Where Is the Group Content?

SWTOR has long had a reputation of being a "single-player MMO", and I've always hated that. One of the very first posts I ever wrote on this blog dealt with this topic in fact. Don't get me wrong, I have no issue whatsoever with anyone praising the personal storyline or preferring to play by themselves, but the thing that has always ground my gears is how this often dovetails into people being dismissive of the game's group content, calling it sub-par and not worth anyone's time.

Especially at lauch, that was just so not true. Coming fresh out of WoW's Cataclysm, where Blizzard had removed all group content from the levelling content in the open world, I loved that in SWTOR, heroics actively encouraged you to team up with others while levelling, plus you got bonus XP for questing in a group, instead of an XP penalty like in WoW. Social points also offered an incentive to do group content in PvE. While WoW players were moaning about being stuck with the Dragon Soul raid for nearly a year, SWTOR pumped out a new flashpoint or operation every other month. It was objectively a glorious game in terms of group content if you enjoyed that kind of thing.

Sadly, over time, SWTOR's dedication to encouraging grouping has been watered down quite a bit. Rise of the Hutt Cartel was the first and last story expansion that supported group conversations in new story content. Heroics were nerfed in difficulty and turned into just another kind of soloable daily quest in 4.0. Social points were removed with 7.0. Any plans to add new flashpoints or operations were discarded with 4.0, until they eventually made a come-back a few years later, but things have kind of petered out a bit again since then.

This has made me a bit sad, but not... devastatingly so, because while I enjoy group content, I obviously don't spend all my time in it either. I love getting new story updates! And I suspect that catering more to solo players is simply where the money is. At the very least, I'd assume that it's much more straightforward to measure the return on investment when you see a subscription up-tick after a new story update as opposed to a patch adding a new operation. I wouldn't expect many lapsed players to specifically come back for a new operation, and I'm guessing it's more of a retention mechanic for existing long-time players, giving them something to do with their friends once their interest in playing by themselves has been exhausted.

With all that said, I do think that spending some time on catering to players who like group content is still important, because they are the ones most likely to get others to try or stay in the game, to gush about it in public and promote it on social media. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single well-known SWTOR content creator that doesn't participate in group content at least some of the time.

And recently, I've been hearing a lot of discontent - from different directions, so it's not just one person and their group of friends - around the fact that we haven't heard anything about upcoming group content in a while. Now, players always want more of the stuff they like, but the reason this really drew my attention is that I've heard these kinds of complaints before... and they usually did not bode well for the months ahead, as in the past these were the times when I had to watch people I cared about leave the game and never come back. I think at this point SWTOR players who are invested in group content have mostly come to accept that their preferred mode of play is not a high priority for the devs and that they can't expect updates tailored to their interests very often - but there's still an expectation of getting something at certain intervals, and there's definitely a point where they'll lose patience and unsub.

Looking at my timeline of major content additions from last year, the longest gaps between major group content releases over time have been as follows:

• Between operations: 2 years and 10 months, between the release of Dxun and R-4.
• Between flashpoints/small group content: 1 year and 5 months, between the release of Nathema Conspiracy and Objective Meridian
• Between major PvP updates: 4 years and 2 months, between the release of Vandin Huttball and the introduction of PvP seasons (yes, really)
  

I'm writing this at the end of June, shortly after we just got a major patch, so I wouldn't expect another one until October at the earliest, by which point it will have been:

• 2 years and 2 months since the last operation (R-4)
• 1 year and 4 months since the last flashpoint/small group content (Shrine of Silence)
• 1 year and 10 months since the last major PvP update (introduction of seasons)

In other words, it's not totally unprecedented to have to wait this long for new group content, but considering that it's been this long for every type of it, I'm not surprised to see people going stir-crazy all over the place.

I really hope that the devs will have something relevant to share whenever they announce the next major patch (I'm not counting the next Galactic Season, as I know that's its own thing), because few things are as much of a downer to me in this game as seeing players I like and whose company I enjoy slowly turn away from the game because the devs just don't care about giving them anything new to hold their interest.

A Year at Broadsword

Today's it's been exactly one year since it was officially announced that development of Star Wars: The Old Republic was being transferred from Bioware to Broadsword Studios. I actually would've completely forgotten about this anniversary if somebody hadn't reminded me on Twitter a few days ago, and today I was reminded again when Keith released this producer's letter for the second quarter of 2024.

I don't have much to say about the producer's letter itself because it spends more time looking back than telling us anything really new. Nar Shaddaa Nightlife will start on July 9th, and at some point in July or August there'll be a livestream about the next Galactic Season patch. Just business as usual, really. That's not a bad thing though, is it?

When the news of the studio move first broke in early June last year, it sounded extremely scary for fans of the game. Words like "maintenance mode" were thrown around a lot, and certain content creators were cashing in on presenting the news in the worst possible light. 

Exhibit A

Even those of us who were trying not to panic were struggling to make sense of the situation with the limited information we had available.

A year later, all of the hubbub surrounding the subject honestly seems kind of silly in hindsight, because from a player perspective, nothing really ended up changing at all. And I mean, if you weren't happy with the work the devs were doing before, there's no reason for you to be positively excited about the move either, but for me it's honestly been a big relief.

The content has kept coming out at a similar pace to what we've been getting in the last couple of years before the transition, with patch 7.4 with a new story update and a new daily area launching last December, and more recently patch 7.5 at the end of May giving us another new story update as well as introducing a new seasonal event. In-between we also saw the servers get moved to the Cloud, the launch of a whole new server for the APAC region, and both Galactic and PvP seasons have kept rolling along.

If I had to point out anything that's changed... well, right after the move, the devs actually seemed a bit giddy to me, though that seems to have settled down again since then. I will say that if anything's changed, it does seem to me that the team has dared to be a bit more experimental with communication and monetisation.

In terms of communication, they actually revived the e-mail channel as a way of promoting the game to existing and lapsed players (even if the look of their decade-old email template pains me a little, as someone who does that kind of marketing as her day job) plus they sent out a survey looking for feedback in November, something they hadn't done in many years. Totally anecdotally, at least one thing I specifically asked for in that survey was actually put into the game a few months later as well, so...

In terms of monetisation - well, I know some gamers consider it a dirty word, but I don't mean anything bad by it when I say that it seems to me that the devs have been experimenting a bit more. I'm not someone who keeps a super close eye on the Cartel Market, but it has seemed to me like they've been rotating the stock around a bit more, putting different items on sale more often, featuring better and more popular items as the deal of the day, and just generally been trying to make existing ways of monetisation interesting to new audiences, such as with shiny new dyes (which totally worked on me, not gonna lie) or more recently, outfits that allow you to display your hair under a hood. Nothing radical or obtrusive.

In summary, here's the tl;dr for lazy readers and for those Google snippets:

What has changed about SWTOR since the move from Bioware to Broadsword?

Not much, the game has continued to receive content patches of a similar size and at a similar pace to before the transition.

Did SWTOR go into maintenance mode?

No, it continues to receive story updates and other content updates multiple times a year.

The Abundance Festival in Review

I wrote about the Festival of Spring Abundance at the start of the month when it first came out, but now that it's about to wrap up I wanted to write another post about it to reflect on how it's gone.

For me personally at least, this new event has been a massive success. I took part in some of the activities pretty much every day, completed the little event storyline on nine different characters, and ground out enough currency to buy most of the rewards I really wanted on Darth Malgus, which included the Nightshift Tech armour set for one of my agents as well as at least one of each decoration. I can definitely see myself coming back for more of the potted plants though, as they tend to be one of my favourite types of stronghold decoration. The only slight regret I share with Intisar is that the armour set is character- instead of legacy-bound.

I also got all the achievements except the one that is still bugged (so nobody could get it) and the one for the rare fish that is completely RNG-dependent. All in all, I enjoyed this event enough that I can see it competing with Life Day for the position of being my favourite seasonal event in SWTOR - except they're both such chill events, they'd probably be happy to just share first place.

The daily missions were easily my favourite part, because they were both fast and easy while still awarding a lot of Conquest points. Okay, so the dancing one was pretty much a matter of getting paid for taking an AFK break... but I'm not someone who minds a freebie every now and then.

The pie baking and eating was probably the most fascinating to me, though I was a little disappointed that there wasn't as much complexity to it as I originally assumed. When I first learned that there were achievements for eating a perfect and a bad pie for example, my mind instantly went spinning with all kinds of theories about how to make my pie qualify as perfect ("bad" seemed obvious since you can select the wrong ingredients while putting your pastry together), but I then found out that your skill in preparing the pie actually has zero impact on its perceived quality when someone else eats it by clicking on it on the table; it just seems to be completely random.

What still remained fascinating to me though was that people seemed to bring real life food preferences into the baking process. What I mean is that most days, when it came to choosing which pie to bake, I took a look at the tables to see which of the four types had the least representation or was maybe even missing entirely, so I could fill the gap for anyone else who was still on the weekly pie-eating mission. And the vast majority of the time, it was either the Deepwater Dac Pie (tentacles, gross!) or the Pitted Ka-Olive Pie, but mostly the former. Bestine Threeberry Pie and Sweet Spore Tarts were almost always represented, I can only guess because they looked and sounded like something one might actually want to eat in real life. I just thought that was kind of amusing.

The weeklies were a bit of a mixed bag for me. The creature rescue was extremely adorable the first time I did it, but once I realised that it was the exact same set of creatures every week, it became my least favourite just because it required so much running around. I'm pretty sure the sheer amount of planetary travel involved also cancelled out most of the reward money.

The cultivation daily was similarly time-consuming, and once again I was slightly disappointed to see us planting the exact same crops every week, especially considering that the prerequisite seed procurement mission sent us to a different planet each week. You'd think they'd actually make us pick up different seeds while doing that. I did enjoy making Mr Commando do the mission with me though to get the achievements tied to completing it as a group.

The egg hunt I generally enjoyed, though the experience could vary a lot depending on which server I was on as well as the time of day (I did some of the event stuff on Star Forge and Shae Vizla as well). Yavin IV was very easy for example, since the area is large and offers good visibility, with the roaming Massassi not really posing much of an obstacle. In general, the eggs were not as hard to spot as the livestream in which the event was first announced had led me to expect, but the fact that players were competing for spawns could be a real pain in the neck. The Rishii Village location was the worst in my opinion since it was both small and featured a lot of verticality, which made it hard to do a good "circuit" of the area and competition could be extremely fierce. While trying to poke my nose into every nook and cranny, I also managed to get stuck between buildings more than once, to the point where using /stuck actually killed me instead of moving me. Death by egg hunt, what a way to go.

The one-time story quest was much shorter than I expected. I thought that it was going to be a mirror to the Feast of Prosperity, giving us a new story step for every week of the event, for a total of four missions, but in reality it turned out to only have two parts, both of which were quite short. I can't say I really minded though, as this meant that it actually felt very doable as something to complete on alts. For comparison, I haven't actually done the Feast of Prosperity storyline on many characters due to its length. My only gripe with the Abundance storyline was that even though the cut scenes were KOTOR style and all the talking was alien gibberish (so there was no voice acting cost tied to giving additional choices), there was no dialogue option to account for your character not actually knowing Juna Helos from the Copero stronghold story. It felt kind of wrong that all my alts were just supposed to know her automatically.

Still, all of these were ultimately very minor complaints, and overall I've had a grand old time. I already look forward to revisiting this event next year to earn some more plant decos and work on those last two remaining achievements.

PvP: Queues, Rewards & Healer Power

I originally planned to name this post "PvP Ponderings", but a quick search on the blog revealed that I already made a post with that exact same title back in 2012. That post was mostly about how unexpectedly enjoyable SWTOR's PvP had turned out to be for me (and others).

The last time I really spoke about PvP on the blog was back at the start of PvP Season 5 in March. My lofty ambitions to progress through the PvP season track on more than one server didn't really end up going anywhere, since Galactic Season 6 ended up eating most of my time soon afterwards and had no overlap with PvP at all for its first five weeks. As a result, I only completed the PvP season on Darth Malgus this time... though I did get all the achievements again, and was actually fully done (even with the medals achievement) a couple of weeks before the end of the season. I think most of that was due to the crazy Total Galactic War we had in April, as I did something like nine PvP weeklies during that week, which obviously gave me a major leg up in terms of achievement progress early on.

At the time of me writing this, we're already into the fourth week of PvP Season 6... and while I'm having fun, I'm honestly also a little concerned. I've previously written about how my experiences PvPing on different servers have heightened my awareness of how different these places can be in terms of activity levels and queue times, and to be honest I've always viewed the Darth Malgus server as a good place to be in that regards. Sure, pops might be marginally quicker on Star Forge, but at that point you're just splitting hairs.

However, this season so far, things have felt different somehow. Like during the last two seasons, I'm trying to get my arena credits done in the lowbie bracket, but I don't remember having to wait quite so long between matches before. I know the lowbie bracket isn't the most active, and I haven't exactly pulled out a stop watch while sitting in the queue, but fifteen to twenty minutes between arena matches seems quite normal now even during prime time, which means that if (like me) you lose a bunch of those matches, it can take up to two hours to just get the daily "play arenas" mission done, which means that completing a whole arena weekly (which basically requires four dailies worth of play) is turning into a considerable time investment. I'm thinking about switching to the midbie bracket this week just to see if that's any better. Still, I probably wouldn't even have commented on this if I hadn't noticed my queue times at max-level increasing as well. I remember when I used to boast about unranked PvP pops being near-instant on my server, while now it can sometimes take ten minutes to get into a warzone even at level 80 during prime time.

I'm trying to tell myself that it's not a big deal, or even that I'm just imagining these queue times being longer than they used to be, but I can't help but worry. Back in 2017, shortly before the last big set of server merges, I wrote a post called "The Curse of Queues", in which I pondered the way automated queueing systems shape our gameplay expectations and how the more of them you add to your MMO, the bigger your population needs to be to appear somewhat lively. Accordingly, when the devs decided to split the unranked queue into warzones and arenas, I was a little worried about what that might mean for wait times, since you'd now need more players queueing to keep both modes active at the same time. I didn't notice any negative effects immediately - but now I wonder whether the consequences of this split might be starting to catch up with reality.

My first thought once I considered the subject of queues "drying up" was something along the lines of: Okay, for whatever reason not enough people are queueing for PvP. Could the devs offer some incentives to make more people join in? However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that unranked PvP has probably never offered more rewards than it does now. I don't remember the details of all the PvP gearing systems throughout the years, but it was basically always a matter of completing daily and weekly missions to work towards some gear upgrades and that was mostly it. Oh, and you'd gain valour ranks for titles I guess. But otherwise, people just kind of had to PvP for fun, because there wasn't much else in it.

Nowadays on the other hand, we still have all that other stuff, plus seasons rewarding things like cosmetic armours and stronghold decorations. Shouldn't PvP be more popular than ever? Then I remembered that there's this thing called the Overjustification Effect (I had to look up the exact name), which basically means that things that we find inherently enjoyable become less so once we start doing them for extrinsic rewards. And then I wondered whether there isn't some of that at play here, especially as the requirements in terms of when and how to play (in order to earn those rewards) are much more stringent now than they used to be.

What I mean by that is that before 7.0, to earn rewards from PvP, you just had to pick up the daily and weekly mission from the PvP terminal, press the queue button, and that was it. Progress might be faster or slower depending on your win-loss ratio, but you could always take a break and pick up where you left off at a later point without losing anything.

Since the devs changed it so that dailies and weeklies reset every day/week, you need to keep playing to get them done within the specified time frame or lose all your progress. I used to hop around between alts a lot more, playing a warzone here or there as different roles or specs, but nowadays I'm much more focused on sticking with the same small number of characters, because else I can't complete my weeklies, which would mean progress towards tech fragments and seasonal achievements going to waste.

I also no longer get warzones and arenas served at random, with both giving me equal credit towards my goals, but I need to queue for them separately, and complete a certain number of matches in both modes if I want to get full rewards - all within the week of course. It's kind of strangely demanding, and I actually noticed that it makes me more cranky when I have a losing streak. Obviously I never liked losing all the time, but at least in the past I could decide to take a break and come back later. Nowadays though there's always that feeling of, "Grr, I need to complete this today, why can't I get one bloody win? I don't have all evening for this!" I've definitely noticed that the matches during which I'm most relaxed and enjoying myself the most are those with the lowest "reward stakes", for example when my weekly is already at 15/16 and I literally just need to complete one more match regardless of outcome.

I can obviously only speak for myself, but the requirements for progress really do feel quite different from a casual PvPers point of view compared to how it used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if that affected more people's enjoyment.

Of course, when it comes to PvP, everyone tends to have their own pet issue that they think is ruining it at any given point - usually certain classes being over- or under-powered - but I honestly feel like I don't have enough knowledge about that area of the game to have strong opinions on the current state of class balance. I'd argue that things have never been perfectly balanced though and that the game has weathered all kinds of "flavours of the month" throughout the years.

One thing that was interesting to me on that subject though was when I watched a PvPer's "react" video the other day and he mentioned that he thought healers were actually kind of weak right now, since a good dps could easily beat a good healer one on one. This made my ears perk up because I did mention at the end of Season 4 that I had found myself surprised by how much more I enjoyed dpsing in PvP nowadays when healing had been my passion for over a decade. I didn't think to blame anything systematic for that; I figured it was just me, but now it seems likely that those two things are related, because that feeling of powerlessness has definitely contributed to me being turned off healing in PvP for the past year or so.

It's weird because I can't off the top of my head remember another era of the game when healers in general were quite so weak in PvP (as opposed to one specific class being over- or underpowered). More often the complaint has been that they are too powerful, and that this made matches tedious when it's too hard to kill anyone. With that in mind, I funnily enough can't even claim that the current situation has necessarily been bad for the quality of matches as a whole - it definitely seems to be that, going in as a dps, I see far fewer of those "slug fests" where people just hammer each other in a big pile around an objective forever without anyone actually going down. Ball carriers in Huttball actually need to be fast or good at passing now; you can't just brute force your way through a wall of enemies with some heals behind you. And those are not bad things! So I wouldn't blame the weakness of healers for a decline in interest in PvP, even if it has affected my personal enjoyment somewhat. It's just another interesting thing that I've observed.

This has turned out to be quite rambly, but these are just some of the things that have been going through my mind in regards to PvP lately. What are your personal experiences with this game mode recently? Do you think I'm completely wrong about declining participation and that queues are fine? I'm happy to hear other points of view.

Desperate Defiance - NOW We're Getting Somewhere!

Alongside opportunities to dance around the holo pole and fish, Patch 7.5 also included the latest update to SWTOR's ongoing storyline. And it was GOOD. That's it, review done!

I jest, of course. You know I can't write one of these without using a few thousand words.

Before I get into the story itself though, we have to talk about cut scenes, which is to say that yes, the KOTOR-style scenes in which the player character is unvoiced are back once again. In 7.3 they surprised me, but I was ultimately okay with the way they were integrated into the story. In 7.4 I was somewhat dismayed to see them make a return in the continuation of the main storyline while also being inserted in what felt like somewhat random places to me. At this point I'm kind of resigning myself to silent protagonist cut scenes simply being "a thing" in the new story updates from now on. I can only guess that it really is just a cost-cutting measure and that the devs therefore can't really comment on it in any way without it sounding bad.

This bothers me because I want to see this game at its best, and considering how pivotal the voice-acted characters have always been to its value proposition, unvoiced cut scenes just aren't on the same level. On the other hand though, I can't pretend that it totally ruins my own enjoyment of the story. It is what it is, and I think after this I will no longer comment on the mere presence of KOTOR-style cut scenes in new story updates. It just seems to be the new normal, unfortunately.

I will say though that the way these were inserted in 7.4 bothered me more than in this update. Here, they felt at least well-used to me in the sense that the black bars usually came up when we entered a quiet moment during which people were just standing around and talking to my character, and the devs at least made the most of it by also giving us more conversation options in those situations.

On a related matter, in the first half of the story on Hutta, I actually found myself missing even the KOTOR-style cut scenes, because several steps of story progression happen without any cut scenes at all - there are just some voice-over lines while you click on stuff, the same way you get when handing in dailies on Rishi and Yavin IV. This just stood out to me because the whole bit in the warehouse for example struck me as something that easily could have had at least two cut scenes in my opinion, even if they had just been KOTOR-style. As it was, all the dialogue with Virta just happened in quick voice-overs, and as a result I couldn't even remember her name or what she looked like after several playthroughs and had to check back just for writing this post. It's interesting to see how much of a difference the more cinematic editing makes to how memorable I find the characters. But anyway, what "bit in the warehouse" am I talking about anyway? Let's get into the actual plot. Full spoilers ahead as usual!

We start with a shot of one of Heta Kol's ships, surrounded by wreckage with a Republic logo on it. On board, we see a Hidden Chain soldier execute a prisoner while Ri'kan looks on. The latter then receives a report about a missing strike team, which Sa'har - who's standing just around the corner - overhears.

We switch to a shot of our characters honing their skills on Odessen which actually seems to be class-specific, something I really liked. My trooper and agent were shooting target dummies, my warrior was working on her lightsaber technique, and my consular was mediating with rocks floating around her head, which I thought was neat.

Lana (and Theron, if he's alive for you) show up to tell you that the Republic or Empire (depending on faction, obviously) wants to have a chat about the whole Mandalorian situation. They are not best pleased with this whole civil war causing chaos all over the place while you're supposed to be allied with the leader of the Mandalorians. You do chat with them for a bit but end up cutting the conversation short as you receive a call from Sa'har, who wants to meet you on Mek-Sha.

In a hideout there (I never realised before this conversation that she came from the orphanage on Mek-Sha), she tells you that she's got a plan to get Darth Nul's holocron away from Heta. It's being used to power a machine that awakens the Force in people, and Heta has been kidnapping people to use these new Force users as soldiers for her cause, which sounds like such a badly thought-out plan, it immediately made me think that Heta's clearly not as clever as she thinks she is. Anyway, this machine is being kept on a well-guarded ship that can only be reached via special shuttles, and after what Sa'har overheard earlier, she knows that one such strike team shuttle has gone missing on Hutta. She proposes to steal it from there and to use it to infiltrate the ship.

One way or another, you go along with the plan, and find yourself in the Minboosa District on Hutta, where - naturally - a slave rebellion is going on and causing chaos. Turns out the Mandos got held up because the local Hutt impounded their ship in the mayhem. For some reason I found the mental image of battle-hardened Mandalorians getting their ship towed by a Hutt incredibly amusing.

As you investigate the area, you run into some of the rebellious slaves and help them out in order to get to the Mandalorian shuttle. The new area on Hutta is pretty small, but I've got to admit I still wondered whether it wasn't meant to be a daily zone at one point, based on the various tasks we're being asked to complete for the slaves. I mean, you could argue that it wouldn't make sense for a group of escaped slaves to be a daily hub, but then dailies rarely make a lot of sense and the tasks they give by themselves definitely gave me daily or at least repeatable mission vibes (à la Interpreter's Retreat).

At one point you run into Yusinduu the Hutt himself and a big fight breaks out. In the aftermath, you find yourself teaming up with two of the leaders of the slave rebellion, a Rodian called Adi and an Evocii called Rakit. Adi seems like a fairly gentle soul - is it me or was it hinted that he might be at least a little Force-sensitive? I'm basing this on what he says about Sa'har's thoughts when she's out of the room. Rakit serves as a bit of a foil for him by being more fierce and wanting to inflict as much damage as possible to Yusinduu during the escape.

When you're ready to storm the place where all the spaceships are stored, both Adi and Rakit run into trouble with their respective tasks and you can only help one of them. Adi wants to slice the elevators to help more people escape, while Rakit is trying to disable the defensive turrets. Interestingly, helping Adi results in more people getting away, but Adi himself gets mortally wounded and dies, much to Rakit's despair. If you help with the turrets, Rakit and Adi both make it out, but Adi is dismayed to see that many of his fellow slaves didn't make it in turn. (I also saw someone mention that helping Adi and saving more "random" slaves means that you get NPC support for the fight mentioned below, but I can't say I noticed that myself.)

You also run into Yusinduu again, piloting a walker like Karagga at the end of Karagga's Palace, and putting up a surprisingly tough fight for modern story content. I've not actually died to it or anything, but on one try I lost my companion, and more than once it actually made me think of popping my heroic moment for safety. Otherwise he was a bit of a disappointment though, as I thought based on the preview that he might have a bigger role than showing up in that one scene and then going straight into boss fight mode the next time you run into him.

Either way you get your shuttle and you arrive at Heta's ship. Sa'har disables various alarms, though this doesn't prevent you from having to fight your way through wave after wave of Mandos. You free a group of slaves on the way, featuring a nice touch: if you didn't save Mina Nehrum in the last update, she's among the freed prisoners here. You can escort the prisoners to your shuttle, leave them to look after themselves, or even encourage them to join the fighting. Here I have to say that choosing the escort option is extremely annoying, because it will cause new Mandos to spawn in the corridors you just cleared, twice. They're not too hard to dispatch, but having to clear the same corridor three times in quick succession is not my idea of fun gameplay. Eventually you get to the machine, though Ri'kan is also there and intercepts you. A fight ensues, during which the machine gets destroyed and the ship is damaged to the point that it will blow up soon (because isn't that how it always goes).

While Sa'har stands up to Ri'kan, she panics when he appears to be sliding off the platform and wants to save him, crying for you to help her pull him back up. Here you get three options: to help her, to dive for Darth Nul's holocron first, or to just grab the holocron and walk off. The latter made me feel like a right bastard. The second one isn't too bad because your character says something like "hang on", clearly intending to help, but then gets cut off from the two of them by falling debris. If you do help to pull Ri'kan to safety, Sa'har will grab the holocron for you and give it a meaningful look before handing it over... but then Ri'kan wakes and attacks her again just as you're running to leave, and she pushes the door shut behind you.

The ship blows up behind you, with the clear implication being that the Twi'lek siblings probably died in the blast. You talk to either Arn or Krovos about what happened, how you got the holocron, and about what to do with the freed prisoners. I found it ironic that considering they're Force sensitive, Krovos is okay with sending them to Korriban, but Arn says there's no way the Jedi will accept them. Interesting case of the Empire actually being the more pragmatic ones.

It seems like you actually achieved a major victory for once by getting the holocron back and striking a major blow against Heta Kol... but we're not quite done yet. We pivot to a cut scene that shows Jekaiah Ordo receiving a message from Shae at last that basically says "sorry, but I gotta do what I gotta do", followed by a cut to Shae and four extremely badass-looking mercenaries breaking into Malgus' fleet prison and cutting him loose. Maybe that's just my interpretation, but he actually looks slightly uncertain when she frees him, as if he's not entirely certain just WTF she's doing either and why (though he does manage to hide it well). And that's the cut.

Obviously, the first thought I had after this story was: Hallelujah, we're finally getting somewhere! The criticism I see people level against the current storyline the most often is that it's just been going on for too long in real time, and while I don't entirely agree, it's definitely a criticism I understand. It's been more than three years since we were introduced to Heta Kol's rebellion, and Malgus has been sitting in his fleet prison for more than two years of real time. Several patches seemed to be more focused on establishing background lore than making anything actually happen. It's definitely been a bit frustrating at times.

And yet, here we have a single patch in which we finally see Sa'har turn on the Hidden Chain for real, you steal Darth Nul's holocron back and foil Heta's plans, Sa'har dies (?!), Shae comes back and breaks Malgus out. That's seemingly a lot of finality, and suddenly we really have no clue what's going to happen next. I love it!

However, main plot progression aside, there were also a lot of fun little details that I enjoyed, like the aforementioned class-specific intro. In the call with the Republic, I was happy to see Arn having our back, while the Imperial call amused me with the way Acina, Xarion and Krovos presented a surprisingly unified front of annoyance. If your continuity has Emperor Vowrawn instead of Empress Acina, he's so smarmy during the whole conversation, I absolutely loved it.

There were also some fun bits of gameplay - when you meet up with Sa'har on Mek-Sha, you have to follow a trail of light to find her, and one of the tasks for the slaves involves playing as a gonk droid. Yusinduu being a tough fight actually kind of impressed me, though I was less keen on the encounter with Ri'kan, which just kind of stops at one point with him becoming immune to damage, apparently because an RP dialogue between him and Sa'har needs to play out, but fire keeps spawning under your feet the entire time, which I thought was a bit confusing and annoying.

Sa'har as your companion for this story worked really well in my eyes. I would say that based on past storylines, there's a certain balance to be struck between making a companion sufficiently interesting and giving them goals of their own, and making sure that they don't end up usurping the story, causing your character to just tag along and gape while the actually interesting decisions get made by other people (*cough*FallenEmpire*cough*).

Sa'har straddles this line really well in my opinion because we know a lot about her and can understand her motivations, plus she's played a meaningful part in the story leading up to all this, yet at the same time she's also extremely insecure and lost, meaning you can build her up or tear her down, the story still makes sense either way because you're in charge. In the dev stream, it was also hinted that our interactions with Sa'har would affect her behaviour going forward, but to be honest I didn't really notice her responding noticeably differently in multiple playthroughs depending on whether I was nice or mean to her. That said, there's always a chance that I simply wasn't consistent enough in my responses to reach the right trigger point, which is something that has been a problem for me in this and other Bioware games in the past. If you noticed any changes in Sa'har's behaviour based on your conversation choices yourself, please share in the comments. Either way, there doesn't seem to be room for further follow-up to see how Sa'har has been affected by all this, because she's dead now, right? (Insert meaningful eyebrow wiggle here. No character in the Star Wars universe - or many an action movie to be honest - is dead until we see the body.)

There were several points in the story where you did get to make quite interesting story decisions with visible impacts though: where to send the slaves, whether to help Adi or Rakit when they are struggling during the escape, how to treat the freed prisoners on Heta's ship, and of course whether you try to help Sa'har during the final encounter. During the conversation with Arn/Krovos you also get to decide what to do with the holocron and the prisoners. Just interesting stuff all around.

And oh, that ending! I think it's well done in the sense that it's not surprising that Shae has gone off the deep end after how she acted when we last saw her in 7.3, but there's also a certain sense of "how the hell could she possibly think this was going to be a good idea". I'm sure that some players will have felt an immediate urge to kill her for her betrayal, while others will still want to reconcile, and I'm very interested in seeing where the devs will take us after this.

The cut scene of the prison break was also extremely cool. The moment we first see the mercs helping Shae, you can tell that these aren't random mercs but characters. I wasn't sure who it was for example, but it looked like one of them was using the Force to throw a droid against the wall? And what was up with that ninja stabbing droids with knives?! I need to know more.

What stood out to you the most in this update? Did you encounter anything interesting that I didn't mention here? And which member of Shae's prison break gang is your favourite? Feel free to share opinions in the comments.

Legacy Level 50 on Star Forge

The other week I hit an interesting milestone by reaching legacy level 50 on Star Forge. While I have characters on all servers, I've never done a transfer between any of them, so my legacy levels are entirely independent of each other and purely a reflection of how much time I've spent playing on that specific server.

It's not really a surprise that Star Forge was the first secondary server on which I maxed out my legacy, considering that Shintar the Cathar trooper, created in 2016, was one of my first and most-played alts created on a different server than my home.

Still, at the same time it's kind of funny to think that it took me eight years of real time to get there, and to consider just how little in terms of story content I got done in all that time. When I hit legacy level 50 on The Red Eclipse (which would eventually get merged into Darth Malgus), I had only been playing for about ten months and had already completed four out of the eight class stories. On Star Forge I've still only completed one of them! So much legacy experience acquired from random nonsense like running dailies I guess...

Another thing that cracked me up was that I once again failed utterly at actually capturing a screenshot of the big ding, just like I did back in 2012. I'd been well aware that I was sitting at legacy level 49 and was creeping up on 50 but then... I just kinda forgot about it again, and when I realised that the ding had happened without me actually noticing, I checked my achievements just to find that it had actually happened several days ago. Seriously.

Anyway, I know that legacy levels are pretty meaningless, and have been so since forever. I reckon most long-term players have been 50 for so long, they haven't even thought about the concept in years. But to me, it was still an interesting milestone to reach on a second server. I'll probably post again whenever I get there on the other servers, but if I recall correctly, all the others are still only somewhere in the thirties, so it's probably going to be a while.

Being in Guilds on Other Servers

When I first started playing on other servers for Galactic Seasons, it was purely a solo project. However, as my characters there started to make progress through their class stories and I became more attached to them, I also developed an increasing urge to be part of a guild with them, to be social with other people, and to have some sense of belonging while playing on those other servers too.

Season 6 has been the first season for which I was guilded on at least my main character on every single server, and it's been... an interesting experience. I've certainly developed more sympathy for people who struggle to find a good guild. For me, it's always kind of happened automatically, because when I'm really into an MMO I play a lot, and when you play a lot you run into familiar faces after a while, and when you spend a lot of time around the same people, you learn who you like and who you don't like being around kind of automatically. However, when you're playing more casually, like I am on these secondary servers, it can be much harder to get a good picture of which guilds offer the kind of experience you're looking for. Fortunately I seem to be at least mostly there after this season.

On Shae Vizla, I am of course still a member of Heroes of the Republic/Empire, which I joined at the server's launch. It has a bunch of nice people in it, and when the server launched, it was the biggest guild in town for a while, which allowed me to get the Galaxy Conqueror achievement without even trying, which certainly felt kind of ironic when that's one I'm still missing on Darth Malgus after more than a decade. One day you'll be mine, Belsavis! Ahem.

Anyway, things have kind of calmed down a lot since then, but I don't mind - it means I have to be less concerned about logging into all my alts to keep them active and avoid removal from the guild.

On Star Forge, I joined Intisar's little guild at the end of GS4. I had a pretty good time with them in GS5 (which was part of what inspired me to seek out guilds on more servers, because even with only casual involvement on my part it just made the whole experience much nicer). During Season 6 I didn't have as many chances to play with them (their events usually start at 1 a.m. my time and that's just not doable for me most of the time), however I still felt included and welcome on the Discord. I also got to join for some action with "Team Disco" on Swtorista's streams a few more times, since she streams at what's mid-morning in her time zone, which translates into mid-afternoon for me, which in turn means that I can actually stop by sometimes and backfill if I'm working from home and my workload allows it.

On Satele Shan, I joined Ootini Knights/Rage at the start of this season, and felt warmly welcomed there too, though I was a bit surprised by how quiet it was on their Discord. I didn't really expect to run into people a lot in-game due to my time zone issues, but I didn't see much activity on the Discord either, such as organised events or anything at all. I just figured a guild connected to a long-running podcast would have a bit more going on. As it is, it feels more like a place where a lot of people park their alts while primarily playing somewhere else... which is exactly what I'm doing myself, mind you, so no shade from me!

Loyal readers may remember that on Tulak Hord, I helped someone form a guild the first time I reached the fleet, and then just kind of stayed in that guild even as it went nowhere. Ultimately it just had me and one other guy left in it, but I didn't mind. During GS5 I even made it a bit of a personal goal for myself to use the guild ship that the other guy had purchased to invade small yield planets and then achieve the guild target by myself. I initially thought that I would just do the same again in GS6, but the nerfing of the reputation objective, as well as my inability to get alts into the guild due to the other guy never being around, made it hard to be efficient and I got a little frustrated after a while. In the end I left a friendly farewell in the guild message of the day and decided to try and find myself a new home where I could reap some guild Conquest rewards without having to do all the work by myself.

I already had a new guild in mind as well. I'd seen their recruitment message and liked it, their guild name sounded cute, and I'd actually run a master mode flashpoint with two of their members that had gone very well. It seemed like a good fit! So I got myself invited, looked for their Discord link... and found that they didn't have one. Instead they were old-school and used TeamSpeak for voice and listed a guild website in the guild description.

I was surprised, but didn't actually mind too much as my own guild on Darth Malgus also still uses TS for voice chat, and I was curious to see what a guild website would look like in the year 2024. I signed up and created a profile - but unfortunately the site turned out to be pretty empty. No event sign-ups or anything, and on the forums there was just an old message from someone complaining that they'd created events that nobody signed up for, and that they weren't going to bother anymore. Undeterred, I wrote a post to ask how one would go about finding out what's happening in this guild. More than a week later (!) I got a reply that said that people don't really look at the guild website, and to just be on TS in the evenings or speak up in guild chat. I've got to admit, that's a bit too old-school even for me, especially when I'm not planning to commit to playing a whole lot on this server. It was honestly kind of disappointing, because how am I supposed to make any kind of connection to people when I don't have opportunities to talk to them? I'm staying for now but we'll see where both I and the guild are at when the next season starts I guess.

Finally, on Leviathan I joined Republic/Imperial Court at the end of last season, the guild that I'd seen advertise on Shae Vizla as offering a home specifically for players doing Conquest and Galactic Seasons across all servers. That was a slightly odd experience in a different way. They do have a Discord, and when I joined it I found out that this whole "guild conglomerate" was owned by the same people who lead Wardens of the Old Republic on Darth Malgus, a guild that used to dominate the planetary leaderboards once upon a time but whose activity fell off at some point for reasons unknown to me. As it turns out, they're still alive and kicking on Darth Malgus, just on a slightly smaller scale, and active as "Courts" on the other servers.

I had hoped to maybe find some organised events for group seasons objectives on Leviathan on the Discord, but it turned out that while they do have guilds on all servers, the main focus in terms of activity is on Darth Malgus and Shae Vizla, with none of the others getting regular events, just impromptu pings when someone does something like put a world boss group together (which I usually don't see in time). I also muted the general chat on Discord at some point because it made me feel like I really didn't fit in there. Remember when I expressed confusion about people freaking out and rage-quitting on the second boss in False Emperor for example? Well, the same week I wrote that, one of the officers in Courts ranted about stupid pugs and how they (the officer, not the pugs) hate it when people use the turrets on that boss and how that always makes them quit the group. Awkwarrrd.

Anyway, I guess on Leviathan my options for socialisation were always going to be limited with me not really speaking French and only a small number of English-speaking players on the server. It does feel like everyone who's there for seasons is indeed in Courts, as the guilds on both factions always go for the large yield target from what I've seen and achieve it easily. There are clearly a lot of people logging in every week to get their Conquest and seasons objectives done, just not necessarily with any interest in socialising while doing so. I guess you can't win them all, but I appreciate that they freely invite anyone who wants to be there with no questions asked, and that the guild has made it possible for me to earn guild Conquest rewards on all my alts on the server. I just didn't think it was possible to be a member of such a big guild and still feel so lonely in the crowd.

I will say that this whole adventure has once again made me more appreciative of what an absolutely genius gameplay system Conquest is. I mostly write about it in the context of my guild getting into crazy competitions during Total Galactic War nowadays, but it's really rewarding from a casual point of view as well, making it very worthwhile to be a member of a guild even if you don't talk to anyone. And from a leadership perspective, Conquest points give a better indication of activity levels than mere logins. I guess most guilds don't regularly check on their members' contributions, but I know that I take note of who's usually getting their personal Conquest done and who isn't, and by doing my part in the guilds I'm in on those other servers, I can show at least a "sign of life" and make a small contribution even when I'm not able to be online at prime time to socialise.

Drop In: Yavin 4

Now that I'm pretty much done with my seasons goals on the other servers, I'm not sure whether I'll continue the "drop in" series... but last week, I still visited Yavin 4 strongholds on three different servers, which is enough material for a post.

Like Alderaan, Yavin 4 is huge and personally I just bought it when it first came out without actually doing much with it. As a result, my first visit to a Yavin stronghold last week was primarily spent doing a lot of running/driving around to figure out where all the extensions even were. You won't believe how long it took me just to find my way out of the first building the first time...

The first Yavin 4 stronghold I visited was Leeha's Pursuit of Peace on Darth Malgus. I always thought of Yavin as a very "Sithy" planet, so I was intrigued by how someone might convert it to a more Jedi theme (which is what the name seemed to imply).

I didn't think the entrance area looked particularly peaceful. I see some massassi there, an underwalker, statues of Revan and Darth Marr, and I forget who the guy posing for the statue at the top was, but I know he's also a Sith.

However, the first indoor area seemed a bit more on brand, with potted plants, datacrons and various crystals - which can also be Sithy to some degree I guess, but they didn't give that vibe here. It felt kind of colourful and friendly, as far as that's possible in a dank ruin like this.

Exiting onto the bridge leading to the biggest chunk of the stronghold, I found myself confronted with this giant Jedi statue, more crystals and an avenue of trees, which also seemed appropriate enough. Apparently I forgot to take pictures of this same spot elsewhere, but I generally felt that this view you have immediately after exiting the first building was well suited to creating striking vistas.

In one of the side buildings I found what I can only call a "Rakata room", which I thought was an interesting idea. There are a lot of Rakata-themed decos but while they were an evil Empire, I never got the impression that their use of the Force fit as neatly into the light-dark dichotomy of the Jedi and Sith (the casters in the Legacy of the Rakata flashpoint all use Sage abilities for example).

Now this staging ground was amazingly well done in my opinion. I like the neat lining up of soldiers and vehicles, and while many of the named NPCs came up as holograms for me, you could still tell that there was thought put into their placement. I like how C2-N2 and T7 are right next to each other as if they're roleplaying as C-3PO and R2-D2 for example.

On Leviathan I went to "Tyriuna's Temple of Darkness" because I figured why not see how it looks when someone goes all in on the Sith theme this time? The first building certainly looked very different, with hanging vines, gloomy-looking statues and Imperial flags.

This deco caught my eye because it looked like an ancient graveyard and I had not seen that before:

The cave at the far end of the stronghold housed a Kell Dragon, which I guess is the appropriate environment for one of these beasts!

And once again, the bad guys kept prisoners. Poor Choza.

 

Finally, I visited Mercwiththemouth's Stronghold on Satele Shan, just because I thought the character name was funny. It was listed as being at 99% completion, so I immediately had an uneasy feeling when I zoned in and the entire entrance area was empty. Deco spam incoming?

 

 

 

I started to wonder what was going on when I found more and more empty rooms, yet at the same time everything was super laggy. Had the game bugged out on me in some way? How could I be lagging if all these rooms were indeed empty? I got my answer when I got to the top of the first building and found that the owner had spammed his stronghold with small animated turrets... all their movements were what was making the whole thing lag.

 

Ultimately I was still surprised by how much empty space I saw at 99% completion though. I wonder if some of it was Yavin 4 plants which I kind of overlooked as part of the scenery, because otherwise I don't know how else you could get to 99% completion with so much empty space, even if one did fill a bunch of rooms with lots of small decos.

Spring Abundance

This week's patch 7.5 brought with it three major new features, all of which I'll write about at some point. However, the one of which it was the easiest to get a general impression was undoubtedly the new seasonal spring event, called Spring Abundance Festival.

Unfortunately it's been a bit hard to locate during its first week, as the mission terminal they put on the fleet is in the exact same spot as the Gree event terminal, which was also active this past week, causing the two quest starters to overlap almost completely. With a bit of careful hovering you could find the right spot to start the introductory mission though.

From the looks of it, there's going to be a story mission that unlocks a new step each week like there is during the Feast of Prosperity, and completion of the first part is also required to unlock the various repeatable event missions. It's a bit longer than most event-type intros, but still not too bad to do on alts. One thing I noticed though was that other players were constantly photo-bombing my KOTOR-style cut scene; I wonder if the devs forgot to tick some box to hide other players from these?

Based on the general theme of the event, I expected a degree of similarity to the Feast of Prosperity, and I think it's fair to say that there is, though I'd argue that Spring Abundance manages to be even more chill. After all, the Feast still has you going out hunting world bosses and there's a bit of pressure to serve those meals in time. At Spring Abundance, aside from having to kill about a dozen mobs for the introductory mission, there are no such pressures. Just chill, 100% of the time, catching fish, baking pies and dancing at the May holo pole.

I've seen some people snark about the very idea of having these activities in SWTOR, but to be honest I don't get why. I thought it was a bit odd that we were sweeping floors for the Gormak as part of the main storyline, but as a side activity like this? Why the hell not? Nobody can be hero of the galaxy 24/7, and who says even a Sith can't enjoy a bit of gardening in their downtime?

The daily activities are cute, fast and fun, and everything gives Conquest points too, which is a nice bonus. One thing that's interesting to me is that the mission structure is a bit different from the usual in that there isn't a weekly that requires you to do x number of dailies, but instead there are several weeklies that are tasks of their own that can only be done once a week, plus the dailies which you can just repeat every day for fun (and profit).

Particularly clever to me is the way they used this for the pie baking and eating, as there is a daily to bake pie, but the mission to sample different pies only requires you to do so once a week, so even if it was quiet and not all pies were available to eat when you first showed up, you can try again the next day. Right now the event is pretty much the opposite of quiet though, mind you - people seem to happily and enthusiastically be taking part at all times of day from what I've seen. There are some pretty nice rewards to be earned as well (though I haven't decided yet what I'll go for myself), so this event just strikes me as a winner all around.