Galactic Season 2 Complete on The Leviathan

The last server on which I completed Season 2, just a couple of days before the season ended on Tuesday, was the French server The Leviathan.

The fact that my credit buyout for levels 83 to 93 on there came to only 25 million and was therefore slightly cheaper than on Tulak Hord is slightly deceptive, because in actuality, Leviathan was the server on which I was consistently the least progressed, and my Sage knight finished the season at level 62, which is five levels lower than my Commando on Tulak Hord.

The biggest obstacle to my progression were the PvP-related season objectives, which I generally liked and therefore wanted to do, but which I repeatedly failed to complete because I just couldn't get enough warzone pops. I did manage a few times, mostly when I was lucky enough to get into several successive arenas in the same play session, but this was rare. Throughout the season I queued in both the lowbie and midbie brackets, and would sometimes spend hours running around questing without ever seeing a pop. On the rare occasions when something did pop, it was usually an only partially filled arena. There was one single time when the server opened a midbie Novare Coast, which elicited gasps of surprise in warzone chat, but in reality it was still only a match of 3v5 or something like that and not very fun. This only affected ground PvP, interestingly enough - queueing for veteran flashpoints or GSF was usually fine, probably because those queues include max-level players as well.

In terms of solo play, I started by just breezing through the class story, as I'd just taken my Commando on Tulak Hord through all the planetary side missions and didn't want to do the exact same thing again, but I soon felt bad when it sunk in that this was after all my first and only character on Leviathan and she was hardly seeing anything of the galaxy. In addition, I made the mistake of playing too many knights this season (I also had lowbie knights on Star Forge and Satele Shan), so that at one point I was doing the same class mission three times within a single week, which just seemed silly and was actually more repetitive than doing a few more side quests. I eventually ended up going back to Tython and Coruscant to pick off exploration missions there in bits and pieces while my class story stalled on Nar Shaddaa. Once I crossed the level 50 threshold, my focus shifted towards more rewarding endgame activities, just like on the other servers.

However, the most fascinating aspect of playing on Leviathan for me was the language, or rather the way it affected my behaviour. I had several years of French in school over two decades ago, but even though I always liked languages in general, this one never really resonated with me and I was happy to forget most of it the moment I didn't have to deal with it anymore. The end result is that while I can still read and understand some very basic French nowadays, I felt too self-conscious to try and write anything in chat myself beyond the occasional "salut" and "merci".

This is kind of funny to me because I suspect that I wasn't the only "foreigner" moonlighting on Leviathan for the purpose of seasons, and I think others were a lot less shy about simply writing in English or perhaps running their messages through Google Translate. There was one arena I remember in particular where someone kept writing instructions about who to focus in French and even with my limited knowledge of the language I kept thinking: That doesn't sound grammatically correct... is this from Google Translate? 

Then again, it could just as well have been the French version of internet shorthand... I was greatly amused by the idea that laziness in regards to spelling and grammar online might accidentally be bringing native speakers and Google Translators closer together - I certainly had my doubts about which one I was dealing with when it came to some of the German I saw on Tulak Hord.

Equally amusing was the idea that I might well have ended up in an arena team where none of us really spoke French but assumed that everyone else was. To be on the safe side and in order not to make too much of a fool out of myself, I mostly restricted myself to using emotes, which I knew would show up correctly in whatever language client my team mates were using.

If any French-speaking players from Leviathan are reading this, I'd be curious to know your thoughts on the non-French-speaking "tourists" that appeared on the server for Season 2.