Mid-Season Doldrums

It feels a bit funny to talk about mid-season when Galactic Season 7 has only been live for one and a half months and we know that it's supposed to last another four and a half months. However, I am level 69 out of 100 on Darth Malgus, so even with the bonus achievements in mind, it does feel like I'm reasonably close to the halfway point, which feels like a good time to talk about how things have been going so far.

In a nutshell, while I thought that everything about GS7 sounded solid on paper, I haven't been enjoying myself as much as I would've hoped. But let's start with the good and then go down from there.

What's going well

I do love that the weekly objective for the DvL bosses means that there's one guaranteed large group objective every week, because this helps to fill my guild's social nights. You could argue that it's not ideal if people only show up to tick their weekly boxes and don't want to hang around to actually be social afterwards, but from my perspective as a guild officer, I'd rather have people who are perhaps not that into the game right now show up at least briefly once a week to say hi than not show up at all. It's good for guild cohesion, basically.

What's going so-so

My plans to impose stricter limits on my investment in seasons on other servers have worked out well so far in the sense that I've been able to stick to them without suddenly having the urge to binge. However, it also hasn't increased the fun as much as I had hoped. When you're only aiming for four easy weekly objectives each week, this basically means that I do a bounty contract on every server (because that's the easiest/fastest one by far), get 200k Conquest points somehow, and the rest is usually some kind of combination of mission-related objectives. However, depending on the nature of said objectives it can still be oddly time-consuming and a bit samey to be doing them on all servers.

I'm still aiming to do the 25k Conquest points per day for the daily objective on each server at the moment as well, but I'm starting to wonder whether I shouldn't be cutting down on that too. With the final removal of any kind of seasons-related currency there just doesn't seem as much of a point to it (when previously the extra currency you'd get from the daily objectives certainly added up) as the one hundred levels themselves can be achieved extremely easily without that. It's still worth logging in at least four times a week for the free season points from the login rewards, but beyond that, I think I need to reconsider this one as well.

What's not going so well

When I gave the notion of Bounty Contract Week being live all season a thumbs-up, this came with the assumption that everything related to that event would be available too, including Conquest objectives. The latter has not been the case however, and I can only guess that these are still strictly tied to the Death Mark Conquest event, which has not come around so far this season and I'm not sure it will (since Bounty Contract Week is usually its main draw). As someone who's quite motivated by Conquest, this has been disappointing to me.

More importantly however, I'm just not that into seasons at the moment. I'm kind of reminded of how I had to cut back on my investment in seasons a bit during GS4 (after burning myself out a little during GS3) and there might be a bit of that at work again this time, but it's also the first time that I find myself really straining against the way seasons try to keep you engaged at all times.

What I mean by that is that things like login rewards and daily objectives are not a big deal while you're having fun anyway - they just provide a bit of extra reward and direction. However, when your interests shift and you kind of want to do other things for a while, these same incentives can start to feel like a bit of a ball and chain, as they demand more attention than you perhaps really want to give the game at that particular moment. Worst case, by the time the chain finally snaps, you'll actively resent the way it held you back until then and you'll actually feel negatively about going back to the game. I vaguely recall having feelings like that in regards to ESO's extremely valuable login rewards and all the various incentives that Neverwinter used to give me to keep me logging in multiple times a day. I actually talked about this a bit when login rewards were first introduced to SWTOR back in 2020.

Now, those login rewards were actually pretty mild, ultimately, but seasons are definitely doing that thing where they really push you to keep coming back and playing in order not to miss out on the rewards. They've become such an integral part of the game that it's wild to think that they were only added three and a half years ago.

The reason I'm really straining against this at the moment is that I'm having a lot of fun with the latest WoW expansion right now. And to be clear, by itself, that's not a dig against SWTOR in any way. While I've been continuously subscribed to the game since 2011, I've always played other games on the side and I've always gone through periods of being more and less invested in it. When WoW Classic came out back in 2019 for example, I was all over that and not very interested in SWTOR at all for several months, especially as the latter was also suffering from a period of pre-expansion doldrums at the time. The point is: that was okay. The game didn't have any FOMO mechanics back then that made me feel like I'd be punished for not logging in and not playing for a few days.

Nowadays however, things are different. I may feel like spending more time in WoW, but SWTOR "demands" that I log in daily to earn my Conquest points and do my seasons objectives every week or else I miss out. And yes, I know it's not that strict and it's not as if you can't take a break and still earn all the rewards. And I don't actually have to do anything. However, the point is that the game is a lot more demanding of your time than it used to be and I'm just finding myself nostalgic for the old days when that wasn't the case. Seasons are just the most obvious reminder of that.