I Got the Twitch Mount - Now What?

With only a few days left on the promotion, I was happy to finish accumulating my four Twitch watch hours of Star Wars: The Old Republic to earn the Orlean Voidstream mount. I know you can always just open a random channel in a new tab, mute it and simply let it run in the background if you don't actually feel like watching (and I did in fact do that for a WoW mount last week) but with SWTOR I wanted to try and engage with the whole process a bit more genuinely. So thanks to Intisar, OotiniCast and Swtorista for providing me with some things to watch. I wasn't paying attention 100% of the time but I was watching!

Now, leaving my biases against streaming aside for a moment, my first thought upon claiming my new speeder was: What's next? Surely to make it worth the effort of implementing Twitch drops, they have to do more of these? But what does "worth it" even mean in the context of Twitch drops? Some people seem to consider "Twitch views" for a game a very meaningful metric of public interest and success. So did this purple speeder do anything for SWTOR's Twitch views?

I figured there was probably a site with some public data for this and quickly came across TwitchTracker. I found the SWTOR page on the site and have to admit that I immediately found it extremely interesting. Where to even start? Apparently SWTOR's "rank" on Twitch is #405, which sounds very bad, but #405 out of what total number? [Edit: A day after I wrote the first draft of this post the game's rank already changed to #425, so these numbers are clearly quite volatile.] The site's overall ranking of games goes up to to #773, which would put SWTOR firmly in the bottom half, but then while trying to look up other MMOs for comparison I found that Star Trek Online for example was ranked #1,359, so they clearly have more games than that in their overall database.

Anyway, I think we can agree that SWTOR is not exactly a great hit on Twitch in general, but the more relevant question for me was how its numbers have changed over time. There's a neat graph at the top of the page that shows both average (or peak, you can choose) viewers ever since the start of 2017 (the green line) as well as the number of channels that streamed the game on any given day over the years (the blue line). You can go to the page yourself or click on the image below to enlarge my screenshot of the graph.

The first thing that stood out to me was that while average viewers have hovered around an unexciting 100-200 per day for a really long time, there is one massive peak where daily viewers shot up to more than 15k for one day. What happened in July 2021? Oh right, they announced the Legacy of the Sith expansion (thanks for reminding me, blog archive). That makes sense then! No, wait... why does the peak show on the 15th of July when the announcement stream happened at the start of the month? Oh, apparently popular streamers Shroud and Summit decided to play SWTOR for a few days at that point. Sorry, I guess having a big 10-year-anniversary expansion is not nearly as interesting as those two guys.

So what has the Orlean Voidstream done so far? September isn't really properly visible on the graph yet since we're only halfway through the month, but August nearly doubled the game's average viewers compared to July. Then again, doubling a number that's small to begin with is hardly an amazing feat. We'll see what the impact on September will be.

What about the blue line, the number of channels streaming SWTOR? Well, the first thing I noticed and found quite amusing is that you can see a small peak every year on May the 4th, as people go "it's Star Wars Day, let's play a Star Wars game today" (presumably). That aside, the number of streamers seems to draw a clearer picture of interest in the game over time. From 2017 to 2019 the number of channels that streamed the game hovered pretty consistently around twenty per day for example, until there's a bit of a spike at the end of October 2019 - the release of Onslaught - after which point the daily average goes up to about thirty, indicating that this expansion increased engagement with the game. But oh wait, something else happened at the end of 2019 and throughout 2020... alright, so I guess Covid lockdowns helped with maintaining interest here.

Next we see a spike of more than 70 channels streaming SWTOR at the end of July 2020. I think that one can probably be attributed to the game's Steam launch. For the next few months, 30-40 channels streamed the game per day, until activity reached its biggest peak on record so far, with over 75 channels streaming SWTOR in February 2022 - which was the launch of Legacy of the Sith of course. Unfortunately we all know how that went, and accordingly, activity saw a sharp drop-off over the next few months, until things stabilised somewhat again with what must've been the launch of 7.1. Since then, things have been pretty stable again and kind of similar to 2017 in terms of daily streams, except with numbers ever so slightly lower.

Looking at all this, I can agree that Twitch stats clearly do reflect the state of the game in some way, though I'm kind of surprised that the number of channels that stream it seems to be a better indicator than the number of views. I mean, did that huge spike caused by popular streamers picking up the game really do anything in the long term? At best it looks like views were ever so slightly up for about two months afterwards when compared to the months before the spike.

As for the streaming numbers, while those do seem to correlate with known trends within the game, I find it hard to imagine that the causation is more than one way, as in: obviously people stream SWTOR more when it's doing well and they're having fun. I'm not sure that streaming numbers going up or down a bit have much of an impact on the player base in turn though. I guess I should just be glad that the overall picture is fairly stable.

Anyway, did you make an effort to get the Twitch drop mount? If so, did it make you interact with Twitch differently than normal? If you streamed yourself, did you see it making a difference to your viewership?

Legacy-wide DvL Tokens and More

Yesterday's patch 7.5.1b was an interesting one despite being only a minor patch. For one thing, it changed dark and light side tokens from being character-bound currencies to legacy-wide. It seems the cynicism I expressed about the chances of this happening a few weeks ago was unwarranted, though I do still wonder why converting the Soovada slot machine chips to a legacy currency would be such a big deal but they were able to convert the DvL tokens within a couple of weeks.

Maybe it's simply the difference between a clean and a "sloppy" implementation, as we weren't able to log in and find all our tokens in one place yesterday, but it was necessary to manually log into every single character that had tokens to get them added to the total (which would let you go over the cap by the way, in case anyone was worried). I finished my rounds of alt-hopping with a total of 1,310 tokens.

For fun, I'd held a little contest on my guild Discord beforehand, asking people to guess what my total was going to be after the patch. One guildie actually managed to guess this exact number!

Of course I then had the problem of what to do with all this currency, since I wanted to get back down to below the cap, or else I wasn't going to be able to earn any more tokens from boss kills. Even though the devs added some more items to the vendors, there wasn't really anything I was super keen on. Still, I ended up buying eight of the armour sets as well as a couple of the weapons.

That still left me with more than 300 light side tokens, at which point I just gave up and bought a bunch of speeders to throw into my legacy cargo bay. A lot of my more frequently-played characters already had all of these from back in the day, when the tokens were very easy to earn and I was constantly trying to find ways to avoid bumping up against the cap, but I'm sure I'll find some toons that can actually use them.

It's a good thing I didn't rely on these vendor rewards for motivation to take part in world boss kills this season...

One of my inquisitors trying to decide whether the Dread Harbinger set from the vendor works for her.

There were a few other interesting patch items as well though. For example it was announced that Galactic Season 7's end date, which was originally meant to be the 7th of January, was pushed back to February 18th. I have no issues with that, and the official justification was to give players more time to finish the season without having to be online all the time during the holiday period. It does make me wonder though whether they're behind schedule in some way in terms of content production, seeing how we're supposed to have this ongoing cadence of 7.x patches with story updates and 7.x.1 patches with Galactic Seasons.

Finally, one patch note that seemed to inspire a (to me) surprising amount of anger on reddit was this one:

Players must now defeat the security cannons in the Hammer Station Flashpoint in order to disengage the bridge in Section Zero.

For anyone who doesn't know what this is about, Hammer Station is generally considered the easiest/fastest of all flashpoints and therefore very popular with people who just want to farm flashpoint currency quickly. People's attempts to optimise this speed-running have included not fighting a pair of champion turrets at a bridge near the end of the flashpoint - the "popular" strategy was to just run past them, which would keep you in combat until the end of the flashpoint.

The upside of this was that it would save you about a minute of combat time. The downside was that being stuck in combat meant being unable to regenerate health, so if your group didn't have a healer and/or included low-level characters without a lot of cooldowns, people would sometimes die during the last few trash packs before the last boss (the boss himself is surrounded by kolto stations). Also, being stuck in combat prevents you from exiting the flashpoint, so it was required to suicide-jump off the ledge behind the boss after killing him to get out of combat again.

I think it's fairly obvious from this description that this was never a good risk-reward trade-off in a pug. It was basically the same problem we used to have in Athiss with that damn ledge jump, where people would rather spend five minutes waiting for everyone to climb up a ledge than spend thirty seconds killing two easy mob packs (and which was thankfully patched out in 7.4). Only in this instance they'd rather risk getting some of their group mates killed as well as give everyone a repair bill rather than kill two mobs.

So while reddit may be mad, most people I've talked to are actually glad about this fix, and so am I. Now if they could do something about the craziness of players attempting to run past/skip all the trash leading to the first boss as well... I'm just continually saddened by the weird and degenerate gameplay that has infested what I once used to think of as a nice little starter flashpoint.

Lessons Learned from Training Bessi

As of about a week ago, I'm the proud owner of a permanent basilisk droid companion! Like I said in my last post about B3-S1, I was actually surprised by how enjoyable I ended up finding the process, when I was originally very much against the idea of being given a reason to do the same old daily zones yet again for the umpteenth time.

However, there are definitely a few things I learned along the way that I kind of wish I had known sooner. Heck, this one sentence from my previous post contains two misconceptions in one: "[T]here are four different currencies involved and so far I've always reached the weekly cap for all of them within only two hours of gameplay, at which point it's back to the stable for Bessi as she can't make any more progress until the next week." Since I want other people to be able to avoid the mistakes I made, let me break it down for you:

1. Bessi's time is not precious

In that previous post, I made it sound like it was really easy to hit the weekly cap on all the Bessi-related currencies within only two hours, but that was on a stealther and knowing my way around. I almost took a certain pride in making efficient use of my "Bessi-time" because I figured it was the most precious resource in the whole endeavour. Can't make any progress with Bessi if you're not allowed to have her out, can you?

This turned out to be very wrong for two reasons: First off, the memory chips you need to spend to activate Bessi for an hour are extremely easy to get. You get several for free from the terminal in Lane's lab every week, and the collected research containers also have a random chance of containing extra memory chips. So I soon found myself bumping up against the real limiting factors: training modules and prototype data.

The latter isn't that hard to get but is required in higher and higher numbers as you go up in levels, and also serves as currency for buying training modules for specific planets from the vendor. Training modules aren't exactly rare per se either, but since it's random what modules you'll get granted for free and they can send you to 14 different planets, it's possible for module RNG a.k.a. "just not getting enough of the one you actually need" to be a real blocker.

Oh, and guess what gives you two free training modules every time? Feeding Bessi a memory chip! So I went from trying to be super efficient with her time in the early levels and treating memory chips as extremely precious, to actively feeding her the things all day without even using Bessi for anything (you can use up more memory chips before the timer for the last one has actually run out by dismissing Bessi in Lane's Lab and then initiating the "conversation" with her while she's lying in her dedicated spot).

2. You don't have to stop after you've maxed out your currencies for the week

The other misconception I expressed in that earlier quote was that maxing out my Bessi-related currencies for the week meant that I was done and that there was nothing else left to do. In reality, you can keep doing training modules for as long as you have any. The collected research you get as a reward is a container, so you can simply stash those in your cargo bay to immediately have a leg up on your weekly progress for the next reset. You don't have to worry about accidentally wasting them either, as the game won't even let you open them if you're already maxed out on all the currencies contained within.

Do take care though with which training modules you use up every week, because...

3. It pays off to know which training modules are used at which level

I'm usually someone who prefers exploring things for myself, only resorting to guides when I get stuck, but with Bessi, having at least a little bit of knowledge in advance definitely pays off. Specifically, what you should know is that at the higher levels, you'll have to complete training modules in specific daily areas to progress. These are:

Level 5: Black Hole, CZ-198, Iokath
Level 6: Onderon, Oricon, Ruhnuk
Level 8: Kessan's Landing, Ossus, Yavin IV
Level 9: Makeb, Manaan, Section X

Mek-Sha and Rishi are not required for any specific levels.

What this means is that when you pick which training modules to do in a given week, keep in mind what's coming up next and don't use up the ones you're about to need at the next level! I don't remember the exact details, but I think I did a bunch of Black Hole and CZ-198 modules at level four because hey! They are really easy daily areas! And then I levelled up and groaned when I saw that I'd just used up what was required for the next level, when I could have done level four with any old module.

4. You don't get credit for everything you should get credit for

Maybe that'll be fixed one day, but as it stands, there are some slight bugs with the training module missions. That you need to actually have Bessi out and in the role she's training for when you complete a mission is logical enough, but other restrictions... not so much. For example I was initially under the impression that the bonus missions that ask you to do a heroic don't give you anything, because they only seem to grant you your reward if the heroic is completed before the main mission (as opposed to at the same time). So if your main objective says to complete two missions, and you do a normal daily first and a heroic second, the heroic doesn't count for the bonus in my experience, meaning you need to make sure to always do any heroics first if you want to get credit for the bonus. The collected research you get from these bonus missions is actually quite good as it contains lots of prototype data plus a little bit of several of the other types.

Oh, and Makeb heroics are just totally screwed up in terms of credit. I found this forum post helpful for pointing out several of the missions from the terminal that don't count towards training Bessi. GSI missions don't work either in case you're wondering.

5. Bonus tip:

Not something "I wish I'd known" because I did find out about it in time, but at level 10 you're asked to have Bessi use her abilities in every role 500 times. That is a lot. By the time I had done everything else required at that level, I still needed about 300 more ability uses in each role. Fortunately, for tank and dps, you can just sic Bessi on a training dummy and go AFK for a while. For her to practice healing, I opted to engage a champion mob on Nar Shaddaa and let him punch me in the face for a while. This requires a little bit of attention, but not that much and at least it's kind of amusing (even if I had to do it several times over, because even with me practically doing no dps to him, Bessi's piddly heal-dps would eventually kill him).