Galactic Command Is Alright Now

The other day, while reading through a comment section that shall not be named, I saw someone comment on how hated Galactic Command was, claiming that Bioware was totally tone-deaf for not changing it. My first thought on reading this was: Oh my, you obviously haven't actually played the game in a while, because if Bioware has done anything in the past year it's make lots of changes to Galactic Command.

However, then it occurred to me that this person probably isn't alone in their thinking, because as I've said before: If you're a game developer, your big mistakes will make all the headlines, but your apologies and fixes after the fact won't; so there are probably a lot of (former) SWTOR players out there who left the game over their annoyance with Galactic Command and have never looked back. I can't blame them for having felt that way, it sure was quite terrible in its initial implementation! But it is worth mentioning that Bioware has done a lot to improve the system and it's really quite decent now. So let's look over the changes in case you haven't actually been keeping up with everything that's been going on with the game.

Galactic Command had loads of problems at launch. Let's start by looking back at them:

1) Non-subscribers got completely locked out of endgame gear acquisition, since all of it came out of Command crates, which could only be earned by subscribers.

2) The loot from the crates was completely random, with no bad luck protection if you kept getting the same pair of boots over and over again, and no alternate ways of filling out those missing slots (except for crafting, to some degree).

3) The loot from the crates was in general pretty crappy. Set pieces were rare, and you would get lots of greens.

4) On top of all that, the rate at which you earned these crates of potentially useless loot felt really slow. I can't find the quote now, but I think they said that their original target was for people to earn a crate about once every half hour, and I'm not sure even that was achieved by the average player.

5) The introduction of CXP boosters to the Cartel Market added a certain uncomfortable pay-to-win flavour (or whatever you want to call it) to the game.

Now let's look at how all that has changed!

1) Actually, that one is still around. At the same time, I always considered that the least of the system's problems. Of course I'm biased, being a subscriber myself, but then I also play other F2P games without their optional subscription and find it acceptable to be locked out of high-end gear progression there. /shrug. Crafted gear is still an option, just without the set bonuses.

2) First off, gear drops were added back onto operations bosses, so those serve as a guaranteed source of loot again. A currency called Command tokens was also added to the crates, and tier 1 gear for all slots can be bought for Command tokens directly from a vendor, allowing you to use them to fill the slots for which you didn't get lucky with a drop directly.

There is also a secondary currency called Unassembled Components, which can be used to upgrade tier pieces. So if you make it through the entirety of tier 2 without ever getting the right relic for example, you can use Unassembled Components to upgrade your existing tier 1 relic to tier 2. Currently this second currency only drops from PvP, GSF and nightmare operations, but the next patch will also start awarding it for disintegrating gear from crates, thereby making it accessible to everyone.

3) The number of completely crappy items has been reduced, and as you advance through any given tier, your chances of earning a set piece are constantly increasing. They also added some more extra goodies to the loot tables, such as Command XP boosts and even Grand Chance Cubes, which contain a random item from the Cartel Market and would previously only make it into the game via real money purchases.

4) I don't have the exact numbers, but the basic rate at which you gain CXP has been increased greatly several times. I think it was at least doubled... or was it even tripled? And that's just the base rate; in addition there are also a legacy and a character perk that you can unlock to increase your rate of CXP gain even more. When the system was first introduced, I felt accomplished if after a whole day of heavy farming I had six or seven crates to show for it. Nowadays a casual ops run with my guild (meaning that we do content that we can clear easily as opposed to wiping on progression) can net me 20+ crates in one go. The other night I did three daily zones with their weeklies and earned 30 crates from it.

5) The boosters still exist, however they can also be purchased from an in-game vendor on the fleet (thus without a real money requirement) and even have a chance of dropping from Command crates.

In short: While I was really unhappy with the state of endgame at the end of last year, on a basic level it has managed to return to something similar to what it was before the introduction of Galactic Command (ability to slowly earn currency to buy basic gear from a vendor, better gear can be acquired more quickly from operations drops), with the crates basically being a nice bonus that results in the occasional extra goodie at the end of the evening. If you stopped subscribing because the initial iteration of Galactic Command annoyed you, don't be afraid to give it another try!