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.