but it's a new area, so including it made a certain kind of sense. What's surprising is that the Interpreter's Retreat and Kessan's Landing weren't included using the same kind logic.

Instead we got the Black Hole and Section X, which are separate maps, sure, but since they are old they were technically already included as part of Corellia and Belsavis last year. I recall that at least one of the finalists for Corellia was in fact a shot taken in the Black Hole, and my own submission for Belsavis was a shot of Section X. I guess I can simply submit the exact same image again? Just seems a little odd.

Anyway, last year I used the occasion of the contest returning as an opportunity to showcase my own submissions from the year before, but this year I'd like to talk about my observations about three of this year's locations instead.

Ziost is of course a unique planet in the sense that it has a "before" state that only exists during the storyline and which is very different from the permanent "after" state in which we get to do dailies. I had several alts with the Ziost storyline active and thought I'd be clever by taking screenshots on these otherwise impossible to access maps, but I've got to admit I liked none of them enough to submit in the end. Looking out at the skyline in front of the People's Tower certainly made me rethink the impact of Vitiate's actions that day, but the buildings honestly looked a bit basic and like the designers intentionally didn't put that much work into them, knowing that they would live in a phase only used for a single storyline where nobody would spend a lot of time marvelling at the scenery (and who would blame them).

Somewhat basic-looking Ziost skyline

I can see why CZ-198 was saved until the end because while it's an extremely popular daily location, it basically just consists of a landing platform and some indoor spaces. I look forward to seeing whether someone actually manages to come up with a good shot of the place, because I certainly didn't.

The Minboosa District mostly consists of a lot of swamp and pipelines (and I learned that the annoying Xuvva spawns that can see through stealth are not limited to the storyline but just always there it seems), but while scouting the area for good shot locations I was surprised to realise that there's actually a whole sub-zone that we never go to during the storyline. I didn't think it was particularly pretty so I didn't take a picture of it, but it did make me wonder what was up with that. With Broadsword's more limited resources nowadays, it seems odd to have such a large chunk of an already relatively small map not serve any purpose.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this year's contest. It's worth noting that the devs have acknowledged that they're basically out of planets now and that they're thinking about what other topics future screenshot contests could be about, such as strongholds or outfits. I'm not sure how that would work because surely then it'd more about building a good-looking outfit/stronghold rather than about being able to take good screenshots of the world we all share? Personally I think something like flashpoints might work better, but we'll see. If you want to enter the current competition while the going is still hot, you have until the 20th of October.