Galactic Season 6 & Reputation

Galactic Season 6 is here and we can all get a shiny new villa! Everyone is happy! Or are they?

As it turns out, GS6 launched with an unexpected amount of grumbling and confusion. In all their excitement about date nights, and in their eagerness to provide details about the new stronghold, it seems the devs forgot to mention a fairly important change coming with GS6: that for the first time since Season 2, there isn't a new reputation track to be filled out throughout the season.

Now, by itself, I don't think that would've been a huge deal, even if it came as a surprise. I've had conversations with quite a few people over the last couple of years where we basically agreed that the seasonal reputations were a bit weird, both from a narrative point of view (gaining reputation with a faction you never really interact with aside from your seasonal companion where applicable) and from a practical point of view (what good is a reputation that doesn't grant you access to anything other than an achievement).

However, while the devs removed the reputation, they left in the seasonal currency that was previously used to gain it, which is now not actually a currency anymore but literally just a grey item whose acquisition counts towards an achievement tracker. You can't really blame people for being confused by the fact that level two of the seasons reward track was effectively prompting players to claim nothing but a bunch of vendor trash. Musco actually took to the forums today to add a bit of context to all of this, and among other things he explained that they ended up at this awkward halfway point because while they did want to get rid of the seasonal reputation, they were also a bit worried about taking away too much at once - however, he admits that the end result ended up being unnecessarily confusing.

I will say that personally, I liked the seasonal reputation track because as someone who's been playing the game since launch, I've maxed out literally every other reputation in game on my main server, and each season adding a new one was handy for Conquest, as "gain reputation with a faction" is a Conquest objective that awards a ton of points and that was otherwise inaccessible to me.

However, that Conquest objective has in fact been the third point of contention, because it also received a stealth nerf with the patch that reduced its points value to a small fraction of what it used to be. On my main server that's no skin off my back, considering that I have no more ways to gain reputation until they add another daily area or something anyway.

On the other servers however... that daily Conquest point boost from clicking a reputation token was a godsend during seasons, especially on days when I was tired and only really looking to get credit for the daily objective on each server. Log in, press a button, done. I don't think I relied on it too much, since I do actually enjoy playing on all servers, but I know others that leaned into it quite heavily. Today in TOR had a whole guide on how to reach Galactic Season level 100 "without playing any content", just by pressing reputation tokens, and I think ultimately that's the kind of thing that's considered clever as long as only a few people do it but that turns into degenerate gameplay as it becomes more widespread and accepted as the "best" way to do things.

So I think that nerf was completely deserved and understandable. It didn't really make sense for a single button click to grant more Conquest points than completion of one or even multiple daily areas. I do think the devs are going to back-pedal a little bit after the amount of pushback there's been on the forums but I don't think we'll go back to the old numbers. Either way, there are still other low-effort ways of earning Conquest points for when you're starved for time - they'll just require more than one button push.