Twelve Years of SWTOR Blogging

This blog is only a few days younger than SWTOR itself, so I always get to celebrate its birthday shortly after the game's. It hit me recently that twelve years of doing this means that I've been maintaining this blog for about a third of my life, or half of my adult life. That's pretty huge! Other people raise kids in that time... I have no regrets though.

In fact, this past year has been the best year for the blog in quite a while, as it was the first time in several years that my annual post count went up instead of down. I didn't quite manage to surpass one hundred posts (which I last did in 2019), but I nearly reached the same number I published in 2020, which makes me happy.

I think the reasons for this are a mix of the reinvigoration of my interest in the game that I mentioned in my last post and the fact that I cut back on my play time in WoW Classic. Some people might say it's already quite a lot to be playing two MMOs at the same time, but I also raided in both for a couple of years, and that really cut down on my free time for blogging as I had some sort of commitment in either one game or the other almost every evening. It's been nice to go down to being a bit more casual again in that regard, and apparently writing more about SWTOR has been what I really wanted to do with that extra time. Let's look at just what I had to say throughout the year:

In January, I was still busy thinking about the 7.2 patch that had come out in December, giving more detailed thoughts on its story update and grousing a bit about the UI changes that were made to the map system (they actually added the red dots for enemies to the overlay map since then, so it's better now than it used to be). With eight weeks left of Galactic Season 3, I set myself the stretch goal of also getting the "complete 100 weekly objectives" achievement on all servers. And in a bit of a throwback to Shadow of Revan, I hunted down three not-so-little grophets for the first time.

February was the quietest month on the blog, probably because I was too busy grinding out those extra seasons objectives everywhere. I summarised my thoughts on the season as a whole as well as on the first ever PvP season. It being about a year since the launch of Legacy of the Sith, I also mused on how I still missed at least some of the abilities that I'd lost in the big pruning.

As March rolled around, I finished my GS3 adventures on the other servers, which meant I had time for non-season-related things for a little while. I finally killed the first boss in the R-4 operation on veteran mode, had a blast during Total Galactic War, and goofed around with guildies during the Rakghoul Resurgence event.

However, April and with it the start of Galactic Season 4 were just around the corner. I felt somewhat ambivalent about getting another season quite so quickly. I did like the pacifist theme though and it gave me an excuse to get my pacifist character out of retirement.

May saw me muse about the introduction of a credit cost for quick travel and delighted by the removal of the daily commendation currency. I was also excited to share my participation in Today in TOR's Galactic Championship... which was fun while it lasted, but at this rate I think we're unfortunately unlikely to ever see the final episodes as they got stuck in something like "production hell" it seems (after everything was filmed). In Galactic Season news, I was amused to find that the chapter objectives had managed to coax me into taking another one of my alts through KotFE. We were also well into the second PvP season and I had thoughts on that too. Finally, we got our first glimpse of patch 7.3.

June of course was the month when the news about the move to Broadsword broke. I had thoughts, and I shared every bit of semi-official news or insider comments I could find. It was also the launch of the 7.3 patch though, and I wrote an in-depth review of the new story.

I continued to share more thoughts on the patch's features in July, when I talked about the new flashpoint as well as the new area on Voss, which also inspired me to muse on which other existing planets I'd like to revisit in a similar fashion. I also regaled everyone with the legendary tale of Savanna Vorantikus, gave a review of Galactic Season 4 and made inroads into playing through Onslaught and beyond as a Republic saboteur for the first time.

August was a more quiet month in some ways, so I wrote about evergreen topics such as my thoughts on the base game romances for female characters or why you should care about Conquest. TOR Fashion was also slated to shut down unexpectedly, and I wrote about Swtorista's project to save it.

In September I got to kill Dread Master Brontes on master mode for the first time and experienced some strange Conquest drama. Galactic Season 5 arrived, and so did the third iteration of the Best View in SWTOR contest, plus after months of careful testing, SWTOR finally made the move to the cloud. I also shared some thoughts on my PvP experiences in Season 3.

Galactic Season 5 came with more story than any previous season, which prompted me to write about it in October. The livestream preview for 7.4 stoked some hype, and I mused a bit about the strange state of master mode operations.

November brought more than one surprise as the devs sent out an email survey to players for the first time in years and dropped the news about the launch of the new APAC server on us with little warning. I enjoyed writing about my early impressions.

Finally December rolled around and with it patch 7.4 and a new story update. The New Overlords Podcast also dropped a very insightful interview with the devs and of course, SWTOR celebrated its 12th birthday. To another year of playing and blogging about it!