Lessons Learned from Training Bessi

As of about a week ago, I'm the proud owner of a permanent basilisk droid companion! Like I said in my last post about B3-S1, I was actually surprised by how enjoyable I ended up finding the process, when I was originally very much against the idea of being given a reason to do the same old daily zones yet again for the umpteenth time.

However, there are definitely a few things I learned along the way that I kind of wish I had known sooner. Heck, this one sentence from my previous post contains two misconceptions in one: "[T]here are four different currencies involved and so far I've always reached the weekly cap for all of them within only two hours of gameplay, at which point it's back to the stable for Bessi as she can't make any more progress until the next week." Since I want other people to be able to avoid the mistakes I made, let me break it down for you:

1. Bessi's time is not precious

In that previous post, I made it sound like it was really easy to hit the weekly cap on all the Bessi-related currencies within only two hours, but that was on a stealther and knowing my way around. I almost took a certain pride in making efficient use of my "Bessi-time" because I figured it was the most precious resource in the whole endeavour. Can't make any progress with Bessi if you're not allowed to have her out, can you?

This turned out to be very wrong for two reasons: First off, the memory chips you need to spend to activate Bessi for an hour are extremely easy to get. You get several for free from the terminal in Lane's lab every week, and the collected research containers also have a random chance of containing extra memory chips. So I soon found myself bumping up against the real limiting factors: training modules and prototype data.

The latter isn't that hard to get but is required in higher and higher numbers as you go up in levels, and also serves as currency for buying training modules for specific planets from the vendor. Training modules aren't exactly rare per se either, but since it's random what modules you'll get granted for free and they can send you to 14 different planets, it's possible for module RNG a.k.a. "just not getting enough of the one you actually need" to be a real blocker.

Oh, and guess what gives you two free training modules every time? Feeding Bessi a memory chip! So I went from trying to be super efficient with her time in the early levels and treating memory chips as extremely precious, to actively feeding her the things all day without even using Bessi for anything (you can use up more memory chips before the timer for the last one has actually run out by dismissing Bessi in Lane's Lab and then initiating the "conversation" with her while she's lying in her dedicated spot).

2. You don't have to stop after you've maxed out your currencies for the week

The other misconception I expressed in that earlier quote was that maxing out my Bessi-related currencies for the week meant that I was done and that there was nothing else left to do. In reality, you can keep doing training modules for as long as you have any. The collected research you get as a reward is a container, so you can simply stash those in your cargo bay to immediately have a leg up on your weekly progress for the next reset. You don't have to worry about accidentally wasting them either, as the game won't even let you open them if you're already maxed out on all the currencies contained within.

Do take care though with which training modules you use up every week, because...

3. It pays off to know which training modules are used at which level

I'm usually someone who prefers exploring things for myself, only resorting to guides when I get stuck, but with Bessi, having at least a little bit of knowledge in advance definitely pays off. Specifically, what you should know is that at the higher levels, you'll have to complete training modules in specific daily areas to progress. These are:

Level 5: Black Hole, CZ-198, Iokath
Level 6: Onderon, Oricon, Ruhnuk
Level 8: Kessan's Landing, Ossus, Yavin IV
Level 9: Makeb, Manaan, Section X

Mek-Sha and Rishi are not required for any specific levels.

What this means is that when you pick which training modules to do in a given week, keep in mind what's coming up next and don't use up the ones you're about to need at the next level! I don't remember the exact details, but I think I did a bunch of Black Hole and CZ-198 modules at level four because hey! They are really easy daily areas! And then I levelled up and groaned when I saw that I'd just used up what was required for the next level, when I could have done level four with any old module.

4. You don't get credit for everything you should get credit for

Maybe that'll be fixed one day, but as it stands, there are some slight bugs with the training module missions. That you need to actually have Bessi out and in the role she's training for when you complete a mission is logical enough, but other restrictions... not so much. For example I was initially under the impression that the bonus missions that ask you to do a heroic don't give you anything, because they only seem to grant you your reward if the heroic is completed before the main mission (as opposed to at the same time). So if your main objective says to complete two missions, and you do a normal daily first and a heroic second, the heroic doesn't count for the bonus in my experience, meaning you need to make sure to always do any heroics first if you want to get credit for the bonus. The collected research you get from these bonus missions is actually quite good as it contains lots of prototype data plus a little bit of several of the other types.

Oh, and Makeb heroics are just totally screwed up in terms of credit. I found this forum post helpful for pointing out several of the missions from the terminal that don't count towards training Bessi. GSI missions don't work either in case you're wondering.

5. Bonus tip:

Not something "I wish I'd known" because I did find out about it in time, but at level 10 you're asked to have Bessi use her abilities in every role 500 times. That is a lot. By the time I had done everything else required at that level, I still needed about 300 more ability uses in each role. Fortunately, for tank and dps, you can just sic Bessi on a training dummy and go AFK for a while. For her to practice healing, I opted to engage a champion mob on Nar Shaddaa and let him punch me in the face for a while. This requires a little bit of attention, but not that much and at least it's kind of amusing (even if I had to do it several times over, because even with me practically doing no dps to him, Bessi's piddly heal-dps would eventually kill him).

Getting KotFE Flashbacks in the New WoW Expansion

So World of Warcraft has a new expansion out, and Mr Commando and I have been playing it for the past few days. Why am I writing about that on my SWTOR blog? Because new WoW expansions have a weird way of reminding me of The Old Republic, that's why!

Two years ago I wrote a post about how I keep noticing familiar voices from SWTOR in other media, and I cited the then-new WoW expansion Dragonflight as an example, as it featured the female trooper as a dragon and Senya as a centaur. This new expansion is even worse though, because not only does it feature some familiar voices, but the residents of the new land you travel to call you "Outlander".

What I thought was the ultimate flashback moment arrived when I made it to the second zone and there's this cut scene of a pompous rock dwarf leader making an appearance, and he starts his speech by yelling "Outlanders!". That really took me back right there, as the voice also seemed familiar and I could've sworn that I had the exact same guy yell "Outlander!" at me before in one of the Knights expansions.

I couldn't quite place my finger on it though, and while a guildie had some suggestions as to who the voice actor might be, that still didn't answer my question of which character in KotFE or KotET he reminded me of. It wasn't until the next morning as I was about to get on a train when it suddenly came to me: the leader of the Heralds of Zildrog! I immediately pulled up a YouTube video of the encounter and yep, there was that familiar voice. I guess it makes sense that this would fire up recognition in my brain, considering that he voices what's effectively a conceited cult leader in both instances.

I still can't say with 100% certainty that it's the same guy since I can't find full voice credits for The War Within at this point, but assuming that it's indeed the same voice actor, the Exalted in KotFE is credited as Fred Tatasciore, who was also the new voice for Tanno Vik and apparently... Doctor Oggurobb? Huh!

Anyway, that moment was a particular stand-out but there have been others. Darin De Paul (Valkorion) is as prolific as ever and lends his voice to more than a few random rock dwarves. And just as I was starting to wonder whether they hadn't managed to include Jennifer Hale anywhere this time, she popped up as the voice of a random blacksmith. It's just something that tickles me. Have you encountered familiar voices elsewhere lately?

I will be writing more about the WoW expansion on my WoW blog by the way. Just in case you're interested (and/or didn't know that was a thing).

First Impressions of GS7

I haven't had as much of a chance to immediately dive into Galactic Season 7 as I maybe would've liked, but I did check in on all servers this week and at least made a start. I said I wasn't going to keep a detailed diary of my seasonal progress this time, but that doesn't mean that I have nothing at all to say about my experiences.

The first thing I noticed was that there doesn't seem to be a seasonal story this time. You still get a mission item at level one, but all that unlocks is a quick intro on Hutta where you briefly talk to someone from the Bounty Brokers Association about hunting down some Force-sensitive types - to provide an in-character explanation for killing the Dark vs. Light bosses I guess - and that's it.

I can't say I was particularly surprised or dismayed by that. While I loved GS5's story, last season was a bit of a damp squib in comparison, and I can only guess that the devs decided somewhere along the way that this "seasonal story" thing wasn't working out the way they'd hoped, so they just ditched it. And I'm fine with that. Yes, GS5 showed that there was potential to do more with the idea, but if it's not working, I'm happy for them to focus on other things, considering that seasons were never meant to be about story anyway. I just hope they put those cut scene and dialogue tree building resources to good use somewhere else.

In my last post I wondered which way GS7 was going to pivot after seemingly everybody hated last season's insane vendor trash grind. The answer to that is: they just got rid of the whole currency concept and the "big" seasonal achievement this time just requires you to do a lot of bounty contracts and kill a bunch of DvL bosses. That seems... reasonable to me. It's still going to take effort, but it's much more predictable and easier to space out based on your own preferences.

If you wanted to and have done a lot of bounty hunting in the past to generate unlocks, you could even complete the meta achievement in the first week! One of my guildies got all 40 of the required DvL boss kills within the space of a few days just by idling on Dromund Kaas and tapping the DvL boss for the week whenever a group came by. Shared tagging for the win! I do imagine this achievement is going to be a lot harder to get on the less popular servers though. (Not that I was planning to do that, but I mean for the people who have their mains there.)

With the currency (real or fake) gone and one of the easy weekly objectives having been focused on currency acquisition in the past, the devs decided to have two season-specific weeklies this time: one to kill two DvL bosses and one to do a bounty contract. I think that's nice as it adds more flavour to the season, and should satisfy both those looking for something easy to do solo every week (the bounty contract) and those who like the group objectives to have something to do with their guilds.

My experience with the DvL bosses themselves has been a bit of a... mixed bag. As mentioned before, I defeated them all back in the day, so I roughly knew what to expect, but I knew the devs were going to have to fix the awkward spawning/despawning mechanics and I figured maybe they were going to apply some nerfs in the process as well. The spawning issues have indeed been fixed, as just two bosses are up each week in a fixed spot, and they respawn after something like five minutes of being killed, so there's no fear of missing out if you're in the process of assembling a group and someone else gets there first.

However, in terms of difficulty, they don't feel nerfed at all. This first week, the two active spawn points were on Dromund Kaas and Tatooine - both low-level planets, which always used to make the fights easier - though even here you could already notice a marked difference between the damage output on DK vs. Tat. My guild group had no real problems of course, though even that wasn't without deaths, as it's easy to get caught out by a circle-drop-and-stun combo even as a seasoned raider.

On Star Forge I joined an Imperial pug group as healer, and it felt like insane level whack-a-mole trying to keep everybody alive, though we did successfully kill the boss on Dromund Kaas. I immediately moved on to Tatooine but some people said they wanted to kill the same boss again to progress towards the meta achievement. It then turned out that I must've either been the only healer or maybe just one of two, as it looked like the group wiped when they pulled the same boss again without me (I couldn't tell with 100% certainty, but everybody died and people in ops group chat sounded disappointed). I then summoned them to Tatooine, where we succeeded again, though with more deaths than last time.

On the other servers I was less successful. On Satele Shan I joined a pug but people kept dropping out as fast as new ones joined, and someone insisted that we shouldn't even try the boss until we had at least 16 players, so after about half an hour of that I dropped out too to go to bed. At other times, I just went to the jungle to see whether I was lucky enough to find someone else already fighting the boss, but was unlucky enough to not encounter any groups. I just got myself killed more than once when what looked like random levellers decided to try and solo the boss, and apparently the range at which you get pulled into combat is really big, meaning that if a single person decides to pull and you're an innocent bystander some yards away, you'll pretty much immediately find yourself dotted and stunned to death.

I suspect I could've gotten kills on more servers if I'd just had the time and dedication to simply loiter near a boss or on the fleet for longer, but I didn't want to do that this time. I'm trying to stick to my plan of aiming for fewer objectives per week on the secondary servers, and there were a lot of other objectives this first week that required a lot less time and effort. I still ended up achieving more than four weeklies on most servers, but it definitely felt much more relaxed to have a goal of four and then maybe go "oh, I can knock out one more out today" rather than trying to work towards six or seven from the start of the week and then feeling stressed out as the weekly reset draws close.

One thing I'd forgotten about and which I saw people complain about is that the dark and light tokens dropped by the bosses are per character, and that many of the rewards you can buy with them have alignment requirements. I'd honestly forgotten about all of that. I found that a lot of my characters still had loads of tokens from back in the day anyway, because there wasn't anything of interest to me left on the vendors. Plus the tokens were actually really easy to get back then, as you'd get one every time your character gained a Galactic Command (and later Renown) level while the side of the Force that matched your alignment was in the lead in the galaxy-wide Dark vs. Light war, which was easy enough to achieve. I agree that like the Nightlife chips, this is another currency that really should be legacy-wide, but considering what the devs said about the former, I wouldn't hold my breath for these tokens getting fixed before the end of the season either.

Galactic Season 7 Starts Tomorrow

... and I'm curious to see what it will be like.

Unfortunately the patch date coincides with three very busy days at work for me this time, so I won't be able to jump right into the action - I'm guessing I'll be lucky if I manage to even log into all servers on Tuesday. But that's okay; it's not like I need to get anything specific done right away.

I do wonder whether we'll be in for any mechanical surprises like we were at the start of the last season. I feel like we really can't have a repeat of GS6's ultra-grindy blueprint achievement, considering how off-putting everyone seemed to find it, but I haven't seen the devs comment on that at all. They're usually pretty good at taking that kind of feedback into account, but when they then don't talk about what they're planning to change, you never know whether the "improvement" won't end up being awkward in some other way.

As for myself, I think I'll once again try to re-think my approach to completing the season on all servers. Last season, I tried to check myself a bit by keeping a detailed diary of my progress every week, but that didn't quite work out the way I had planned. So I'm not planning to do that again, but I'm considering simply setting myself a hard cap of weekly objectives on the secondary servers, something like "aim for four and do no more than five", considering how easily I still tended to slip into pushing for 7/7 everywhere last time.

In general I feel like I really need to take it a bit easier in GS7 compared to the last one. I'm sort of reminded of how I pushed myself to complete the 100 weekly objectives achievement on all servers in Season 3, and then felt a little burnt out and like I really couldn't muster as much enthusiasm for GS4. I think grinding for blueprints until the very end had a similar effect on me in GS6, and as a result I feel like I hardly had much of a break between seasons and like I just don't have that much energy to invest into a new season just yet.

Do you have any plans or goals for the new season?

Could Flashpoints Become Endgame Again?

I've been thinking a lot about flashpoints recently. Over the past year and a half, I've been dabbling in Mythic Plus dungeons in World of Warcraft with some friends, and while I have my issues with that system, it has served as a reminder of how much I still enjoy small group content with friends... and how little reason I've had to do any of that in SWTOR for a while now, even as I continue to run operations with my guild.

When 7.0 first came out, we ran master mode flashpoints as part of our gearing up process, trying to get items from every possible source available, but after that it soon became clear that of the three different PvE gearing paths available since Legacy of the Sith, flashpoints have come out as the most lacklustre. The Noble Decurion gear you get from solo activities is by far the easiest to grind out and upgrade, while the Rakata purples from operations offer the best overall itemisation, not to mention the highest possible item level, which makes them a worthwhile goal to pursue even if it takes some effort. Flashpoint gear occupies an uncomfortable position in the middle, meaning it's not the best, but also ridiculously pricey in terms of currency upgrade costs, meaning you're almost always better off choosing one of the other paths.

(I note that many guides recommend acquiring and upgrading a single Supreme Decurion item from flashpoints and dissembling it to unlock the mod vendor - but that's it, after that you're basically not supposed to set foot into a flashpoint ever again.)

Seasons used to offer an incentive to group up for flashpoints with guildies, as the way the old flashpoint objective worked meant that it was faster to run a master mode including the bonus boss with guildies than to do multiple, easier but more haphazard runs with pugs. However, since this was changed to require exactly two runs no matter what, it's not as attractive anymore to put the effort in to assemble a group of friends. Sure, I'll still run with guildies for fun sometimes, but the temptation to just "get it done" with a quick solo mode stealth run or pug when that is also an option at any time is definitely much stronger than it used to be.

It strikes me that there is really some missed potential there, considering the sheer number of flashpoints the game contains, most of which do have a master mode as well. There just isn't much incentive to run them beyond some achievements and rare decoration drops nowadays - and to be clear, I don't want to over-incentivise flashpoints either, so that people feel like they have to run them all the time, but I really think we could get a lot more mileage out of them than we currently do.

Whenever I do queue for a master mode flashpoint for example, I almost always get the same ones, because people want to just do the easiest ones for rewards and not have to deal with any of the harder or newer ones. Which I think is a crying shame!

I remember when Lost Island first came out, it was put into a second "tier" of flashpoints with a separate queue and rewards because it was considered to be so much harder than the others. That ultimately didn't go anywhere, I guess because having a tier with only a single flashpoint in it isn't particularly enticing. In this day and age however, when we have dozens of flashpoints available that are all scaled to the current level cap, many of which are of wildly varying difficulty, wouldn't this be a perfect time to revisit that idea? It doesn't make sense that the game treats master mode Hammer Station and master mode Ruins of Nul as if they were exactly the same.

Flashpoints I would personally put in tier two would be:

• Assault on Tython 
• Battle of Rishi
  
• Blood Hunt
• Crisis on Umbara
• Lost Island
• Nathema Conspiracy
• Objective Meridian
• Ruins of Nul
• Secrets of the Enclave
• Shrine of Silence
• Spirit of Vengeance
• Traitor Among The Chiss

That's 12 of the current 29 master mode flashpoints - maybe you could add or remove a couple. I'm not married to the idea of a specific list, and obviously any selection would still include some (comparatively) easier and some harder ones... but not "Hammer Station easy", you know.

And what would be the point of having a separate tier, you might ask? Well, it could give separate rewards, and again I look back at something that I liked about the early days of the game - that the last boss in a master mode flashpoint used to drop a Rakata piece. Why not do something like that again? You can't tell me that it takes less effort to complete any of these than to do a master mode Nefra.

Both of these suggestions wouldn't require the introduction of anything dramatically new, as they both refer back to systems that were in the game before, and gear rewards that are in the game right now, but I'm open to other ideas as well of course. I'd just like to see some incentives to make flashpoints more attractive again as something to run with both guildies and pugs, especially on master mode.

Achievements I Would Add to Old Content

I'm actually not the biggest fan of achievements and prefer it when MMOs don't have them, as the big UI pop-ups tend to take me out of the world too much, but seeing how they seem to be considered pretty much a standard feature of most games nowadays, I've learned to live with them. Sometimes they'll even motivate me to do something! I won't necessarily go out of my way to hunt for achievements, but if I'm already doing something, and there's an achievement to do just a little bit more for example, that can definitely work as an incentive.

For those who don't know, SWTOR originally launched without an achievement system, but added one with the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion in 2013, which included a lot of retrofitted achievements for older content. However, there were always some things that made me go "huh" - every time I found myself a bit surprised that there wasn't an achievement for a particular thing. Here's my top five list of achievements that I would still add to old content:

1. Being sneaky in the Black Hole

In first place, we have the mission that inspired this whole post: [Daily] Eyes and Ears on Republic side or [Daily] Hypermatter Directive on Imp side. These are mirrored dailies that require you to click on five spots in a warehouse while navigating a bunch of sensors that will spawn a guard droid each if you trip them. There's no particular punishment for this other than having to kill the droid so you don't have to do it perfectly, but I at least try to be perfectly sneaky every time, and on the rare occasion when I succeed, I always feel extremely proud. Alas, the game doesn't agree that this is a special feat and there's no achievement for it. If any daily mission ever deserved an achievement, I think it's this one.

2. Kill Esh-ka

One type of common achievement that was added with Rise of the Hutt Cartel was to kill a bunch of mobs on every planet, often sorted into different categories. On Voss for example, there's one to kill hostile droids, members of the opposite faction, and several different kinds of beasts. I didn't inspect all the newly added achievements in advance, so as I quested my way across the different planets for the first time after the expansion, it was always interesting to see what would pop up.

I have this distinct memory of doing this on Belsavis, and at one point wondering why nothing had popped up yet for the dozens of Esh-ka I'd killed. And then I checked and found that there wasn't even an achievement for these mobs... which make up what feels like half the enemies on the planet. I always thought that was a bit odd.

After thinking about it a bit more, I can only guess that the devs were worried that something like "kill 100 Esh-ka" might sound kind of... genocidal? Generally the kill achievements for humanoids ask you to take out a faction, not a species. But that strikes me as something that could be addressed with proper wording - "defeat 100 Esh-ka escapees" or something. I want my wading through tunnels and tunnels full of these to be acknowledged!

3. Harmonised flashpoint achievements

When a new flashpoint comes out nowadays, it generally has a pretty standard set of achievements: do it x times on story/veteran mode, do it x times on master mode, kill each boss at least once, and then maybe a couple of extra achievements for bonus bosses or special mechanics. This wasn't always the case though, and if you look back at the achievements archive, there are quite a few flashpoints that only have an achievement for running them once on story or vet mode, such as the Esseles, Black Talon, Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders and more. I think this is because at the time, they were low-level content that didn't scale, and it didn't really make sense to ask people to re-run a level 20 flashpoint twenty times after they'd out-levelled it (though there are always alts I guess...) Nowadays though, with everything being scaled, I don't see why these achievements shouldn't be the same across the board. Same with flashpoints that are lacking achievements for their bonus bosses, such as Assault on Tython and Korriban Incursion.

I know some old-timers would hate me for this - "I've already run the Esseles a hundred times and now you want me to run it another twenty times for a new achievement in 2024?!" Well... yeah. I'd still do it.

4. Planetary storylines

This one is fairly simple: I think it's a bit of a missed opportunity that there are achievements for completing all the class stories, but none for doing all the planetary storylines at least once. I'm not saying they're all narrative masterpieces, but I think they add a lot of context for each planet and achievements could make for a good incentive to encourage people to give them a try. I still occasionally see comments from players who try to do literally nothing but their class story and then wonder why they end up under-levelled at some point.

5. Exploration missions

I've always felt a bit sour about the fact that exploration missions get hidden by default nowadays, until I heard Swtorista say in a stream that they apparently confused people? I don't know, that was before we had the purple markers for main story missions... either way, I think at the very least they deserve an achievement of their own as well, to give people an incentive to check them out, similar to the planetary storylines. For these, I guess I wouldn't make a separate one for each planet, but simply something like "complete 50 exploration missions across the galaxy" (or however many there are - I wouldn't require you to do them all, but probably something like two thirds of them).

Have you ever come across something in game that made you go "huh, I'm surprised there isn't an achievement for that"? Feel free to share in the comments!

Nar Shaddaa Nightlife Again

Nar Shaddaa Nightlife has always been my least favourite of the seasonal in-game events, because I think playing the slots is honestly kind of boring, and it has always freaked me out a bit how nonchalantly people will brag about just how many millions of credits they've already wasted on the machines. I know it's only virtual money, but I've definitely seen it encourage some players' compulsions in a bad way (if you catch my drift).

That's not to say that it hasn't evolved to be somewhat more involved over time. Personally, I hit a bit of a low point with the event in 2020, when the game started heaping free chips on me faster than I could use them up, and it felt like I was being funnelled into hours of dull clicking just to claim some freebies. Fortunately that problem was eventually addressed in 2022, with the addition of the "max bet" machines and vendors that would allow you to convert a large number of chips into fewer special chips with better odds to get over the finish line more quickly.

I was therefore rather curious when developer Joe Stragmalia took to the forums a few weeks ago to announce further changes for this year. Players quickly latched on to what they perceived as nerfs and got grumpy, but to me, "reducing the amount of time it takes to play and win prizes with the slot machines" was only ever going to be a win. Remember, people, simply getting your chip back counts as a "win" but actually gains you nothing and just means that you wasted precious seconds of your life listening to a boop sound! Though on further consideration, didn't the max bet machines already address this problem to some degree?

I found that reading about the changes in bullet point form didn't really convey their impact very well, but after a bit of playing the slots myself it became clear very quickly that there's a new intended "strategy" to it all, which is to play the Kingpin machines until you get the (new?) Good Karma buff which lasts ten minutes, then play the Smuggler's Luck machines until you get the Feeling Lucky buff (lasts two minutes), and then go play the Emperor's Grace machine with both buffs - which will guarantee that you don't lose - and rake in prizes until the buffs either time out or you hit a jackpot, which also removes the buff. (This is somewhat contrary to what was said on the forums by the way, where the post claims that any win will remove the buffs, which is currently not the case.)

Now, I think this is an interesting concept, but the thing that bugs me about it is that it requires you to have sufficient numbers of all three chips to effectively follow the recommended strategy, and naturally, I found that a lot of my characters had huge numbers of just one or two of the chips but none of the third type. You can compensate to some degree by buying what you're missing from the vendors, but I for one don't actually want to spend money on these gambling adventures!

Joe kind of buried the lede in a follow-up post in my opinion, where he stated that they are looking into finally making the gambling chips legacy-wide as well but it's kind of complicated and definitely not happening this year. If they do manage to pull it off for next year, I'll happily come back with a vengeance and with piles of what's likely to be hundreds of chips of all three types, which just happen to be spread out across different characters in a very inconvenient way right now.

For the time being I'll just play a little, for a reason that hasn't received much attention on the forums... they actually added Conquest objectives for the event! Specifically a pretty meaty daily one to win five times (getting your chip back on Smuggler's Luck counts) and a big weekly one that requires you to play (not win) the Emperor's Grace machine twenty times. I've been trying to complete the former objective most days because it's such easy points, similar to increasing your influence level with a companion. The latter I've also done twice, though that one's a bit tougher to do because having twenty Emperor's Grace chips to hand does require some work or luck, and if you can't get the other buffs before playing them, you might end up just losing and feeling bad...

I'm actually less fussed about the prizes themselves though and will simply take whatever I can get. Remember the High Roller Shades which I so coveted and failed to get in 2021, and finally got just before the event was about to end in 2022? This year I got two more of them during the first week of the event... naturally. The new helmet doesn't excite me quite as much - I'd probably try to use it in an outfit if I did win it, but I won't cry about it if I don't.

PvP Season Six Finished

The other day I finished my goals for PvP Season 6... including all the achievements. I was rather surprised to be hitting that point with almost two months left in the season.

When the devs originally announced their plans for Season 6, I wasn't too on board with some of the changes and noted that I was hoping they'd reconsider some of their plans based on people's feedback. Unfortunately that didn't happen, and I definitely grumbled when I claimed my adrenal and medpack "rewards", which didn't stack with the thousands I already have and vendored for a two-digit number of credits.

But the five levels added to the reward track had an... interesting effect. Usually the way my season progression would go was: finish the warzone weekly achievement first (since I really enjoy warzones and they are responsible for most of my progress in PvP), followed by finishing the main track a few weeks later. Then I'd need a couple more weeks to finish my arena weeklies (since I don't like them as much and pops in the lowbie and midbie brackets can be slow, I rarely complete more than one a week) and finally I'd hit the 2000 medals.

A screenshot from an arena I rather enjoyed. Four bounty hunters vs. the world! RIP, enemy team who got obliterated by three Powertechs with a pet healer both rounds.

This time around, the achievement for twelve weekly warzone missions was still the first thing I completed, but I also had quite a few levels of the reward track left to go so nothing else happened for a while... and then I completed the main track, the arena weekly achievement and the medal achievement all within hours of each other. I think the main track was actually the last thing I finished as well.

That was... odd. I honestly hadn't expected to finish everything seemingly at once and to then just be done, with so much time left in the season. On the one hand it was kind of nice, but on the other I'm not sure that's really the best way to balance these things either. I always figured that completing the reward track was meant to be the main goal, with the additional achievements being "stretch goals" that you can work towards if you're particularly hardcore. When it works that way, this also means that gameplay-wise, there's a kind of curve to your activity, where you first play a lot, working on everything at once, and then it gently slopes downwards as you complete things and have to invest less and less time to just finish off those last few remaining goals.

The regular Galactic Season works like that too (or at least it did in the past, the silly fragments achievement in the last one kind of screwed things up). I'm not sure how much of a point there is to things like the medal achievement if you complete it automatically before even completing the track, just because that's how many matches you need to play to get to the end anyway.

That aside, I don't have much to add about the season that I didn't already express in this post from June.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: June & July 2024

Did you miss this column back in June? I didn't forget about it, but when I opened my draft at the end of the month I found that it only had two links in it, which didn't really seem like enough material to make a post out of, so I decided to combine my recommendations for June and July. That's not to say that people weren't doing enough interesting SWTOR-related things in those two months; as usual I'm just compiling things that I personally came across. I was also quite busy simply playing and writing myself, with less time spent on looking at other people's stuff.

The overarching theme for this installment of "Around the SWTOR-sphere" is going to be patch 7.5 and the content it brought us, which included the Spring Abundance Festival, Bessi the Basilisk droid, the Deseperate Defiance story update and graphical updates to Hutta.

• On the subject of the new story update, before I even wrote my own review of it, Chash Larol from The Old Republic Era wrote theirs, so go and read!
  
  While I was poking around on YouTube for more story reviews, I came across the channel CK Outpost and their video "SWTOR Chains in the Dark Review - What I liked. What I didn't" (that was the name of patch 7.4 if you don't remember). They were quite critical of some things, but I was super stoked to find someone providing in-depth reviews of story content based on multiple playthroughs, something I don't see very often, so I instantly subscribed. Naturally I was also excited when they shared their thoughts about 7.5 this month, in a video simply called "SWTOR Update 7.5 Desperate Defiance Story Review". Unfortunately - unlike me - they liked the latest patch's story even less than 7.4 and sounded quite disenchanted with the game in general to be honest, which is sad to see. Still, I wanted to give the channel a shout-out anyway since I thought their criticisms were well-articulated and they also have a bunch of other, older videos on their channel that people might enjoy, such as various SWTOR-related "top 5" lists and such.
• On the subject of Spring Abundance, I have to give a shoutout to Siow on Vulkk.com, who posted about Baking a Bestine Threeberry Pie with Recipe. Now, I'll have to confess up front that I didn't actually read the whole thing since it's extremely long and I'm not actually that into baking. However, I just think it's really neat that someone went ahead and attempted to recreate one of the new in-game pies in real life. World of Warcraft went so far as to release an official cookbook with recipes to recreate all kinds of in-game dishes, so there is precedent for this kind of thing! We're not quite ready for that in SWTOR I think, but it's a start.
  
  Another Spring Abundance-inspired piece of content I wanted to highlight was this little machinima made by /Jawaface about his character's adventures during the festival on Dantooine. He's only a very small YouTuber, but I've known him for a little while and he's always super friendly and fun to interact with. I also really admire his passion for video editing and creating SWTOR machinima... my only "problem" being that almost all his videos are about jawas and/or his OC Kara, who's supposed to be half-human, half-Jawa I believe? And I'm just... not that interested in Jawas, sorry! Still, I've been wanting to give his channel a shout-out for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity.
• On the subject of the graphical changes to Hutta, my opinion when checking them out on the PTS was that they would take some getting used to but I also thought that they looked better in game than on screenshots. That said, I shared the sentiment of the post called "Same spot on Hutta one server maintenance apart... I'm kind of shocked" on the SWTOR subreddit, which showed that a lot of environmental assets in the distance had gone missing with the revamp, making the horizon look very bleak. Fortunately this appeared to be accidental however, as it was later followed up by: "They put the low-res distant mountain PNGs back on Hutta. This vista looks absolutely GORGEOUS once again!". Phew!
• I haven't come across any non-guide or news content about Bessi the Basilisk droid yet, but I do have one more "SWTOR in 2024" review this month, this time by MMOByte and called "Star Wars The Old Republic in 2024... is Absolutely NOT What You Expect". What surprised me about this one is that they didn't even actually play the game - they have done so in the past and figured that going through the same motions yet again would just be a waste of time - but instead just looked at the activity on SWTOR's various social channels to see how much posting was going on there. I just thought that was... an interesting approach to say the least, and I guess once again highlights the importance of those channels, not just to keep current players up to date, but also because of what kind of image of the game it projects to people who aren't (currently) playing but might be considering it.

Playing as a Male Character

Last week, after more than twelve years of playing Star Wars: The Old Republic almost daily, I completed a class story on a male character for the first time. The question of why it took me this long is kind of fascinating to me.

I've played video games with male protagonists in the past without giving it a second thought, but something about MMOs makes them different somehow. I've never shied away from creating male characters there either (one of the very first alts I created back when I started playing WoW in 2006 was a human male warlock) but for some reason I always struggled to get as invested in them as I was in my female characters.

I do know that I'm at least not entirely alone in this - Nick Yee from Quantic Foundry did an interesting survey about gender preferences in gaming a few years ago, which found that a large majority of women prefer to play female characters, but only less than half of the surveyed men preferred playing male characters. In fact, almost a third of men also preferred playing female characters.

Anecdotally, my own experience has been that people have basically two modes of engaging with their characters in an MMO: by viewing them as an extension of themselves, an avatar or personal representation, or by viewing them as toys to play with, dolls to dress up, action figures that they can make jump around. This isn't to say that people aren't capable of doing both, but I think that "by default" you tend to lean either one way or the other when you start a game.

My personal observation at least has been that people who prefer playing characters that match their real life gender tend to view them more as representations of themselves, while those who'll happily mix and match view them more as objects to be played around with and with whom they don't necessarily identify. Though why women would be so much more prone to the former than the latter is honestly a mystery to me.

Either way, my strong preference for female characters in MMOs wasn't something to which I gave a huge amount of thought in the past... but of course SWTOR has a lot of "gendered" content in the original class stories, such as flirt options and whole romances that are only accessible to you if your character is the right gender. After more than a decade of exploring the game with dozens of female alts, I was really starting to feel that I was missing out by denying myself access to those optional story bits designed for male characters.

I actually created my very first male character in TOR back in 2012: Zilek, my Jedi consular on what is now the Satele Shan server. I know this because I mentioned his creation in this post from October 2012. As I anticipated back then, I partially played through the starting zone and then didn't do anything with him again for ages.

As far as I can tell from screenshots, I decided to check in on him again for reasons I can no longer remember around May 2019. What I do remember is that I almost instantly realised that I suddenly hated the way he looked (I'd originally given him shoulder-length black hair and that complexion option with the lip liner), so I gave him a makeover to make him more visually appealing. That helped, but somehow the quest cut scenes still bothered me. For some irrational reason I cannot quite fathom, it felt strange to see him talk and have a male voice coming out of "my" character. It just felt wrong. So I bought him an outfit with a mask - something I usually never do - but in this instance it weirdly helped to make him more playable, as if it made it easier to pretend he was secretly a girl or something?! If that sounds kind of insane to you, I didn't think any better of myself for feeling that way.

I levelled him for a few weeks, but then forgot about him again for the next three years. It wasn't until I started doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers that I began to give him attention more regularly and got him to max level, though I still haven't finished his class story.

As I got more into the idea of levelling a male character of each class, I made more of my new alts on the other servers male. They are all still relatively low level and not very advanced, but they exist and get play time, even if sporadically. At some point I realised that the only permutation I was still missing entirely was a male Sith warrior... so I went ahead and created one on my home server Darth Malgus. This was also around the time I was having a blast PvPing as a Juggernaut on Shae Vizla, so my newest warrior's purpose became to both do lowbie PvP while levelling and go through the warrior class story as a male character for the first time.

And... I actually succeeded! The questing really picked up once I outlevelled the lowbie bracket, as I wasn't keen to start midbie PvP at the very bottom of that pile and focused on progressing the story over queueing for arenas for the next ten levels or so.

I actually had a lot of fun with the story as well, and I didn't even have the urge to hide my character's face this time. I think what helped was that with this one, I had an idea for a "character" from the beginning and didn't even pretend that I was using him to represent my real self at any point. But it required a kind of actual "work" from me at first, as I had to think about what his personality was and how he would react to certain situations. There were some choices where I had to pause and think for a really long time to remind myself that I didn't want to go with whatever my gut feeling was, but what this character would do in that situation. For how challenging I found that at times, it was also a new kind of fun to be honest, and he quickly became one of my new favourites, as I connected to him in a different way to all my other alts.

I went in with a plan to romance one of the warrior's female love interests (seeing that kind of stuff was part of the whole point of making a male character, after all) and found myself surprisingly torn by which route to go down. I initially didn't think he was going to be interested in Vette, but she can be so charming... with Jaesa, I wasn't sure whether I was going to make her light or dark side, as he wasn't clearly one or the other himself, but I eventually ended up with her dark side version.

Now, dark side Jaesa has always been one of my least favourite companions, and I've been baffled by why she's so popular with some people. After playing through her romance, I can at least kind of see why - she may be psychotically violent, but she's also a stereotypically bad girl that falls head over heels for the player character and pursues him aggressively - I can see that being appealing. It's just that if you're playing a female character, like I always have, you're only left with the conversations where she's being absolutely psychotic and nothing else.

I thought that since I'd flirted with both Vette and Jaesa, there would be some sort of conversation that would force me to choose between them at some point, but I don't know if I just did things in the wrong order but I never saw anything like it. The most I got was Jaesa making a reference to my character having a thing with the Twi'lek but she never seemed to take all that much issue with it. Vette on the other hand never even mentioned Jaesa and asked to get married after a single kiss, which was just an obvious "whoa, no". Ultimately my warrior ended up agreeing to marry Jaesa in the most assholish way possible, which I thought was both disturbing and funny in equal amounts.

I kind of like the idea of continuing to play him to see some of the expansion content as a male character as well (even if I have no particular urge to flirt with Lord Cytharat, who knows what might happen) but realistically my enthusiasm for that kind of thing tends to fizzle out once I hit the level cap at the latest - we'll see how it goes.