My Feedback After Galactic Season 1

I was not particularly fond of the idea of Seasons when they were first announced. More login rewards and incentives to repeat content that we've done a hundred times before? Puh-leeease. And yet... I still love filling up bars, I'm a sucker for limited time events, and the things I had to do to earn Seasons points ranged from activities I enjoyed anyway to those that I at least didn't mind doing for a while. So I went all in and completed the Season in the minimum amount of time possible without using any of the buyout options to skip ahead.

That said, I'm glad to be done with the whole thing for a while. The novelty wore off quickly, and with only so many hours of free time in a week, having to spend half an hour to an hour on Seasons every day for three months while also continuing my normal ops-running two to three nights a week meant that I didn't really have time for much else that wasn't directly Seasons-related.

It's kind of interesting actually, because I was in a bit of a slump before 6.3 in terms of my in-game activity and didn't feel like playing too much. The Galactic Seasons incentives increased my engagement with the game... but also reminded me of parts of it that I hadn't played in a while and that I suddenly didn't have enough time for, such as progressing more of my alts through their personal stories. Previously I had just been slack with doing those things, but naturally, the moment I didn't have time for it anymore, I suddenly wanted to do nothing more than to play story content on my alts! I'm looking forward to giving them some love now that I have the time to do so again. Funny how that goes.

Anyway, while I'm sure that a lot of how Galactic Season 2 is going to work is already predetermined, I still wanted to write down some feedback for Bioware if they happen to read this, about what I'd like to see more of and what I hope they'll change next time.

Things I Liked

Effort vs. reward

While dedicating half an hour to an hour to Seasons objectives every day seemed like a lot when compressed into less than three months, ultimately the time commitment required to complete the Season isn't that high... but there are a lot of rewards on offer on the subscriber track in particular. A companion, four thousand Cartel Coins, plus piles of decos, gear and mounts... I didn't really need a lot of those things myself, but most players enjoy getting free stuff and I don't think anybody can say that there hasn't been a lot of that in this first Season.

I also liked how they put a lot of old subscriber/event rewards on the Seasons vendor. Again, as a steady subscriber from launch I didn't actually need any of them myself, but I know that there's been demand for the companions to return in particular, and I think it's nice that players who are keen on them have now been given a way to earn them in game.

Objective variety

When the concept of Seasons was first announced I wondered how they were going to distinguish it from Conquest, which is after all a similar system that rewards completing objectives on a daily to weekly basis. I did like that they limited things to just two daily objectives a day and two weeklies a week, which meant that unlike for Conquest in its modern state, you did actually have to target specific activities instead of simply doing whatever and watching your bar auto-fill. The re-roll option seemed sufficient to me to allow people to avoid that one thing they really dislike (though you did have to be smart about it, and generally speaking, the fewer different types of content you like, the harder a time you'll have being a completionist - but then, that's just MMOs for you).

I also liked the themes they introduced, both focused on the Season's companion Altuur and on different planets grouped by proximity. Because Altuur is a Kubaz and they like eating insects, there were objectives centred around insectoids, and I think that's a neat concept! Likewise, the weekly rotation focusing on a different part of the galaxy each time was a nice idea. It's just a different way of slicing these things that hadn't been done before, and I was happy with that.

Timings and catch-up

I was actually quite surprised when I realised after reaching Seasons level 100 that we were barely halfway through the Season at that point, because for some reason it had felt more urgent than that to complete it. But no, people have plenty of opportunity to still get there at their own pace, or to use one of the two catch-up options with Cartel Coins or credits. I think Bioware really did well there in terms of giving people options to make the whole thing appealing to different play styles.

Things I Didn't Like So Much

Bugs!

I'm talking about the technical variety here first. I've long accepted that SWTOR is not a highly polished game... you'll encounter a lot of little glitches and such while levelling up, though in Bioware's defense the vast majority of them are just visual and shouldn't ruin anyone's gameplay. (I've encountered more game-breaking bugs during my casual return to retail WoW over the last few months than I've seen in SWTOR over the last five years.)

But in a time-limited event like that... I just can't help but feel that they should have been able to do better. They tried hard to fix any truly serious issues (such as the missing weekly objectives in week 3) as soon as possible, but anything that didn't totally break the system has largely remained unresolved. During week 2 with its outer rim theme, I remember seeing a certain daily objective being unsure whether it was asking me to go to Rishi or Section X, and when the same week rolled around again five weeks later, that bug was still unfixed. Likewise, the fact that Dread Palace didn't count for the ops weekly in week 4 was never addressed and still persisted in week 9 more than a month later. Just because it's technically still possible to complete the objective by doing another operation that doesn't make it a great experience for players who bothered to put a group together for Dread Fortress just for this, you know?

I quickly learned that it was best to hold off on making any plans to complete my weekly objectives, in order to give other players time to find the bugs and report them on the forums first without me ending up wasting any of my own time (selfish, I know...) but it shouldn't have to be like that.

Insectoids

So I said earlier that I liked the idea of the insects theme in principle... unfortunately in practice, it sucked, mainly because insectoids are simply not a hugely common mob type, which meant that any objectives related to killing them were either awkwardly time-consuming or very repetitive. I mean, you can tell it was bad because they actually felt the need to add more Shaclaws to Voss in the last patch purely to make that objective a little less painful! (I don't know if that helped by the way, I avoided that objective like the plague after the first time.)

So I'm happy for them to give the next Season a theme like that too, but I hope that if it involves mob killing again they pick a type that's more common, such as droids or beasts.

Mob killing in general

Honestly, I wasn't keen on the mob killing objectives in general. I never liked the rampage achievements for Conquest much either. Which is funny because I'll happily grind mobs by the hundreds in other MMOs, but those games usually make the process more interesting by having those mobs drop interesting loot or something, or having them exist in high densities that are intentionally designed to be fun to AoE down. Mob pulls in SWTOR's open world are generally pretty spaced out, meaning that you spend a lot of time just running around the map to round them all up, and they rarely drop anything of value. It's just not that kind of game.

That said, I'm sure there are people for whom these are their absolute favourite type of objectives, so I guess I shouldn't call for their removal... I guess I just wanted to get this rant off my chest. Maybe we could at least reduce the mob counter a bit though? 75 kills is a lot. On some planets I could complete a whole round of dailies without coming across that many mobs.

Need more objective variety

I'm happy with Seasons objectives being somewhat limited... as I said in a previous post, it reminds me a bit of Conquest in the earlier days. So I'm certainly not campaigning to have Seasons objectives for everything the way we have for Conquest now, so that they basically auto-complete themselves if you play at all that week. However... looking at the general theme of the Season, I did think there were some obvious gaps that I'd personally like to see closed next Season:

• Some sort of more solo-friendly weekly objective. I'm generally fine with the idea of the dailies being more targeted towards soloers and the weeklies towards people who like to group, but it seemed a bit odd to me that there wasn't a single option among the weeklies that could be done completely solo. Maybe something like "complete 15 quests" on the planets of the week? Or take away the veteran mode and group finder requirements for the flashpoint weekly.
• A flashpoint daily objective! I thought it was really striking that this was the one type of staple repeatable content that wasn't represented at all among the daily objectives. This really needs to be added next Season I think. Any difficulty, no group finder requirement. Just do it, Bioware.
• Something related to KotFE/KotET content. This may sound surprising coming from someone who's largely been happy to leave that whole era of storytelling behind, but I found it a bit odd that over the course of a five week cycle, we visited pretty much every known planet in the galaxy, including secluded daily areas and the dead Ziost - except for Zakuul. I'm not saying I'd want that content to pop up among my daily objectives all the time, but during something like an unknown/wild space week, why not have "complete a chapter" as a potential daily objective for that one week only?
• More GSI! I'm not nuts about GSI missions in general and again, I'm not saying I necessarily want them to pop up all the time... but seeing them come up only twice this Season left me wanting more. There are GSI missions available on a number of planets, so I don't see why this couldn't be a (rare?) objective during more than one week.
  

Season 2

Regardless of how much is changed or stays the same for Season 2, I'd like to think that I might adjust my personal approach a bit next time around. Seeing just how much time I had left after reaching level 100 this time, I could see myself taking things a little easier next time around and not fretting too much about missing a day here or there, or skipping some objectives that I just don't fancy on a particular day. Then again, I'm also a sucker for routines, so maybe I'll burn just as hard regardless, simply because I feel compelled to fill up that bar as soon as I can.