A Season of Uprisings... And?

Yesterday evening it was time for the SWTOR dev stream about 7.6.1, the patch that will bring with it the start of Galactic Season 8. I've been finding the lull in interesting activity recently noticeable, so I was hyped for some news - perhaps too much so, as I actually ended up feeling somewhat disappointed. I could tell that other people were also keen to hear about Galactic Season 8, as my post speculating about what its theme might be from back in December has been my most popular post for several weeks now.

The big reveal came and... *drumroll* it's uprisings. No massive surprise there, as this was one of the activities people had been throwing around as the season's potential focus during the speculation. I just didn't think it was going to be uprisings myself because I didn't think Broadsword would want to make a season entirely focused on a type of group content.

To be fair, they didn't explicitly say it, but it kind of sounded like at least some modes might become easily soloable during the season. To mix things up, we'll be given some special gadgets from Kai Zykken that will do things like call little droid swarms to come to our assistance or cause explosions. Uprisings will also no longer be limited to subscribers, and will become accessible from level ten.

I'm curious to see how they'll hold up as levelling content, and whether newer or more casual players will find them confusing. They don't have much in the way of a narrative, but they're technically set after Knights of the Eternal Throne's base story, with Lana and Theron sending you out to fight people on both Republic and Empire side that are conspiring against the Eternal Alliance, which doesn't really make any sense at level ten.

Some of the rewards that were showcased look quite good too - I really liked the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas themed decorations and can see myself finding a lot of good uses for those.

That said... I've got to admit I was the opposite of excited when all this was announced. In my review of GS7 back in December, I noted that it had been a rather "meh" experience for me, as I felt the season was kind of lacking in flavour and newness. Annnd, unfortunately GS8 looks like it's going to be more or less the same. From the sounds of it, there is once again not going to be a grand reward that everything's centred around, such as a companion, stronghold, or side story.

As for uprisings as an activity... let's just say that of all the things people speculated could be the theme of the season, I would have preferred almost anything else. I don't hate them, but they are very low down on the list of activities I'm happy to take part in, so having a whole season centred around them fills me more with dread than anticipation. I want to believe that the changes will make them more interesting! But I'm not sure the devs can pull it off.

When this was followed up by an announcement that they were going to add more achievements to the existing dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine, as well as some new Bessi customisations to grind out exactly the same way as you ground out Bessi's unlocks, it just added to the feeling that all we have to look forward to is replaying more of the same content that we've just done. I think I wouldn't have minded these so much on any other day, but as a direct follow-up to the uprising season they felt deflating.

Then Eric got to the headline "Cartel Market Storefront Updates" and my ears perked up, because I think parts of the Cartel Market interface are pretty poor to use and I think that making a number of small key changes here could really improve the experience of using it. So Eric was like: "As an example you go: I wanna buy a blaster pistol. And so you go and look at weapons and there's just a lot of them." I was quietly nodding along. "And so one of the things we're looking at doing is... putting things across the market into retirement."

To which my mental reaction was something along the lines of: Jesus Christ, what?! That is not how that sentence was supposed to continue! The Cartel Market isn't overwhelming because there are too many items on it, it's because there are no freaking filters! If you want to buy a blaster pistol, there's no way for you to just see the blaster pistols, you have to wade through all these other weapon types that your character can't actually use just to find the odd pistol here or there; that's where the pain point is! You don't need a FOMO sale, you need bloody filters!

Ahem. This one may have kind of pushed my buttons because I work in e-commerce in real life and am part of the UI/UX team at my job. So I was suffering professional outrage at the fact that I can't remember the last time anything a dev said missed the mark for me by a mile like that. I guess consider this your public service announcement that there'll be a weapon sale for the next two weeks, and all those weapons that are on sale will then be removed from the Cartel Market afterwards. Then they'll do the same for another category and so on. This isn't an entirely new thing, as there are a lot of things that aren't available on the CM at any given moment. I just wish they hadn't led with making it sound like they were actually going to improve the user interface instead of making a FOMO push.

There were a couple of other (to me) minor things like that they are still working on improving the character texture updates, but I was kind of starting to tune out towards the end. So much so that I missed the casual mention of 7.7 bringing dynamic encounters to more planets and XR-53 getting a master mode. I would have missed that entirely if a guildie hadn't pointed it out to me afterwards! I think those things sound really cool actually, even if I'm personally unlikely to beat an XR-53 master mode. I just think the fight is well-tuned for story and veteran mode and has room for a master mode on top to challenge high-end players.

However, all that still feels kind of far away, and in the meantime I feel like I don't have a lot to look forward to, which is disappointing to me. And most importantly to me, there was no comment on the still missing story update that was originally meant to come with 7.6. Back in November I summarised what they said about this on the 7.6 dev stream as such: "[...] they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere."

Back then, I wasn't sure how strong the suspicion about the voice actor's strike was, as people can be quite wrong sometimes when it comes to making guesses about what's going on inside a studio, but it seems to be quite cemented in at this point, as other games have released updates with bits that would usually be voiced missing, and I think I saw a comment from dataminers that the 7.6 story content looks largely complete in the game files except for the missing voice lines.

Someone pointed me at this video about the voice actors' strike, which I think explains the whole situation pretty well. To be clear, I'm 100% in support of the union and their demands here, and I'm not holding it against Broadsword either that they are unable to proceed in the meantime. However, considering that it's now been more than three months since the 7.6 dev stream and nine months since the last story update, I really just wanted them to say something, to acknowledge that this situation sucks, that they don't have an ETA yet but that they'll release all the built up story content at once as soon as the strike ends. Or something. 

And you know, I realise it's quite possible that they are simply not able to do that, as there may well be some kind of ruling from above to not talk about the strike to players/customers. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating to be presented with this front of "nothing's wrong" while there's a freaking elephant in the room. They also mentioned in this stream that there would be a new date night in 7.6.1, just to then say absolutely nothing else about it, seemingly acknowledging that while they've probably indeed built this content, we still won't actually be getting it with the patch due to missing voice work, despite their announcement.

I'm kind of reminded of when we didn't get a story update for over a year during 2020, but there were two important differences there: one was that the global pandemic was a very obvious obstacle to a lot of work in a sense that people could generally understand. While the SAG-AFTRA strike is obviously also a public thing, it's nowhere near on the same level, and without any public acknowledgement of what's going on, SWTOR players will just assume the worst as usual about how the game is now dying because it's no longer releasing story content or whatever.

The other difference is that SWTOR had just released the Onslaught expansion at the end of 2019, which was rich with new content and goals to chase, meaning the game was able to coast on that momentum for a bit. The current situation feels more like the opposite, in the sense that we went from getting a new planet in 7.2 at the end of 2022 to a smaller new daily zone in 7.4, to an even smaller new planetary area without anything to do in it in 7.5. The current storyline feels to many like it's overstayed its welcome a bit, and people are desperate for something fresh, so to me this feels like the worst possible time to suddenly have to stop releasing major updates.

I think I'm a pretty patient person and I always roll my eyes a little at the people who complain about two story updates with full voice acting, cinematics and story choices per year as if they were nothing, because I think the team is doing a great job putting out high-quality content with the resources they have. However, I hate feeling like I have nothing to really look forward to at the moment, as the new season doesn't particularly excite me and who knows when the voice actors strike will end. It's been going on for more than seven months! According to Wikipedia the longest SAG-AFTRA strike in history lasted close to a year, so I guess unless they are going for a new record we can hope for an agreement before July at least?

I don't know, man, that's just a long time to feel like I should be focusing on other games.

Another PvP Season Under My Belt

PvP Season Seven has a few weeks left to run, but I completed my last achievement last week, so things are going to be kind of quiet for me in game for the next few weeks. At least we can expect to get some information about the next patch in the livestream next week.

The pacing change that came with the additional levels introduced last season still felt odd, as I once again finished all the bonus achievements before actually completing the seasonal reward track. If anything, it was even more pronounced this season, as I didn't make an effort to make the maximum progress of one thousand points a week this time around, which meant that I needed an extra week to complete the track. The track being the last thing to get finished remains slightly strange to me.

My most stand-out experiences this season were all in arenas, interestingly enough. The best match I had was without a doubt when the plasmatech Vanguard that I'm levelling dinged upwards into the midbie bracket. I actually don't like doing PvP at the lower end of a bracket, because you usually feel very obviously underpowered compared to the characters at the upper end, and sometimes people even get shirty about having low-level team mates. As it was though, I still had a PvP weekly I wanted to complete, and in this arena, fortunately nobody complained. And we ended up having an insanely good match, which we won 2-1, with me actually doing crazy amounts of damage with my DoTs despite my low level. The last round also came down to a 1v1 between me and an enemy, which I won. That felt pretty great.

My worst arena experience of the season were several days when the midbie queue was made unbearable by a premade, which was kind of ironic as people complained about premades a lot in past seasons and many seemed to think that discontinuing 8-person queues for warzones would solve that problem. Yet I rarely had problems with premades in previous seasons, while they were a really noticeable nuisance this time around.

Even so, I'd still argue that the real problem isn't the existence of premades in itself - I see nothing wrong with friends or guildies wanting to queue together. The problem is population (yes, I'm beating that drum again). When you only have about ten people or so queueing for midbie arenas on a given evening, and four of them are in a group together, it's obvious that everyone else is doomed to have a bad time. I very rarely quit matches, but when I got put up against the same premade for the third time in a row, I apologised to the one person on my team who had already loaded in, explained that I was getting tired of getting stomped by these guys over and over and left, followed by me logging off and doing something else for an hour or two. When I logged back in I thought I'd give queueing another try - and was immediately put up against the same premade yet again. It was absolutely infuriating.

The generally most interesting arena experience I had, with a mix of good and bad, was when I was doing a midbie arena on my Juggernaut, and the second person to load in on my team immediately said something like "oops, I meant to queue for warzones". Sensing that he was about to quit, I quickly teased "you've got to stay for this match though", which at least worked to engage the guy in conversation. He groused that he wasn't that good etc. and I simply said I'd still rather have him here than go up against the three people on the enemy team by myself, which oddly seemed to convince him.

I can't actually remember whether we ended up with properly balanced teams in the end, but I do recall that there were only three people on our team and that both I and my reluctant arena buddy actually put up a pretty good fight. The third person however was a Scoundrel that did nothing but use their basic attack and throw grenades every now and then. Didn't even use stealth from what I remember. There was one particularly odd moment when I and the warzone guy had both died, and the only two players remaining were our Scoundrel and a Powertech on the enemy team. And the Scoundrel just stood there, plinking away at the PT with their basic attack so uselessly, that the Powertech actually stopped fighting for a bit and just watched in confusion. Was that Scoundrel really not even going to try anything else? Eventually the PT got bored though and killed them (easily, of course).

This caused warzone guy to get mad and start insulting the Scoundrel, which in turn resulted in me trying to calm him down. He said things like "don't queue for PvP if you're not even going to try" and I tried to argue that the Scoundrel may well be a newer player and just not know how to play very well. Sure, they were above level fifty, but I'm pretty sure you can make it to that level by using nothing but two buttons nowadays if you want.

The whole thing just made me feel very conflicted because I've been converted to the benefits of accessibility and agree that the story doesn't need to be hard to be enjoyable, but at the same time putting obstacles in the player's way that force them to learn to press more than two buttons is one of the main ways in which you can teach someone to play better. I guess in an ideal world there'd be enough people queueing that two-button-pressers could go up against other two-button-pressers, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in and as it stands, encountering someone in PvP who is still on such a basic level of gameplay when they are more than halfway towards the level cap is definitely a shock to the system.

Is the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle Good Value?

I'm not the biggest fan of the Cartel Market, but it helps to keep the game alive and is relatively inoffensive when compared to the monetisation efforts of many other MMOs. While I can't recall buying Cartel coins for real money more than once in the past decade, I do occasionally buy things with the CC I get through subscribing and completing Galactic Seasons. One item that caught my interest when it was announced was the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle first presented during the dev livestream for 7.6.

I'll admit that the fact that the devs who talked about it were super funny certainly helped to pique my interest, but primarily I was curious about the concept of a decoration bundle that came with a built-in quest. I think we haven't had to buy anything story-related from the Cartel Market since those cubes with the Shroud diaries. (I'm not counting the HK-55 chapter since subscribers originally earned access to that as part of the normal content release cadence.)

Now if you're worried about "having" to buy this bundle for the story... don't. There's no voice acting and nothing's tied to any existing story content, it's just a little side mission utilising the new comlink interface and tied to the bundle itself.

However, I did think that this made for a nice bit of "added value" to the decorations, which was the primary reason that I bought it - curiosity about just what was going to be included. So I'm writing this post for anyone else who might be wondering.

On opening the bundle, you are given 82 decorations of various types and sizes, plus an item that starts a quest. If you do so it will instruct you to place the Neglected Spire Basin decoration, which is basically a broken fountain, in one of your strongholds and to interact with it. As you identify it as damaged, you're given the option to contact the manufacturer about the problem, which leads you to a terminal on Mek-Sha, where after going through some of the expected red tape, you're eventually being assigned a repair droid to fix the basin (and seemingly everything else).

When you complete this quest, you're rewarded with another 86 decorations, a pet, and another quest item. This follow-up quest starts from the same Neglected Spire Basin, as even after it's been repaired, it turns out to have a baby dianoga stuck in the pipework. The new mission asks you to learn more about dianogas on the fleet, again using the comlink interface, followed by a trip to Hutta to gather some items to lure the dianoga out. Once you've successfully done so, the second mission is completed and the baby dianoga also becomes your pet.

As with many virtual items, it can be hard to assess whether something is good value or not, and if that wasn't tricky enough, decoration bundles are even tougher to judge because they are pretty much guaranteed to contain some items that you don't care that much about. Still, just by comparing the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle to other items on the Cartel Market, at least some conclusions can be drawn.

At 2500 Cartel Coins, it's a bit pricier than most decoration bundles, which more commonly run between 1300 and 1800 Coins. However, those other bundles also usually contain only around 10-30 decos, so the fact that you get more than five times as many decorations for a price increase of less than 40% is insane. And that's without even attaching any value to the little quests or the two pets. (Pets are usually another 240 CC each.)

The only caveat as per Swtorista (I didn't think to check this myself) is that all the items are bound and can't be sold on the GTN. The quest also isn't a legacy unlock, so while you can move the quest starter item around between characters of your legacy, once it's completed it's done, and you can't repeat it on another character, though the two pets themselves can be unlocked in Collections.

So in my opinion at least, this bundle is great value for money if you're into decorating at all and have some CC to spare. You can see a full list of all the decorations on Swtorista's site, but I particularly like the fountains/basins and different types of lamps.

If you have to spend real money to get the required CC, I'd be a bit more hesitant, simply because I don't like that the pricing of 2500 CC is just a bit more than you get with the 20 dollar Cartel coin bundle (which buys 2400 CC) and I'm not a fan of those kinds of upsell tactics. 

Still, I consider that a relatively minor niggle, and overall I've got to give this one a major thumbs up. I've only used some of the decos so far, but the pets have certainly gotten some comments! I'd be happy to see more "value-added" bundles like this in the future.

10 Types of Annoying PvP Match

PvP Season 7 is in full swing and I'm taking part in it as usual. I wouldn't do so if I didn't enjoy PvP, but even with the best will in the world, PvP can also be filled with frustrations sometimes. Inspired by some of those feelings, I bring you a list of ten different types of annoying PvP match that I regularly come across in my journeys.

Note that this is not a top ten list because the severity of annoyance with each of these types of match can vary a lot depending on the exact circumstances of the situation, and you can have both mild cases and ones that are really bloody annoying in each category.

The one that's doomed from the start due to numbers

By that I mean the number of people on each team, not dps numbers. This is more likely to happen in arenas than in warzones and mostly happens in lower level PvP, though it can technically happen in any mode depending on your luck. If the difference is only one person and the skill difference between the teams is big enough, you can still have an interesting match sometimes, but there's nothing quite like starting an arena with only one other person on your team vs. a full group of four, or the game pitting you against three enemies all by yourself. You just know it's not gonna happen no matter what. (Though the other day I was put into an arena by myself vs. three opponents and actually managed to kill one of them before they killed me - I considered that a win on a personal level.)

The one where desync keeps screwing you over

Mostly this happens in Huttball. I've written about desync in the past, and I remember they even took two of the Huttball maps out of the game for a while to "fix" them, though I don't think that ultimately went anywhere. It's not always equally bad, but there are definitely times when you desperately want to intercept the ball carrier but the game just can't decide what floor they are even on until after they've already scored.

The one where your whole team is just clueless

Everyone's got to start learning at some point, and I can't hold it against anyone if they don't know the rules and objectives of each warzone on day one. Nonetheless, being saddled with a whole team of players like that at once can be frustrating. The prime example I always think of for this was an Odessen Proving Grounds match that started with the southern and middle nodes active... and the moment the spawn point opened, everyone but me ran north, where there was... nothing. I just knew right then that I wasn't in for a good time. I mean, I couldn't even be mad, but it sure is deflating to be literally the only person in a team of eight going for the objective while the other seven bumble around in the middle of nowhere.

The one where you're just getting completely steamrolled

Whether it's because you're up against a premade or the matchmaker is just doing its usual thing of not giving a damn, it's not very fun to be in a match where you basically get murdered the moment you come out of the spawn point. If you're lucky, at least it'll be over quickly, but if you're unlucky, you might end up against a premade that intentionally tries to draw things out so they can farm more numbers before finishing you off.

The one where your team is trying but just not good enough

This is a very peculiar kind of annoyance because when both teams are trying but one is just a bit better, that should make for a good match, right? Even if you lose in the end, at least you had a chance? Well... I'd say that's true in principle, but there' a certain point where it can in fact make the match extra annoying, when you can tell that everyone is really trying but then you always get foiled at the last moment anyway, and still lose the Huttball match 0-6 or whatever. It's like you get your hopes up over and over again just to have them dashed repeatedly. This kind of match doesn't so much leave you mad at your team mates, but more like you're going insane from a terrible itch that you just can't scratch.

The one where people are going crazy with the insults

Honestly, I never quite got the idea of "smack talk" in PvP. I get that it's a thing that some people like, but I'm more in camp "good sportsmanship" where you try to not take it personally and treat everyone involved with respect, which is kind of the opposite really. Anyway, usually the sorts of comments I'm thinking of here wouldn't even remotely qualify for friendly banter anyway and just involve people outright yelling insults at each other. I'm not so thin-skinned that I consider a match immediately ruined if someone starts ranting, but depending on the intensity and how many people are doing it, it can definitely bring the vibe down. Though I've learned that /ignore really does help here.

The one where you're in a warzone with damage farmers

Look, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with just wanting to beat up the enemy, but there's arenas for that, right? Warzones have objectives for a reason, and it's very frustrating when the majority of your team is not on board with that. In fact, it's quite ironic how sometimes being in a warzone with a bunch of elite damage farmers is almost indistinguishable from being in one with a bunch of complete noobs. The only difference is that when you look at the scoreboard at the end, the veterans will have some big numbers and will presumably pat each other on the back about how well they did spamming AoE at the spawn for the entire duration of the match. However, you yourself will still end up just as frustrated being literally the only person going for the objective and ending up easily foiled by the enemy. The rare amusing exception to this is if both teams are damage farmers, and you can do objectives pretty much undisturbed while they all brawl in mid.

The one where you meet "that one guy"

Who's "that one guy", you might ask? The answer is: your nemesis, at least for the duration of the match. It doesn't matter what else is going on, you keep running into that one person and they piss you off every time! The prime example I always remember when thinking of this was a Huttball match where a Shadow was pretty much solo-running the ball for the enemy and would always have the perfect counter to every attempt of mine to stop him. It was so frustrating! More recently, I played a few matches on Star Forge where this one tank seemed to be absolutely intent on spending the entirety of each match crawling up my rear, no matter where on the map I went. I was healing, and to a certain degree getting focused as a healer is normal, but there were other healers on my team and yet that person was always on me. It's not even that I got killed all the time or anything, but it got very annoying rather quickly to be the target of seemingly every single stun and interrupt of that guy for the entire match.

The one where people give up and go AFK the moment the enemy gets ahead

I tend to think of AFKers in PvP as the bane of my existence, and a couple of seasons ago I ran into them quite frequently, but recently things have fortunately been better on that front and I haven't encountered that nearly as often. Interestingly, often when I hear people talk about AFKers, the blame gets (rightly or wrongly) put on people who actually don't like PvP and just queue up for certain rewards, hoping they'll get by just sitting in stealth for the entire match. I mention this because while I have no doubt that this does happen sometimes, my personal experience has been almost the opposite, that AFKers are often very much into PvP in general and may even be skilled players, but they just absolutely cannot deal with losing and will stop trying the moment their team falls behind, and then just stand in a corner while complaining about how much everyone but them sucks. In arenas this is often even worse, where you'll see certain people kill themselves with /stuck in the spawn at the start of the second round if their team lost the first round.

The one where you just need that one win or have been waiting forever

I think I've occasionally mentioned before how the way daily and weekly missions reset since 7.0 has made me feel more pressured for time when it comes to completing them, and that I actually often have more fun PvPing when I'm not trying to tick any boxes. As it is though, spending a lot of time in the queue and running out of time to, say, complete a daily, really ramps up the pressure for the match to be good when it finally pops, and there's nothing quite like the despair you feel when you've waited half an hour or longer to get into a game and then it just goes sideways immediately and you know it's going to be a waste of time.