Onderon Jungle Fight

There is so much great stuff in Onslaught that I want to talk about, but today I have to get one not-so-great thing off my chest.

First off, they changed the way reputations work after seven years: Previously, gaining reputation meant that you were rewarded reputation tokens which you could then consume at your leisure, up to a weekly cap. This meant that if you binged hard on new content during the first week, you could technically save up enough tokens to later max out your reputation over the course of several weeks simply by using them up over time as they came off cooldown. Once you had achieved maximum reputation, you could then vendor any remaining and future tokens for a few extra credits.

In Onslaught, Bioware has effectively done away with this system, and tokens only exist as a technicality. You can see the token icon when you get a quest reward, but it's consumed/the reputation is awarded instantly, and if you're already at the weekly cap you simply don't get anything. I can't help but find this disappointing, as I struggle to see how players are supposed to benefit from this change. It just feels like a cynical move to get people to grind daily areas for longer.

I can't say I'm particularly thrilled to do this on Onderon in particular, because it's a rather odd daily area. It's no Iokath in terms of confusion and inconvenience factor, but for some reason the person who came up with most of the daily missions decided that making lots of quests with minimal instructions that require you to find small clicky things on the ground in a wild, overgrown jungle was a good idea. Needless to say, I don't agree.

This green circle on green grass is actually one of the more visible markers.

It does get a lot better once you know what you're looking for and roughly in what area, but the first time around the full round of dailies took me around two hours on each faction simply because I couldn't find things, and the instructions were lacking. "Plant listening devices in the jungle" - where exactly? On the trees, on the ground? Even with a general area marked on the map it took me a while to find the small circles among the bushes where I was supposed to place the things.

As another example, on Imperial side there was a quest that had me collecting armour and weapons from Republic forces in a specified area. I think I did around three laps of their camp, killing everything in sight, until the lack of drops drove me to look up what I was doing wrong and I found that I wasn't supposed to take these things from actual Republic troopers but had to find specific small clicky items lying on the ground (because I needed that one specific datapad, piece of armour etc., not just any old one apparently) - if they weren't bugged that is. The last one I could only pick up after switching instances twice.

Republic players are not so lucky of course, as the "final ship's log" they are supposed to pick up as part of another daily mission has been unclickable since launch and no amount of instance switching has seemed to help. Yesterday's patch was supposed to fix it according to the patch notes, but we've not seen any evidence of the actual fix so far, still having no luck with it even after completely dropping the quest and trying to start over.

The only reason I remain keen on doing the rounds on Onderon right now is that it gives me a good excuse and opportunity to gather some of the new biochem materials, which are required in absolutely stupendous amounts to craft anything at all (but that's a subject to tackle another day). I doubt that I'll be coming back to these dailies for sheer fun of it once I'm done with the reputation though.