Around the SWTOR-sphere: December 2024

It's the end of December, which means that I successfully made it through another year, and I was actually able to keep up with this series pretty well! Summer was a bit of a quiet season where I skipped a couple of months when I didn't really have much to share, but other than that I've managed to find some things to recommend pretty much every month.

• December seemed to be a month for more casual players to come back to SWTOR, whether it was because of the anniversary celebrations or because of the threat of the impending name purge for inactive characters. Roger from Contains Moderate Peril was inspired to return by the latter and wrote down some thoughts about his most recent experiences in "Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic Part 3". He also made a separate post about dynamic encounters. If the "part 3" in the title of the first post makes you wonder where parts one and two are, the answer is that those were made in 2022 and can be found here and here respectively.
• Another MMO blogger that gave the game another spin was Syp from Bio Break, who decided to make a new smuggler for what's probably the sixth time or so. I'm always kind of surprised he isn't more curious about all the class stories he's never seen before. Think I'm exaggerating his love for smugglers? Check out his blog's archive for the SWTOR tag.
• Speaking of personalities from the wider MMO space, if you haven't seen it yet, you'll definitely want to check out Josh Strife Hayes' magnum opus of a video called "The Ultimate MMO Tier List (Backed by SCIENCE) (sort of)". It's (obviously) not about SWTOR in specific, but SWTOR is included in the ranking. If you do want to know more about his thoughts about that game in specific, I did write about it when he gave it its own dedicated review back in 2022.
• Looking at SWTOR content creators in specific, Kal from Today in TOR posted a great dev interview with Ashley and Caitlin this month in which they talked about things like lore and their writing process, which was extremely insightful if you're interested in that kind of stuff at all. Full disclosure: part of why I was so pleased with this interview was that Kal collected questions from the public to submit for the interview, and literally half the questions they chose to answer were ones submitted by me. (Others may have proposed similar ones, I don't know, but the point stands that I apparently ask good questions.)
• Meanwhile Swtorista decided to go down the rabbit hole of Rare Blue and Purple World Drop Gear in SWTOR, which is such a convoluted and historically complicated system it makes my head spin, and I'm impressed that she was interested enough in the subject to actually do the research and put it all together. I know it's a meme that "fashion is the real endgame" but I'm not sure even World of Warcraft has as many content creators posting about how to collect outfits as SWTOR does.
• On the PvP front, Ivano 1337 caught my eye with his video "SWTOR 7.6 PVP TIER LIST | Best Classes for 8v8 Warzones". Now, tier lists can be entertaining content by themselves, but one thing I appreciate about Ivano's content (and I think I mentioned this before) is that as a more casual PvPer myself, I will often notice that something feels "off" somehow, but not being an expert in the field I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is wrong. In this specific case, I've been doing a lot of my PvP as Vigilance Guardian/Vengeance Juggernaut, which more recently just hasn't felt as good for some reason. Seeing Ivano put their current strengths and weaknesses into such clear terms while also ranking them as the weakest of the Guardian/Jug specs in the current environment was a real a-ha moment for me. Since then I've respecced to skank tank and while it hasn't suddenly improved my win rate (probably because I'm still figuring out what I'm doing) it's been really refreshing and a lot more fun. Not to say I necessarily encourage everyone to play whatever's the latest flavour of the month, but if you're struggling to make a particular spec work for you, understanding why that is and how you might have a better experience is really helpful I think.
• Finally, YouTuber /JawaFace got very excited about the introduction of the new companion mount with patch 7.6 - just for said excitement to turn into bitter disappointment when it turned out that his favourite Jawa Blizz doesn't fit into the sidecar for some reason. He expressed his feelings in a creative way with a short video simply called "Companion Mount", which gave me a good chuckle. Are you seeing this, devs?
  

Speculating About Galactic Season 8

We got another Executive Producer Letter last week, and again it was mostly a summary of what happened in the game over the past few months, with only a couple of vague hints as to what's to come in the new year. Personally I didn't think too much about this at first, but then I saw several friends go absolutely wild with speculation about one particular line, which I thought was quite entertaining in itself, so I thought it would be fun to compile all the theories I've seen in a post as well as to add my own thoughts.

The line that got everybody talking was this one:

[Our next Galactic Season] will be a fun one as we throw you into some content you may not have played in a bit...  

The intriguing bit is of course the question of what's "content you may not have played in a bit". I think there are only two things we can exclude for certain here: content that is very popular (because people are presumably playing it all the time), and content that is no longer in the game (because then there would be no "may" about whether we haven't played it recently).

The main categories of content I could see Keith referring to here are as follows:

• Old side content that people maybe do for a bit when they first start playing, but then get what they wanted out of it or simply get bored: Bounty Contract Week, which formed the basis for GS7, would fall into that category for me.
• Content that just isn't very popular with the majority of the player base for some reason or another: A prime example of this one would be Galactic Starfighter, which does have a passionate community that loves it, but it's extremely small compared to the player base as a whole.
• Content that isn't very rewarding: These activities may be fun to do once or twice, but there's just very little incentive to repeat them. The main example I can think of here would be uprisings - while I've never been a huge fan of them myself, people sure did run them a lot back during Knights of the Eternal throne when they were a prime source of Command XP. Nowadays their rewards feel pretty laughable for the effort: I recently ran some during Total Galactic War for the Conquest points, but being awarded ten tech fragments at the end almost felt insulting.
• Content that may well be fun and appealing, but isn't very accessible for some reason or another. Here my prime example would be Kuat Drive Yards (a flashpoint people used to farm like crazy when it first came out) no longer being in the group finder since 7.0. 

I think the thing that jumps out as an immediate problem is that in each of these cases there's a reason the content isn't being done as much as it used to, and simply making it central to a new season wouldn't automatically solve whatever's keeping people from engaging with it right now.

For example I've seen it suggested that the next season could be centred on Relics of the Gree, the same way the current season had Bounty Contract Week active at all times. This wouldn't be the worst thing in the world as I've always enjoyed the Gree event, but unless the devs add at least some new rewards to the reputation vendor, I fear I'd quickly suffer from the same kind of "been there, done that a hundred times" boredom I experienced during GS7.

I also think that the devs wouldn't make a season purely focused on group content. As much as I enjoy playing with others myself, I think that having a whole season centred on one particular type of group content, be it uprisings or flashpoints, would not sit well with a lot of players considering how solo-focused the game has become. I also don't think that the season would be about anything that's particularly difficult, such as veteran or master mode chapters.

I think a Starfighter season could work, if only because they could simply call it space-themed and have GSF-related objectives for those who're brave enough to PvP and on-rails space mission objectives for those who'd rather stick to PvE and solo play, similarly to how GS7 had both the soloable bounty contract objectives and the world boss objectives for groups. My only concern here is that space combat in any variety doesn't seem to be that popular with the player base as a whole. Anyone remember when the devs were first hyping up the "Super Secret Space Project" that turned out to be GSF? I was never quite sure how they expected that to turn out...

Do you have any thoughts on what Keith's hint might have been about? I've really enjoyed seeing people's ideas (even if I've got to admit that the basic notion of another season focused on old - or worse, unpopular - content doesn't currently excite me). I'm curious to find out next year whether the speculation came anywhere close to reality or whether we've ended up barking up the wrong tree.

Lair Bosses Ranked!

I was wondering how to write about the new lair boss added with patch 7.6 without being too repetitive, seeing how I already put down some thoughts on the fight (at least about its difficulty tuning) after killing it on the PTS. I finally settled on this idea, to write about all the lair bosses currently in the game and rank them, seeing how there aren't that many of them and I haven't talked about the others all that much in the past either.

1. Xenoanalyst II

My favourite lair boss is still the very first one they ever added to the game: Xenoanayst II from the Gree event. The concept of a fight that is openly just a test of your strength rather than hostility towards you has always tickled me (I liked that about Colicoid War Game too), and it always cracks me up how the boss is openly jubilant at the end after you beat him because you've done so well.

The mechanics require everyone to do their part on veteran mode but are fairly straightforward and easy to understand, while story mode is easy to pug with pretty much any group. The random chance to get Jawas during the species comparison is a fun little Easter egg, and reward-wise, it's always worth getting a bit more of the Gree-specific event currency. People like farming the boss for his rare mount drop as well.

The fact that he's only available for a few weeks each year also makes it impossible to ever overdose on the guy, so there's that.

2. Propagator Core XR-53

Yes, I honestly think that the new lair boss is the best boss we've had of this type that isn't tied to a Conquest event. Story mode is tuned in such a way that you can kill it with a pug without needing to give long explanations of anything, yet it also isn't impossible to die if you mess up enough. Veteran mode is a challenge, with several interesting mechanics that can be dealt with in more than one way and most of which have a decent margin for error, meaning that consistent mistakes do make things considerably harder, but there are very few things that will turn your attempt into an instant wipe. The dps check is tight for a standard ops group setup but not insurmountable, and you can also play with the group setup to squeeze more dps out of your raid.

Other things that make it good are the fact that it's very easily accessible, with the entrance being located right inside your faction's main base on Ilum. I don't think this is something that really matters a lot for ops in general, but when you're getting a group together to kill only one boss, you don't want to spend too much time faffing around just to get there.

In the same vein I like that there's a little bit of trash for flavour, but it's extremely quick to get past and doesn't really slow you down.

Finally, I know not everyone's excited about a new tier of augments, but I like that there's a reason to actually visit this boss in specific. Chasing better gear isn't as much of a motivation in SWTOR as it is in other MMOs, but I do think us raiders do appreciate a bit of a carrot to lure us in and make it worthwhile to do new content every now and then. I do suspect that whenever these augments become obsolete, the boss's appeal will also be somewhat diminished.

3. The Eyeless

The second lair boss that's tied to a recurring event is another one of my favourites. His mechanics are very simple on both story and hard mode, but he always feels like a fun romp. Someone always feels the need to comment on his perfectly sculpted butt cheeks, and on hard mode, at least one of the melee always dies to the very obvious and very easy to avoid AoE smash, but it won't cause you to wipe.

Like with Xeno, limited availability and drops that always retain their usefulness are other points in this guy's favour. The reason I rank him slightly below Propagator is that his mechanics are a bit basic.

4. Hive of the Mountain Queen

While we're now getting to the bottom half of the list, 4th place overall still isn't all bad, as it's effectively second place for bosses that aren't tied to Conquest events. Hive of the Mountain Queen's strongest point is that it's a very flavourful operation, with moody environments, interesting trash, and a fight that uses the theme of "insect queen using her minions to fight you" to great effect.

The reasons I rank it slightly lower is that I think the veteran mode is a bit overtuned, and while the trash is very interesting the first time you do it, it does feel like a tad much for frequent repeat visits. Also, the Queen basically offers no interesting loot (which was even a problem when the fight first came out!) - there's technically a rare companion from what I hear, but it's apparently so rare that few people have ever even seen it.

5. Toborro's Courtyard

I wasn't a fan of Toborro's Courtyard when it first came out, and I still struggle to find a lot of nice things to say about it today. I guess story mode is easy enough to pug, and veteran mode feels like it has an appropriate difficulty level as well. The mechanic of having to blow up barrels during the fight, as well as having to flit in and out of the boss's range (because he's completely static but does that laser beam of death every so often) are mildly interesting.

The problem is that you have to repeat the same couple of moves in the exact same way for far too long, which turns the hard mode version of the fight into a tedious exercise in struggling not to lose focus out of sheer boredom. There also isn't any interesting loot to be had, and the fact that prepping the barrels gets you stuck in combat, making it impossible to do a proper ready check before the pull, is a bit of a nuisance (even if "jump if you're ready" is always good for a bit of nostalgia).

Finally, the location is also a bit annoying to get to. I like Makeb as a planet, but navigating all the different mesas is not easy, and getting to the courtyard requires riding through a pretty trash-filled area that is likely to force you to dismount and fight for a bit.

6. Colossal Monolith

I can imagine that some people might question my choice to put this fight at the very bottom of the list, making an argument that it should be above Golden Fury at the very least, if not higher up. I will give you that the Mololith has more interesting mechanics, but I still dislike him all the same. Both story and hard mode feel overtuned for what they're supposed to be (I've actually never killed this guy on 8-man VM to this day), and while you could argue that his mechanics may be interesting, several of them are what I refer to as "circles for circles' sake", meaning it makes no sense whatsoever in universe that you stop this guy from hurting you by having people jump into coloured floor tiles around his head on cue (I always disliked that about Underlurker as well). Like, what's even supposed to be happening there diagetically? Maybe I'm a sucker for caring about this stuff, but I actually find it more enjoyable when boss fight mechanics align with abilities that actually make sense in universe, and Golden Fury at least has that going for it.

Additionally, the Monolith is yet another boss that drops nothing of interest and is kind of a pain to get to. There's pretty much always someone who needs a summon because they haven't unlocked Ziost yet, and if you're unlucky, it will then turn out that someone else can't even accept the summon because they don't have their ship yet. Just being able to get to a boss that isn't even that much fun to fight shouldn't be this much of a hassle.

Have you had a chance to defeat the XR-Propagator Core on Ilum yet? If so, what did you think of the fight? And do you agree or disagree with my rankings?

My 13th Year of SWTOR Blogging

With SWTOR's birthday comes this blog's 13th birthday! And it's been a good year for the blog as well - I think I might actually manage to hit 100 posts by the end of the year, which would be a feat I haven't achieved since 2019. And yes, nobody is setting me any targets, but it does feel nice to know that it's not simply a matter of my activity always going downhill over time. 

In fact, I thought it would be fun to create a little table showing the number of posts I've made across both this and my other gaming blogs over the years. If you just count SWTOR and WoW, 2024 was actually my third most prolific year since I started posting! Then I remembered that I also maintained a blog about Neverwinter Online for a few years, and while those posts tended to be very short (and I'm not sure they should be given the same weight to be honest), it skewed the numbers into a whole different direction. Apparently my busiest year altogether was 2016, for some reason...? 2020 coming in second at least makes some sense, what with the pandemic and all that.

Year	Total Blog Posts	about SWTOR	about WoW	about NWO
2009	87		87
2010	181		181
2011	115	5	110
2012	155	149	6
2013	116	109	7
2014	163	115	20	28
2015	190	107	17	66
2016	229	146	32	51
2017	164	113	12	39
2018	185	103	9	73
2019	156	103	39	14
2020	213	96	64	53
2021	154	76	57	21
2022	139	75	62	2
2023	159	94	65
2024 (so far)	168	98	70

Anyway, coming back to this blog in specific, it feels to me like it's been a good year. I felt like I was engaged with the game pretty consistently, which was reflected in an urge to write about it pretty consistently as well.

In January I was still busy dissecting some of the content that had come with December's 7.4 patch, such as graphics updates made to the starter planets, the new GTN or our continued research into Basilisk droids. I was also still heavily into playing on the Shae Vizla server, which had launched only two months prior. In an effort to do better by my fellow content creators, I started my "Around the SWTOR-sphere" column at the end of the month, which I've been able to keep up with pretty consistently over the course of the year and which was (to me) surprisingly well-received.

In February, I still wrote about some adventures on Shae Vizla, such as me replaying the Sith warrior class story for the first time in ages and musing about the server's decreasing activity levels. I also wrote about more evergreen topics such as missing Kuat Drive Yards or being very impressed by the Republic saboteur choices on Dantooine and Manaan. A dev stream gave us a preview of patch 7.4.1 and beyond, and I gave my opinions on it.

The patch actually arrived in March, which saw me checking out two of the new date nights and going all in with Galactic Season 6. I started a series where I documented my various visits of public strongholds for the weekly seasons objective, which ended up being unexpectedly popular with a a certain segment of my readership, and I decided to revive the weekly Galactic Seasons diary I'd kept in Season 1.

The next two months were pretty much entirely consumed by these diary entries plus more stronghold drop-ins, with the only deviations being a tale of a crazy Conquest adventure in April, and thoughts on the 7.5 dev livestream in May as well as the situation on the Shae Vizla server after six months.

In June, my Galactic Seasons activities slowly wound down (though not before hitting legacy level 50 on Star Forge, which was a notable milestone to me) and patch 7.5 launched. I had fun with the new Spring Abundance Festival and really enjoyed the latest story update, though I also expressed some concerns about the state of PvP.

July was a wild grab bag including another dev livestream, me quitting Twitter, mount sale shopping tips and my first impressions of the new venture system. I also put a bit more thought into pieces about my favourite post-launch story updates and my strange relationship with playing male characters.

August brought with it the return of the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event, and I mused on some evergreen topics such as achievements I would add to old content and how flashpoints could become a bigger part of SWTOR's endgame again. At the end of the month, Galactic 7 started. And that's still going on until February! That's one long season.

In September I was already hit my the mid-season doldrums, so I instead spent time on game-adjacent things like Twitch drops, going on a podcast, or musing about the next expansion.

October got me more excited again with the return of the Best View in SWTOR contest and a surprise teaser video for 7.6 generating hype. I also had fun revisiting the Feast of Prosperity and grinding currency for flower pots (no, really).

November saw another dev stream about 7.6 as well as me visiting and commenting on content on the PTS several times. I also raised my glass to the Shae Vizla server's first birthday.

And this month of course we got patch 7.6 as well as all that entails, and I'll have more posts about different aspects of it to come. Also, I had another crazy Conquest adventure with my guild...

Thanks for another year of reading along, whether you're currently playing SWTOR yourself or not, whether you're an old-timer or someone who only just found the blog recently, whether you just read along quietly or leave comments sometimes. My interactions with other players through this blog are definitely an important part of what keeps the game fun for me.

SWTOR Is a Teenager Today

... and I'd totally forgotten until other people reminded me on social media. I feel bad because I usually have this post prepared quite some time in advance, but the Christmas period is often stressful for me and this year has certainly been... something. Anyway, it's not too late to celebrate!

But first, the usual collage of my main character with a new image added for 2024!

2024 was the developers' first full year under Broadsword instead of Bioware, and as I already noted in June when it had been twelve months since the original announcement, not much actually changed from a player's perspective. Contrary to some people's expectations, the game did not go into maintenance mode. (Seriously, the way I see people throw that word around on social media - also when talking about other games - just makes me roll my eyes at this point. I feel like it's becoming the new "[game] is dead" in terms of how utterly meaningless the phrase is becoming.)

As it stands, Star Wars: The Old Republic continued the last couple of years' trend of releasing two major patches per year, with smaller patches which are mostly tied to seasons added in-between. Major highlights from the past year included the new world event added in spring, a meaty story update that came with a new planetary map added to Hutta, the venture system giving us a new companion with a story to earn in game, Twitch drops becoming a thing (again), the addition of the Mac launcher (which is now in open beta!), and with the most recent patch a new operations boss and a new public event system. Aside from that we had more seasons (one of which included a new stronghold), date nights, plus all kinds of new art modernisations, not to mention my favourite bug fix ever: the return of non-combat pets. Not too shabby when you add it all up like that, eh?

Here are my birthday posts from years past if you want to make comparisons to what I thought of years gone by at the time:

Happy Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 2nd Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy Third Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 4th Birthday, SWTOR!
Five Years of SWTOR
Six Years of SWTOR
Seven Years of SWTOR
Eight Years of SWTOR
Nine Years of SWTOR
Happy 10th Birthday, SWTOR!
Eleven Years of SWTOR
SWTOR Turns Twelve Today

To many more! I'm looking forward to seeing the story content that was meant to come with 7.6 and had to be postponed, as well as seeing what else the devs have in store for us in the new year. I know I wrote a post back in September about when we'll get a new expansion, in which I was not very optimistic about that prospect, but I've actually changed my mind about that a bit since 7.6. I'm not sure 2025 will be the year when it happens, but I'll just say that I've got a hunch that the devs have got something bigger planned again for the future. I can't wait to find out!

Dynamic Encounters Are Here and They Are Fun

I have to admit I wasn't immediately racing to check out dynamic encounters after the patch went live last week. Sure, I was looking forward to doing them eventually, but after completing fifty of them on the PTS, I figured I knew what I was going to be in for and didn't feel the same urgency to find out "what the new thing was like" that I sometimes feel when a patch adds new content. Plus I figured that things might be a bit overcrowded for the first couple of days and wanted to avoid that too.

When I finally set out a few days later, I was kind of surprised by how different the experience was to the PTS. Not dramatically, mind you, the basic system is still the same - but there were some changes that I absolutely didn't expect (beyond the obvious bug fixes like Republic characters no longer being prompted to kill Jedi in one dynamic encounter - that felt so wrong on the PTS).

For example, I'd noted on the PTS that encounters tagged as "encounter shared" would progress at the same pace for everyone in the area, just to then disappear once completed. This has been changed on live so the encounters loop endlessly (for the duration of the encounter anyway), which was initially kind of confusing to me. I don't think this is a bad change, mind you, just different, and it might affect how you want to prioritise different encounters when several interesting ones are up at once.

The number of events that are active on the map at the same time has also been reduced, at least on Hoth - my screenshot from the PTS showed 15 of them up at once, and I did in fact note at the time that I thought this was a bit overwhelming from a visual point of view at least. However, I didn't expect the number of active encounters to go down, as the general feedback on the forums seemed to be that the more active Hoth was preferable to the more quiet Tatooine. I would've expected the devs to up the number of events on Tatooine and not reduce the numbers on Hoth. Again though, this is not a complaint; it was just surprising to me. It does probably help with funnelling more people into doing the same encounters together, even if it means that it takes longer until certain ones come up in the "rotation".

Finally, there were some small changes - for example I quite enjoyed the ice fishing encounter on the PTS, but I was confused by the instructions to "look for the shadows" and I had the most success fishing by just plopping the fishing droid down on the cracks in the ice - I eventually figured it was meant to function similarly to certain GSI missions where you're meant to put your seeker droid over specific, static ground markers. I left feedback that I thought the instructions where unclear and expected those to be updated (if anything was going to happen at all) - but instead I found that on live, there are flitting shadows to target that never appeared for me on the PTS! And even funnier, when you catch a fish it appears to kill an actual invisible mob somewhere, as you get Conquest points and an "ugh"-style death sound plays. I just thought that was unexpectedly hilarious.

I've just been having a lot of fun doing dynamic encounters in general - I haven't been grinding them heavily, but have just been doing a few on both Hoth and Tatooine every day until I've completed both of the daily planetary "kill enemies" Conquest objectives. It's been nice to see more people out and about in the open world, with the new encounters proving quite popular at all times of day despite not offering any huge rewards.

In general it feels to me like these have the potential to fill a kind of gap in content that I didn't even realise existed, when you just want to play a bit but don't necessarily have the time or focus to dig into a piece of story or even a round of dailies. Dynamic encounters make it easy to play as little or as much as you like, and I've found them quite great as something to do while sitting in the PvP queue as well if pops take a bit of time.

I'm curious how long it will take me to complete all the related achievements, as the random nature of the events and the fact that only a limited number are up at any given point means that some encounters can prove kind of elusive. However, I'm in no rush as I'm happily just enjoying what we got and I look forward to (hopefully) seeing this system expanded to more planets in future patches.

Name and Game

It was only really a footnote on the list of interesting things to come with patch 7.6, but to me the fact that the devs were finally going to release some old and inactive character names was the most exciting patch feature by far. While talking to other long-time players, we were unable to recall for certain the last time this was done, with the best guess being that it was over ten years ago (!). Obviously some names were lost and reclaimed during server merges, but still... a decade of forgotten throwaway alts taking up names had made coming up with new and unique names quite challenging by this point.

I also found it interesting to watch the reactions of different kinds of players to the announcement, especially from ones that were inactive at the time. I mean, I generally try to take people's grievances seriously even if I don't necessarily agree, but some of the complaints I saw were really quite bizarre, with people writing veritable essays about how they cared so much about their character names and Broadsword was evil for threatening to take them away, and then it'd turn out that they hadn't actually played the game in five years and considered the mere act of logging in to secure their names an unreasonable effort.

What really surprised me though were all the positive reactions I saw: people basically just viewing the name purge as a reminder to re-download the game and get back into playing and even giving Broadsword money. Clearly they should do this more often if that's all it takes to make people resubscribe!

Also, if you missed out on your opportunity to secure your existing character names for whatever reason and your names were "released", don't worry, you're actually not that badly off, because if you log in now, you can still reclaim them if they're available, and even better (and I haven't seen anyone else post about this) you get a free name change on all your characters! Meaning on login you can either re-use their old name if it's still available, or if you ever thought about changing it before (for example because you used a bunch of special characters and want to see whether you can now have the same name without those) you can now make that adjustment for free.

I know this because my guildies noticed that characters whose names had been released were identifiable in the guild roster by now having "_010124" attached to their names, and someone teased that they could troll people by stealing their names, which prompted one non-subscribed guildie to finally log in and find out about the above. He then proceeded to give himself a bunch of free renames on various alts for exactly the reason I mentioned, to get rid of some special characters.

Anyway, as for myself - I just went on to claim the name "Shintar" on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, which were the only two servers where I didn't own it yet. Now it's me everywhere! Shintar isn't always my main on the other servers, but she's always a trooper and she's always me. I also renamed one low-level alt on Tulak Hord who had an apostrophe in his name that ended up bothering me more than I originally expected when I named him.

Flying high on these gains I got a bit over-excited and decided to also use a rename token on my bounty hunter T'ir, who'd gained the apostrophe in her name during the very first server consolidations back in 2012. I don't play her that often so I'm not hugely invested (and this particular apostrophe doesn't bother me that much) but the idea of reclaiming a name I'd lost in 2012 still made me starry-eyed for a minute. Except - "Tir" on Darth Malgus was still taken. Fair play!

The rename token was still consumed on use though, and she just has the semi-permanent option in her character panel to change her name now. I just don't know what I'd even change it to if not removing the apostrophe! I guess I'll just consider it a write-off. Not that it's a big deal with the tokens being 90% off at the moment.

Did you get to snag any new names? Several of my guildies were extremely pleased to pick up some nice and short new names or old ones they'd lost, such as someone getting the name of his main back that he'd lost years ago.

Living the Degen Conquest Life

It's patch day today and there are lots of interesting things going on, but I'll get to all of those in good time. First though, I wanted to talk about why I haven't posted in over a week, and the reason for that is that I was stuck in a Conquest-shaped rabbit hole because it was Total Galactic War.

I know this is where a lot of my regular readers probably click away, but I can't help myself: 99% of the time, SWTOR may be a character-driven multiplayer RPG (and I do love it for that), but that 1% of the time in which the game is a vehicle for fierce guild battles instead still fascinates me as well. Hardcore Conquest players are the type that even the most elitist raiders and PvPers see as a whole different level of degenerate, and two to three times a year, I'm part of the club.

This Total Galactic War started innocently enough. I did my usual thing of checking where the big guilds went first, and once all those planets had been ruled out, taking into consideration which destinations guildies were still interested in, the choice was clear: we were going to Oricon.

I didn't think it was going to be much of a challenge to win first place there as I didn't recognise any of the names on the leaderboard, though I'd later find out that the guild in the lead, called Ace of Saints (which is a pretty cool name, not gonna lie), was actually a well-known ops progression guild on Imperial side. 

For the first few days, enthusiasm for Conquest in my guild seemed to be at an all-time low, and often it felt like me and the one other major Conquest enthusiast were the only ones grinding out any points. As such, it wasn't entirely surprising that we failed to actually overtake this (to me) complete no-name guild even after several days, though I still found it frustrating, because even with just a few of us putting any effort in, we were at least keeping up with them pretty well, never falling more than a few million points behind.

I also developed a bit of a grudge against at least some of the Aces during that time, as I kept coming up against them in PvP and they were being annoying (something that can be seen as a compliment in that context, I guess?)

With two days left to go on the event, I finally made a passionate plea on Discord for someone else to generate some Conquest points, as it seemed to me like even a couple of people taking up the cause might be enough to close the gap and secure victory.

Somewhat to my own surprise, people heeded my call in respectable numbers and we quickly started to catch up, though we then got to see that Ace of Saints were serious about winning too, seemingly redoubling their efforts whenever we came close to overtaking them. At one point they suddenly surged ahead by something like four million points within thirty minutes, a number they couldn't possibly have generated by "natural" means with the number of people they had online at the time.

This did leave an impression on some of my guildies: "Look, we're not going to beat them! Look how many points they got in such a short time; we can't beat that!" Being a veteran of many Total Galactic Wars, I did my best to counter the psychological warfare of course: "That's what they want you to think! Look, they obviously popped some tokens to get that far ahead that quickly - we've got them scared! We absolutely can beat them, we just mustn't let their tactics intimidate us."

And once again, people actually listened, and if anything actually redoubled their efforts (because I think as far as competitive Conquest goes, a little bit of adversary actually helps stir their spirits and pride). I have to admit my heart melted a little when I saw a long-time guildie get the achievements for doing the Iokath dailies for the first time - all to earn us points!

We also picked up rampaging across the galaxy again, an activity that is nominally quite boring (you literally just run around as a big group and kill everything in your way) but which always tickles me a little just for how different it is from everything else in the game. As a guildie commented: "I wonder what a new player would think if they saw us racing past in this big group, scouring the landscape everywhere we go?" Personally I suspect that new player would wonder what the heck is going on, but they'd probably also think that whatever we're doing, it looked kind of cool.

As I've mentioned in previous stories like this, unless you've got a spy or something, you can never know with 100% certainty what's going on in your opponents' minds, but it did seem pretty clear that they were very much set on staying ahead of us at all times and at all costs, as any time we made some headway towards catching up, they'd get more people online to do group activities together or resort to popping personal conquest requisitions to give their score a boost.

So naturally, an idea started to form in our heads - after all, earlier this year there was this guild that was consistently trailing us all throughout TGW, just to then attempt to dislodge us from first place via usage of personal conquest requisitions minutes before the end of the event. What if we reversed the roles this time, happily continuing to farm points but without necessarily aiming to overtake our opposition? Our token stockpiles hadn't really recovered from the big click-fest back in April yet, so we still needed the gap to not be too big as we only had a limited supply to work with, but a gap of just a few million could definitely be overcome.

I really would have loved to be a fly on the wall in the Aces' Discord conversations over those last couple of days. Were they confident until the end, certain that they had it all figured out and would beat us eventually? Or were they fretting and unsettled by our unwillingness to just concede? One of them whispered one of my guildies on Tuesday morning to say that our efforts were pointless because they were going to win, which got a good chuckle out of those of us who were online at the time.

Now, when our planetary victory was last decided by frantic token-clicking back in April, I couldn't be online at the time so had to wait for others to report what had happened, but this time I was working from home on the day and boy, was it nerve-racking to be online as the Conquest timer counted down! I actually started to watch the way point gains worked really closely, noting that it took a minute from you earning any points for them to be added to the guild total, and on a separate timer, the guild totals on the scoreboard also update once a minute, so depending on your timing, it can take close to two minutes for points you've contributed to actually show up on the board.

I decided to pop my own twelve tokens with five minutes left on the clock, and then it was just frantic staring at the board as everybody's scores jumped once a minute, with no time left to react to any new developments. Suddenly, our score was at 79 million! Then theirs at 80 million! Then ours at 87 million! When the padlocks came down to indicate that the event had ended, we had once again won first place. (And I learned that despite Conquest nominally being locked, points still trickle in for another couple of minutes... I wonder what would happen if those last few points were to actually change the ranking of guilds...)

After spending all day grinding Conquest points for several days in a row (Mr Commando had expressed concern that I was behaving on a level of obsessiveness that was usually reserved for him), I almost wasn't sure what to do with myself for a few minutes after the event ended. More than anything though, I was extremely satisfied, as we'd once again been challenged to a fight and came out ahead.

 

I also can't help but wonder whether we simply had more tokens than the Aces when push came to shove at the end, or whether they could have beaten us if they'd only been more strategic about things and willing to let us get ahead for a few days instead of burning tokens worth millions of points early on to stay ahead of us at all times while also continuously spurring us on even more.

When I checked the galaxy-wide leaderboards to see how things had gone on other planets, it was striking that there hadn't been an actual battle over first place on any other planet - everywhere else the guild in first place had simply won without any real competition. There was one exception: Section X, where the Stale Cookie Warriors had only barely triumphed over the Republic branch of Yerba Mate (I only just looked up what that means... I always figured it was a phrase in a foreign language; I didn't realise it was a plant!) I wonder if they had a cool story to tell about their battle as well? Too bad we'll probably never know.

This is why I like to document our little stories, because while they may not be important in the grand scheme of things, they are the kind of emergent gameplay MMOs are famous for (and yes, it even exists in SWTOR for all its theme-parky nature) and tend to become the subject of tales told about the guild's history for years to come.

One Season Ends, Another Begins

I'm happy to say that I finished all my goals for Galactic Season 7 this past week. Everything just came together all at once: First I hit level 100 on Star Forge and Leviathan, then over the next couple of days on Tulak Hord, Satele Shan and Shae Vizla. Finally, on Saturday I ticked off the two meta achievements on Darth Malgus. I got the last few world boss kills I needed a few weeks ago, so it was just a matter of completing a few more seasons objectives and grinding out some more bounties.

I know I sometimes talk about how my ambitious goals for seasons can take on a somewhat chore-like quality, but damn, did it feel satisfying to be done with everything. I also love knowing that I can now expect to have a roughly three-month break from seasons - there will be a PvP season during that time, but that's not quite the same thing - and I look forward to checking out the new content coming with 7.6, progressing some characters' personal stories here and there, and just generally chilling and throwing snowballs during Life Day. As mentioned last year, during December more than during any other time of the year, I really appreciate this in-game holiday simply giving me a chance to relax, without putting any particular demands on my time.

As for GS7, I already gave my overall impressions of it last month. Setting stricter limits for myself on the other servers ultimately worked out well, as I definitely had fewer "trying to squeeze in just a couple more objectives before going to bed" moments of stress than on some previous occasions, and I still completed all my goals with plenty of time to spare. If anything, I should probably try easing up on my activity on the other servers even more next season, just to see how little time investment I can get away with (while still playing in a way I enjoy instead of simply maximising for seasons points per minute).

In general, nothing too exciting happened on the other servers this season; I would sum up my experiences playing on them over the last few months as follows:

While playing on Leviathan, I probably have the most strictly solo experience of any server, simply because my ability to communicate in French is so limited, but boy do I adore all my alts on that server for some reason. I've actually given my knight over there more different outfits to wear than most of my alts on Darth Malgus. I guess it's just been too long since I allowed myself to simply fall in love with another Twi'lek (I keep telling myself I need to try playing a greater variety of species)!

On Tulak Hord, I'm still in the guild with the dedicated website that nobody uses. I'm not sure how active the guild itself still is either, as I got guild mails from officers at various points that seemed to indicate that they hadn't been around as much. The planetary invasion still happened every week, and the guild Conquest bar did get filled up, but some weeks I was up there in the top five contributors just for making my 100k on my trooper.

On Satele Shan, I'm getting so close to finally finishing my Shadow Zilek's class story - it's so close I can taste it! I wrote about how he was my first ever male character in this post - it's hard to believe that I created him more than twelve years ago now and he still hasn't defeated the First Son. However, he's about halfway through Corellia now and I'm considering just pushing through even after being done with seasons, just to finally complete that particular milestone.

Star Forge and playing with New Outriders and occasionally helping out Swtorista's Team Disco has turned into a warm comfort blanket for me. I love my guild of twelve years on Darth Malgus, but being an officer is work sometimes, and many of my guildies are - how do I put this nicely - a bit cynical about the game at this point. So when I get to just hang out with friends on Star Forge, it's nice to not have to do any talking or organising for a change, to just tag along and do as I'm told, and simply giggle at people's jokes in a more light-hearted atmosphere.

On Shae Vizla, I'm up to two class stories completed now (my consular got there the other week) and with me hitting legacy level 44 yesterday, I came to realise that despite the server's young age, this may well end up being the one on which I end up hitting legacy level 50 next, a feat I've otherwise only achieved on Darth Malgus and Star Forge so far. We'll see whether I get there during the next season.