Happy Birthday to the Shae Vizla Server!

One year ago today, the SWTOR devs surprised us all with the sudden and previously unannounced launch of the Shae Vizla APAC server. As someone who lives in Europe but nevertheless jumped right in just to see what it was all about, I had a lot of fun with the fresh server experience. This lasted for about two months, but once Galactic Season 5 and PvP Season 4 were over, activity on the server kind of dropped off a cliff.

Unlike many, I didn't stop playing there myself, but I did dial down my investment a bit, simply treating the server as equal to my other "secondary" servers where I'm mainly active for Galactic Seasons. I'm still in the same guild, my legacy level is up to 43, and while I've still only completed one class story, two other characters are very close to finishing theirs too, which is still more progress than I've made on that front on any other server bar my home on Darth Malgus. However, I've stopped trying to attend guild events that start at 1 a.m. my time (I don't know why all the raids seem to happen at what's lunch time in Sydney) and I no longer attempt to queue for PvP. Group content just isn't happening for me on Shae Vizla.

I wrote about the state of the server six months ago, and as far as I can tell, the situation hasn't changed much since then. You can still get things done if you can find a guild or community that organises events in your time zone, but looking at the Conquest board this week, the numbers actually look even smaller than on Leviathan at this point, indicating a further drop in activity.

I really wish I had something more uplifting to say to celebrate the server's birthday! I guess in another six months it will have outlived the original APAC servers, which were only online from March 2012 to August 2013?

Feel free to share your own Shae Vizla experiences in the comments.

7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

After watching the big Warcraft Direct stream yesterday, it was quite a contrast to spend time on SWTOR's 7.6 dev stream tonight. Smaller studio, fewer viewers, but also a much more relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughs. I was immediately overcome with an urge to make a bunch of gifs of the interactions between Eric Musco and Papa Keith, intending to post them on Bluesky, but it couldn't cope with me uploading any images at the time (I later learned it wasn't just me), so I'll be inserting them into this blog post instead, even if that may seem a bit random!

As usual, if you want the full rundown of every little detail, I recommend watching the recording of the stream yourself or reading a detailed summary elsewhere - Kal already has one up here for example. Over here I'm more choosy with what I talk about and won't mention everything, but I'll add some commentary to make it more interesting. Let's get on with it!

Topical and time-sensitive things first: There's a new Twitch drop for the next 14 days, an Ilum poster deco with a purple border. Handily livestream viewers were able to earn it right away simply by watching the stream as it only requires one hour of watch time. There'll also be another Twitch drop, a purple Vulptilla mount, once 7.6 launches. We weren't given an exact date for that, but from what they did say on the stream it sounds like it will be early December.

Also, effective immediately, there's a big 50% off sale on dyes going on! The interesting thing related to this was that they mentioned that they're planning to make changes to how dyes work soon... I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately jumped to the notion of making them unlockable in Collections, something I've seen people request more than once. I don't think that will happen though - dye sales have got to be too much of a money-maker for that - but I'm still curious to hear what they've got in mind once the time comes.

We got some info about the 7.6 story, and I tend to not go into too much detail about story previews in these posts, but I did want to note that Imperials will finally get to see Major Anri again, almost three years after Manaan, and that the story is supposedly going to be structured a bit differently, consisting of four threads you can advance in any order, about Shae Vizla, Darth Malgus, the Hidden Chain and Darth Nul's holocron respectively. I'm curious to see how that'll pan out - it could mean more content, but I've got to admit that personally I'm a little worried that "you can do them in any order" means that each "thread" will contain a lot of exposition/cut-scene watching and fewer interesting choices - but we'll see.

Unfortunately after all that talk about how interesting the new story is going to be, we won't actually get to see it at 7.6's release, because while the patch itself will still land as planned, they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere.

There was some talk about dynamic encounters and the new lair boss, but I won't go into that here as I already covered those topics in my post about the PTS from last week. They just confirmed that dynamic encounters will only exist on Hoth and Tatooine at launch, with the possible exception of Hidden Chain invasions, which might also happen on other planets from the sounds of it.

The new lair boss is also going to drop crafting materials for new augments, something that people had already caught on to some time ago but that hadn't been officially announced. These new augments will be better than the current gold augments. I guess this will offer a sort of gear progression without further raising overall item rating, though it does make me wonder whether the next gear reset perhaps isn't as far away as I thought.

There was some talk about new Cartel Market items, which I usually don't go into here either, but there was one thing that piqued my interest: there'll be a new decoration bundle called the Remote Outpost Bundle, and it'll come with a small amount of story/gameplay attached from the sounds of it. I was immediately reminded of the encrypted datacubes from back in the day and how people were not happy with those, though I guess a big part of that was that they came from inside Cartel packs, while this will be a direct purchase. I'll make sure to get it when it comes out and will let you know whether it's worth the money or not.

In terms of gameplay, there'll be a new UI feature called comlink to interact with terminals and characters in a more organic way without having to always resort to KOTOR-style cut scenes. They emphasised that this isn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations but should simply serve as another option for interactions where appropriate. The example they showed was of someone using a terminal and being given a prompt to enter a password, where in the current system that would bring up the KOTOR-style black bars and mute dialogue options like "enter code" or "walk away". They explained that they could also see this working for characters "texting" you.

PvP Season 7 will still start with the launch of 7.6 and bring an end to 8-man premades, as they'll once again be limited to four people max, and the devs are also disabling the old level 75 set bonuses in PvP to reduce the power of twinks. Not what I personally consider PvP's biggest problems right now, but better than nothing. What did stand out to me was that one of the new season rewards is actually going to be a proper emote instead of the previous "text-only" one, which might actually be something to look forward to for me.

As the stream was getting close to wrapping up, Eric and Keith dropped a few more surprises on us at the end. First off, we'll get a new mount as a free subscriber reward that introduces something new: the ability to have your (humanoid) companion ride in a sidecar beside you and a non-combat pet in the luggage rack. The preview looked hilarious and made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how much I'll use it but it'll be fun for a little while if nothing else. Plus I appreciate that they decided to make it a sub reward instead of a Cartel Market item. There'll also be two new mounts from dynamic encounter-related achievements that won't show your companion but will include your active mini pet.

Next they announced that they'll do a character name purge for the first time in a long time. If you're a subscriber, all your characters are safe, but if not, you'll want to log into any toons that haven't been logged into since January 1st of this year, else they will be flagged for a rename. I wonder if that'll give me a chance to claim Shintar without the funny i on Tulak Hord, the one server where I don't currently own the name... they also mentioned that they'll try to remember to do this a bit more often in the future to not have all these names taken up by inactive characters.

Finally, a big surprise at the very end: they're working on more art modernisation for planetary environments, but also for player characters. Musco immediately assured everyone that their number one priority was to not change the overall feel of the characters. The examples they showed looked really good, with just more detail on the facial textures and more gloss on the eyes. (When I tried to explain this to Mr Commando afterwards, he said that talking about shiny hair and eyes made me sound like I was trying to sell him a dog!)

All in all, a fun stream with lots of news and some interesting things to look forward to, though the story update being delayed with no clear ETA was a bit of a bummer. What was your favourite part of this stream?

Galactic Season 7 in Review

You might call it premature to review a season that's intended to be live for three more months, but I'm about 80% done with it myself (including my goals on the secondary servers) and I think that's good enough to pass judgement on it.

In a nutshell, that judgement is a resounding "meh", similar to last season, though for completely different reasons. I loved Season 6's stronghold focus (I still use the Copero stronghold a lot on all servers - even bought the matching utility bundle from the Cartel Market), but its story was disappointing and the grindy meta achievement infuriating, meaning the good and the bad kind of cancelled each other out, meaning that all things considered I felt kind of blah about it.

Season 7 had no such problems. There hasn't been anything particularly terrible about it... but unfortunately there hasn't been anything particularly great about it either. It's just been kinda boring in a way I honestly didn't expect.

When the season's theme was first announced, I thought the concept of tying it to an existing world event sounded interesting, and bringing back world bosses that had been removed from the game several years ago sounded like a good idea to me too. However, in practice the fact that there wasn't anything new going on kind of got me down after a while.

I had some fun unlocking bounty hunting achievements on the other servers, where I often hadn't touched Bounty Contract Week before, but on Darth Malgus I already got all those achievements about a decade ago, and there just wasn't anything left for me to chase after. Same thing with the DvL bosses - I know some guildies were happy to finally tick off the achievement to kill them all, but again, I already got that four years ago, and I had so many DvL tokens left over I didn't even really know what to do with them.

I can live with a season without any grand rewards (the white Loth kitten is cute but I don't feel a pet is on the same level as a companion or stronghold), I can live with a season without a story, but I need there to be something.

I even kind of missed the currency drops in a weird way, because at least finding a strange new currency among your loot drops gave you an indication that something was different, even if you weren't following the latest news about the game or paying attention to the seasons UI. This time there just wasn't anything going on in the open that made me feel like a season was actually happening, no gameplay that was different from usual, nor anything new and intriguing out to see in the world (I remember seeing one of the meditation shrines in Season 4 before I'd got to the point of knowing what they were for and they instantly grabbed my attention). It just felt like a whole lot of nothing special.

Even Season 1 felt like it had more of a "vibe" than this, and that had all those tedious daily objectives to kill insectoid mobs on different planets. I was not a fan of those at all, but at least "killing insectoids that you usually wouldn't care about" was a theme! This season's one-minute intro to provide a pretext for why killing two DvL bosses a week should count as "bounty hunting" just wasn't enough.

I did like that we had both a seasonal weekly objective that was easy to solo and one for groups every week, but that's kind of it in terms of things that stood out to me positively. More than anything, this season made me feel like the worst kind of jaded MMO veteran, simply because everything about it felt so much like "been there, done that".

If you had a really good time with this season, please do let me know in the comments! I'd love to hear how other people felt inspired to hunt bounties every week or found fighting the DvL bosses a really novel experience. However, for me it was all just a bit too old hat, and I really hope that the next season will actually have something new to offer for long-time players (even if seasons are inherently about replaying old content to some extent).

Impressions from the 7.6 PTS

A combination of PTS incentives and curiosity about the new dynamic encounter system got me to spend some time on the public test server this past week.

My aging PC doesn't have enough disk space to support having two versions of SWTOR installed nowadays, so I had to put the PTS on my laptop, but that actually worked out quite well this time around as I was travelling last week and had the laptop with me for evening entertainment anyway.

Only two planets have dynamic encounters on the PTS right now: Hoth and Tatooine. It's currently not clear whether that's all 7.6 will launch with or whether these planets were picked for focused testing and we'll be surprised with some more content once the patch goes live. There were some indicators on the PTS galaxy map hinting at dynamic events on other planets like Alderaan and Belsavis, but with no actual content available there so far.

One thing I originally wondered after seeing the sneak peek trailer was whether dynamic encounters would be more like World of Warcraft's world quests (as in, personal to you) or dynamic events in other MMOs (shared and the same for everyone). Interestingly, the answer turned out to be "both". There are two types of events, designated as either "group shared" or "encounter shared". In the former, your progress is personal, and the encounter continues to exist for other players on the map even after you've completed it. In the latter, everyone doing stuff contributes to the event's progression, and once the encounter completes, everyone gets their reward at the same time and it disappears from the map. The shared encounters are generally rarer and can still be soloed if nobody else is around, but they tend to require killing more mobs and can therefore feel like a bit of a slog if you're the only person in the area. On the other hand it's a lot of fun (in my opinion) if there are other players around and you can see things progress really quickly as everybody does their part.

In general gameplay terms, the encounters are about what you'd expect: a lot of kill x mobs and some clicking on shiny things, though there are some standouts where the devs clearly tried to be creative and come up with more varied activities. 

I don't think dynamic events are intended to be a new "main" gameplay mode, though depending on how many planets will get them when 7.6 launches, I'd be curious to see how much levelling you could get done by just doing dynamic encounters - as an experiment if nothing else! Realistically though, I think they are meant to be similar to side missions, just without all the picking up and handing in required. At max level they currently award a tiny number of tech fragments and Conquest commendations, small enough that they wouldn't make for a great primary source of either currency.

One thing that made me wonder a little was how much focus there is on highlighting these new dynamic encounters on the map. The galaxy map highlights planets that have them active, and on the planetary map they show up as big glowy diamonds. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it does seem an odd choice when the devs took multiple steps in the past to hide away exploration missions and/or make them less prominent because they were apparently confusing/distracting people. Surely new levellers will get a lot more distracted by all these big glowy indicators on their maps? I dunno.

I'm still a bit torn on whether to try the new lair boss on the PTS as well or not. On the one hand I prefer not to spoil myself when it comes to content like that and would rather see things for the first time on live, but on the other hand every bit of feedback might help with making the Propagator Core a better raid.

The initial round of forum feedback certainly hasn't looked too good. Players were asked what they thought of the fight's different phases, and everyone basically replied "what phases?" because by all accounts, it was just an extremely long slog against an enemy with a lot of hitpoints while trying to manage some bad stuff dropping on the floor.

There has since been another dev post on the forums that basically admitted that almost nothing about the fight was working correctly and that it will see massive changes with the next PTS update. Which is good in the sense that it means the tedious version people experienced in the first week wasn't at all final, though it also makes you wonder why and how an operations boss ended up being put on the PTS in that state in the first place (since you'd expect the devs to be able to verify that at least the very basics are functioning before asking people to play test). I guess I'll have a few more weeks to see how things develop and whether I want to have a go myself.