Lacking Enthusiasm

It's been a bit quiet here recently, and I think it's going to stay that way for a while longer. I'm still playing the game and having fun, but I do kind of feel like I lack things I want to talk about at the moment. I'm a firm believer in the adage that there's never nothing to talk about when it comes to MMOs, but you do need to feel sufficient motivation to sit down and create content about your game of choice, and I haven't had a lot of that recently.

Part of that has had to do with real life, but primarily I'm just a bit down on SWTOR to be honest. Not so down that I don't want to play at all, but lacking that extra level of excitement that makes me want to share my thoughts about it all the time. With the devs seemingly focusing most of their resources on building new story content that they then can't release because of the voice actors' strike and the new season being focused on a theme I don't love, I'm just finding myself a bit short on nice things to say at the moment.

I have a few half-baked posts about evergreen topics in my drafts but those require a bit more energy and work than the more rambly takes about whatever's been going on more recently. And the detailed diaries I kept about my Galactic Seasons progress in the past were something that entertained me at the time but is no longer interesting to me at this point.

Last week I was actually thinking about cutting back my investment in seasons, since I was once again starting to feel a bit stressed out trying to complete my objectives for the week on all servers. It's kind of funny how much more that's become an issue since the addition of Shae Vizla, since you'd think that six servers is only one more than five servers, but looked at differently, doing seasons on all servers now basically requires twenty percent more time, and that's not nothing. I looked back at my posts from Galactic Season 2, when I first started this whole multi-server completion project, and at how much fun I had with it back then, while barely ever feeling stressed at all. I've been wracking my brains about how to get back to that and what might be the best way to perhaps apply some more limitations to my seasonal efforts while still hitting level 100 everywhere, but that's turned out to be trickier than I thought.

The easiest way to go about it of course would be to simply cut a few servers, but that then leaves the question of which ones. Star Forge and Shae Vizla are the ones where I'm the most involved with guilds so surely those should stay no matter what, but I really love my stable of alts on Leviathan too, even if I don't know anyone there... you can't ask me to choose between my babies like that! So I just keep on trucking for now.

At least the weekly uprising is quick and easy now since the devs put story mode into the group finder, and this week has generally been very easy for earning my daily Conquest points since it was Death Mark, a Conquest event that we haven't had in many months due to Galactic Season 7 locking it out for its entire duration, and which makes it incredibly simple to rack up points due to to the repeatable Taskmaster (complete missions anywhere) and Galactic Rampage (kill any mobs, anywhere) objectives.

Sometimes you also get an unexpected windfall in terms of seasons objective completion. I hadn't planned on doing DvL bosses on any server other than Darth Malgus for example, but on Leviathan a guildie was building a pug for them just as I logged on on Tuesday this week, and on Saturday I was up and awake late enough that I managed to leech kills off my guild on Star Forge. On Sunday morning I even stumbled my way into a pug for Colossal Monolith on Shae Vizla of all places, something I definitely hadn't been counting on or actively trying for.

So I'm doing all these things and having fun with them, but that's about as much SWTOR as I can take at the moment, with not much energy or enthusiasm left over for writing about it. I can only hope that 7.7 will bring a couple of new talking points with it whenever it arrives. While I expect that we still won't see any story by then and that master mode Propagator will be out of my league, I've heard talk of the PTS showing dynamic encounters on some new planets, which would definitely be something to get excited about. And well, whenever the voice actors' strike does end, we'll hopefully get one massive story dump all in one go. I'm just not holding my breath for that one at the moment, since we really have no idea when an agreement will be reached and it could still be a while.

A Rocky Start

I've made it clear that I wasn't enthused by the announcement that the current Galactic Season's theme would be uprisings, but I was willing to give it a shot to see how things would play out. Specifically, there were three items that stood out to me as promising during the announcement dev stream:

1. The talk about the Czerka combat enhancers and the fun effects they'd have on your enemies reminded me of WoW's Mists of Pandaria Remix event from last year, which did something similar in an effort to make old content interesting to replay in a new way, with special gems empowering your gear in that content only. I played a lot of that and it was quite fun whenever I'd fire off a simple attack just to trigger a hail of meteors around everything in the vicinity for example. Now, things got a bit crazy in Remix due to the fact that the gems also levelled up, with people being able to one-shot raid bosses solo in the end, and I didn't expect (or even want) SWTOR to do anything close to that, but I figured there'd be some flashy effects and we'd get to feel a bit OP in uprisings compared to how our characters usually behave.

2. There was mention of uprisings being something that you could do solo, which implied to me that either as a side-effect of the above making us OP or through re-tuning, uprisings might become easy enough for the average player to solo, at the very least on story difficulty. This struck me as a solid idea to expand their appeal, especially considering that the three existing difficulties weren't really differentiated by much other than mobs having more health and doing more damage.

3. With the minimum level to queue for them dramatically decreased, I imagined levellers that had only just arrived on the fleet queueing up for uprisings instead of veteran mode flashpoints, and "levelling through uprisings" potentially becoming a new way to spice things up for long-time players who are levelling their umpteenth alt.

Unfortunately, none of the above actually matched the reality of what we got.

First off, there are only three different buffs you can get from the Czerka boosts, and they are mostly underwhelming. The one I've got most frequently so far is the one that supposedly makes every fifth enemy explode, but in reality only counts personal killing blows, so if you're in a group and/or (god forbid) not in a dps spec, you can forget about this doing anything at all. When I got this buff as a healer, I saw it go off maybe twice during a run. Utterly useless.

The one that makes you leak puddles of "radiation" is a bit better, though I wish they'd given it a different animation than the pink agony circles from the DvL bosses, because my brain does not like that the exact same visual effect is something to avoid on penalty of death early in the evening and then something to actively stand in two hours later. Still, it's decent in boss fights when you can place it directly under the boss's feet, though it's pretty useless on trash, especially if you're ranged, as you generally won't be pooping out circles anywhere near to where the actual mobs are.

The one that summons little droids seems to be the only one that manages to be both useful and fun, and naturally I've never gotten that one myself yet in more than half a dozen runs. As a result, most of the time the buffs feel like they make zero difference to your runs and you only apply them since they are required for one of the meta achievements for the season (something I wasn't aware of until I actually saw it in game).

The devs also did not retune uprisings to make them soloable in a way that is comparable to solo mode flashpoints. I know that someone, somewhere is gonna go "well, I solo them all the time" and you know what, good for you. But they are only soloable in the same way that other pieces of group content are technically soloable if you min-max your character's output and are willing to bash your head against the wall repeatedly until things go just right. I was expecting something that would be accessible to the average player and would be quick to do, in order to make the uprising of the week an attractive seasons objective to complete. This has not been the case.

Well, at least it should be easy to run them in group finder if they are kind of like veteran flashpoints now, role neutral and accessible from a low level? Also wrong! I was surprised to find that at the start of the season, story mode uprisings weren't in the group finder at all, only veteran mode. As all my own uprising runs have always been with guildies, I have no idea when this happened, but I'm pretty sure you used to be able to queue for story mode as well.

Anyway, having veteran mode accessible from level ten but still having it require a trinity group and be somewhat challenging was just a disaster. People were reporting everywhere that queues took ages to pop, even on the biggest server, and that the groups that did form seemed to struggle more often than not. I ran the first uprising of the week, Done and Dusted, on veteran mode with a group of guildies and was surprised by how hard everything hit. We were all max-level in top-end gear and still suffered some deaths, so I can only imagine the kind of shit-show a pug consisting of low levels would have been.

Oh, and the whole "levelling through uprisings" idea was also dead in the water since the devs changed it so only the featured uprising of the week is available in group finder. I mean, you could still technically just spam that one over and over again, but why would you want to? I can understand why they did that, but it was still another small disappointment.

Basically, my first impression was that the much-hyped buffs were boring and useless, and the devs were funnelling people into a mode that took ages to pop just to provide a terrible experience, something that players were understandably balking at. I was just baffled by how undercooked this all seemed. I can imagine people making arguments in defence of some of the decisions they made, but only having veteran mode in the group finder and funnelling low-levels into something with a similar difficulty to a master mode flashpoints was just such an obviously bad idea, I couldn't believe they went live with that.

Now, in my earliest draft of this post I was going to make a list of bullet points for what Broadsword could do to still salvage this whole thing, but fortunately they did actually take some actions already. Most importantly they took vet mode out of the group finder and put story mode back in, as well as further tuning down the difficulty of both modes.

Veteran Firefrost with my guildies this week already felt a lot easier to me, and I successfully pugged story mode on all the other servers. I even got a quick pop on Shae Vizla! A lot of people were clearly new to the content as well, as I saw visible confusion about where to go and what to do more than once, and in one run, two of my group mates immediately jumped to their death upon spawning in, not realising they had to wait for an elevator.

I was surprised by how many of them didn't use any of the Czerka buffs either. Yes, they are mostly useless, but usage is required for one of the meta achievements. I wonder if maybe people haven't quite "got" how this is supposed to work yet and buff usage will go up as the season progresses or whether they just don't care at all.

With the group finder and difficulty fixes applied, I guess doing a quick story mode uprising once a week will be an acceptable effort for a weekly seasons objective for many, but I still think it's a far cry from the way all this was promoted on stream. In my opinion the devs would have to go ahead and significantly buff at least two of the three combat enhancers to actually make them worthwhile and fun, but I'm not sure they'll actually go that far. It just strikes me as a missed opportunity.

A Farewell to the OotiniCast

According to the OotiniCast website, they posted their first episode on November 19, 2011, almost thirteen and a half years ago. I myself didn't find out about them until about two years later, with the first mention of them on the blog dating back to February 2014 and a post called "Some Podcast Recommendations". It's funny to me that even back then, more than eleven years ago, I described OotiniCast as "one of those SWTOR podcasts that have seemingly been around forever".

However, even "seemingly forever" eventually comes to an end, and I was slightly dismayed when I found out on Bluesky last week that they were going to record their very last episode this past Tuesday. I very rarely caught them live, as time zones meant that their recording time usually started around midnight in the UK, but as we're currently in the strange twilight zone of the US having changed to daylight savings while Europe hasn't done so yet, this particular show started an hour earlier for me than usual and I was able to stay up to tune in. It was a good and wholesome time, even if cried right along with Chill at the end when he wrapped things up, explained what was going to happen next and thanked everyone for their contributions over the years.

I'm not going to pretend that I was OotiniCast's number one loyal fan who listened to every single episode, because I didn't. I think I used to listen to them more frequently in the early days compared to later on, but even so my engagement was always a bit on and off from what I remember. It's not that the show wasn't interesting enough, but it never tried to promote itself as hard as other fan sites. They talked about the news, but they weren't your number one news source about SWTOR, and while their tip of the week could be insightful and useful, they weren't exactly aiming to teach you how to play the game either (a bit like me on the blog really). I reckon this was both a blessing and a curse.

I think it was clearly a blessing in so far as I don't think the show would've been able to keep going for as long as it did if it had tried to be something other than a couple of friends chatting about the game and inviting the community to join in. I watched so many other podcasts come and go over the years, and they often managed to entice me with catchy episode titles or in-depth discussions about specific topics - but two dozen episodes later they'd run out of interesting subjects to talk about at length, quickly followed by them burning out and/or losing interest.

I do however think that the more meandering nature of the podcast was a bit of a curse in the sense that it made it a lot harder to promote it in a way that grabbed people's attention. In the early days, they would at least have detailed show notes on the site that would give you a glimpse of what to expect from each episode, but at some point that was replaced by a simple copy and paste with just a bit of information about the show in general, including a link to their guild website which had stopped working years ago. I imagine that with every new episode announcement simply being summed up as some variation of "here's a new episode in which we talk about stuff", it became a lot harder to draw in new listeners.

That said, I feel like OotiniCast's influence on the community over the years should not be understated. I think due to its sheer longevity, pretty much anyone looking up anything about SWTOR online would stumble across it eventually. While most episodes were just the hosts chatting, over the years they also included interviews with devs, voice actors and other content creators, and I think you'll struggle to find people who've been involved in SWTOR fan spaces who haven't been touched by and/or involved with the OotiniCast at some point. (Checking my email, I found that I myself sent them some suggestions for questions for an interview with Charles Boyd back in 2020.)

I remember crying over nine years ago when Chill shared the story of his wife's death (which was absolutely heartbreaking), but there were also many more happy moments. OotiniCast was where I first heard about the notion of levelling from one to cap purely via GSF for example (yes, there was a time when you could queue for GSF at level one).

In recent years, Chill would always tell stories about wacky projects he'd start, such as farming Coruscant heroics on every single alt for Alliance crates, levelling without a companion, or levelling his newest alt named and dressed up based on another IP and the strange shenanigans they would get up to. In the last episode he talked about how he'd created a trooper called Zapp Brannigan (based on the character from Futurama), how he made him make all the worst choices, and how he was going to turn Yuun into his version of Kif. I always thought that was funny and fascinating, because it's not how I'd play myself but sounds really fun in its own way.

Chill didn't go into much detail about why they decided to end the show beyond mentioning changes in his real life and that he just didn't want to keep going with it. Considering that he was there from the beginning (unlike his co-hosts, who seemed to change every few years), I think he definitely earned the right to just go "I think I've done this for long enough; I want to do something else now." I appreciate that he did draw a clear line to end the show instead of letting it simply fade into oblivion, with updates just stopping with no further notice.

That said, I've got to admit I've been kind of surprised by how hard the news hit me, considering that I wasn't someone who listened to every single episode. I think it's because OotiniCast is the one SWTOR fan site I could think of that was actually older than mine and was still receiving regular updates. I feel kind of like when you've been employed somewhere for a while and find out that the last guy who's been there longer than you is leaving. Suddenly you're the most senior person in the room, and there's no longer anyone left who can reminisce with you about "the good old days". I mean, does anyone reading this in 2025 even remember Darth Hater, TORWars or TOROCast? I kind of feel like I'll be entering my "old lady yelling at clouds" era soon.

All that said, I salute Chill and the rest of the hosts for their dedication over the years (putting out more than 500 episodes of a single podcast over so many years is amazing) and I hope they can continue enjoying the game even without podcasting about it. Your contributions will be missed.

Best Ding in a While

I overestimated my guildies' interest in generating Conquest points on Imp side this week... which meant that I buckled down over the weekend and put in extra effort myself to make sure that we'd still hit our large yield target. As part of this I dusted off my old DvL Merc, who'd been sitting at level 79 for ages, and did some PvP on her, even though I finished the PvP season a few weeks ago.

PvPing at level 79 can feel a bit like cheating, considering how much more powerful you are compared to most other characters in the bracket, but since you can't halt your XP gains, it's a fleeting pleasure that I'm simply happy to enjoy while it lasts. Even without any augments and with gear that had never been the best even back when 75 was the level cap, my Merc was rocking the damage charts hard, and the matchmaking algorithm blessed me with a winning streak to boot. There was one match where I was startled to find upon consulting the scoreboard at the end that we'd apparently been a man down the entire time but had still come away victorious somehow.

With only a tiny sliver of my XP bar left to go, I knew that my next match was going to be my last one in the midbie bracket, and since my warzone weekly mission was on 9 out of 12, I really wanted one more win in order to complete it before levelling up. I still would've been able to finish the quest at level 80, but then I would've had to sort myself out with level 80 gear before queueing again, which would've meant extra effort.

I got into a Voidstar that started with both teams severely under strength and my team on attack during the first round. I wouldn't swear by it, but it certainly felt like we were a man down again at least to begin with, which made it difficult to make any headway for a long time. However, we did eventually manage to breach the first door and cross the bridge, with the round ending at the second door - a situation that isn't really a clear indication of an impending win or loss, as matches that end there can very much still go either way.

As we started the defence round, it quickly became apparent that the rest of my team (which had filled out by then) seemed decent enough at watching the doors, however there was zero communication going on. I just kept running back and forth between both sides as I noticed our opponents changing their angle of attack repeatedly.

At one point I ended up fighting on the left side with only one other person against about four enemies. The other guy died and I soon followed, realising too late that nobody else had moved over and I had been the last person standing. I typed "left" into the chat but it was too late. Waiting inside the respawn area, I saw one person still try to reinforce from the right but they didn't make it over in time to prevent the enemy team from planting the bomb.

I got out of the respawn just as the door was blown off and hurled myself right back into the fray in an attempt to stall the enemy forces. They enjoyed taking me down but sadly I barely slowed them and soon found myself in the respawn again, this time on the other side of the bridge. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the rest of my team did not do a great job at halting the enemy advance at this point, and one of the bridges was activated mere seconds later.

I typed "bridge open" into the chat in an attempt to get those who were still brawling wherever to pay attention to the objectives, and then ran forward to shoot the first enemy that came into my range, to make sure that I was in combat and couldn't be CCed by one of the enemy's stealthers.

I frantically shot two attackers going for the right door, but then saw a stealther appear at the left door as well, so I quickly whirled around and interrupted them too. I knew I wouldn't be able to hold both sides by myself for long, but by god I was going to try (while hoping that nobody had a stun or root up because that definitely would have screwed me over in that moment).

After what can't have been more than thirty seconds but what felt like an eternity of me having to cover both doors by myself, a friendly arrived and started defending the left door, freeing me up to fully focus on the right one. Eventually the rest of the team trickled in as well and we established a more solid defence.

Finally, it was over, my quest ticked over and I dinged 80. The final scoreboard showed me as having the most kills and damage taken out of everyone (the enemy clearly hated me), most damage and healing on my team (apparently we had a proper healer at one point who had left), and third highest objective points to boot.

It's rare that I get to rock the numbers like that in a warzone (I'm not usually focused on them and happy to spend a match just standing guard for example), nor do I generally feel like I did the bulk of the work, but in this one I feel confident in saying that I carried a heavy load for my team, especially with that solo defence of the two doors across the bridge. Too bad there are no more MVP votes to earn, so I'll never know whether any of my team mates appreciated it... but it sure was a great and memorable way to hit max level.

Season Launch

Sooo... since I expressed my disappointment about the last dev stream, I've been feeling a little demotivated. However, the actual launch date for the new season followed soon after, and I'm not so disenchanted that I won't take part in it! I might do less if I don't find it that fun, but that's not a foregone conclusion (sometimes things turn out to be more or less fun than I originally expected).

It was certainly interesting to get some more details over the past few days that hadn't been revealed on the stream yet. I was kind of fascinated by how many people I saw going nuts over the thigh high boots reward for example... always makes me feel a bit alienated from the rest of the player base when I'm reminded that I don't care nearly as much about the Space Barbie aspect as a lot of others apparently do. I mean, I like my characters to look nice too, but I really don't have much of an eye for detail in that particular area. There was also a patch note about moving parts on helmets in cinematics that I saw some people get excited about and I didn't even know what they were talking about.

The main thing that caught my eye was that the DvL bosses are making a return for Season 8, both as weekly objectives and for the meta achievement, which made me scream a little on the inside. Don't get me wrong, I was all in favour of bringing them back in GS7, but after months of death zergs on Hoth I'd had more than enough of them. Learning that I'd be back to revisit them every week for this season as well made me wish the meta achievement would've been to just run 40 uprisings instead or whatever, even though I'm not a fan of those either. Just strikes me as a classic case of "be careful what you wish for" - things could get worse!

Yesterday the patch actually dropped, and the first thing I heard about it was a guildie complaining that he wasn't earning any Conquest points. A forum thread on the matter narrowed it down to the affected people being players who still owned multiples of any strongholds from the server merges years ago (such as two copies of the Coruscant apartment). This included me.

It was kind of a mix of funny and sad, as I believe this was the second patch in a row where they tried to fix something Conquest-related and then broke something else instead. At least last time my points were only reduced, not completely zeroed out...

As someone whose gameplay is very much driven by Conquest, I decided to just not play on Darth Malgus that evening and focus on dusting off my legacies on the other servers instead (where I didn't have any duplicate strongholds and therefore wasn't affected by the bug). I'll say that I like the new weekly objective to do dynamic encounters, as that's easy to do on multiple servers without feeling repetitive. Also, since dynamic encounters still count as missions, it also has nice synergy with another objective this week to complete 15 missions as a smuggler or bounty hunter.

I was a bit unsure before going to bed whether I should just go and deactivate my duplicate strongholds as some people had done. It apparently worked as a bug fix, and I hadn't actually used them much in ages, but at the same time they're something unique that you probably can't get back once deactivated. I decided to hedge my bets and hope for a hotfix overnight, and in this instance the devs did not disappoint, as I woke up to the problem having been fixed, meaning I was able to earn some Conquest points and complete the first daily objective of the season the next morning before the reset.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: February 2025

I'm a little late posting this due to real life reasons, but I certainly wasn't lacking in interesting material to share in February!

• First we have "I Soloed SWTOR's TOUGHEST Raid Bosses!" by Snoopster, which was posted on the 31st of January and therefore just missed getting into the January round-up, but which I loved so much that I just had to feature it here instead. For those who're not familiar with his work, Snoopster used to be known as SWTOR Snoopy and is an old-school content creator who's seemingly less concerned with maximising his view count and more with having fun, with many of his videos being goofy and silly. He just seemed to kind of lose interest in SWTOR at some point, so it was an unexpected (but welcome) surprise to suddenly see him coming out of the woodwork with a two-hour magnum opus unlike anything he'd done before. I know the length may be intimidating to some, but it's filled with his usual fast-paced editing throughout and at least to me, there wasn't a boring moment. As a bonus (for me) I unexpectedly got to see one of my guildies included, as Aregelle (who's featured in the section about Bonethrasher) is in my guild and ops team.
• It being a new year, it's time for a new round of "Is SWTOR worth playing this year" videos! Unfortunately the first one I saw in January was an utter disappointment (which is why it didn't get featured). I'd seen the creator's 2024 version and it looked like they hadn't even logged in during the past year. I (politely) queried this in the comment section, just for my comment to quietly disappear into the aether, which told me all I needed to know, really. "Is Star Wars the Old Republic Worth Playing in 2025?" by Emperor Bebop on the other hand was more to my liking, as even if it doesn't get everything 100% correct (I did leave a comment on the video about the point about inflation being outdated for example), he does show some knowledge about the game (including endgame, which is somewhat unusual for this type of video) and is pretty funny. The self-awareness at the start of the video sure made me chuckle.
  
  That said, if you're looking for something that's more factual and not aiming for five jokes a minute, Swtorista just released her own "Is SWTOR worth trying in 2025?" video a few days ago, which is still the gold standard for providing accurate and concise information for new players. Though I was a bit surprised that she apparently already forgot about the existence of the Shae Vizla server, as she talks about "all three English servers" at one point. Then again, she gave a warning that the population of Satele Shan isn't as high as it used to be, so maybe her not even mentioning Shae Vizla is meant to tell us something in its own way.
• Following the Bioware lay-offs in January (I shared some links on the subject last month), the Ask a Game Dev blog was asked "Why did SWTOR get shuffled to a different developer if it was apparently Bioware's most steady source of income for the better part of the last decade?" The answer isn't exactly going to shock and surprise anyone who's been following this blog and everything surrounding the move to Broadsword from the beginning, but it's nice to see someone else lay it out in even greater detail.
• Fellow SWTOR blogger Intisar continued his Pets of the Old Republic series (which I failed to give its proper due to when he first started it) with two new installments posted in February, about Dwedtoof and the Heartglow Mewvorr. I really like this series because I think there's generally not a lot of conversation about pets in SWTOR other than urgency to log in and grab them whenever they're being given away as subscriber rewards. Intisar's series goes into a lot of detail about the surrounding context for each creature, including lore from the wider Star Wars universe, and I always learn something new from each post.
• Speaking of learning new things, SWTOR content creator Illeva put out an updated companion customisation guide last month, which I took a look at because I was curious and wow, I didn't even know Treek and other Cartel Market companions had customisations! I used to not care about companion customisations that much because I generally quite like the default looks (plus some of them are quite iconic, let's be honest), but by the time you're levelling your tenth trooper it can be fun to make Aric look a bit different, you know?
• Getting in just under the wire, Chash Larol of the Old Republic Era blog posted about "The State of SWTOR's Economy Part 2" on the last day of the month, a subject that hasn't been getting enough exposure I think. What I mean is that people were crying endlessly when inflation was running rampant, yet ever since the devs actually fixed it, things have been conspicuously silent on the subject, so that I still see people talk about the economy being crazy (like in the video I linked above!) even when that hasn't been true in several years now. We need to be louder about the fact that this is no longer true. Many commodities and Cartel Market items on the GTN are probably the cheapest now that they've been in about eight years.

Got any SWTOR content of your own to recommend that was released in February? Feel free to leave a comment!

A Season of Uprisings... And?

Yesterday evening it was time for the SWTOR dev stream about 7.6.1, the patch that will bring with it the start of Galactic Season 8. I've been finding the lull in interesting activity recently noticeable, so I was hyped for some news - perhaps too much so, as I actually ended up feeling somewhat disappointed. I could tell that other people were also keen to hear about Galactic Season 8, as my post speculating about what its theme might be from back in December has been my most popular post for several weeks now.

The big reveal came and... *drumroll* it's uprisings. No massive surprise there, as this was one of the activities people had been throwing around as the season's potential focus during the speculation. I just didn't think it was going to be uprisings myself because I didn't think Broadsword would want to make a season entirely focused on a type of group content.

To be fair, they didn't explicitly say it, but it kind of sounded like at least some modes might become easily soloable during the season. To mix things up, we'll be given some special gadgets from Kai Zykken that will do things like call little droid swarms to come to our assistance or cause explosions. Uprisings will also no longer be limited to subscribers, and will become accessible from level ten.

I'm curious to see how they'll hold up as levelling content, and whether newer or more casual players will find them confusing. They don't have much in the way of a narrative, but they're technically set after Knights of the Eternal Throne's base story, with Lana and Theron sending you out to fight people on both Republic and Empire side that are conspiring against the Eternal Alliance, which doesn't really make any sense at level ten.

Some of the rewards that were showcased look quite good too - I really liked the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas themed decorations and can see myself finding a lot of good uses for those.

That said... I've got to admit I was the opposite of excited when all this was announced. In my review of GS7 back in December, I noted that it had been a rather "meh" experience for me, as I felt the season was kind of lacking in flavour and newness. Annnd, unfortunately GS8 looks like it's going to be more or less the same. From the sounds of it, there is once again not going to be a grand reward that everything's centred around, such as a companion, stronghold, or side story.

As for uprisings as an activity... let's just say that of all the things people speculated could be the theme of the season, I would have preferred almost anything else. I don't hate them, but they are very low down on the list of activities I'm happy to take part in, so having a whole season centred around them fills me more with dread than anticipation. I want to believe that the changes will make them more interesting! But I'm not sure the devs can pull it off.

When this was followed up by an announcement that they were going to add more achievements to the existing dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine, as well as some new Bessi customisations to grind out exactly the same way as you ground out Bessi's unlocks, it just added to the feeling that all we have to look forward to is replaying more of the same content that we've just done. I think I wouldn't have minded these so much on any other day, but as a direct follow-up to the uprising season they felt deflating.

Then Eric got to the headline "Cartel Market Storefront Updates" and my ears perked up, because I think parts of the Cartel Market interface are pretty poor to use and I think that making a number of small key changes here could really improve the experience of using it. So Eric was like: "As an example you go: I wanna buy a blaster pistol. And so you go and look at weapons and there's just a lot of them." I was quietly nodding along. "And so one of the things we're looking at doing is... putting things across the market into retirement."

To which my mental reaction was something along the lines of: Jesus Christ, what?! That is not how that sentence was supposed to continue! The Cartel Market isn't overwhelming because there are too many items on it, it's because there are no freaking filters! If you want to buy a blaster pistol, there's no way for you to just see the blaster pistols, you have to wade through all these other weapon types that your character can't actually use just to find the odd pistol here or there; that's where the pain point is! You don't need a FOMO sale, you need bloody filters!

Ahem. This one may have kind of pushed my buttons because I work in e-commerce in real life and am part of the UI/UX team at my job. So I was suffering professional outrage at the fact that I can't remember the last time anything a dev said missed the mark for me by a mile like that. I guess consider this your public service announcement that there'll be a weapon sale for the next two weeks, and all those weapons that are on sale will then be removed from the Cartel Market afterwards. Then they'll do the same for another category and so on. This isn't an entirely new thing, as there are a lot of things that aren't available on the CM at any given moment. I just wish they hadn't led with making it sound like they were actually going to improve the user interface instead of making a FOMO push.

There were a couple of other (to me) minor things like that they are still working on improving the character texture updates, but I was kind of starting to tune out towards the end. So much so that I missed the casual mention of 7.7 bringing dynamic encounters to more planets and XR-53 getting a master mode. I would have missed that entirely if a guildie hadn't pointed it out to me afterwards! I think those things sound really cool actually, even if I'm personally unlikely to beat an XR-53 master mode. I just think the fight is well-tuned for story and veteran mode and has room for a master mode on top to challenge high-end players.

However, all that still feels kind of far away, and in the meantime I feel like I don't have a lot to look forward to, which is disappointing to me. And most importantly to me, there was no comment on the still missing story update that was originally meant to come with 7.6. Back in November I summarised what they said about this on the 7.6 dev stream as such: "[...] they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere."

Back then, I wasn't sure how strong the suspicion about the voice actor's strike was, as people can be quite wrong sometimes when it comes to making guesses about what's going on inside a studio, but it seems to be quite cemented in at this point, as other games have released updates with bits that would usually be voiced missing, and I think I saw a comment from dataminers that the 7.6 story content looks largely complete in the game files except for the missing voice lines.

Someone pointed me at this video about the voice actors' strike, which I think explains the whole situation pretty well. To be clear, I'm 100% in support of the union and their demands here, and I'm not holding it against Broadsword either that they are unable to proceed in the meantime. However, considering that it's now been more than three months since the 7.6 dev stream and nine months since the last story update, I really just wanted them to say something, to acknowledge that this situation sucks, that they don't have an ETA yet but that they'll release all the built up story content at once as soon as the strike ends. Or something. 

And you know, I realise it's quite possible that they are simply not able to do that, as there may well be some kind of ruling from above to not talk about the strike to players/customers. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating to be presented with this front of "nothing's wrong" while there's a freaking elephant in the room. They also mentioned in this stream that there would be a new date night in 7.6.1, just to then say absolutely nothing else about it, seemingly acknowledging that while they've probably indeed built this content, we still won't actually be getting it with the patch due to missing voice work, despite their announcement.

I'm kind of reminded of when we didn't get a story update for over a year during 2020, but there were two important differences there: one was that the global pandemic was a very obvious obstacle to a lot of work in a sense that people could generally understand. While the SAG-AFTRA strike is obviously also a public thing, it's nowhere near on the same level, and without any public acknowledgement of what's going on, SWTOR players will just assume the worst as usual about how the game is now dying because it's no longer releasing story content or whatever.

The other difference is that SWTOR had just released the Onslaught expansion at the end of 2019, which was rich with new content and goals to chase, meaning the game was able to coast on that momentum for a bit. The current situation feels more like the opposite, in the sense that we went from getting a new planet in 7.2 at the end of 2022 to a smaller new daily zone in 7.4, to an even smaller new planetary area without anything to do in it in 7.5. The current storyline feels to many like it's overstayed its welcome a bit, and people are desperate for something fresh, so to me this feels like the worst possible time to suddenly have to stop releasing major updates.

I think I'm a pretty patient person and I always roll my eyes a little at the people who complain about two story updates with full voice acting, cinematics and story choices per year as if they were nothing, because I think the team is doing a great job putting out high-quality content with the resources they have. However, I hate feeling like I have nothing to really look forward to at the moment, as the new season doesn't particularly excite me and who knows when the voice actors strike will end. It's been going on for more than seven months! According to Wikipedia the longest SAG-AFTRA strike in history lasted close to a year, so I guess unless they are going for a new record we can hope for an agreement before July at least?

I don't know, man, that's just a long time to feel like I should be focusing on other games.

Another PvP Season Under My Belt

PvP Season Seven has a few weeks left to run, but I completed my last achievement last week, so things are going to be kind of quiet for me in game for the next few weeks. At least we can expect to get some information about the next patch in the livestream next week.

The pacing change that came with the additional levels introduced last season still felt odd, as I once again finished all the bonus achievements before actually completing the seasonal reward track. If anything, it was even more pronounced this season, as I didn't make an effort to make the maximum progress of one thousand points a week this time around, which meant that I needed an extra week to complete the track. The track being the last thing to get finished remains slightly strange to me.

My most stand-out experiences this season were all in arenas, interestingly enough. The best match I had was without a doubt when the plasmatech Vanguard that I'm levelling dinged upwards into the midbie bracket. I actually don't like doing PvP at the lower end of a bracket, because you usually feel very obviously underpowered compared to the characters at the upper end, and sometimes people even get shirty about having low-level team mates. As it was though, I still had a PvP weekly I wanted to complete, and in this arena, fortunately nobody complained. And we ended up having an insanely good match, which we won 2-1, with me actually doing crazy amounts of damage with my DoTs despite my low level. The last round also came down to a 1v1 between me and an enemy, which I won. That felt pretty great.

My worst arena experience of the season were several days when the midbie queue was made unbearable by a premade, which was kind of ironic as people complained about premades a lot in past seasons and many seemed to think that discontinuing 8-person queues for warzones would solve that problem. Yet I rarely had problems with premades in previous seasons, while they were a really noticeable nuisance this time around.

Even so, I'd still argue that the real problem isn't the existence of premades in itself - I see nothing wrong with friends or guildies wanting to queue together. The problem is population (yes, I'm beating that drum again). When you only have about ten people or so queueing for midbie arenas on a given evening, and four of them are in a group together, it's obvious that everyone else is doomed to have a bad time. I very rarely quit matches, but when I got put up against the same premade for the third time in a row, I apologised to the one person on my team who had already loaded in, explained that I was getting tired of getting stomped by these guys over and over and left, followed by me logging off and doing something else for an hour or two. When I logged back in I thought I'd give queueing another try - and was immediately put up against the same premade yet again. It was absolutely infuriating.

The generally most interesting arena experience I had, with a mix of good and bad, was when I was doing a midbie arena on my Juggernaut, and the second person to load in on my team immediately said something like "oops, I meant to queue for warzones". Sensing that he was about to quit, I quickly teased "you've got to stay for this match though", which at least worked to engage the guy in conversation. He groused that he wasn't that good etc. and I simply said I'd still rather have him here than go up against the three people on the enemy team by myself, which oddly seemed to convince him.

I can't actually remember whether we ended up with properly balanced teams in the end, but I do recall that there were only three people on our team and that both I and my reluctant arena buddy actually put up a pretty good fight. The third person however was a Scoundrel that did nothing but use their basic attack and throw grenades every now and then. Didn't even use stealth from what I remember. There was one particularly odd moment when I and the warzone guy had both died, and the only two players remaining were our Scoundrel and a Powertech on the enemy team. And the Scoundrel just stood there, plinking away at the PT with their basic attack so uselessly, that the Powertech actually stopped fighting for a bit and just watched in confusion. Was that Scoundrel really not even going to try anything else? Eventually the PT got bored though and killed them (easily, of course).

This caused warzone guy to get mad and start insulting the Scoundrel, which in turn resulted in me trying to calm him down. He said things like "don't queue for PvP if you're not even going to try" and I tried to argue that the Scoundrel may well be a newer player and just not know how to play very well. Sure, they were above level fifty, but I'm pretty sure you can make it to that level by using nothing but two buttons nowadays if you want.

The whole thing just made me feel very conflicted because I've been converted to the benefits of accessibility and agree that the story doesn't need to be hard to be enjoyable, but at the same time putting obstacles in the player's way that force them to learn to press more than two buttons is one of the main ways in which you can teach someone to play better. I guess in an ideal world there'd be enough people queueing that two-button-pressers could go up against other two-button-pressers, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in and as it stands, encountering someone in PvP who is still on such a basic level of gameplay when they are more than halfway towards the level cap is definitely a shock to the system.

Is the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle Good Value?

I'm not the biggest fan of the Cartel Market, but it helps to keep the game alive and is relatively inoffensive when compared to the monetisation efforts of many other MMOs. While I can't recall buying Cartel coins for real money more than once in the past decade, I do occasionally buy things with the CC I get through subscribing and completing Galactic Seasons. One item that caught my interest when it was announced was the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle first presented during the dev livestream for 7.6.

I'll admit that the fact that the devs who talked about it were super funny certainly helped to pique my interest, but primarily I was curious about the concept of a decoration bundle that came with a built-in quest. I think we haven't had to buy anything story-related from the Cartel Market since those cubes with the Shroud diaries. (I'm not counting the HK-55 chapter since subscribers originally earned access to that as part of the normal content release cadence.)

Now if you're worried about "having" to buy this bundle for the story... don't. There's no voice acting and nothing's tied to any existing story content, it's just a little side mission utilising the new comlink interface and tied to the bundle itself.

However, I did think that this made for a nice bit of "added value" to the decorations, which was the primary reason that I bought it - curiosity about just what was going to be included. So I'm writing this post for anyone else who might be wondering.

On opening the bundle, you are given 82 decorations of various types and sizes, plus an item that starts a quest. If you do so it will instruct you to place the Neglected Spire Basin decoration, which is basically a broken fountain, in one of your strongholds and to interact with it. As you identify it as damaged, you're given the option to contact the manufacturer about the problem, which leads you to a terminal on Mek-Sha, where after going through some of the expected red tape, you're eventually being assigned a repair droid to fix the basin (and seemingly everything else).

When you complete this quest, you're rewarded with another 86 decorations, a pet, and another quest item. This follow-up quest starts from the same Neglected Spire Basin, as even after it's been repaired, it turns out to have a baby dianoga stuck in the pipework. The new mission asks you to learn more about dianogas on the fleet, again using the comlink interface, followed by a trip to Hutta to gather some items to lure the dianoga out. Once you've successfully done so, the second mission is completed and the baby dianoga also becomes your pet.

As with many virtual items, it can be hard to assess whether something is good value or not, and if that wasn't tricky enough, decoration bundles are even tougher to judge because they are pretty much guaranteed to contain some items that you don't care that much about. Still, just by comparing the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle to other items on the Cartel Market, at least some conclusions can be drawn.

At 2500 Cartel Coins, it's a bit pricier than most decoration bundles, which more commonly run between 1300 and 1800 Coins. However, those other bundles also usually contain only around 10-30 decos, so the fact that you get more than five times as many decorations for a price increase of less than 40% is insane. And that's without even attaching any value to the little quests or the two pets. (Pets are usually another 240 CC each.)

The only caveat as per Swtorista (I didn't think to check this myself) is that all the items are bound and can't be sold on the GTN. The quest also isn't a legacy unlock, so while you can move the quest starter item around between characters of your legacy, once it's completed it's done, and you can't repeat it on another character, though the two pets themselves can be unlocked in Collections.

So in my opinion at least, this bundle is great value for money if you're into decorating at all and have some CC to spare. You can see a full list of all the decorations on Swtorista's site, but I particularly like the fountains/basins and different types of lamps.

If you have to spend real money to get the required CC, I'd be a bit more hesitant, simply because I don't like that the pricing of 2500 CC is just a bit more than you get with the 20 dollar Cartel coin bundle (which buys 2400 CC) and I'm not a fan of those kinds of upsell tactics. 

Still, I consider that a relatively minor niggle, and overall I've got to give this one a major thumbs up. I've only used some of the decos so far, but the pets have certainly gotten some comments! I'd be happy to see more "value-added" bundles like this in the future.

10 Types of Annoying PvP Match

PvP Season 7 is in full swing and I'm taking part in it as usual. I wouldn't do so if I didn't enjoy PvP, but even with the best will in the world, PvP can also be filled with frustrations sometimes. Inspired by some of those feelings, I bring you a list of ten different types of annoying PvP match that I regularly come across in my journeys.

Note that this is not a top ten list because the severity of annoyance with each of these types of match can vary a lot depending on the exact circumstances of the situation, and you can have both mild cases and ones that are really bloody annoying in each category.

The one that's doomed from the start due to numbers

By that I mean the number of people on each team, not dps numbers. This is more likely to happen in arenas than in warzones and mostly happens in lower level PvP, though it can technically happen in any mode depending on your luck. If the difference is only one person and the skill difference between the teams is big enough, you can still have an interesting match sometimes, but there's nothing quite like starting an arena with only one other person on your team vs. a full group of four, or the game pitting you against three enemies all by yourself. You just know it's not gonna happen no matter what. (Though the other day I was put into an arena by myself vs. three opponents and actually managed to kill one of them before they killed me - I considered that a win on a personal level.)

The one where desync keeps screwing you over

Mostly this happens in Huttball. I've written about desync in the past, and I remember they even took two of the Huttball maps out of the game for a while to "fix" them, though I don't think that ultimately went anywhere. It's not always equally bad, but there are definitely times when you desperately want to intercept the ball carrier but the game just can't decide what floor they are even on until after they've already scored.

The one where your whole team is just clueless

Everyone's got to start learning at some point, and I can't hold it against anyone if they don't know the rules and objectives of each warzone on day one. Nonetheless, being saddled with a whole team of players like that at once can be frustrating. The prime example I always think of for this was an Odessen Proving Grounds match that started with the southern and middle nodes active... and the moment the spawn point opened, everyone but me ran north, where there was... nothing. I just knew right then that I wasn't in for a good time. I mean, I couldn't even be mad, but it sure is deflating to be literally the only person in a team of eight going for the objective while the other seven bumble around in the middle of nowhere.

The one where you're just getting completely steamrolled

Whether it's because you're up against a premade or the matchmaker is just doing its usual thing of not giving a damn, it's not very fun to be in a match where you basically get murdered the moment you come out of the spawn point. If you're lucky, at least it'll be over quickly, but if you're unlucky, you might end up against a premade that intentionally tries to draw things out so they can farm more numbers before finishing you off.

The one where your team is trying but just not good enough

This is a very peculiar kind of annoyance because when both teams are trying but one is just a bit better, that should make for a good match, right? Even if you lose in the end, at least you had a chance? Well... I'd say that's true in principle, but there' a certain point where it can in fact make the match extra annoying, when you can tell that everyone is really trying but then you always get foiled at the last moment anyway, and still lose the Huttball match 0-6 or whatever. It's like you get your hopes up over and over again just to have them dashed repeatedly. This kind of match doesn't so much leave you mad at your team mates, but more like you're going insane from a terrible itch that you just can't scratch.

The one where people are going crazy with the insults

Honestly, I never quite got the idea of "smack talk" in PvP. I get that it's a thing that some people like, but I'm more in camp "good sportsmanship" where you try to not take it personally and treat everyone involved with respect, which is kind of the opposite really. Anyway, usually the sorts of comments I'm thinking of here wouldn't even remotely qualify for friendly banter anyway and just involve people outright yelling insults at each other. I'm not so thin-skinned that I consider a match immediately ruined if someone starts ranting, but depending on the intensity and how many people are doing it, it can definitely bring the vibe down. Though I've learned that /ignore really does help here.

The one where you're in a warzone with damage farmers

Look, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with just wanting to beat up the enemy, but there's arenas for that, right? Warzones have objectives for a reason, and it's very frustrating when the majority of your team is not on board with that. In fact, it's quite ironic how sometimes being in a warzone with a bunch of elite damage farmers is almost indistinguishable from being in one with a bunch of complete noobs. The only difference is that when you look at the scoreboard at the end, the veterans will have some big numbers and will presumably pat each other on the back about how well they did spamming AoE at the spawn for the entire duration of the match. However, you yourself will still end up just as frustrated being literally the only person going for the objective and ending up easily foiled by the enemy. The rare amusing exception to this is if both teams are damage farmers, and you can do objectives pretty much undisturbed while they all brawl in mid.

The one where you meet "that one guy"

Who's "that one guy", you might ask? The answer is: your nemesis, at least for the duration of the match. It doesn't matter what else is going on, you keep running into that one person and they piss you off every time! The prime example I always remember when thinking of this was a Huttball match where a Shadow was pretty much solo-running the ball for the enemy and would always have the perfect counter to every attempt of mine to stop him. It was so frustrating! More recently, I played a few matches on Star Forge where this one tank seemed to be absolutely intent on spending the entirety of each match crawling up my rear, no matter where on the map I went. I was healing, and to a certain degree getting focused as a healer is normal, but there were other healers on my team and yet that person was always on me. It's not even that I got killed all the time or anything, but it got very annoying rather quickly to be the target of seemingly every single stun and interrupt of that guy for the entire match.

The one where people give up and go AFK the moment the enemy gets ahead

I tend to think of AFKers in PvP as the bane of my existence, and a couple of seasons ago I ran into them quite frequently, but recently things have fortunately been better on that front and I haven't encountered that nearly as often. Interestingly, often when I hear people talk about AFKers, the blame gets (rightly or wrongly) put on people who actually don't like PvP and just queue up for certain rewards, hoping they'll get by just sitting in stealth for the entire match. I mention this because while I have no doubt that this does happen sometimes, my personal experience has been almost the opposite, that AFKers are often very much into PvP in general and may even be skilled players, but they just absolutely cannot deal with losing and will stop trying the moment their team falls behind, and then just stand in a corner while complaining about how much everyone but them sucks. In arenas this is often even worse, where you'll see certain people kill themselves with /stuck in the spawn at the start of the second round if their team lost the first round.

The one where you just need that one win or have been waiting forever

I think I've occasionally mentioned before how the way daily and weekly missions reset since 7.0 has made me feel more pressured for time when it comes to completing them, and that I actually often have more fun PvPing when I'm not trying to tick any boxes. As it is though, spending a lot of time in the queue and running out of time to, say, complete a daily, really ramps up the pressure for the match to be good when it finally pops, and there's nothing quite like the despair you feel when you've waited half an hour or longer to get into a game and then it just goes sideways immediately and you know it's going to be a waste of time.