A Mini GTN Rant

It's been about a year now since the big revamp of the Galactic Trade Network, and I wanted to use the occasion to post some thoughts on how things have been going. Overall, the deflation of the economy due to the taxation changes has been absolutely bananas (which, to be clear, is a good thing), and the GTN has probably played at least a part in this. 

Transaction fees aside, the sales data it provides makes it obvious to potential buyers what other players have been willing to pay for an item in the past, so it's much harder to artificially drive up the price of things, and you can't hope to just fool someone into overpaying by making sure that you're the only one selling and putting a unreasonably high price tag on the item.

The only annoying thing about this is that you can't see this sales data if there isn't already an active listing, and the prices that the GTN "recommends" based on this sales data don't always make sense, in either direction. I saw this recently when opening some of the Cartel packs you get from the Galactic Seasons track on the Shae Vizla server, where the GTN is a lot more quiet.

First I got what I thought was a new-ish and pretty rare weapon which had no listings on the GTN. The system suggested I list it at 30 million credits and I was like "sure, that sounds reasonable for a rare weapon". Then I opened the listing I'd created and...

The historic price was less than half a million? Why in the world would you recommend that I try selling at 30 million then?! Needless to say that listing expired and I re-listed it at a lot less afterwards.

However, it works the other way round as well. Another Cartel Pack gifted me a bronze armour set that wasn't currently being sold on the GTN either. I know that those usually aren't worth that much, so I wasn't surprised that the recommended listing price was only 10k credits. But again, I checked the listing afterwards...

... and the historic range was ten times as much. Why do you do this to me, GTN? I'd really love to know where those numbers come from.

Also, whatever happened to those buy orders we were supposed to get with the new GTN? I was really excited about those but haven't heard anything about that feature in forever. I thought being able to add new functionality like that was partially the point of revamping the whole thing in the first place.

Once More With Feasting

I've been having a blast with the Feast of Prosperity for the past few weeks. Looking back at my blog archives, I really enjoyed it when it was first introduced in 2020 (Has it really only been four years?!), had a good time again in 2021 (when I also used the event to get my pacifist character to the then-level cap of 75) and was pleased to finish off the last achievement associated with the Feast in 2022.

Last year I only gave it a brief mention in the context of getting my pacifist to 80 and how that hadn't actually been all that satisfying, and I think that if you'd asked me then how active I was going to be during the event in 2024, I wouldn't have given myself very high odds. After all, I'd achieved everything that there really was to achieve back in 2022, right?

However, then seasons greatly increased my interest in strongholds and the devs added a bunch of new rewards to the Feast vendor - many of which were decorations - so off I went. Housing enthusiasts have to be such great customers for Broadsword, not just because they buy deco packs from the Cartel Market, but also because decoration rewards are the motivation that keeps on giving. With things like pets, mounts or armour sets, it's mostly a one-and-done deal, but when it comes to things like chairs, potted plants and rugs, you can never have too many, right?

One item in particular that caught my eye was the Regal Wall Garden, which is a gorgeous small planter that fits onto a small wall hook. Perfect for those tricksy walls in the Copero stronghold, and it fits the aesthetic there quite well too! However, it's 1,125 tokens a pop, so I had a lot of work to do.

Actually, that's the wrong way to put it. I had fun doing the Feast dailies and weeklies, and being able to buy more and more decos after each round just made everything even better.

I did all the weeklies on three to four alts per week, and even dabbled in the event a bit on other servers. Even on the notoriously small Leviathan server I managed to get into a world boss group for Trapjaw - it wasn't big, but it was big enough to kill him. (My Operative was also only level 25 - I didn't even realise you could pick up the dailies at such a low level, and Trapjaw's AoE absolutely wrecked me... after dying once, I had to stay far away and just shoot at him ineffectively from max range.) It was a great way to earn Conquest points too, as well as to get credit for this week's "do x missions as a trooper or agent" seasons objective.

I just found it striking how incredibly well the single-player and group content flow together during this event. I'd arrive on Nar Shaddaa and immediately try to get into a world boss group, but if I just missed the last one, the amount of time it took me to do the solo missions would be just about long enough for the next group to start forming, so it was always quick and easy to get everything ticked off for the day. The world bosses themselves are extremely casual-friendly and simple, and now with shared tagging you can get in on the action even if you're absolutely allergic to actually joining a group even for five minutes.

It's just been a joy all around, and all the (new) decos should provide motivation for me to keep taking part for years to come.

Adventures on Oricon

I don't really have anything too deep or meaningful to say this week, but just wanted to ramble a bit about doing dailies on Oricon. The change the devs made to daily areas with the Bessi patch still kind of fascinates me. It was very much a footnote to the actual venture, but dailies used to be one of the few endgame activities that were still largely gated behind a character's story progression, so seeing them get opened up account-wide with so little fuss just surprised me.

And it does seem a bit like... things weren't exactly optimised for this change in some ways, as I found out while questing on Oricon this past week. One of the weekly seasons objectives was to do exploration or repeatable missions in Empire space, and Oricon was one of the eligible planets.

I hadn't unlocked it at all on Shae Vizla yet, so I took my Sith warrior there to start the story. As I arrived in the base, I saw the daily mission terminal all lit up with quests and a little light went on in my head as well.

For those who don't know, the Oricon story requires you to do four simple missions as part of a storyline that eventually cumulates in you being sent into the Dread Fortress operation, and the dailies didn't used to unlock until you'd done the first three of those story missions. These dailies would then also be similar to the original one-time story quests, for example requiring you to destroy three terraforming devices when the storyline originally asked you to destroy five.

So I thought to myself: Wait, if I can pick up the dailies from the start, do I get a two-for-one? I picked up the first story mission to rescue Republic soldiers from escape pods, grabbed the daily mission with the same objective and indeed: every pod I opened gave me credit towards both! I love it when I get to make use of synergies like that.

Unfortunately, the smooth experience didn't last. I first started to run into problems when I got to the quest that requires you to locate a dark energy source by collecting "bioenergy enhancers" from the local mobs (ten for the one-time mission, five for the daily). I collected a whole bunch and then clicked on them to do the locating. One of the quests updated, but the other one didn't. I tried to use the item again, but it wouldn't let me because it kept saying that I'd already done that bit.

Somewhat annoyed, I proceeded into the phase for the quest and completed the one that was on the correct step. When I looked into my bags afterwards to try and use the bioenergy enhancers again for the second quest, they had disappeared, clearly "cleaned up" automatically due to me completing one of the missions. So I had to farm up another set, locate the dark energy source again, and repeat the encounter in the phase. Alright.

Things got worse in the watchtower. I defeated the various droids inside the control room, clicked on the final panel that's supposed to spawn Commander Zaoron and... nothing happened. This was when I noticed that only one of the two missions had updated correctly while the other one wasn't even on the right step. So I exited the phase again, reset the one that had progressed ahead of the other one and went through the whole rigmarole a second time. This time both missions updated successfully.

I watched the cut scene for the one-time mission and then... couldn't click on the holocron to complete the quest. I sighed and went back out once again, but at least one of the missions completed as I did so. I just reset the phase this time (instead of the whole mission) and went back in yet again, hoping that the game would be less confused now with only one quest left, and indeed, the holocron finally became clickable.

All in all, it wasn't the worst thing in the world, and I did get a lot of quests done in one run, but there was also a lot of trial and error with various resets involved. This is unfortunately the kind of thing that makes the game feel somewhat unpolished at times but at the same time isn't likely to get fixed because it's not a hard blocker and you can eventually push through with enough persistence.

Have you had any interesting experiences with the new daily zone unlocks for characters that haven't actually done that planet's story yet?

SWTOR Comes to the Apple Mac

A few weeks ago, Executive Producer Keith Kanneg published his Q3 Producer Letter. It's the kind of thing I would've looked forward to in the past, but more recently these have mostly been summaries of what happened in the last quarter instead of a preview of what's coming up in the next one, so not that exciting to someone like me who's mostly looking for announcements about the future.

Except for one piece of genuine news that was somewhat hidden away towards the end: that SWTOR is going to get a native Mac launcher soon. (They've since hosted a closed technical test with volunteers.) To which my reaction was... huh.

The last time I used a Mac must've been in my high school's computer lab when I was around fifteen, and I don't really tend to hear much about them either. My only "exposure" to them is due to our graphic designers at work using them. And while I see comments from people asking for SWTOR to come to consoles on social media every now and then, I couldn't recall the last time I'd seen anyone bring up a Mac client.

Of course, I then saw Intisar doing the virtual equivalent of somersaults on Discord, as he's a Mac user (which I didn't know) and was over the moon about this bit of news. So someone's happy!

I was curious to find out what Apple's market share is nowadays, but Google is full of contradictory information on that subject. This Wikipedia page has it at around 10%, but several sites claim it to be higher. Then again, general usage may be different from gaming market share anyway. The Steam hardware survey for example shows less than two percent of users on some version of MacOS.

So I can't say that this seems like a huge untapped market to me... especially since it's my understanding that SWTOR was already playable on Macs, though it required a non-trivial degree of faffing around with partitions or emulators. Then again, I can't claim that making the game easier to access for Mac users is a bad thing, and it may not be too bad in terms of effort vs. reward as they're not developing a whole native client, just a launcher (which is then supposed to automatically adjust the right knobs to make the game playable on Mac as far as I understand the process).

It's basically a slightly weird bit of news as a PC user, because while it sounds like a good thing theoretically, it's not something for which we are able to see any real impact on our end. I really just wanted to give a shout-out to this piece of news because it does feel significant in the sense that this isn't the kind of thing we often see a developer do for an MMO that's been out for close to thirteen years, and it does once again show the SWTOR team's commitment to maintaining and expanding the game for years to come.

7.6 Sneak Peek!

I was planning to write about something else today, but then as I was browsing YouTube last night, a new video from SWTOR's official account suddenly popped up in my recommendations. Whaaa...?!

Here we've all been sitting around, waiting for them to announce the next livestream, and they surprise us with an actual teaser like that. I like it! While I've enjoyed the livestreams over the last few years, they do kind of seem targeted at fans who are already highly invested, while a four-minute video talking about upcoming patch features should be much more accessible to a more mainstream audience.

The three major points of interest from the video are: the new type of gameplay that's coming in 7.6, the new lair boss, and the upcoming PTS.

The new type of gameplay that will take us back to existing planets is called "dynamic encounters" and is basically... world quests? Dynamic events? Something like that. We don't know enough details (such as how often they'll occur, and how much credit will be shared vs. personal) to say which of the comparable features in other MMOs they will resemble the most, but we get the basic idea: They'll be a bit like quests, but instead of picking them up in town, you'll just find them popping up on your map.

This seems like a smart direction for the dev team to take, as it'll allow them to add more things for players to do at all levels without needing more voice acting or fancy cinematics, plus it's likely to make the open world feel a bit more alive as you should encounter more players running around on old planets.

I'm tentatively excited, though it remains to be seen how engaging this stuff turns out to be in the long term, and of course there's always the question of rewards. I thought it was kind of funny that the example in the video showed the player getting literally nothing for completion (obviously since it's still a work in progress) but it does make you wonder. XP and credits seem like a given, but the game already throws plenty of those at you everywhere else too. Is another source of Conquest commendations at max level going to excite anyone? But then, SWTOR has never been as highly reward-driven as other MMOs, so I really wouldn't expect these to suddenly start handing out higher-level currency or anything like that. We'll see.

In fact, we should find out more soon enough as this stuff will be going on the Public Test Server! And there'll even be a new reward for going on there and helping with the testing: a special mini pet. I just thought this was funny since I have a guildie who asks every time the PTS goes up whether there's a new reward, and usually there isn't... so I outright told him at one point that there doesn't seem to be much point in asking that question every time. I of course had to ping him immediately once I saw the video, hah!

The other thing we'll get to try on the PTS will be the new lair boss, a droid called Propagator Core XR-53, found on Ilum among the remnants of the Emperor's old space station. Unsurprisingly, like R-4 Anomaly, the fight won't have a 16-person mode, which I know most people don't care about but I'll keep moaning about it anyway because as a guild who has done and continues to do 16-mans, I miss that option. (When R-4 was a seasons objective the other week and we had 13 people on, that was quite challenging to sort out.)

Aside from that though, XR-53 will have both a story and a veteran mode, and I'm curious to find out what it'll be like. I crave more group content, but R-4 was such an awful experience for me at launch that I'm also still a bit wary of their current design philosophy in that area, so I'm hesitant to get too excited just yet.

What are you most interested in learning more about in regards to patch 7.6?

Looking for Good Views

The Best View in SWTOR contest has returned once again! I noted last year that we were at risk of running out of planets to feature, and that has indeed resulted in a rather strange selection this time around. Instead of the usual ten planets, there are only five eligible locations this year, namely:

• Ziost
• CZ-198
• Section X
• Minboosa District
• The Black Hole

Aside from the fact that none of these are among the most picturesque of places, some of the choices struck me as a bit odd. CZ-198 and Ziost make sense as these were indeed among the last few planets/moons yet to be featured, but for some reason Darvannis was still left out. I know it's not the most exciting place to look at, but neither are most of these!

The Minboosa District is technically part of Hutta, which was featured before, but it's a new area, so including it made a certain kind of sense. What's surprising is that the Interpreter's Retreat and Kessan's Landing weren't included using the same kind logic.

Instead we got the Black Hole and Section X, which are separate maps, sure, but since they are old they were technically already included as part of Corellia and Belsavis last year. I recall that at least one of the finalists for Corellia was in fact a shot taken in the Black Hole, and my own submission for Belsavis was a shot of Section X. I guess I can simply submit the exact same image again? Just seems a little odd.

Anyway, last year I used the occasion of the contest returning as an opportunity to showcase my own submissions from the year before, but this year I'd like to talk about my observations about three of this year's locations instead.

Ziost is of course a unique planet in the sense that it has a "before" state that only exists during the storyline and which is very different from the permanent "after" state in which we get to do dailies. I had several alts with the Ziost storyline active and thought I'd be clever by taking screenshots on these otherwise impossible to access maps, but I've got to admit I liked none of them enough to submit in the end. Looking out at the skyline in front of the People's Tower certainly made me rethink the impact of Vitiate's actions that day, but the buildings honestly looked a bit basic and like the designers intentionally didn't put that much work into them, knowing that they would live in a phase only used for a single storyline where nobody would spend a lot of time marvelling at the scenery (and who would blame them).

Somewhat basic-looking Ziost skyline

I can see why CZ-198 was saved until the end because while it's an extremely popular daily location, it basically just consists of a landing platform and some indoor spaces. I look forward to seeing whether someone actually manages to come up with a good shot of the place, because I certainly didn't.

The Minboosa District mostly consists of a lot of swamp and pipelines (and I learned that the annoying Xuvva spawns that can see through stealth are not limited to the storyline but just always there it seems), but while scouting the area for good shot locations I was surprised to realise that there's actually a whole sub-zone that we never go to during the storyline. I didn't think it was particularly pretty so I didn't take a picture of it, but it did make me wonder what was up with that. With Broadsword's more limited resources nowadays, it seems odd to have such a large chunk of an already relatively small map not serve any purpose.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this year's contest. It's worth noting that the devs have acknowledged that they're basically out of planets now and that they're thinking about what other topics future screenshot contests could be about, such as strongholds or outfits. I'm not sure how that would work because surely then it'd more about building a good-looking outfit/stronghold rather than about being able to take good screenshots of the world we all share? Personally I think something like flashpoints might work better, but we'll see. If you want to enter the current competition while the going is still hot, you have until the 20th of October.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: September 2024

This post is a few days late because I briefly forgot that September only has thirty days and then figured since we were already in October anyway, there was no rush anymore to get it out as soon as possible. I once again didn't have any interesting links to share in August (in fact, when I opened my draft at the end of the month it was literally empty), but in September my link-collecting endeavours were more fruitful again.

• Earlier in the month I promoted my appearance on Ivano 1337's PvP podcast, and on the day of recording he told me that he was actually already about to talk to his next guest that same evening. That episode released a few days later and had him talking to - what shall we call him... controversial personality Snave. I have no love for Snave myself - I played Republic on The Red Eclipse before streaming became super popular, and being stomped by Snave's Imperial premades and then being publicly ridiculed for losing on his stream was generally enough to make me stop queueing for the evening. And that's without even going into any of the other reasons most major content creators won't go near him... but I will say that his chat with Ivano was interesting. They also recorded themselves playing a couple of warzones at the end. Funny thing is that for all the reasons to dislike Snave, I actually agree with him about objectives in warzones.
• In the blogosphere, commenter Yeebo (who also has his own blog) finally got around to publishing the two posts about SWTOR he'd been telling me about for a while. The first one is about the "Knights of" era and the months that followed immediately after, and how that content put him off the game for a while. The second one is about how he came back to SWTOR at the start of this year and was pleasantly surprised by the new content he found, and how he thinks the game is actually in a much better place now. Happy ending! (For the time being.)
• The second variety blogger I saw writing about SWTOR last month was Bhagpuss, in a post titled "Back to the future", which was at least partially inspired by reading Yeebo's posts mentioned above. However, he was a lot less enthused and immediately lost interest again as far as I can tell, as there was no follow-up. Still, I appreciated his perspective. I thought it was interesting how disconnected he felt from his characters upon returning for example, when usually people cite feeling more connected to their characters as one of SWTOR's strengths.
• Finally, the SWTOR subreddit actually yielded a couple of posts last month that I found particularly amusing/interesting. On the amusing front, we had this post by someone whose Alderaanian trees were going bonkers - I've got to admit I quite liked the idea of in-game wind moving the leaves (even if it probably shouldn't look quite like that).
• On the "just interesting" front, we had this post by a now deleted user who talked about how transferring from Satele Shan to Star Forge was a complete game changer for them. The topic of server populations has been on my mind a lot after my experiences with doing seasons on all the servers and seeing how dramatically different things can be from one server to the next. You don't have to agree with everything the poster says, but I thought there were some interesting conversations sparked in the comments.