Server Populations Based on Conquest Points

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't that busy during the last Total Galactic War, and as a result I ended up poking around on the other servers as well that week. Having a peek at the planetary leaderboards was interesting in terms of how incredibly different they looked on each server.

People often ask about server populations on reddit, which server is the best to play on etc., and I do have some information that addresses this on my State of SWTOR page, but it did occur to me that it's hard to find any kind of data to actually back up people's perceptions of each server's size. Over in WoW Classic, the most common metric is raid logs, which is already very limited because obviously there are plenty of players who don't raid and aren't counted, but in SWTOR we don't even have that. It's also been many years since we last had indicators of population size on the server selection screen.

The best bit of hard evidence about server size I've ever seen is probably this Today in TOR post from January 2023, which compared the number of Conquest points winning guilds had earned on each server throughout 2022. However, at this point that's several years old, and I have no doubt that server populations have shifted a little - plus the Shae Vizla server didn't exist yet, so it's not included at all.

I do think Conquest is about as good a measure of activity as you're ever going to get, as most things you do in game award Conquest points, so most guilded characters above level 10 will leave some kind of Conquest footprint if they are active at all. The problem is that in any given week the planetary leaderboards are very limited in how much they show us. Total Galactic War is a different beast, however...

So I spent a few hours logging through all servers on a Monday afternoon and manually recorded the full TGW leaderboards on all servers. The event wasn't over yet and scores were still updating all the time, but I didn't really care about that as I wasn't looking for precise numbers for this exercise; I just wanted the big picture. Let me share with you what I found:

First off, Total Galactic War includes 28 planets, with each one having ten spots on its visible leaderboard, so up to 280 guilds can make their presence known in this event. However, the only server on which all slots were actually taken was Star Forge.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the other servers don't have 280 guilds - the major gaps were pretty much always on the large yield planets, so the open slots on Darth Malgus (19), Satele Shan (32) and Tulak Hord (37) primarily indicated a lack of large guilds valuing visibility on the board over potentially conquering one of the smaller yield planets. In all three cases it seemed safe to assume that there were also extra guilds on the medium and small yield planets that had simply been pushed off the board. (The same was true for Star Forge, obviously.)

However, Leviathan and Shae Vizla were a different matter. On Leviathan, only 149 guilds were visible, leaving 131 spots empty - nearly half. On Shae Vizla the picture was even more dire, with only 102 guilds making a showing, leaving 178 openings. Some planets remained completely unconquered, with not a single guild even trying to claim a spot. (That said, I'm almost certain someone out there will read this and go "I'm surprised Shae Vizla has over 100 guilds!")

OK, so guilds are one thing, but what about their actual scores? A guild showing up with 2000 points is not the same as one showing up with 200 million. So I tallied up all the scores visible on the board. In total, across all servers, I counted a little under 12 billion Conquest points. Across the different servers, they were distributed as follows:

• Star Forge: 4.2 billion (35% of total)
• Darth Malgus: 3.4 billion (29% of total)
• Satele Shan: 1.8 billion (15% of total)
• Tulak Hord: 1.5 billion (13% of total)
• Leviathan: 500 million (4% of total)
• Shae Vizla: 400 million (3% of total)

There are some interesting inferences you can make from these numbers. While it sometimes feels to me like I'm constantly hearing about players moving off the smaller servers to Star Forge, these numbers don't really back that up. In fact, 35% is exactly the same slice of the pie that Star Forge occupied on the Today in TOR graphic from 2023.

Today in TOR doughnut chart from 2023 

Satele Shan does seem to be the biggest loser, having gone from nearly twice the size of Tulak Hord to only marginally larger, but part of that is also that TH actually seems to have grown a little since 2022, contrary to what I personally would've expected. Again, anecdotally I have the impression that both German and French players have been moving off their dedicated language servers to Darth Malgus for the bigger population - I've seen them chatter away in general chat and get yelled at for not speaking English. Darth Malgus does indeed seem to have grown, but seemingly only at the expense of Leviathan. Still, overall the shifts in activity levels are a lot milder than I would've expected after nearly four years.

However, what these numbers do show for sure is that you can expect to have a drastically different experience on different servers. If we correlate Conquest points to active population, then Star Forge is more than twice as populated as Satele Shan, and literally more than ten times the size of Shae Vizla. That's going to make a difference to how busy the world feels and how often group content is popping.

As for how these numbers translate into actual player numbers... it's impossible to say, as people can generate wildly varying amounts of Conquest points. When I go all out during Total Galactic War, I can generate 10-15 million by myself, but more realistically a guild invading a large yield planet should probably have at least 10-20 active members to hit its target without too much difficulty. (I base this on my personal experience being a member of different guilds on different servers.) If we assume 20 players per 5 million points generated, then these scores would be evidence of at least 48,000 guilded players leaving a mark during Total Galactic War, but I'd honestly expect the total number of active players to be higher. (Though it'd also give those people a heart attack who think that the game only has 4,000 active players nowadays because that's the daily average recorded on Steam.)

Adventures on the PTS, Part Whatever

I continue to log into the public test server almost every day. I've never been this engaged with testing anything in SWTOR before; it's quite strange.

First there's the new ops boss. I won't spoil anything about the theme or detailed mechanics, don't worry, but I do want to talk a bit about the experience of testing itself. Back when I tried XR-53 on the PTS, I went in with a group where at least a few people already knew what to expect, we killed it after a relatively small number of tries, and then we got an achievement at the end. It wasn't that dissimilar to trying a boss on the live servers for the first time.

This time around, things have been very different. I mentioned in a previous post that the ops entrance is right at the Odessen spawn-in point, which I assume is not going to be how it's going to work when the operation is finalised. When you go through the portal, you get teleported right into a room with the boss - no trash, nothing. Additionally, there's a droid called M4R-TN (Martin, like the ops dev - get it?) who not only offers repairs, but also has a number of consoles next to him that allow you to tweak things about the boss fight, such as in- or decreasing its health and damage output - a true test environment.

If you wanted to, you could dial down the boss's health to next to nothing and one-shot it. But what for? There's no achievement at this stage, or loot. It's up to you, the player, to decide how easy or hard you want the fight to be, purely for the sake of fun, and that's surprisingly difficult.

I'm guessing like most people, we initially tried to simply do the boss fight as presented, without tweaking anything. We also went in blind, because it's fun to discover things by ourselves. And that did work decently enough for story mode.

Veteran mode was a different matter though - so much damage! So much going on! Pure chaos. Trying to figure things out by yourself is fun for a while, but only until it isn't anymore. I've got to confess here that I've also learned over time that my ops team and I aren't actually very good at figuring out boss mechanics by ourselves. We have a tendency to completely misunderstand what's going on at times, and then coming up with ideas based on those misunderstandings that only make things worse. Myself, I just get completely overwhelmed at some point.

It made me realise that for how much I love operations in SWTOR, I'm a bit like the cliché of a WoW Classic raider - good at a 20-year-old fight that I've had opportunity to practice for literal years, but better not present me with anything new or even remotely difficult - as I'll just freeze up, even if I was actively asking for something new before. It's not entirely the same situation, but there are definitely parallels. I like the familiar, and SWTOR has given me plenty of opportunity to get used to things.

The other week I did multiple runs of Terror from Beyond, and it occurred to me that Operator IX on veteran mode is actually a pretty complex and hard to explain fight, what with everything that goes on with the colour mechanics. It doesn't seem so bad to me now after years of repetition, but the first people to figure out the encounter probably also had to spend quite a bit of time wiping, reading tooltips and experimenting in order to figure out exactly what to do at each stage and in what order. I've tried to take comfort in that thought at times when the new boss felt impossibly overwhelming to me - reminding myself that it won't seem half as bad once I've had time to properly understand and digest what's actually happening at each stage.

So after initially just dialling down the boss's damage a lot so we wouldn't die quite so quickly and had more time to actually figure out key mechanics, we did slowly get a grip on those.. but things were still messy and would quickly fall apart entirely. When I happened to come across a video from someone whose team had killed the boss on the PTS only the other day, I watched it, and it immediately taught us some things to improve.

This meant that the other night we finally realised that we'd hit a point where we understood what we were supposed to do; we just didn't have the numbers to execute it. We'd already reduced the default damage by half, but now we also had to reduce the boss's health, because we were hitting what's effectively the soft enrage with the boss still close to half health. (Mr Commando used to call that point "the 50% mechanic" - see my earlier point about us misunderstanding what's happening sometimes.)

On the next attempt we reduced the boss's health massively and he died with ease. So now the last exercise is going to be to dial the numbers up and down a bit more to see how much more we can take, but then I think we'll be done testing this particular fight for now. We've learned the mechanics and will be prepared in that regard. But if it goes live with the current default health and damage numbers, we won't kill it for a long time regardless.

The person who posted the kill video with the boss set to default values said the tuning felt good to them. In the video I could see that they were doing almost double my team's healing and about a third more damage. I mean, good for them, they are clearly good at the game - I just wish they were aware that what they are bringing to the table is not what the average group that attempts a veteran mode is going to have. I'm desperately hoping that the data we've provided by wiping over and over again is at least sending a signal in that regard, but I do still worry that it won't be enough. I suspect that not many who find the boss too hard in its current state will go through the process of wiping for hours to understand what's going on and fine-tune the numbers; most will probably just give up. And then the data set will just consist of the most elite NiM raiders killing it with ease, suggesting that everything is fine and dandy. I don't know. I can only keep trying.

The other thing that I've been spending time on is levelling lowbies with the new difficulty toggle set to veteran or master. I'll probably have another post about that in me at some point, but it's just so weirdly compelling to me. Since I'm playing so much and generating Conquest points, I've also set our PTS guild to invade a planet every week. Since there's no competition, we win every time. I know it's only temporary and doesn't mean anything, but I enjoy seeing "TSS PTS" being the conquerors of an increasing number of planets...

GS11 Start & Total Galactic War

Galactic Season 11 started last week, and for the first time since Galactic Season 2, I'm only aiming to complete it on one server. (While I did end up completing the GS2 track on all servers back in 2022, I didn't really get started on that until a bit later into the season; originally I was just aiming to complete it on Darth Malgus.)

It's honestly been a big relief. No longer am I thinking about how to slot seasonal progress of some sort into every single day of the week. I basically check at the start of the week whether there are any easy weekly objectives that I want to knock out right away, on Saturday I do the large group objectives with my guild, and then I just mop up any leftovers after that. In-between, I don't have to think about seasons at all! Amazing!

I haven't abandoned the other servers entirely, though. As a subscriber, you get a guaranteed level each week for simply logging in on four different days, which is easy enough to do, and I should be able to hit the first milestone that grants free Cartel Coins on all servers just by doing that. I do still love me some free CC.

Aside from that, I'm also still allowing myself to play alts on the other servers as and when I feel like it, which can result in some more progress on the seasons track as a mere side effect. In the first week for example, I attended a social event on Star Forge that earned me a good amount of Conquest points, and I ended up completing the weekly objective to earn 200k points on that server.

It'll be interesting to me to see how that continues as the season goes on, and if I maybe end up hitting any other milestones incidentally - I'll just have to remind myself not to get carried away. This (second) week for example, there was an objective to do quests as a warrior or knight, and again I thought that's something I might feel like doing on multiple servers just for the fun of it, but since I also had other things going on, it did end up feeling like it took up a bit more time than originally planned in the end.

One of said "other things" that were going on this past week was Total Galactic War. For once it wasn't an all-consuming experience for me and my guild, as nobody challenged Twin Suns Squadron for dominion of Nar Shaddaa this time around. The event doesn't end until Tuesday, so I don't want to jinx it, but we're more than 40 million points ahead of the guild in second place and they've shown no sign of wanting to be competitive, so it feels like we're pretty safe this time around. As much as I've enjoyed some of the crazy competitions of the past couple of years, sometimes a straightforward and easy win is nice too.

It's been an interesting experience to have a TGW in the second week of a new season. In recent years, Broadsword has mostly slotted that particular event somewhere in the gap between seasons, which to me made sense as a way to keep people busy and boost engagement with the game during what's otherwise a bit of downtime for many.

You'd think that the start of a season would be interesting enough on its own merits, making it a bit of a "waste" to have this special event on top of it, but I do wonder whether there's a method to the madness. I've definitely noticed in my own guild that there's always a bit of an activity slump between seasons now, and things don't immediately pick back up again the moment the next season starts either - there tends to be a two to three week delay until people have properly "woken back up" again.

This meant that this time, TGW fell into a period where people were already turning their attention back to the game naturally, and it made everyone's reactions to the event so different, it was quite surprising to me. With Total Galactic War, too, there are patterns I've observed over the years, namely that my guildies tend to start off slow and then ramp up their efforts over the weekend. This time though, everyone was crazy excited about the event from day one, with me logging in on Tuesday to find more than twenty people online and grinding points already. I was able to choose an invasion target pretty easily and quickly for a change, and by Wednesday morning we were sitting on about ten million points, more than twice our usual day one performance. I do think this also helped with dissuading other guilds from challenging us this time around.

So maybe the devs were going for a more synergistic approach this time - giving people more than one reason to get back into the game after taking a bit of a break. Or maybe they were hoping to boost PvP participation while the actual PvP season winds down. Or maybe nobody gave a lot of thought to the Conquest calendar and TGW just ended up in a different place than usual by coincidence. It's been interesting to observe the differences either way.

Testing the Open World Difficulty Toggle on the PTS

Yesterday Eric Musco did a let's play stream to talk more about the new overland difficulty toggle coming with 8.0. I wasn't able to watch it live, but I did watch the recording today. Most of it is him just doing laps on Hutta and answering questions from the chat, but it did make me keen to log into the updated PTS to see the new open world difficulty toggle for myself. (Though one interesting reveal that came up during the stream was that after almost fifteen years, they'll finally raise the legacy level cap from 50 to 60 - just after I hid the legacy experience bar from my UI since I'd maxed it out on all servers, hah.)

Anyway, since we were asked to provide feedback on how the difficulty feels on the first two planets in this round, I rolled up a new Commando and jumped straight into the master difficulty setting. To recap, the difficulty toggle increases your damage taken and decreases your experience gains and your healing received. It doesn't affect your damage output, item or credit rewards, or the health of mobs around you.

I did the first few quests and it was certainly noticeable that I remained at level one for much longer than I usually would, but mob difficulty didn't seem too bad at first. Sure, they did more damage to me than normal (which is a very low bar to clear on the starter planets) but I can't say I felt particularly in danger.

However, as I moved from quest to quest and my experience bar barely moved, I noticed the levels of the mobs around me quickly getting ahead of me, which is something that hadn't happened to me in a very long time, and their damage also became more noticeable. In Taloran Village I suffered my first death when a stray Hammer Shot pulled a second group at the same time as I accidentally body-pulled an extra silver mob on top of that. On normal story difficulty that wouldn't have been a problem, but here I died. Different, for sure.

As an aside, the way I'm questing on the PTS is the complete inverse of how I usually level in the live game. Usually, I watch all the cut scenes - even though I've seen them all before - because I want to immerse myself in the RP aspect of it all and am always hoping to encounter the occasional piece of dialogue that I either haven't heard before or at the very least haven't encountered in so long that it's as good as new to me. The combat in-between is not terrible, but relatively mindless, as everything just gets swept away with little effort.

On the PTS, I space-bar through everything because I don't want to spend time on the RP aspect, I don't want to get too invested in characters that will just get wiped anyway, and I'm paying more attention to the gameplay because that's the focus of the testing.

That said, something funny happened as I continued to work my way through all the Ord Mantell missions (both the class storyline and all the side quests): I actually got really into the gameplay. While I had virtually no buttons to press (back in the day I approached something close to a full action bar by the end of the first planet, while I basically had to blast my way through the entirety of Ord Mantell with nothing but Explosive Round this time), the increased difficulty and reduced XP really transformed the experience.

Because XP gains were so stingy that I was falling behind even while doing every single optional mission including all the bonuses, I started to feel a genuine hunger for XP like I haven't felt in this game for over a decade. I kept looking for more dynamic encounters to do just so I could go up one more level. I longed to level up and gain a new ability (even if that last one didn't really end up being fulfilled in any meaningful way during this particular adventure). I actually put med packs on my bar and got excited about gear upgrades

While the moment-to-moment button pressing was not challenging or complex at this level, everything hitting so much harder meant that I had to take care when moving around so I wouldn't accidentally over-pull, and when dealing with multi-mob groups, it was vital to quickly focus down the easy targets to reduce the amount of incoming damage. It reminded me a bit of WoW Classic to be honest.

And then I got to the Separatist volcano base. I remembered that place being quite threatening back in the day, and the trooper class mission in there was possibly the most difficult quest I ever encountered while levelling (I actually talked about it in this post from February 2012.)

Needless to say, I was very curious to see what the experience was going to be like on this new master difficulty, and it did not disappoint. Me at level 7 vs. groups of three mobs each - all level 9-10 and several of them including a strong mob as well - was an absolute disaster. The first time I would've died, the game bugged out and suddenly teleported me back to Fort Garnik, but I travelled right back into the volcano to get back into the fray. 

I managed to down a few pulls near the phase entrance by quickly nuking a single mob and then running out before his two buddies could kill me, but further in I would usually die before being able to flee, so that it became a slow zerg of kill one, die, revive, kill another, die, revive, kill the last one of the pack. I could've tried to go out and gain some more XP before trying again I suppose, but I was too stubborn for that - and I did succeed in the end. It was so satisfying! Mr Commando told me that I was weird for being so delighted by dying over and over again, but it was genuinely fun to me.

I did manage to complete the rest of the base without dying after that, though some fights were very close affairs (as in, me finishing with something like 10 HP left). Once I got my companion, I also went back to do the heroics, which were also very doable, though I had to take some care here too. However, the champion mob for the Savrip dynamic encounter just flattened me and Jorgan in a blink.

I finished the planet at only level 9, and I'm actually weirdly excited to dive back in and do the Esseles and go to Coruscant. It's funny because there's a part of me that is telling me I shouldn't get too into this because it's only the PTS and I don't want to burn myself out before it all goes live, but all I can say is that the difficulty toggle made for a really fun, nostalgic experience for me. I wouldn't want to be required to level every single character like that I suppose, but nobody has to.

The point is that outside of ventures, you can toggle the difficulty up and down at any given moment as it pleases you. I keep seeing people get confused by that and ask questions like "but doesn't that mean you can cheese the difficulty by doing x, y and z" but the point is that there is no special reward for this. The reward is that it's more fun. The ventures are somewhat different, and in those you won't be able to turn the difficulty down once you've committed to it. But outside of that, there is no cheese - there is only choosing what's fun for you.

8.0 Is Called "Masters of the Force"

I was just thinking the other day that it's a bit odd that the devs have given us this much information about 8.0 at this point, but we still don't know the expansion's name. Traditionally, the name would be among the first things you'd want to tell people. When Knights of the Eternal Throne was first announced, we in fact had nothing but a name and a splash screen at first.

And then Broadsword posted a news article this Thursday that summarised everything they'd revealed about the expansion so far while also finally telling us its name: Masters of the Force. There's also a dedicated landing page for it.

I'm not sure how much to read into this name, because to be honest, SWTOR expansion names have traditionally not been super informative in regards to what that expansion's story is about. Like, who are the Knights of the Fallen Empire in KotFE? So I'm not going to spend too much time speculating just who the Masters of the Force are - but let's just say, with where Legacy Reborn ended, it makes sense that who can master the Force is going to be a central question in upcoming story content.

They did also add that the (launch?) storyline is going to be called "Galaxy in Chaos", which, again, also makes sense. Plus it's official confirmation that there will be a new bunch of story content in 8.0. It's funny because for all the things I was unsure of in regards to 8.0 early on, the fact that we'll be getting a continuation of the current storyline is the one thing that was never in question for me. The devs just weren't talking about it this early on because of spoilers. But apparently there were some people on the forums who thought that because the new story hadn't been explicitly mentioned yet, it wasn't going to happen. Huh!

Anyway, it's really nice to be able to put a name to the new "era" now instead of just always calling it 8.0. I happily went back and added the new tag to all my previous posts about the subject.

The one thing I'm currently not so sure about is the acronym, because "Mot(he)F", to me, sounds like someone cutting themselves off before yelling out a swear, but I expect that may just be one of those first impressions that won't stick. I don't think many players remember how we used to call Knights of the Fallen Empire "the coffee expansion" or how people used to cringe about the fact that "KotET" in German describes someone having a bowel movement.

(Oh, and on a related note, Broadsword also released a mini pet code you can redeem until the end of the year for an ugly little gladiopodling pet: GETRDY4MOTF - you're welcome!)

Ranking Legacy of the Sith's Major NPCs

I said that I'd have more to say about Legacy of the Sith now that its story has finally wrapped up. One of the things I wanted to go into in more detail were the characters, because without a doubt, LotS has been the most character-driven storyline SWTOR has ever had.

I decided I'd like to rank the story's major characters from best to worse in terms of how much character development they got and how much I personally enjoyed both watching and interacting with them. Note that this will contain spoilers for various events that occurred throughout Legacy of the Sith.

1. Rass Ordo

The top spot on my list goes to young Mandalorian Rass Ordo without a doubt. I liked him when he was first introduced in Spirit of Vengeance, and he's only continued to develop from there. I may be biased here because he's the only one of the characters on this list with whom I've pursued a romance so far, but I do think his character development has been apparent even in the non-romantic scenes. He was pretty carefree and cheerful when he was introduced to us, and over time we got to witness him first becoming annoyed with the shenanigans of the Hidden Chain and then seriously disenchanted after Shae Vizla's betrayal. At the same time this only strengthened his bond to our character as someone standing for loyalty and stability, and I can't wait to see him again in 8.0.

2. Darth Nul

She may be dead and/or insane, but Darth Nul has in some ways been the unexpected star of this expansion. It's called "Legacy of the Sith" after all and nobody else seems to have left a bigger legacy for us to deal with than her. Obviously she doesn't actually do (much of) anything herself, but the arc of our characters first learning of her existence and then slowly finding out more and more about her until finally confronting her crazed spirit in the mind trap is very satisfying. It looks like we're not done discovering more of her strange projects and inventions either.

3. Shae Vizla

If we look at the Mandalorian side of this expansion's storytelling, it's largely been driven by Shae Vizla's slow descent into... not insanity, but obsession with beating Heta Kol and doing so personally (which, to be fair, is a very Mandalorian thing to do). It's very well written, from her at first very understandable desire to sort out this beef one-on-one on Ruhnuk, to her increased annoyance with the matter of Heta after the latter gets away yet again, to Shae going off like a lone wolf to confront Heta for a third time, eventually dropping out of contact and making everyone's lives worse in the process. It's a classic tragedy as we watch her make several bad (but understandable) decisions after another, which eventually cumulate in her death - even if she does manage to take Heta with her.

4. Darth Malgus 

For being this expansion's original poster boy, Darth Malgus kind of had surprisingly little to do. He gets captured right at the start, then spends several patches brooding in prison not saying much. After he's broken out by Shae, we get a few cool cut scenes of him smashing Hidden Chain soldiers during the hunt for Heta and her machine, but he doesn't really get to shine until the Legacy Reborn update. Honestly, purely based on how much he actually does in Legacy of the Sith, I probably would have to rank him lower if I'm being honest, he just manages to be so cool in everything he does that he still manages to be pretty fun to watch even when it's not that impactful.

5. Darth Jadus 

How long have people been asking for this guy to return in some fashion? And we finally got it! He's still as cunning and infuriatingly smooth-talking as ever and the interactions we've had with him so far have been great. The reason I can't rank him any higher is that he doesn't show up until pretty late in the game and is obviously being set up to clash with us again at a later point, presumably in 8.0 or after.

6. Jekiah Ordo

I never thought that this character, originally introduced to us as basically Shae's P.A., would grow on me as much as he has, but his decision to stand by the Alliance Commander after Shae goes rogue really endeared him to me (which was not a given). He always exudes a calm air of authority but doesn't hesitate to get sharp when he thinks people are stepping out of line (mostly his little brother, hah) while also displaying a softer side with those he cares about. I'm very curious to see where his journey will take him in 8.0 and after.

7. Arn Peralun

Arn already underwent quite a journey in Onslaught, from becoming Tau's new Padawan to slowly coming into his own. In Legacy of the Sith we meet him after he's officially become a knight, and throughout most of the expansion he remains a Republic player's recurring buddy, helping you out on the occasional adventure and always having your back in negotiations with Republic leadership. He remains a solid character that is only "held back" by the fact that he never really has the spotlight, even if he saves your life at the end of Master's Engima. I'd like to romance him on a character one of these days as I suspect that might reveal some more interesting details about him.

8. Major Anri

Originally introduced in Jedi Under Siege, Major Anri is another character that has already undergone a bit of a journey. She's largely the Imperial equivalent to Arn in her role in the story, but at least my impression is that she hasn't had as much of a chance to grow throughout LotS, possibly because as a soldier she's more directly limited by the chain of command, though she does still speak up for you quite boldly at times. There are also hints towards the end of Legacy of the Sith that she's growing somewhat disenchanted with Sith leadership, but it's not yet clear to me whether that's going to go anywhere. Like with Arn, I expect that romancing her might reveal some more.

9. Sa'har Kateen

Sa'har is in some ways Legacy of the Sith's biggest disappointment to me. She was in the expansion's cinematic trailer, and from the get-go we kept getting little cut scenes in game showing what she was up to even when our characters had no involvement with that at the time. I kept thinking that surely this was building up to something big, but in the end it never really did. The biggest interactions we have with her are at the end of Chains in the Dark when she turns against Tyrus, and all throughout Desperate Defiance, but then she seemingly dies, just to immediately get "revived" again one patch later, and in the end nothing much even comes of that in relation to our character as she and Ri'kan just run away on Khar Shian. She does have some character development throughout, but she never stops focusing on Ri'kan, no matter how badly he treats her, and it just gets a bit tiresome to be honest. Mostly I just don't get why she got so much focus throughout the whole expansion when her role in the major events was ultimately relatively small. I expect we'll see her again in 8.0 - maybe something more interesting will happen then.

10. Heta Kol

Heta started as an intriguing new villain in Spirit of Vengeance, but I feel like ultimately that intrigue never really paid off. She's initially shown to be forceful and charismatic, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining how she's managed to rally several otherwise very different clans to her cause. But then... it just never really goes anywhere. In Galactic Threads, Jekiah comments that Heta has morale problems, but we never see her dealing with that. The way we saw her acting towards her underlings, I honestly thought that maybe at some point, internal conflict or betrayal would become a problem for the Hidden Chain, but it never really did (not counting Sa'har, who always remained a bit of an outsider). We never really get any more detail on why Heta does anything she does, other than that she hates what Shae has done with the Mandalorians - yet at the same time, she never seems as obsessed with Shae as Shae is with her. I just feel like her portrayal never entirely came together, meaning I was always chasing after her somewhat half-heartedly myself. She was just someone who was causing trouble for me for reasons that were not personal (to my character) but also not fully known, which just wasn't very satisfying.

 

11. Ri'kan Kateen

All I'll say is, I really hope they have something planned for Ri'kan in the next expansion still, because otherwise - what a waste of time this guy was. He's even more one-note than Sa'har, but unlike Sa'har, we barely even interact with him other than the one confrontation at the end of Ruhnuk and the big fight at the end of Desperate Defiance. Why have we spent as much time as we have on watching cut scenes with him? I thought maybe something would come from the Ordo brothers having personal beef with him over the death of their sister as explained at the end of Ruhnuk, but that never came up again.

Do you agree with my ranking? Are there any characters you feel should have been on the list that I left out? I went back and forth about including Darths Krovos and Rivix for example but ultimately decided that we didn't quite see enough of them throughout the expansion as a whole for me to include them here.

A Dev Speaks - Great News for Fans of Operations

On Wednesday my ops team went on the PTS to try out the first boss of the new operation there. I won't go into too much detail because I don't want to spoil anyone here, plus it was obviously only the first version of the fight, so things are still going to be subject to change. In a nutshell, we had a fun time puzzling out what to do as a group of friends, but for a story mode, that first iteration felt very overtuned - just too much going on and too much damage.

I posted my feedback on the PTS forum and read what other people had to say about their impressions so far. Swtorista seemed to have a similar experience to mine, and added that she was not sure what the devs' intent for story mode even was, in terms of how difficult they actually want it to be nowadays. I have strong opinions on that myself, and wrote a whole post a few years ago about how the SWTOR devs have failed to hit the mark on story mode ops difficulty again and again, but it's true that they haven't even officially commented on the subject in over a decade as far as I'm aware.

So imagine my utter astonishment when someone highlighted to me that there was a dev response to Swtorista's question and other things on the PTS forums today. You can read the post for yourself here if you want, but be aware that it contains a lot of detail about the mechanics of the first boss of the operation.

That said, I think there were some exciting spoiler-free revelations in that post, which I really wanted to shout about so that more people would hear about them.

First off, the least important one but still interesting to me:

In the first few days of testing, there were roughly 1,800 attempts on [the new boss] across Story and Veteran Mode, with 104 kills.

Who says nobody in this game cares about operations anymore? Considering that I'd expect only a tiny fraction of the player base to bother with downloading the PTS, never mind putting a group together to actually test group content on it, those numbers were delightful to see.

But the real kicker came towards the end of the post and had nothing to do with the new operation in specific:

If my name [Martin Smith] sounds familiar, it may be because I was part of the original launch team and worked on Operations until I left BioWare in 2016. Broadsword brought me back to focus on Operations content.

There've been times over the last few years when I've had conversations with people in which doubt was raised whether SWTOR even had a dev dedicated to operations anymore, or whether the one ops they put out once in a blue moon was just someone's side project. So to not only have it confirmed that there is indeed a dedicated ops designer now, but to also hear that he's an OG whom Broadsword specifically brought back to work on operations again was crazy exciting to hear. I don't know if that'll mean that we'll get more operations at a faster pace in the future (relatively to the once every three years or so which we've been on for more than a decade now) but for the first time in a long time I feel at least a bit of hope in that regard. Martin (the dev) continues:

My goal is to make the best Operations content I can, but to do that I need your feedback. I want to know what you want from future Operations, and what you would most like to see fixed or changed in existing Operations.

I am working on improving the process of making new content and building better tools to help design, build, and balance Operations more effectively.

Again, this is just so amazing to hear. My #1 thing to fix about existing operations would still be to nerf Dominique on story mode. Recursive blast just requires too much coordination, and the freaking monstrosities that spawn in at the end to root and stun you - thereby preventing you from doing the mechanic correctly even if you're trying - also need to go in my opinion.

I've got to admit, I'm now wondering whether he already spent some time looking at the old ops before starting work on this new content. (I don't know how long he's been (back) at Broadsword.) The reason I'm wondering is that my guildies and I noticed new voice lines in existing operations recently - not newly recorded, obviously, but stuff that was already there but just wasn't playing for some reason. Scyva suddenly has more things to say about Izax now in Gods from the Machine! And tonight my guildies and I did Dread Palace on the PTS for a laugh (currently not tuned for level 85 yet) and in the Council fight at the end, there was suddenly an extra voice line at the start of the phase with the two ghosts - trust me, I've spent so much time in there over the past couple of years, me and a guildie could immediately tell that this line hadn't been there before. It just seemed like such a random thing to suddenly fix years later... but maybe an ops designer who was reviewing old fights and noticed a bug not triggering a voice line might do such a thing? *insert meaningful eyebrow wiggle here*

Truth is, I have no idea whether those things are related, but it's hard not to see them as signs. For years now I've had to tell guildies that operations obviously weren't a priority for the SWTOR dev team anymore and that everyone needed to check their expectations on that front. Without wanting anyone to get overhyped, this is the first time I feel like endgame group content might have a real future in the game again after all.

Goofing Off on the PTS

Immediately after Thursday's dev stream, the 8.0 PTS went up, and I've actually been hyped to play on it. I didn't used to be someone who cared about public testing, but I've done more and more of it over the last two expansions and have become a bit of a convert to be honest. SWTOR is just not that big of an MMO anymore, and every little contribution to make it better helps. The success of XR-53 in particular has really helped to motivate me, because that fight felt so much better tuned than any other operations boss Broadsword released in almost a decade. I couldn't help but feel like the more extensive PTS testing really helped - not anything I personally did, mind you, but just having a broader selection of players trying out the fight and providing data and feedback.

In this first iteration of the PTS, there isn't much to test yet - primarily it's just the first boss of the upcoming new operation. Accordingly, the way it's set up, you're expected to just create a level one character, take the "Odessen Transport Service" just outside your starter phase* to be transported to Odessen, and then use a terminal there to get auto-levelled to 85, at which point you can grab some gear from nearby vendors, and the entrance to the operation is right there as well. (In fact, it's so close to the edge of the platform that if you run at it without being in an ops group, you have just a brief second of seeing the "you need to be in an ops group to enter" notification before falling to your death, which I thought was a hilarious troll.)

I haven't tried the new boss yet, but I'm planning to check it out this week - with a full guild group no less. This is the first time I've managed to get buy-in for going on the PTS from my whole ops team, which is another reason I'm excited.

However, until then, being an unnaturally boosted level 85 character is... a bit restrictive. You have no legacy, no ship and no companions. You don't have access to any of your unlocks from the regular servers, including species and hairdos. Not to mention that you look like a bit of a dork running around in the same not great-looking default armour set as everyone else.

Cartel Coin purchases are disabled on the PTS (for good reason), but unfortunately that includes several pop-ups that merely include a CC buyout option, such as the one to increase your inventory space or unlock additional outfit slots. Not much one can do about that, unfortunately, but at least some of the other restrictions can be worked around.

If, like me, you're someone who has earned loads of loyalty rewards and the like over the years, you might be able to grab a companion and/or a better outfit from your mailbox. I don't recommend trying to empty your mail entirely, due to the aforementioned bag space limitations, but if you can pick out just a couple of useful items, it's quite handy. 

Otherwise you can travel to the fleet and see the adaptive armour vendor in the supplies section for an alternative outfit. The selection there isn't amazing, but at least you'll be able to cheaply grab a coherent look that matches your origin story. The only way to get a companion outside your mailbox is to actually play through the class story on your starter planet. I'm not usually someone who ever space-bars through conversations, but I speed-ran my Sage through Tython for once and it was actually pretty quick.

Completing the starter planet will also unlock your legacy, and if you then make it through Coruscant on top of that, you can get your ship too. A quicker, alternative way to unlocking your legacy and ship, as well as the option for a second combat style - but no companions - is to start Knights of the Fallen Empire from the chapters menu. You don't actually have to play through it, just accept all the various prompts that ask if you're sure that you want to skip ahead and boom, there's your legacy and ship.

Why go through all this hassle for a test character? They'll probably be wiped/reset at some point anyway, right? Well, why not? Breaking out of the default constraints of the test environment is a different kind of gameplay challenge, and I bet I'll feel better testing the boss later this week when I actually get to wear an outfit I like! It also allows for additional exploration which incidentally might reveal more about features that aren't officially ready for testing yet.

For example ventures/difficulty modes are not yet ready for testing, but after completing my Tython story (on the standard difficulty, because nothing else is available), I found a surprise "challenge reward" box in my inventory which contained a "Regenerating Freeze Bombs" unlock that I was unable to use yet but which is probably an unintended preview of the kind of stuff that will be coming with the ventures. I also saw someone mention on the forums that they saw a Z axis in their stronghold options? Be still, my heart!

Oh yeah, all strongholds are free to open and expand on the PTS as well, unless they require special tokens. So go nuts and grab that free teleport as well while you're out there.

Now let's see what we can get up to next week when our PTS guild's ability to do Conquest unlocks... 

* If you're a newborn Jedi on Tython and can't find the teleport, it's right next to the first taxi droid on the raised platform where you first land. For some reason the probe droid really blends into the background there and is easy to overlook - I ran right past it at first, and talked to at least three other people that evening who had the same problem. When I made a trooper for comparison, it was much more obvious to find the droid there, as it was waiting right outside the crashed walker. 

A More Classic Experience in Our Future

Today was the day of the long-awaited dev stream giving us the first details about 8.0. The devs didn't mention anything about the story or what to expect on Ryloth yet, but there were some very interesting announcements about mechanical features.

Musco started by talking about some (not super exciting to me, but nonetheless very welcome) quality of life improvements, such as fitted gear being added to collections, toys becoming abilities so they no longer take up bag space, and interactable decorations becoming persistent (so the game will remember what state you left them in).

He also surprised me by announcing something I never thought I'd hear any MMO dev promote as a good thing: that they'll be slowing down levelling a little. Now, he didn't use those exact words - and probably for good reason - but it's effectively what he described, giving the current negative example of new players immediately overlevelling their surroundings massively after only three quests. So I don't think the goal is to make things massively slower, but to rein in those early levels in particular. He did say that they'd give us more details later about which sources of XP would be adjusted exactly. 

That said, this is a nice segue into the biggest new feature they announced: adjustable overland difficulty. (I was doing an ops on my main screen while watching the livestream on my second monitor and I may have excitedly yelled "open world difficulty options" at my guildies over voice, shortly before wiping us on Izax veteran mode.) As a simple toggle, you'll be able to adjust the difficulty of mobs for you personally by upgrading from story to veteran or master at any time, which will increase your damage taken, reduce your healing received, and decrease your XP gains.

Now, this was never a feature I personally clamoured for, but I'm aware that it's something other MMOs have and that I've seen players ask for more than a few times. The reason I wasn't that invested into the idea personally is that I don't think the current difficulty is terrible - shortly after 4.0 it was a joke, yes, but they did retune things a bit around Onslaught and since then I think it's been okay-ish. Yes, low level planets are still easy to steamroll, but if you actually do higher-level content and don't always have your companion set to heal, you can still find some danger in places.

Plus, let's be honest - if we take veteran and master mode chapters as examples of Broadsword's tuning for additional solo challenge, they are not great. They can be challenging alright, but in rather un-fun ways.

So by itself, this kind of sounded... interesting, and nice for those who really want it I guess, but not necessarily that big a deal to me personally. However, there was more!

While you can dial your personal difficulty up and down at any time, there'll also be a new venture focused around it, challenging you to create new characters of all eight base classes and level them through veteran or master mode world difficulty (these characters will be locked into their chosen difficulty and unable to change), fulfil certain goals along the way and earn rewards in the process.

As an old-timer I had immediate flashbacks to the Dark vs. Light event from over a decade ago now, which asked us to level new alts of all eight origin stories as well as complete certain milestones on at least one of them (such as making it through all the "Knights of" chapters).

I actually found myself thinking only the other day how Galactic Seasons kind of fill a similar role nowadays as the DvL event back then by making us re-do old content for rewards, but that they never care about levelling and story, and how it would maybe be nice to have something like that again some day as a one-time thing. The nice thing about this being implemented in the form of a venture is that there's no time limit on it, and the fact that you have to effectively level up in "challenge mode" will actually make the experience somewhat different from a gameplay perspective too.

It's also worth noting that it was stated that veteran difficulty is aiming to make the gameplay more reminiscent of the "classic" experience - my post from last year about the notion of SWTOR Classic and why I don't think it'll ever happen has turned into one of the more popular posts on the blog, and there's been some chatter in the comments about how one could create something at least approximating the classic experience in the game as it is now. Commenter Thander's suggestion from back then actually sounds remarkably similar to what was announced! So one can hope that this feature might also appeal to some lapsed players who would be interested in returning if only they could choose to have a bit more challenge in their everyday gameplay.

We'll see how successful the devs will be in terms of getting the tuning right, but the difficulty toggle will be available to try out on the PTS in a later phase, so we all better check it out then and let them know what we think.

In the meantime, if you want to read more details about what else was announced on the stream, including things like new rewards from Galactic Season 11 and the Feast of Prosperity, check out one of these stream summaries from the usual suspects:

• Official website 
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Weekend Master Mode Flashpoint Pugs

I'm glad to not have to think about seasons anymore for a while, but that doesn't mean that I was unaware that one of this week's weekly objectives was to run a random master mode flashpoint. I decided I might as well server hop and queue for a few while there was increased interest in the activity - not for seasons, but for fun.

I started by logging into Tulak Hord quite late on Saturday evening, expecting a long wait in the queue - if anything was still going to happen at all this late in the day - but got a nearly instant pop for my Commando healer. It took me to the Esseles, which was welcomed as this was one of the flashpoints that character still needed for her Aratech Ice quest.

I was kind of amused when the tank asked whether he should rush through and drag a bunch of trash mobs along like people do on veteran mode, because in my mind, playing like that is usually a sign of someone who's in a hurry and has little consideration for the other players in their group. Someone politely asking the rest of their team whether he should be rushing felt quite bizarre to me. There was a bit of back and forth about it in chat which mostly revealed that nobody had a strong opinion on the matter, and the tank eventually just settled on taking it (relatively) slowly and going at a more relaxed pace instead, which was fine by me. (Though we still didn't really go slowly, we just killed things as we pulled them instead of going for some giant drive-by pile-up.) We also did the bonus boss and everything.

I then logged over to Satele Shan, where I queued my Shadow as both tank and dps but seemed to have no luck. Just as Mr Commando was telling me that he was going to bed and I replied that I was thinking about doing the same, I finally got a pop as dps. (It was close to midnight my time by this point.) It was for Shrine of Silence.

There was a part of me that immediately thought that this was a baaad idea, starting a difficult master mode with a low chance of success so late. Mr Commando came over and looked over my shoulder. "Oh, you're doing that one," he commented. "Which difficulty is it?" I responded in the tiny voice of someone who's very aware that she's done something naughty: "Master mode". He rolled his eyes and said that he'd see me in two hours then.

In reality, I did get a chance to say good night to him a bit earlier, when I died on the second boss and was stuck being unable to revive for several minutes, which was a good opportunity for an AFK break. However, he wasn't entirely wrong otherwise, even though the group progressed through most of the flashpoint with no major problems, including the bonus boss. On the second encounter with the two mystics both the tank and I got knocked off the platform (which was what enforced the above-mentioned AFK break) but the healer and remaining dps were able to finish the fight off without us.

I had opened up Starparse at one point to get an idea of our dps since I remembered the last boss being a brutal dps check, and both the other dps (a Guardian) and me on my Shadow were pretty close in terms of numbers - not amazing, but not terrible either. I was starting to get my hopes up that maybe we could do this, but when we actually did reach the last boss I got an immediate reality check when our first attempt resulted in a wipe with the boss still having more than 30% of his health left.

After the second wipe I honestly half expected the group to fall apart - everyone had been very nice and communicative up to this point, so I wouldn't have been upset or surprised if someone had piped up with something along the lines of "sorry, but it looks like this one's not happening" but in actuality, nobody in the group showed even the slightest doubt that we'd be able to do it if we just kept trying, so I felt like I owed it to them to do my best as well (and I could definitely tell that I had room for improvement).

At one point I realised that I'd misunderstood one of the tank's instructions about the adds, and when I correctly started to completely ignore them, the next attempt went a lot better. I did notice that the Guardian dps still seemed to be chasing adds however, so I suggested in chat that we should both just focus the boss at the end. He didn't really respond and just kept doing the same thing, but our attempts kept getting slightly better regardless, which led to us wiping at something like 5% at one point.

Suddenly the Guardian spoke up to suggest that we should just nuke the boss and I was like "that's what I've been saying, yes!" - and on the next attempt we killed it with nobody even dying. It was sooo satisfying. I looted a cool trooper armour set as well, which I put on Lieutenant Iresso. It was getting close to 2 a.m. for me by this point, so Mr Commando had been more on point than expected, but it felt so worth it.

The next morning I queued for a master mode flashpoint on Leviathan (I'd already been trying earlier on Saturday but with no success) and when I finally got a pop as healer it took me to Hammer Station - a place I'm not usually a fan of, but after Shrine of Silence it seemed like a good palate cleanser. That's what I thought at first at least, but then one of the dps typed in chat that we should just run and charged off through all the trash on their own. Unsurprisingly, they died, and then all the mobs they had aggroed turned around and killed the rest of us. I sighed and rolled my eyes, but in fairness, the person actually apologised and then we just did everything normally and it went fine.

Finally, in the early afternoon I threw myself in the queue with my trooper on Star Forge, queued as both tank and dps. I was surprised by how long my wait was, considering my flexibility and how busy Star Forge usually is. At three different times I got a pop that someone declined instantly, before anyone could've possibly had had time to even look at the proposed group make-up, which I thought was weird. Finally on the fourth go an actual group formed with me as its healer.

We got into Crisis on Umbara, another flashpoint that I tend to think of as not exactly trivial on master mode, but things seemed to be going well enough. Our pace was on the slow side and there were some deaths from people clearly not being familiar (enough) with certain mechanics, but nothing really major. We even managed to kill the Alpha Slybex.

I was just starting to think how nice it was to be in that stage of an expansion where everyone is a bit overgeared and you can carry a couple of people not really knowing what they're doing but then we got to the final boss and it wiped the floor with us. I went through every single one of my cooldowns but the adds were just absolutely swarming us and things weren't dying nearly quickly enough. After two wipes I suggested that we could pull the boss down the hill to create a funnel and make the adds a bit more manageable, and even though nobody responded, people complied. That wasn't an instant success, but I think we got the boss down on what was overall our fourth attempt or so. So that was good, I was just a bit weirded out by the way people were clearly reading and acting upon the chat but not responding to me at all. Apart from a "hi" at the beginning and a "ty" after a revive, nobody but me said anything all run, which was quite a contrast to how chatty my groups on all the other servers had been.

Either way, I quite enjoyed this round of pugs and I'll try to keep using seasonal master mode objectives as a reminder to queue up for these more often.