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.