Patch 7.8 Ramblings

Patch 7.8 with the long-awaited story update and more landed this week, and for the first time in a while I felt like there were so many things going on in SWTOR at once, I hardly knew where to start. And I loved it!

I finished my last Galactic Seasons achievement on Darth Malgus last week (which means I should probably write my usual season review soon) but on the other servers I still need a few more weeklies for the last meta achievement, and I didn't want to abandon them completely this week, even if there was new content to explore on my main.

Mostly I just ran the featured flashpoint on each server, which was Legacy of the Rakata this week. And oh my god, the skips! Fortunately there's not too much annoying jumping going on in this one, but I was continually surprised by the number of trash pulls for which I learned that you can literally walk right through them without aggroing anything as long as you walk down a certain narrow line between two specific mobs. I always wondered who was the first person to figure that out and how it spread.

Primarily I wanted to check out the new story of course, but on launch night I saw a few people talking about bugs so I decided to hold off at first, because with the level of anticipation I was feeling, I figured I really couldn't deal with the disappointment of then running into a blocker. Fortunately the aforementioned issues were fixed quickly, and as of the time I'm writing this, I've played through the Galactic Threads story once. I can tell you that my first impression was very positive, but before I write my full review I need to see it a few more times on different classes. It seems like the kind of story that's mostly the same for everyone, but at least one part of it is gonna be different for Imperials, and there were a few other small moments where I found myself thinking "I wonder if you get a different line here if you have a different origin story". I've got to know!

One thing that was very obvious was that this update was originally meant to be part of patch 7.6, which also brought us the XR-53 lair boss on Ilum and the first batch of dynamic encounters on Tatooine and Hoth. Because the story has us going to all these places and there would've been some very obvious synergy there, discovering dynamic encounters for the first time as you're also cruising around Tatooine for the story. As it was, I was like "nope, I don't want to help promote your band right now, I'm 100% on Tatooine encounter achievements, bye". Though I did pause to help out the Weary Travellers at the taxi spot, because I can never ignore those. And on Hoth I helped rehome an ice cat, because I can rarely resist that either. I could just tell that it probably would've been an even better experience if it had come out as originally planned.

One tiny thing I'll comment on in terms of the story - and I guess this could be considered a spoiler if you're a purist, but it's only a small thing that happens literally in the first five minutes - is that I took the opportunity to flirt with Rass Ordo, and for a moment it looked like it was gonna go somewhere, but then he wasn't in the mood. It just made me realise I'm so ready for my trooper to finally kiss someone. Since her creation almost fourteen years ago, she's taken some flirt options here and there, but has never taken it all the way! I sure hope Rass is around in the next update as well.

Next to the story, the other big addition that came with the patch was of course the new dynamic encounter zone on Dantooine. Again, I'll have to make a longer post about that later on, but first impressions are once again positive, even if I had some issues with bugs on day one.

On top of all that, it was the start of a new PvP season, so I once again jumped back into warzones and some lower-level arenas. Within the same evening, I had one Voidstar match that was absolutely beautiful, with amazing, objective-focused teamwork that I see so rarely in a pug, and an Ancient Hypergate where someone yelled insults and ALL CAPS at me after I failed to defend a pylon. I put them on ignore as I've had to do with others before them, but it still always gives me an unpleasant adrenaline rush in the moment to be attacked like that, and no matter how much I tell myself that I don't need to care about the opinions of some random internet stranger, it can be really hard not to dwell on it. Always reminds me of why so many people avoid PvP.

Finally, the devs once again made some minor changes to the user interface this patch. They keep doing that and I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's honestly always a bit jarring and strange from a player perspective. Did we really have to devote development time to making the quest tracker ALL CAPS for example? However, I will say that in this particular case, all was forgiven on my part the moment I noticed that they also added a scroll bar to the quest tracker at last, which is something that filled me with delight. I always hated how that feature always just kind of "gave up" after five missions or whatever the previous limit was and simply added "X additional missions tracked" at the bottom. It's not really helping me to say I'm tracking these missions if I can't actually see any details about them, is it? Well, with the addition of the scroll bar, I finally can. Thanks, Broadsword!

The Subscriber Login Event in the Rear View Mirror

Lots of exciting things are happening in my favourite MMOs, but sadly real life has been kicking my arse lately so I haven't had as much time to play games as I would've liked, never mind writing about them. Still, tomorrow SWTOR gets its first story update in one and a half years, so I thought I had to sit down and post at least briefly - not about what's to come, but about the subscriber login event that's also coming to an end tomorrow.

Back in September I was kind of "whatever" about it, looking at it from the perspective of someone who's never had a reason not to continue subscribing to SWTOR, but now that it's coming to an end I wanted to take a moment to say that I actually ended up quite liking it. It was nice to get something marginally more useful from the weekly login reward for several months.

It was particularly nice for my alts on the other servers, where I spent all my currency on buying Rakata gear for my level 80s, and if I had tokens left over at the end of that I spent those on some extra OP-1s for further gear upgrades. Do I need this gear for anything? Of course not, but it's still a nice thing to have.

On my main on Darth Malgus, I ended up buying the two ship droid customisations and after that, all the different pets. I think at the end I had purchased every single one of them except for one. Did I think they were all amazing? Not really, but on Darth Malgus I have more gear and currencies than I know what to do with at this point, I already had all the emotes that were on offer, and I'm not huge on regeneration toys, so the pets were the next best thing. Especially since they were all originally from the Cartel Market, so now they're in my collections for future unlocking if I should fancy it.

Can I just say that it's kind of funny in hindsight that a single pet from the vendor cost as much as three Rakata gear pieces? Interesting value assignment there...

If you were a subscriber, what did you end up doing with your tokens?

Some of my guildies - who are usually not necessarily representative of the wider player base - were almost aggressively uninterested; it was actually kind of funny. Like, you're already subscribed and the devs are giving you free stuff, don't you want it?

The funniest to me was one particular guildie who's been a subscriber since launch and seems to have remained subscribed out of inertia more than anything, as he doesn't even really seem to play anymore - he just logs on once every two months or so to join us for a social night or something and then disappears again. He also hated the gearing system that was introduced with Legacy of the Sith and was always moaning about the fact that the the gear he got from being carried through an operation wasn't the best yet but required further upgrading.

So naturally, when this event came around, we were all like "oh man, this is going to be great for Nev; finally he can get the 340 Rakata gear he always wanted for simply logging in" - and then he didn't log in until literally the penultimate week of the event. We told him that he still had time to get three pieces if he just logged in four times during the last week, but he didn't do that either. Too busy, he told us afterwards, before stating wistfully that he wished he could just buy gear with Cartel Coins. (I know, I know. But hey, pay to win wouldn't be a thing in any game if there weren't people who liked it.) 

GS9 Week 14: Flashpoints, Flashpoints, Flashpoints!

A little over a month ago I wrote about how much I've been enjoying the current Galactic Season, and how I'd been thinking about setting myself the stretch goal of completing the full meta achievement on all servers this time (instead of the basic 100 levels). I'm not here to tell you that I've achieved that, but at this point I can say that it's definitely happening. I've reached season level 100 and defeated my 250 enhanced enemies on all servers, with the only boxes left to tick being a couple more Flashpoint Frenzy objectives and about 20 more weekly objectives in total.

It's been really surprising to me how energised I've felt for this season. I always say that this whole "doing seasons on multiple servers" thing means walking a fine line between a fun challenge and burning myself out with too many digital chores, and usually I tend to start losing steam after around eight weeks. This time though, I've kept going all the way to level hundred, to the point that my secondary legacies were only slightly behind my main one, and even after that I've just kept going... and going... and going.

The weekly flashpoint objective has been a big part of that, and I've written about my fascination with seeing the flashpoint scene on different servers. This week was particularly amazing for that as there were a total of three weekly flashpoint objectives: Korriban Incursion and Assault on Tython were both featured veteran flashpoints for the week, and the objective to do any random master mode flashpoint was also up. I ended up doing all three of these on all servers (minus the master mode on Shae Vizla since I couldn't get that to pop), for a total of 17 flashpoint runs throughout the week, and it was thoroughly enjoyable for the most part. Sure, not every single run was amazing, but I'd say the majority were at least funny or interesting in some way.

Tython and Korriban were good flashpoints to do repeatedly because they are relatively short and have maps that are slightly more open than the average instance, meaning people can take different routes. There are a number of skips of varying difficulties, which I all saw done at some point, but I also saw every single one of those trash pulls taken down the old-fashioned way and more. Some groups pulled mob groups I didn't even know existed, even after all these years, such as when someone in Korriban Incursion accidentally hurled their sabers over a ridge and a bunch of angry tuk'atas descended upon us. I had no idea those were even there!

As far as skipping goes, on Tulak Hord, Assault on Tython popped up as my random master mode and the tank was very careful to skip as much trash as possible while we took out the artillery targeting arrays in the first part of the flashpoint, just to then randomly charge into several groups of enemies just before Major Travik while commenting that he wanted to do the bonus (which requires you to kill a certain minimum number of trash mobs). "Why did we just do all that sneaking then?!" I exclaimed, to which he replied that he wasn't sure either; it was just a habit. That cracked me up.

My favourite experience of the week - and perhaps of the season so far - was this week's master mode flashpoint on Satele Shan though. I'm still never quite sure on that server whether I'm better off queueing late in the evening or waiting until the weekend and trying early in the morning my time. This week I tried in the evening again, and even while queueing as both dps and tank the wait was long. I decided for once to spend my time doing something that was neither good for seasons nor Conquest and simply drove around Belsavis, doing the Macrobinocular mission step there, uncovering the map and picking up some datacrons. After what felt like nearly an hour's wait I was about to give up when I finally got a pop.

The group finder made me the tank in a master mode Cademimu run. When nobody gives me "bat out of hell" vibes I usually ask whether people want to do the bonus, and there was enough support to do it. The Cademimu bonus boss is called Garold the Dark One, which always makes me laugh because Garold sounds like a hybrid of Gary and Harold, neither of which are good Sith names. Anyway, we tried to fight him and promptly wiped. The healer immediately apologised, saying it was their first time and they had mistakenly rolled right into a red circle.

As I always love an opportunity to teach people when it arises naturally, I gave the tip that all ranged could just stand behind the railing by the elevator to avoid being pulled in by the boss, in order to stay safely outside of his AoE. On the next attempt we tried that, but someone fell down the lift shaft, two people died and we hit the enrage. I just thought it was entertaining and perfectly natural progression! On the third attempt we got him down and I think everyone was very pleased.

After dispatching General Ortol, one person in the group asked whether we were up for running another flashpoint for the weekly. I had only really queued for the seasons objective, didn't need the weekly mission and was tired... but that group had such great vibes, I did want to run with them again, so I did. The second flashpoint we got was Mando Raiders, and this time there were no wipes, just some minor shenanigans that got me musing about how nice it was to be the tank when you have a group that genuinely wants to be led and learn, and for whom you sometimes do have to work a bit to keep them safe if they accidentally butt-pull some extra turrets.

It was just a good vibes week all around, and I'm getting to the point where I think I can ease up on most of the other seasons objectives and just keep running the weekly flashpoints until (close to) the end of the season. 

An Expansion Tease & A Peculiar Controversy

On Wednesday it was time for the dev stream preparing us for the launch of 7.8! And it was... okay? To be honest, there were less "news" than I'd hoped for, though to some degree that was to be expected considering we already knew a fair bit about the patch's major features. Still, I was a bit surprised that they spent a full fifteen minutes recapping the Legacy of the Sith story so far - I have no doubt that's useful to some, but probably not to that many among your hardcore audience that come to watch you live on Twitch. Whenever I glanced at chat people were complaining that they were bored and wanted to move on, and I had to remind myself to not pay too much attention to chat because it always contains a lot of negativity, sadly.

Also, what they told us about Galactic Threads was pretty much the exact same stuff they told us about it a year ago when it was originally meant to launch. Really, the most exciting bit of genuinely new news to me was a note that they'd be updating the large ceiling hooks in strongholds to work like large floor hooks, meaning they'll also contain a three by three grid of small hooks. This is great because the devs gave us a bunch of new small ceiling decorations this season which look really nice but were hard to place in an effective way due to the lack of small ceiling hooks available in almost every single stronghold. Either way, 7.8 still looks exciting to me and I'm very much looking forward to it.

One slightly sad piece of news for German and French players was that the voice work for 7.8 still isn't ready in their languages, so they'll only be able to play the new story in English for now. I wonder why Broadsword couldn't get that done while the English voice actors were on strike - the German and French ones weren't, as far as I'm aware! Either way, I guess it's up to these players to choose whether they want to play through the new story in English or wait even longer. 

(Side note: Sometimes I wonder whether a future project for me, once I hit legacy level 50 on all servers, could be something like playing through the class stories in German. I bet hearing all those player characters and familiar NPCs talk in completely different voices would be wild. But I'm getting sidetracked...)

Anyway, I'm not going to go into much more detail about things like new Cartel Market additions and so on. As usual you can find full, detailed breakdowns elsewhere:

• Official SWTOR website
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

I just want to talk about two more things that came out of this livestream. First off, Papa Keith appeared at the end of the stream, and as he so often does, casually dropped a hint about something yet to come that would hype players up. Specifically he said that in his producer's letter for the game's anniversary, he'll be giving us a roadmap for what's coming in the new year, and that they'll be "wrapping up Legacy of the Sith". That's kind of like... telling us that they are working on an 8.0 expansion without telling us that they're working on an 8.0 expansion.

EEEEEEEEEE!

I'm trying not to get too excited just yet because it hasn't been stated explicitly at this point, but it's hard not to be hopeful. I still stand by everything I wrote about the prospect of a new expansion a little over a year ago, but man, would I ever love for a good expac launch to make the game feel exciting and invigorated again. I'm looking forward to learning more.

Now, for something completely different - at the end of the stream, they showed off the new loading screen/key art for patch 7.8:

My reaction to that was something along the lines of "Nice. Lana and Shae's faces look a bit weird though. Oh well." And then I moved on, because a character looking slightly off on the art of a SWTOR loading screen is a pretty common thing. I remember when Legacy of the Sith's key art was first revealed, one of my guildies commented that Lana looked like Adam Driver in a wig, which made me go "oof" but I could also see what he meant!

When I checked social media for chatter about Wednesday's dev stream, I was surprised to see a few comments that accused the new key art of being AI generated. Warning: I'm going to go into way more detail than this probably deserves, but it's a subject that interests me and I kind of fell down a rabbit hole, so you've been warned.

As a certified AI hater my reaction was of course to be shocked and want to find out more. From what I've seen of the SWTOR devs they've always struck me as very pro human creativity and anti AI art, but who knows what's going on behind closed doors when there's money to be saved? I tried to look for more information on where this whole idea came from, but couldn't find more than the same three people or so repeating that it was "obviously" AI, no explanation needed, which was of course not helpful.

Finally Tacogoats, a SWTOR player I follow on Bluesky, shared a link to a tumbler post of his in which he attempted to break down the evidence he saw for the art piece being artificially generated. And for all the details he circled... I did not find it convincing at all. The comments seemed to either be flat out wrong (no, Anri is not missing her index finger; it's right there), issues that I couldn't make out at all, or even if I could kind of see what it was that was bothering him, I still didn't see how these things were in any way evidence of AI involvement. So what if the one knuckle on Malgus' hand has a slightly odd edge? Cause human artists never create the slightest imperfections when drawing hands? I was expecting some kind of "gotcha" like a line from something in the foreground merging into a different line in the background, like you can often get with AI art since it doesn't actually have any concept of three dimensionality. However, there was nothing of the sort.

In fact, the more I looked, the more I became convinced that this couldn't be AI. AI image generators are very good at conjuring up things for which they have lots of references. They can easily create a photorealistic image of a non-existing human because their training data contains millions of photos of humans! What they are not good at is creating very specific details for which they don't have (enough) references. And let's be real, random SWTOR NPCs are not something for which any AI is going to have lots to work with.

I remember when I encountered the very first image generator I'd ever seen - a few years ago now - I tried to get it to generate images of Darth Malgus and Satele Shan and it failed utterly. I think Malgus was a black blur with angry eyes so it clearly had some vague reference for him, but Satele pretty much just resulted in random noise. Obviously things have progressed somewhat since then, but it's not like the internet suddenly got flooded with millions of screenshots or art of all these SWTOR characters that wasn't there before.

I actually got curious enough to dust off my OpenAI login and ask ChatGPT to generate me a "painterly" image of Lana Beniko (since she's one of the characters on the key art). I'll be honest, the result was actually better than I expected. It clearly had enough material to deduce that Lana's a white, slightly angry-looking woman with mid-length blonde hair and a side parting. I also asked it to generate an action shot in which she'd have her lightsaber out and again - it wasn't totally terrible in my opinion.

But two things stood out to me: that it was actually very good at giving her an attractive face (even if it doesn't look exactly like Lana does in game) - which is something to think about when the first thing anyone mentioned being slightly "off" about the key art were the faces - and the fact that the AI had absolutely no clue what sort of armour she wears, dressing her in a generic black combat suit with matching pauldrons and a cloak.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that ChatGPT might not be the best image generator and that my prompting was extremely low effort - I'm sure someone could prod an AI into producing something better, but anywhere close to the sort of detail we actually see in the key art? That seems incredibly unlikely to me, not with where we're at right now. And all that's just talking about a single character, never mind five of them in a balanced composition. In a way, going down this rabbit hole has actually increased my appreciation for this new loading screen.

I can't blame people for being paranoid and suspicious. Corporations trying to cut costs by replacing real artists' jobs with an inferior AI-generated product is a real thing. But so is people being overly paranoid and thinking that everything is AI when it actually isn't. As a creative person myself (even if my hobby is writing, not drawing or painting), someone accusing my stuff of sounding/looking like AI would actually be more hurtful to me than just saying that they think it's terrible. We're not doing the art community a favour by immediately accusing things of being "AI slop" as soon as we don't like something.

Bonus AI laugh: I also asked ChatGPT to generate me an image of Shae Vizla and that one was a lot less charming. It clearly had enough of a clue to give me a red-headed Mandalorian, but what the fuck is that armour? Why is the "blaster" I asked for in the prompt just a plain old 20th century gun? And why is there another random Mandalorian's helmet attached to her thigh?!

Star Wars: Visions Season 3

Did you know that season three of Star Wars: Visions has already been out for several weeks? For some reason I've seen zero promotional material or even buzz about it, so thanks to Vulkk for bringing it to my attention the other week.

As someone who's not an anime fan, I was a little disappointed that we were back to all anime, all the time (after the wide variety of animation styles that were featured in season two) but oh well, I guess spotlighting Eastern animation in particular was always supposed to be the show's focus. Either way, I wanted to jot down some thoughts on each short again.

1. The Duel: Payback

As the title implies, this was a sequel to season 1's "The Duel", which had been almost universally beloved. In short, I thought this was good too, but somewhat less interesting to me personally. I was also a dork and had forgotten the details of the original, so I at first thought that it was going to be about the Sith lady from season 1 getting revenge, meaning I perceived the cyborg Jedi coming after the Ronin as a kind of surprise twist. It was only on rewatching the original Duel that I realised that actually, we saw the Sith lady die, so this was always going to be about something else. 

2. The Sound of Four Wings

This was probably my least favourite of the batch for reasons I struggle to articulate. I didn't think it was bad or anything, everything about it just felt kind of generic and uninteresting to me. 

3. The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope

Another sequel to a popular season 1 episode, though I felt that there was very little connection to the original with this one. The thing that stood out to me about the original Ninth Jedi was the surprise twist, not the generic anime protagonist, so a sequel that follows that character on a completely different adventure was always bound to not grip me in the same way. I still enjoyed it overall though, except that I found the little droid sidekick a bit grating. Maybe I'm just over cutesy characters that always speak in third person. Just how many times do you think the word "Teto" appeared in the script? 

4. The Bounty Hunters

This one was merely okay to me. There were parts that had me intrigued and parts that left me feeling a bit disappointed. The droid actually coming back with his assassin personality activated was a pleasant surprise for example, but I didn't love that the protagonist wore this face mask for the entire episode, making you think that maybe she's sick or scarred or something, but then it's literally nothing.

5. Yuko's Treasure

I didn't think an episode featuring a little kid and a droid shaped like a teddy bear would be my favourite but somehow that's exactly what happened. It just had a certain charm (comparable to Skeleton Crew) that really worked for me.

6. The Lost Ones

Apparently this one was another sequel, to season 1's "The Village Bride", but I only found that out afterwards and again, I wouldn't have been able to tell because what was interesting to me about the Village Bride was the culture of the village that got saved, not the relatively generic protagonist. Still, I liked it as a stand-alone too, as the studio's world building was very strong again. 

7. The Smuggler

In this one I liked the story as a whole, but somehow the English voice actor delivered every line as if the main character was supposed to be six years old (when she was clearly a grown woman) and that really threw me off. Other than that I thought it was cool.

8. The Bird of Paradise

This one was the most visually beautiful episode of this season in my opinion, and I liked that it was more contemplative and had a somewhat open ending. 

9. BLACK 

I have no idea what this one was about beyond the description provided in the episode summary. It's totally psychedelic and impressive from an artistic point of view - and I'll say that I was engrossed for the entire duration, but I also wouldn't want to watch it again. Definitely something different though.

---

As a whole, I feel like this season was perhaps the weakest one so far, though not by much. I just didn't really care that much about the sequels to previous episodes and would have wished for more visual and narrative variety. Still an interesting series though, and I continue to appreciate that it tries to do different things with the Star Wars property.

Tulak Hord Talk

After eight seasons and almost four years of playing on multiple servers, I'm pretty well settled in everywhere, with a growing roster of alts on each server and most of my characters in stable guilds. The one server where I was still feeling a bit "unsafe" though was Tulak Hord, mainly because I hadn't really found a guild that truly covered all my needs and made me feel like it was going to stick around.

You may recall from this post last year that after more than two years of staying in a two-person guild, my attempt to find something a bit more suitable for someone interested in playing alts and doing Conquest led me to a guild that turned out to run an old-fashioned guild website that nobody actually used. I was a bit put out by that but stuck around.

Over time, things got more quiet in said guild. I never actually got to know my guildies really, but I was under the impression that there had been a core group of people that did operations together, and it looked like that had eventually fallen apart. The guild wasn't strictly dead, but going by the numbers on the weekly Conquest board, it at one point looked like I was one of a maximum of five people that were still playing.

I had almost resigned myself to potentially inheriting the guild eventually once the last of the other players stopped logging in, but after several months of this state of relative inactivity, I noticed that things started picking up again, not because the gang was back together, but because the person that the GM title had defaulted to had seemingly decided to go on a recruiting spree. Which was fine by me, but I didn't give it too much thought either.

Tonight though, something funny happened. I was just doing a few more quests on an alt (on Tulak Hord, obviously) to finish off one last weekly seasons objective when someone said "hey Shin" in guild chat. I said hi back but didn't pay it any further mind as I hadn't really had a lot of interaction with anyone in the guild.

I continued to focus on my questing, until the same person said something along the lines of "I'll just go back to DM now" and I swear for a moment my brain was short circuiting. Why was someone speaking English in guild chat on Tulak Hord? And why were they telling me about going back to Darth Malgus? What server was I on again? What the heck was even going on?

I opened the guild panel and looked at the only other person online. Their legacy name didn't sound familiar, but the character name vaguely rang a bell. It sounded kind of like one of my guildies from Darth Malgus, the one who'd inspired me to try doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers in the first place.

"Xen?!" I typed incredulously, and with my mind still spinning. How could he be here? Had I ever gotten him invited into this guild? No, even I couldn't be that forgetful, surely? What was happening?

He proceeded to tell me that he'd been invited the other day via a random recruitment message, after his last guild on Tulak Hord had kicked him for inactivity. I mean, what are the freaking odds? I just thought that was absolutely wild. Tulak Hord isn't the biggest server, but it's still got a good number of guilds, and the one we are now both in is relatively small, so that was some crazy serendipity alright. 

On an unrelated note, another thing that bothered me about playing on Tulak Hord until recently was that this guild didn't have an Imperial counterpart, so my Imperial alts were still homeless and lost in space. I'd done a bit of research about where I could take them but hadn't come up with anything enticing enough for me to make the effort of actively applying.

Well, the other night I was just about to log off on my Sith inquisitor when someone offered me a random invite to their guild. I checked that the guild name wasn't anything offensive or utterly ridiculous and accepted. So now I'm a pirate on Imp side, and my characters have the guild rank "fish food". We'll see where that goes! 

Another Season of Feasting

The Feast of Prosperity has once again come and gone, and I just wanted to make a short post about how much I enjoyed it (again). I feel like the devs have really managed to hit the spot for me with these seasonal events as I pretty much love them all (except Nar Shadda Nightlife - but even that is "okay" nowadays in my opinion).

A couple of years ago I thought I'd be done with this event after getting all the achievements, but the many decorations have made it worth coming back every year to pick up a few more. The gameplay is fun, and that the event is also extremely good for Conquest points is just the cherry on top.

I simply never tire of the friendly world boss groups, and the game rarely feels more like an MMO and more alive than when you've got a full raid group thundering through the ruins of Coronet Zoo to absolutely steamroll everything in your way and collect exactly three Nexu tongues from mobs that fortunately seem to have way more tongues than you'd expect.

While waiting for those groups to fill, the food serving and cooking takes up just enough time to keep busy, ensuring that you never get bored. (I also like that all the ingredients we are sent to gather actually end up in the kitchen when we do the cooking, from ice crystals to scyk bellies.) It's all just very wholesome and well-balanced.

I'm already looking forward to next year.

 Though bringing this many pets along is probably not hygienic. Oh well.

Flashpointing on Different Servers

One of the major reasons I've really been enjoying the current Galactic Season is that it's gotten me back into pugging. I've enjoyed doing group content in SWTOR with strangers for as long as I can remember, but over the last few years I've kind of fallen out of the habit on my home server Darth Malgus. I think it's mainly because I spend so much time on organising and running things with my guild that my "weekly group content quota" feels more than filled by the time that's all done.

On the other servers though, it's a different story. While most of my characters are guilded at this point, due to time zones I rarely find myself with an opportunity to join my guildies there for group content, so most of the time I'm at the mercy of random strangers who happen to be online at the same time as me. And it's been surprisingly fun!

What's been really interesting about the whole experience though is that doing at least one flashpoint per week on every server, one can really feel the different vibes. I briefly toyed with the idea of taking detailed notes and trying to come up with some sort of objective ranking but quickly discarded that notion, both because it would've been a lot of work but also because things like whether you had a nice group or why you may have liked one pug more than another are really hard to objectively quantify. I decided it was fine to limit myself to subjective observations and let people make their own judgements about that.

To begin with, I'll say that the differences between the servers are actually not dramatic in my opinion. It's not like you'll always have good runs on one server and bad ones on another. So far this season, every single flashpoint I got into was completed successfully, with the exception of a master mode Ruins of Nul where we called it quits on Regnant. However, that particular boss is very tough, we'd given it several decent tries, and it just didn't look like we were getting even close to succeeding. Everyone was very polite about collectively admitting defeat at that point.

I also haven't seen a single hostile vote-kick initiated anywhere, which was interesting to me compared to World of Warcraft, where people will boot you for the most frivolous of reasons. In my SWTOR flashpoints this season, I once initiated a kick for someone who'd been disconnected for a while when we couldn't proceed any further at a checkpoint that required everyone in the group to be present and click, and in another run an individual who'd been kind of toxic themselves actively begged to be kicked to get away from the rest of the group. But that was entirely it.

That's not to say that all players in my flashpoints have been perfect angels, but if there's conflict, people would seemingly rather have a verbal fight about it than simply try to give their opponent the boot, which I find interesting. I could imagine that some might prefer being quietly removed over being insulted in what's supposed to be just a game, but personally I kind of appreciate that this shows that even when things get heated, SWTOR players have an unspoken attitude of "we're in this together, so let's all just get to the end, OK?" where they don't want to deprive someone else of their flashpoint credit even if they find the other person annoying.

Generally, most of my runs have been what I'd call pleasant and quiet: not much conversation and we just get on with things without too much friction. Usually at least one person will aim for every possible shortcut there is, but at the same time nobody bats an eyelid if someone fails to be sneaky and pulls an extra group - you just help to clean up and get on with it.

So that's what's been the same on all servers. Now let's talk about those subtle differences I mentioned:

I feel like on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, you can really tell that these are smaller communities as everything's just a little bit more friendly and relaxed. People are a bit more chatty than average, with everyone always saying hi and bye at the start and end of a run and actually pausing to discuss tactics if there are any questions or hiccups. I wouldn't say these chats are necessarily "nicer" than on other servers (the chattiness can also include rudeness or complaints) but there is a clear acknowledgement of the other players being there and attempts at communication.

You'll run into people with a range of skills, from the one who's never done the instance before to the experienced raider, with most probably sitting somewhere in-between. These servers are small but still healthy communities, where you'll learn to recognise the names of some of the bigger guilds after a while.

This is somewhat of a contrast to Star Forge, whose mega server status has only been increasing over the past couple of years, as people from smaller servers with an interest in high-end or queued content are increasingly transferring off the smaller servers in order to have a larger pool of players to work with and shorter queues. As a result of that, I feel like Star Forge is the server where you have the highest chance of having one or more super efficiency-obsessed players in your group who set a stiff pace because they're already planning their next activity afterwards and don't want to spend a second more inside this flashpoint than they have to. If there's some new degenerate trash skip, you'll probably learn it here. (Me in D7: What's this guy doing, running right through so many groups at once? Wait what, if we just stand here and wait, everything evades? WTF.)

I think this creates an interesting conundrum because in general we'd like to guide new players towards a server that's busy and where queues are popping, but I can't help but get the impression that at least as far as flashpoints are concerned, almost any other server is probably a more welcoming environment for someone's first run, as people are going at least marginally more slowly, so that chances of the newbie just being left behind and panicking over where everyone went are at least somewhat reduced.

To clarify though, I'm not claiming that Star Forge players are unfriendly or anything. I haven't seen that particular situation arise myself, but I imagine most would probably be perfectly fine with slowing down a bit if someone said that they're new and need a bit of help. It's just that the default assumption in group content seems to be that if you're on Star Forge, you're here because you're a veteran player who wants to maximise your efficiency in terms of play time, more so than anywhere else at least.

This is particularly striking when compared to Satele Shan, the other and now smaller US server. Am I saying that everything there is super slow? Not at all, SS players can also be in a hurry, but what has stood out to me there is how much personality players display in my runs there. Both my best and worst runs of the season (so far) have been on Satele Shan.

The worst was a run where one guy was always rushing ahead and ignoring that the rest of the group was still fighting things, while another player who was queued as tank was pulling things willy-nilly without actually tanking them. These two people could hardly have been more at odds with each other, they fought about it, and me and the remaining dps were awkwardly caught in the middle.

The good runs on the other hand were ones where people were chatting happily, asking to do the bonus boss and just generally goofing off in a way that's just such a contrast to the more business-like, in-and-out approach that I usually encounter on Star Forge (and many other servers). It's like everyone who wants a fast and easy ride has transferred off and what's left of the population has a much higher density of absolute maniacs (both good and bad).

Finally, we have Shae Vizla, the Oceanic server where queued content mostly died about three months after its release. The current and previous Galactic Season have been good at creating groups for the featured content at least, but I've got to admit the experience always feels a bit sad to me, because my impression is that you basically get only two kinds of people in these runs: complete newbies who decided to queue up for something for the first time, and seasoned veterans who are only here for Galactic Seasons (and are usually in one of three guilds). 

I'm being a bit hyperbolic of course, but it does feel markedly different from the vibes on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, where you still have this healthy mix of different player types. On Shae Vizla, the newbies presumably don't talk because they're unsure of what's going on, and the veterans don't talk because they're like Star Forge rushers on crack - gotta quickly finish this flashpoint here so I can do it five more times on the other servers!

I'm curious whether others who've done group content on more than one server have had similar experiences or see the situation completely differently. Even if you play on only one server, do you think my characterisation of the flashpoint-playing population matches up with your own experiences there?

Let's Talk About Czerka Combat Enhancers

During the last Galactic Season, we were introduced to the concept of experimental Czerka combat stims, which were supposed to bring a breath of fresh air to an old type of content that turned out to be the season's theme: uprisings. The reality of that didn't really match my expectations, and I discussed in this post how and why I thought that the effects of the stims were mostly boring and useless. I suggested that at least two of the three needed buffing, but nothing of that sort ever happened.

When new stim effects were announced for this season, I didn't get my hopes up too much but figured that they could hardly be worse than the ones from Season 8. Again I ended up slightly disappointed... this time not by the new effects themselves, but by the fact that all the old ones were still present as well, so every time you use a stim, you only have a two in five chance of actually seeing one of the new powers. I think it took me three or four weeks until I finally got sufficiently "lucky" with the random numbers. (Later I would always click the buff off if I didn't like it and reapply the stim until I got a result I liked, but early on I didn't have that many stims from drops yet and I didn't care enough to buy extras from the vendor.)

The two new effects are both decent actually: One gives you two floating probes over your shoulders that add dps by pew pew-ing everything you're in combat with, and the other one gives you a temporary action button that allows you to pick up a mob up to silver strength and throw it at another enemy. That can be kind of fun, especially when it leads to somewhat unexpected results (such as being able to pick up and throw a stationary turret), but it does kind of lose its lustre after a while - in my opinion at least - mainly because I think the cooldown is too long, and the fact that the throw causes everything in the vicinity to fly off in ten different directions is actually kind of inconvenient in AoE situations.

Anyway, talking about the different enhancer effects wasn't actually going to be the main point of this post. Instead, it's that this season has kind of made me wonder about the concept of these stims as a whole because I've noticed some friction for the first time that I never encountered last season. Back then, the main thing that stood out to me was that in any given uprising, I was often the only one to pop a stim, which gave me the impression that people didn't really know or care about the feature. If people were ever confused by some mobs growing big and red, or my character leaving pink puddles of poop on the floor, nobody ever said anything.

This season though, I've noticed an increase in friction around the stims. I still see few other people using them in pugs most of the time, but I actually had two runs of the featured veteran flashpoint of the week (both on the Leviathan server) where someone asked for the stim buffs to be removed. I didn't want to, and since I'm not fluent enough in French to have a discussion about it, I unfortunately turned into one of those pugs that just follow along silently and don't respond to anything, but it was still awkward.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've experienced (and heard of other people's unpleasant experiences with) people popping combat enhancers in master mode flashpoints. Now, best case that just turns the whole run into a big of a slog, but in some instances it can actually seriously kneecap you - for example on a boss fight where you're supposed to kill adds quickly, having those adds suddenly quadruple in health when they spawn in can pose a serious obstacle. The solution is obvious - get rid of the combat enhancer - but having to be the party pooper that asks someone else to please click off their stim buff isn't really any fun either.

What I'm getting from both of these scenarios is that the trade-off the stims ask of you (gain an extra ability in exchange for some mobs gaining more health and hitting harder) doesn't feel worth it a lot of the time. I'll be honest myself and admit that I'm 100% only doing it for the achievement that requires you to kill 250 enhanced mobs in flashpoints. This has turned out to be much easier to achieve than last season's equivalent for some reason - maybe because flashpoints are generally longer than uprisings?

On Darth Malgus, where I always do my weekly flashpoint with guildies and we all agreed to pop a stim at the start, we were all done with the achievement after only four or five weeks (though the fact that we're the kind of people who will do the bonus boss in every flashpoint certainly helped with that). On the other servers it's still a work in progress for me, but the reason I even considered this one achievable on all servers is the fact that even in a run where only one person is using an enhancer and we skip a lot of mobs, I'll still be able to make a decent chunk of progress on my tally.

However, once done I'm not really interested in continuing to use the enhancers after that, because I'm honestly inclined to agree that they just make everything take longer without a sufficiently fun pay-off and I don't want to get into arguments about it with the rest of my pug group. I don't know what kind of systems the devs are planning for the next Galactic Season, but I don't really feel like this whole Czerka stims thing has been a huge success, at least not the way it's currently implemented.

Still, I'd love to hear other opinions on this. What have your experiences been with the Czerka combat enhancers this season? Do you find them fun or tedious, and have you experienced any disagreement about this in your flashpoint pugs? Let me know in the comments. 

Looking forward to 7.8

I learned long ago not to get too hyped about new content for my favourite MMOs as it's too easy to end up disappointed, but then, what's life without a little bit of happy anticipation? Patch 7.8 can't be more than a few weeks away now, and I'm very much looking forward to us getting our first story update in one and a half years.

That alone would already be something to celebrate, but this week we found out that there's more to come in this patch. Keith had already hinted in his producer's letter at the start of the month that Dantooine would be in for some dynamic changes, and then last week the official YouTube channel dropped this nice little teaser video:

I had a bit of a chuckle at Musco describing Dantooine with the words "it's usually pretty quiet there" when that planet is either being raided by pirates or overrun with swoopers on the regular, but either way the news of the Dantooine stronghold and the devs trying something new with the dynamic encounter system there were great to hear. With both story and new gameplay in the pipeline, this may well shape up to be the meatiest content patch we've received in a while and I'm here for it.

Side note: If you're someone who doesn't always keep up to date with what's been happening in SWTOR recently, I've got a new permanent page for you called "The State of SWTOR", which is linked from the sidebar on desktop and the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page on mobile. I'm planning to keep it updated on the regular and we'll see whether it gains enough traction to reduce the number of people asking on the subreddit how the game is doing every day.

Galactic Season 9 Progress and Goals

We're eight weeks into Galactic Season 9 at this point, which means that the first players are getting close to hitting level 100. I tend to think of that time as the season's unofficial halfway point, because while there are technically still eighteen weeks left (meaning we're actually only about a third of the way in), this tends to be when I'm about halfway done with the meta achievements and thereby my own seasonal goals.

I've got to say I'm actually really enjoying this season so far, despite the lack of a narrative theme. Flashpoints are just my jam, and even if I miss the cut scenes, it's been nice to run more of them again, especially on servers other than Darth Malgus where I'd done very little grouping/pugging prior to this season.

My "secondary legacies" are all making good progress as well, and the other week I hit level 80 on Imperial side for the first time on Leviathan, Tulak Hord and Satele Shan in quick succession, meaning I now have two max-level characters on each of these servers as well. Not exactly an amazing feat, but considering how thin I spread myself playing on all servers, progress on the ones where I don't play as much has been pretty slow and even these minor milestones feel quite meaningful.

From left to right: Chonkov, my bounty hunter on Leviathan; Dormahla, my Sith inquisitor on Tulak Hord; Yin, my Imperial agent on Satele Shan. 

Back in Galactic Season 3 (which feels like forever ago now... hard to wrap my head around the fact that this was only less than three years ago) I actually ended up setting myself the crazy stretch goal of doing the full meta achievement on all servers - this ultimately failed because the advancement of the seasonal reputation (which was one of the things that was required) was so heavily time-gated (and most importantly, had no catch-up mechanic) that I was already too far behind by the time I even started getting interested in the idea, but I did still end up completing the 100 weekly objectives on all servers. I think my ultimate takeaway from that was that while I felt pretty proud and pleased with myself, I probably wasn't going to go and do that again because of how much effort it took.

Except here we are three years later, and I'm actually considering it again this season! The simple reason why is that aside from the 100 weekly objectives, both of the other meta achievements are about doing flashpoints, which is the part I'm having the most fun with and want to do more of anyway. I'm not 100% committed to the idea yet - we'll see how things play out over the next few weeks, but I've definitely been thinking about it.

Date Night Data

Earlier in the year, Narrative Director Ashley Ruhl gave a talk at 2025's Game Developers Conference, on the subject of SWTOR's date nights. I believe it's technically available to view online, but only if you have an expensive subscription to the GDC website. So I was quite pleased when /Jawaface pointed out to me last week that at least the slides for the presentation were now freely available to view for everyone.

Slides alone obviously don't give you the whole picture, but they do give you a pretty good idea of just what was discussed. It being from a conference for game developers, the talk was obviously primarily targeted at that audience and covered things like the technical side of setting up certain cut scenes for example. If I as a layperson had to sum up Ashley's message to other developers based on these slides, I'd say it's to not give up on passion projects for your game because your time will eventually come, and that you can get a surprising amount done by repurposing existing tools.

What I as a player found the most interesting though was the below slide, clearly added to show that date nights were a success. It shows the completion rates for the new main story added with patch 7.5 (that was Desperate Defiance) compared to the four date nights that were added in the previous patch (for Lana, Theron, Arcann and Koth).

It shows that 30 days after release, more players had completed at least one of the available date nights than 7.5's story. Now, you could argue that maybe that's not an entirely fair comparison, seeing how date night missions only take about five minutes and are available to anyone who's completed the "Knights of" expansions, while 7.5 required your character to be all caught up with several years of additional story updates added since then (plus it also took more time to complete). Nonetheless...

I thought this was quite impressive. As someone who's generally less interested in the romance aspect of the game compared to others, I was kind of surprised just how popular these were. Also that Lana looks to be about twice as popular as any of the other three companions in this comparison, but then I guess she's the only woman running against three men. I guess this is why those of us who aren't that crazy about Lana will never be able to get rid of her... (I'm joking. Mostly.)

I suspect that the numbers for the date nights released after that must have been less exciting, considering that all the other companions are limited to specific classes as opposed to being available to everyone. Personally I still haven't done any beyond Theron and Arcann, as I just don't have the right combination of characters far enough progressed through the story. One day I guess...

Anyway, I just thought that was an interesting little insight into content performance, of the type that devs usually don't share with players (while at the same time we as players love to get our hands on it - as was also evidenced by all the excitement about John Hight's leaked slide about WoW subscriptions from his GDC presentation last year).

What Will the EA Buyout Mean for SWTOR?

In case you managed to miss the big gaming news on Monday, Electronic Arts announced that it's going from a publicly traded company to a private one, thanks to a 55 billion dollar buyout. This is unusual as generally, large companies strive for the opposite, to go public. You hear about things going the other way a lot less often, never mind with such a large sum of money changing hands.

I wasn't sure whether I should write about this on the blog because I'm not really an expert on all this business stuff. People who seem more knowledgeable on the subject mostly seem to think that this will enrich a certain number of individuals while ultimately being bad for EA itself, likely leading to a lot of lay-offs and perhaps even bankruptcy further down the line. So not great news for fans of Bioware games and the like.

However, many of the comments I've read on social media about how this is likely to affect SWTOR have been so utterly hyperbolic and divorced from reality, I feel we need to clarify some things. Remember, The Old Republic is NOT a Bioware game anymore, not in the technical sense anyway. It's being developed by Broadsword!

Also, if you read the article linked at the top, the transaction "is expected to close in Q1 FY27" so nothing's happening as a result of this for at least another year.

Whatever is going to happen as the result of this buyout eventually, I do not believe we have reason to worry about SWTOR in specific. Keep in mind that SWTOR isn't something that EA wholly owns; it's a collaborative project between Disney, Broadsword and EA.

Disney may be making the smallest contribution at this point (unless they are secretly responsible for a lot of the investment in the game) but they are actually the ones with the ultimate power due to owning the Star Wars IP. They could theoretically cause the game to shut down at any time by saying "we no longer want this to represent Star Wars" and that would be it. You can't take the Star Wars out of SWTOR and still have a game. This seems unlikely to be a problem though as based on various dev interviews, the Disney peeps seem to love the game and are quite happy with the work the devs have been doing with it.

The interaction between Broadsword and EA is a lot less clear. Unlike Bioware, Broadsword as a studio is not owned by EA, however EA still serves as SWTOR's publisher. Wikipedia actually has its own entry for video game publisher - and from the sounds of it a publisher's influence can vary a lot, from being heavily involved in pretty much everything but the coding to basically just handling distribution. From the outside we can't really tell just how much involvement EA has in SWTOR nowadays. We know they provide customer services, distribute the game through Origin the "EA App" and handle payments. But do they actually put money into the studio to develop the game and give any direction in terms of what the devs should be working on? For all we know, Broadsword might simply use SWTOR's revenue to pay the devs and then pay EA their cut. We just don't know.

I would personally be wary of assuming that EA in its publisher role is this all-powerful entity that controls everything. It's very much possible for a game dev studio to break ties with a publisher and continue doing their thing without them, such as Bungie did with Activision in 2019. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen here, I'm just saying it's within the realm of reasonable possibilities that Broadsword, with the approval of Disney, could continue to develop SWTOR even if EA wanted to stop being involved with the game for whatever reason. EA doesn't have the power to simply unilaterally shut them down on a whim.

Not that I think it's likely that this question would even come up. SWTOR seems to currently sit in this relatively comfortable spot where it's small enough to not draw unnecessary attention in terms of opportunities to cut spending (What's even left to cut when the team is already this small?) but simultaneously profitable enough that none of the bigwigs feel the need to get rid of it. When EA's new owners are looking into cutting costs, they'll probably look at single player focused studios that are using up money without sufficiently high returns, not so much at live service games whose development teams are already small while contributing a steady pay check month after month.

Yes, there's always a chance that something weird and crazy happens, but that's like worrying about being hit on the head by a meteorite when you go outside. The more likely scenarios are not immediately concerning to SWTOR players, not unless or until we directly hear otherwise. To re-use an image from a few years ago (yes, we've been through this whole panic thing more than once at this point):

(P.S: To be clear, I'm not saying this isn't big news, and you have every right to be concerned about games directly owned by EA as well as the devs working on these games. However, this blog is about SWTOR and my point is that for SWTOR in specific, there is currently no reason to assume that it will impact the game in a major way.)

Legacy Level 50 on Shae Vizla

Last year in June I made a post to commemorate the milestone of hitting legacy level 50 on Star Forge, making it the second server on which I achieved this feat. I said I'd post again when I achieved the same on another server, so... here we are!

I hit legacy level 50 on Shae Vizla this weekend, after completing the featured veteran flashpoint of the week for Galactic Seasons. And yes, I failed to get a screenshot of it once again, though I wasn't completely oblivious to the event this time. I was in fact very aware that I was getting close, but to be honest the flashpoint had been a bit unpleasant from my perspective, so that distracted me... When we clicked the console at the end to trigger completion, I got about ten different message pop-ups about achievements, Conquest and seasonal progression, and the couple of seconds it took me to realise "oh snap, I also dinged legacy level 50; I should take a screenshot" were too much of a delay, as the relevant text had already faded from my screen again.

You may be wondering how my legacy on Shae Vizla ended up getting ahead of Satele Shan, the Leviathan and Tulak Hord, where I've been playing for longer, and the answer is simply that I played on SV pretty intensely for a few months when it first came out, which ended up giving me a boost. It's also the secondary server where I've completed the largest number of class stories, with that number currently sitting at four (warrior, consular, trooper and bounty hunter).

That said, these days it doesn't really get any extra play time compared to the other servers on which I primarily play for Galactic Seasons. It does always make me a bit sad to remember how bustling and alive the Shae Vizla server was at its launch compared to how it is now. This Sunday it occurred to me to work my way through the levels in /who (so typing "/who 1-9", "/who 10-19" etc. in quick succession) and around 8pm Sydney time, what I would expect to be prime time for the APAC region, there were only a little over 100 people online on Imp side. Even if we're generous and assume about the same amount of activity on Republic side, 200 concurrent players is not a lot for an official SWTOR server. Maybe there are other times of day when it's busier if the population is still skewed towards including as many US and EU players as there seemed to be at launch, but it can't be that much better I reckon.

Anyway! The other three servers on which I haven't hit legacy level 50 yet are not that far off either at this point - I believe they are all around legacy level 45 or so. I wouldn't expect to ding 50 there this season, but I could see myself hitting that milestone on all three servers in quick succession at some point next year.

10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There

Star Wars: The Old Republic is primarily know for its developer-crafted stories, but any player who's engaged with the social side of the game for any length of time knows that there are also community-driven stories and dramas, and moments when you simply had to be there to know what made them so exciting, even if some of the related content is still available in the game today. As someone who's been a subscriber since early access and never stopped playing, I thought it would be fun to share some of the most interesting moments I remember with my readers, especially with newer ones who may not have been playing as long.

Note: If you've never played through some of the expansion storylines, some of the later items on this list will contain story spoilers.

The /getdown bug

Going chronologically, let's start with a story with which I amused my guildies one night. Back when the game launched, you could apparently do dance emotes in combat, and someone quickly discovered that doing /getdown would suddenly prevent opponents from attacking. This was actually picked up by several gaming news sites at the time, both because SWTOR was the newest hotness in town and because the mere idea of enemies being stunned into inaction by your dancing skills was a very funny thing to write headlines about.

I never saw this bug in action myself, but I did come across this comic on social media at the time which made me laugh so much that I saved it:

Click to enlarge and read properly. I wish I could credit the original artist (Minicrit?) with a link, but alas, RIP Google Plus.

The big PvP debacle on original Ilum

Another thing that made headlines around launch was the planet Ilum and the PvP taking place there. You see, the western ice shelf where the Gree visit nowadays used to be a dedicated PvP area. This brief video by Force Gaming should give you an idea of how it was supposed to work. It was released about two weeks after launch, and the video notes that at the time, people were just flipping objectives and not much PvP was going on. This was "fixed" with a patch... that in turn broke the area in a whole bunch of other ways. The result were crazy AoE fests that the game's engine couldn't deal with very well, which caused people to gain valour way too fast, even as they were just dying over and over in the mayhem. It was just chaos and caused endless complaints.

Once again, this is something I didn't actually get to experience directly, as I took my time levelling and didn't get to Ilum until about three months later, by which time all the craziness had already died down. In January 2013, I actually wrote a post called "The strangeness of Ilum a year later", but in those first weeks after launch, it was seemingly all people would talk about on forums and news sites, about how this newly launched MMO clearly didn't know how to deal with PvP and was therefore already failing horribly.

The original Rakghoul event

The recurring Rakghoul Resurgence event is probably old hat to most of you at this point - just another world event that comes around every so often and which has been around for what feels like forever. The very first Rakghoul event in April 2012 though... that was something else. The activities it came with weren't really any more exciting than what we have in the repeating event, but the vibe was very different and unique, mainly because we had no idea it was coming.

The game was still very new at the time, had a lot going on and we were getting patches and updates about more patches all the time... but this came as a complete surprise, and the experience of everyone being confused about what was going on and slowly figuring things out over the course of the first day was unique and exciting in a way that I think is hard to convey nowadays. You can read the blog post I wrote about it at the time to get an idea though. (I also wrote two follow-ups.)

Ultimately the fact that it was a time-limited one-off was also one of the biggest criticisms Bioware received, which is why they eventually swapped to making new events recurring. The Rakghouls would eventually join the rotation in early 2014.

The Grand Acquisitions Race

The Grand Acquisitions Race (sometimes also referred to as "the Chevin event") was SWTOR's second one-time world event, and a lot less exciting than the original Rakghoul incursion on Tatooine. One reason for this was that we actually knew that it was coming, even if we didn't know the details. The second reason however was that it was simply a lot less exciting in terms of activities, as all there was to do was a time-gated puzzle quest chain and farming currency crates on Nar Shaddaa. I have to chuckle a bit when I occasionally see people say that this event should be brought back. People didn't even care about it that much when the game was still in its heyday and a limited-time world event was something exciting! Still, I guess my point is you had to be there to know just how underwhelming it really was.

The return of Revan

I think this one might be a bit hard to parse for anyone who started playing after 2014. We all know Revan is in the game, right? There's a whole expansion called "Shadow of Revan", no? Well, for a moment, try to imagine that there wasn't. Revan is in the game, but only in this weird side quest that you'll only see if you like doing group content, and he's a prisoner one moment and a genocidal maniac the next, and if you blink you'll miss him dying as well. Also note that you had to have levelled through and done group content on both factions to be able to make sense of this brief cameo, something which fans of the original KotOR were not at all happy about.

Then it's 2014 - we've been level 55 for a bit over a year, got several new daily areas and raids, everything's kind of chugging along nicely if you're not dying for your character's personal story to be continued... and then we start getting a new series of flashpoints that's being promoted as a new story arc called "Forged Alliances". That Theron guy is kinda cute, but aside from that it's all a bit mysterious. Who are these new troublemakers in the shadows? The answer came in September, in a post in which I felt the need to give a spoiler warning.

Whoa, Revan is back? Revan is alive? Is it really him though? And then a whole expansion with his name! It was exciting times for a while, showing once again that Revan's name still attracted the crowds. I think reception of the expansion storyline was ultimately a bit mixed - it gave the character a better send-off than the base game had for sure, but it was still a bit awkward in the eyes of some.

The launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire

Did you realise that we're less than a month away from the KotFE expansion turning ten years old? I'm sure I'm not the only long-time player who still thinks of everything pre-KotFE as the good old days, and everything that came after it as "the new stuff". It is after all a fact that it changed the game in bigger ways than perhaps anything that came afterwards, with the introduction of features like level sync or its complete overhaul of the companion system.

Still, I'm not even talking about all of that. What made KotFE's launch a "you had to be there" moment was just how absolutely insane the hype was. A new CGI trailer for the first time since launch! Accidental leaks with announcements that could be interpreted in multiple possible ways! General Star Wars hype as we were all looking forward to the sequel trilogy! (Oops.) Absolute mayhem!

And when it came out, people (including me) did indeed love it! Mainstream gaming sites were like "hey, this game still exists and is good"! It felt like we were all set for a big SWTOR renaissance... except it all fizzled out within a couple of months. People thought the story was neat, but they didn't want to hang around to wait for one new chapter per month. They felt there wasn't enough to do at endgame. And those of us who did stick around quickly found out how tedious the new story was to play through on alts, never mind the plot going in directions that became more and more aggravating. For the second time in its life, SWTOR had released (something) with a lot of hype and then failed to live up to it.

Galactic Command

For anyone who might not know, Galactic Command was a new gearing/endgame progression system introduced with the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion, and in its original iteration, it was the worst system of its kind that I've personally ever seen. To add insult to injury, people (including me) were telling them from the moment it was announced that it was a bad idea, but the devs were all "nah, it'll work and be fun, you'll see".

It didn't and it wasn't. For me, the early days of Galactic Command were one of my all-time low points with the game. Fortunately the devs scrambled to fix it immediately after launch, but it took about six months to get it into what could be described as an "acceptable" state and many players held a grudge long after. It's another one of those things that in hindsight makes you wonder what could've been sooo bad about it, but if you were there, you know.

Theron's betrayal

I did say there were spoilers in here, didn't I? I think looking at the game's storylines as a whole, the Fractured Alliances story (consisting of the three flashpoints Crisis on Umbara, Traitor Among the Chiss and The Nathema Conspiracy) is probably not among many people's favourites. The writing definitely felt like it had dug itself into a bit of a hole with Knights of the Eternal Throne, and it wasn't clear how it was going to get out of it.

I actually think that Fractured Alliances ultimately succeeded in what it set out to do, but it's fair to say that it was a bumpy ride. One thing I really did enjoy about it though was the community interactions it created. Theron's betrayal in Crisis on Umbara was not well-received for a variety of reasons, but it was interesting to watch the conversation around it evolve as more people started to believe that the whole thing was just a ruse. In hindsight, there are some hints towards this from the beginning, but they were easy to overlook at first.

People just didn't want their love interest to betray them, and there was even a hashtag called #believeintheron making the rounds on Twitter. I remember seeing screenshots of people assembling on Odessen with all their Therons out and forming a heart-shape or something. I just thought that was very cool, and actually kind of made me more invested in the final outcome than the story itself would have been able to do on its own.

Darth Malgus' return

Back in 2017, I wrote a post called "11 NPCs That Died Before Their Time" and Darth Malgus was second on my list. I just couldn't believe that they put him in all the cinematic trailers and then simply had him get killed off in one of the first endgame flashpoints! I'm not sure I was aware at the time that there was a supposedly deleted scene from the KotFE trailer that showed Malgus being delivered to Valkorion, frozen in a block of carbonite. Even if I was, it seemed obvious at the time that they'd deleted it for a reason and for all intents and purposes, Malgus was still considered dead.

When he really did come back with the Ossus update at the end of 2018, I absolutely loved it. It was a really well-presented surprise, and while I don't think it was as big as the return of Revan, for me personally it was actually more meaningful than that had been. It's hard to think that it's already been seven years since then - at this point it feels like it should be obvious to everyone playing the game in any capacity at all that Darth Malgus is alive. However, that moment when we first found out was definitely special. (Cue some comment about how he's unfortunately outstayed his welcome since then.)

Move to Broadsword

Two years ago, when IGN leaked the news that Star Wars: The Old Republic was going to be transferred from Bioware to some largely unknown studio called Broadsword Entertainment, all hell broke loose in the community for a few weeks. I think dedicated SWTOR players are quite used to endless doom-saying about the game and are well-practised at ignoring it by this point, but this sounded serious, and it was not at all clear what the consequences were going to be.

To me it was probably more worrying than even the original free-to-play announcement had been, and I found myself seeking solace in spending a lot more time than usual talking to fellow content creators. I also felt compelled to try and do my own part by practising something vaguely resembling journalism, which meant assembling information from different sources and trying to put it into context for people. In hindsight it seems almost silly how much we worried, considering how little changed from a player perspective after the studio transition, but at the time it was big news.

Runner-ups:

I could've tried to come up with even more stories, but I thought that 10 was a good number to stop at. Nonetheless, here are three more events that I considered mentioning but decided against because they were mostly negative but also ultimately not that interesting to talk about in detail in my opinion:

• The original free-to-play transition
• The Legacy of the Sith expansion launch
• The whole character texture update drama

Which of all of these events were you personally around for? Do you agree with my characterisation of how things went down? Are there any other major events in the game's history that you would've included on this list?