The Stranger from Kubindi - Some Fun Personal Stats

As mentioned previously, I'm planning to write a three-part post-mortem about my experience with SWTOR's first Galactic Season. Let's start with some fun stats! Well, I thought they were fun anyway.

One of the nice things about keeping a diary of all the Seasons objectives I completed literally every day for three months is that it provided me with data that I could enter into a spreadsheet to find out how much some of my perceptions were backed up by reality. Did I really lose most of my GSF matches? How often did I use the re-roll function in the end? Let's find out!

First off... poor flashpoints. I got assigned the flashpoint weekly ten times out of eleven, but I only completed it twice! The other eight times I re-rolled it, while never re-rolling any of my other weeklies. You'd think I disliked flashpoints or something... I don't, but in the context of Seasons objectives I did find that weekly pretty time-consuming and inefficient.

The re-roll statistics for daily objectives are a little more varied, though they still paint a very clear picture of my preferences: The daily objective I re-rolled the most was insectoid killing, which I re-rolled 20 times throughout the Season! And yet I still ended up "having" to do it 14 times anyway. Heroics I re-rolled seven times, generic mob killing four, and dailies three. These weren't caused by any sort of strong dislike, but more based on general mood and often related to me having got a streak of the same objective several days in a row and craving some variety. GSF I only tried to re-roll once and the warzone daily never.

In general the number of re-rolls I attempted for daily objectives went up over the course of the Season; I'm guessing because my patience with repetition grew shorter. During the first two weeks I only used the re-roll function on dailies twice each, but in weeks eight and ten for example I used it no less than five times. I often regretted those later re-rolls though - the early ones were reserved for things I really didn't fancy doing, while the later ones were sometimes attempts at simply having a shot at something better... but usually it only made things worse. This is why gambling is bad, kids.

In terms of objectives I actually completed, there was a pretty good spread: Looking at my weeklies, I did GSF and warzones seven times each, and operations six times - flashpoints, as already mentioned, only twice. My most commonly completed daily objective was planetary mob killing with 31 times (note that this was always for the planets of the week - I did not see the ones for the starter planets even once). With 75 mob kills required each time (minus some bugginess), that resulted in a rampage of over 2,000 mobs cut or shot down purely for Seasons objectives!

My second most frequently completed daily objective was warzones, which I did 30 times, followed by 29 rounds of planetary dailies and 28 GSF matches completed. Thanks to the re-rolls I "only" had to do heroics 18 times and hunted down insectoids 14 times. The real outlier was the PO to complete GSI missions, which I only saw twice. I guess I could have lumped it in with the other dailies, but since it's mechanically so different that didn't seem right. I really wish that this one had come up more often, just for the sake of variety.

Anyway, what makes these numbers interesting to me was that they didn't feel this even while I was playing, probably because of how much some of them forced me out of my comfort zone. For example I do PvP all the time... not a lot of it, but quite regularly, often for Conquest, so also having a daily PO to do a warzone barely registered with me. GSF I hadn't done much in a while, but it's also something I'm quite comfortable doing at least occasionally for Conquest and such, so playing a few GSF matches a week didn't feel like a huge change either. But things like dailies and heroics are so rarely part of the way I play the game that being "forced" to do up to seven rounds of planetary dailies a week (I'm looking at you, week nine) felt pretty chore-like at times, even though realistically I didn't spend much more time on them than on the other activities.

Besides the objectives, the other two things I looked at were my PvP win-loss ratio and how much I travelled around the galaxy. Playing GSF over eleven weeks, it felt like I lost more matches than I won, and this was an accurate impression, though I guess the difference wasn't as drastic as it could have been: 14 wins vs. 19 losses. Warzones felt much better, and they were! In that mode I recorded 23 wins vs. 15 losses.

In terms of gallivanting around the galaxy, with each week being limited to objectives on a certain number of planets, I was curious whether I managed to mix it up or kept coming back to the same locations over and over. The answer is that I succeeded... kinda, I guess? The planet/area I visited the most often was CZ-198, on eight different days, due to the many "do dailies" objectives that sent me there. It's tied for first place with Balmorra, but that can be explained by the fact that the core world themed week is the only one I did three times (I only cycled through all the other weeks twice). The same reasoning applies to Alderaan, which I visited on seven different days.

Most planets I visited on around three to six different days, which seems quite reasonable. The biggest outliers were Iokath which I only visited once (though I would have liked to get an objective to go there more often), as well as Rishi and Voss. The latter I only visited that one time when I got the objective to kill Shaclaws and then decided "never again". Interestingly, Dantooine, Mek-Sha and Onderon were all eligible as locations to kill mobs at one point or another but I didn't visit either of them even once. Maybe something to consider for variety next time.

And that's it! Wasn't that interesting? Up next, we'll be looking at how this whole experience made me feel and what feedback I would give Bioware about what to change for the next Season.