Galactic Season 6 in Review

We've got less than a month left of Galactic Season 6, and usually I would've been done with and written about the whole thing weeks ago. The reason I'm still at it this time is the Fragments Found achievement, which is grindy and horrible and which, at my current rate, will keep me busy until the very last week of the season. Still, that last stretch seems pretty predictable at this point, so I thought I might as well share my thoughts on the season as a whole.

GS5 was a slam dunk for me last year, so it pains me to say that GS6 was a bit more of a mixed bag. Let's get into the whys and hows.

Theme & Rewards

I expressed at the end of Season 5 that all the free decorations handed out as part of the seasons reward track had rekindled my interest in housing in an unexpected way, so I loved that the main reward for Season 6 was a stronghold. The Copero Villa is beautiful, and with its smaller rooms it fills a niche that wasn't previously catered to, offering a housing option for those who aren't so fond of the giant vaulted ceilings that are present pretty much everywhere else in the game.

The matching decorations on the reward track were also absolutely beautiful, and I can say with confidence that I finally stopped fretting about what to do with my season tokens whenever I get close to the cap again - I can always use a few more of those beautiful decos from the vendor. There were some other solid pieces on the reward track as well.

Objectives

The objectives were... okay. I definitely appreciated that the devs took the feedback about the ops objective from last season on board and changed it so it only required completion of a single story or veteran mode operation instead of two to four within a single week. Otherwise it was mostly the same old, except that they seemed to want to mix things up a bit by doubling up on certain objectives, like in that one week when all three "kill 100 mobs with your companion" objectives were active at the same time, which was kind of strange in a way that I can't really rate as good or bad.

I did think the seasonal objective to visit another person's stronghold was genius in its simplicity and I had a lot of fun looking at other people's strongholds across all servers. The posts I wrote about this were also quite popular with at least a certain subset of my readers, somewhat to my surprise.

Story

The story is where the disappointment starts to set in, because after how much I enjoyed Galactic Season 5's story, I had high hopes for this one. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Season 5 was a narrative masterpiece, but it was an actual piece of story content where I didn't expect it, with a fun little mystery and three missions that actually offered you choices that changed the experience a little. I really liked that.

Unfortunately Season 6's story was nothing like it. It still came with three missions that you unlocked as you progressed along the reward track, but they didn't feel like part of a coherent whole, offered no choices and didn't come to any kind of real conclusion.

There was a little Easter Egg for those who brought Amity along again though, solidifying his position as best boy in my mind.

I actually thought the first mission was quite interesting at first, and the idea of "run this flashpoint" being framed as an act of studying history struck me as very clever. Unfortunately the three flashpoints you were required to run are all on the long side if you don't have stealth, and it made the mission a bit of a drag to do more than once. Most annoyingly though, you kind of go into it with the expectation of learning more about your mysterious Chiss benefactors at the end, but you don't get to meet any of them, and Vagol Oss' information about House Inrokini's goals remains vague all the way to the end.

In the second mission you meet a Jedi researcher called Cay Teenu who has also come to help you out with your studies. She's interested in biology and has a strained relationship with a former padawan who was expelled from the Jedi order. I thought this was actually the most coherent of the three missions, because at least it comes to somewhat of a conclusion with the Jedi thanking you for your help at the end.

The final part introduces yet another character who wants you to run errands for her, a disgraced Sith named Juna Helos. However, once you complete her mission, nothing happens. I initially thought I'd missed something - both her and Vagol offer some more conversation options after their missions, but they didn't yield any more information. I even went all conspiracy theorist for a little while, wondering whether there was some deeper meaning to each NPC making recommendations about what kind of decorations you could put into the house, whether you needed to decorate the villa in a certain way to unlock the last part of the story. But no, doing additional research on this just yielded other people being confused by the sudden cut-off as well. Season 6's story consists of nothing but running some errands in the name of mysterious benefactors that you don't get to meet and that's... it. No pay-off. With Juna Helos also appearing in the Spring Abundance storyline, another option I considered was whether there could be a continuation next season, but I think that would be a bit odd and seems unlikely to me.

Blueprint Fragments

I wrote about how the removal of the seasonal reputation track caused some confusion at the start of the season, and the way the devs kept the seasonal currency in as nothing but vendor trash. This definitely seemed like a strange setup, but once I understood what was happening, I didn't mind it too much.

The problems started once I realised how stupidly grindy the final achievement was that replaced the old reputation track. With the seasonal reputations, I'd never had any issues with maxing them out well before the end of the season. Acquiring the reputation tokens took no special effort beyond doing my weekly objectives every week, I just had to remember to actually pop them in order to max out my weekly reputation allocation in a timely manner. In fact, last season I commented on how I didn't see the point of the "Brrazz's Gift" booster items since I never needed to boost the item drop rate for the reputation currency anyway.

In hindsight it feels like that comment of mine made the monkey paw curl... I was hoping for a nicer and more useful type of reward when I wrote that, but the devs apparently took it to mean that they needed to make the boosters more useful by turning the seasonal currency into a horrible grind that will make you yearn for anything to alleviate the pain.

Don't get me wrong, I get that this is the "top tier" achievement that requires extra effort, but the degree of extra effort required this season was ridiculous. I don't know anyone who aimed for that achievement and wasn't fretting about it pretty much throughout the whole season. The thing that got me was that I spend so much time in this game and yet still only just scraped by because of how incredibly grindy it is.

It doesn't sound so bad on paper; after all you earn fragments for completing pretty much any kind of PvE group content, plus while simply fighting things with your companion. In practice though, you can (and I have) spend hours playing the game without making any progress towards this achievement whatsoever. Doing PvP? Nada. GSF? Nope. Killing some ops bosses with your guild but you don't fully clear because you're still progressing? Nothing. Killing things with your companion in areas that don't count for some reason? This has to be the worst one because you just can't tell what kind of area will or won't count and why. I killed hundreds of mobs in the Minboosa District while playing through the 7.5 story repeatedly, and those didn't drop a single fragment. Other areas do seem to be eligible but still offer only a crap drop rate. I did Kessan's Landing dailies (as a non-stealther) with the Brrazz buff on, just to end up with two fragments in my inventory at the end. Out of 1500 needed. It just felt ridiculous.

When someone who plays as many hours as I do a week still struggles, something seems wrong to me. I've heard people say that you can earn a decent amount of fragments by applying the buff and then just slaughtering flesh raiders on Tython for an hour or two... which may be true but also sounds like absolutely awful gameplay. It shouldn't be like that!

And that's without even starting on the fact that the buff items, for what little good they did, were bind on pickup instead of bind to legacy, and the buff didn't stop running once you logged off, so if you couldn't play for the full hour of the buff duration in a single play session - tough luck, the rest was wasted.

I hope that whatever they end up doing for the next season doesn't include anything like this. If they don't want to do a reputation track anymore, that's fine, but collecting 1500 pieces of vendor trash that only drops under certain (unclear) circumstances, and with a low drop rate at that, was just a horrible replacement all around.