Waiting for 6.0

I've said before that even though I like to dedicate most of my play time to a single MMO, I don't think it's fair to expect a single game to entertain you 100% of the time. There are times when you'll get bored, and it's okay to do other things - I would recommend also doing other things in fact, because if you force yourself to stick to something you're bored with, that just breeds resentment after a while. Better to take a break and give yourself the chance to actually miss all the things you love about the game.

That's kind of where I feel I'm with SWTOR once again right now. Not that I'm really taking a break - after all I'm still showing up for guild activities several times a week - but in between those scheduled events I've been feeling a bit aimless lately. It's not so much that I have nothing to do as that it's all stuff that I've done before, and more importantly stuff that I feel I've done quite recently. Meanwhile Neverwinter's being all alluring with the release of a new module... it's easy to see why my attention would wander.

Aside from the general ups and downs that everyone has, it does strike me though that we've been at level 70 and inside the 5.x patch cycle for a really long time now. Just for fun, I counted the duration between previous expansions and came up with the following:

Launch - 2.0: 476 days
2.0 - 3.0: 602 days
3.0 - 4.0: 322 days
4.0 - 5.0: 406 days
5.0 - today: 579 days

You can already tell that this is going to be the longest expansion cycle ever, because while the time between 2.0 and 3.0 was still longer if you compare them today, we're not far from catching up with it at this point, and we don't even have a release date for 6.0 yet, only vague hopes that it will hit before the end of the year. So whenever it comes out, 5.x will likely be closer to having lasted 700-800 days at least.

On top of that, the perceived closeness between the length of this current expansion and that of 2.x is deceptive, because the 2.x cycle also included the launch of Galactic Starfighter and Galactic Strongholds, which were big enough to be considered their own expansions at the time; they just didn't reset the patch counter so to speak. If we do include them as major milestones that broke up the flow of the game, expac duration actually breaks down like this:

2.0 - GSF: 301 days
GSF - GSH: 196 days
GSH - 3.0: 105 days

There wasn't a lot of time to get bored back then...

Mind you, I don't get bored that easily anyway. It's an interesting difference between me and my pet tank actually, which rears its head every time we try to play something new together. He gets super excited about new stuff and wants to binge on it 24/7, but then also gets bored more quickly. Meanwhile I also get excited about new things of course, but usually I don't want to stop doing everything else just because of that and will want to take short breaks pretty early on. This then also results in me staying interested much longer, long after my pet tank has already lost interest.

Anyway, that said... even I feel that 5.x has had its time in the sun and that the game could do with a bit of a shake-up by now. It's funny to me now to think back to how worried we were about Galactic Command taking forever to level up and how easy it became after a few patches. It actually served me well as something to keep busy, but after getting more than a dozen characters to Command rank 300 I'm really not that bothered anymore. The new conquest system had me engaged for a little while, and I do still participate in conquest every week, but I don't really want to engage in too many activities purely for the sake of grinding conquest points.

I do still have my Pugging videos to work on, and I've also been playing around with a new idea to spice up my alt play a little bit, but it is getting harder to come up with new things to do with Knights of the Eternal Throne rapidly approaching the two year mark. How is your engagement holding up?